Lead Software Engineer Ana Resendez and Associate Production Director Clayton Stone confirmed the decision in a BlizzCon interview with But Why Tho?. Blizzard says the opening raids are intended to resemble original WoW’s more accessible entry-level raids. The developers want them challenging, but still approachable enough that players can bring friends rather than treating entry itself as a logistical encounter.
Barrow Deeps and Hyjal Summit Let You Walk Straight In
Forever’s first new raid tier opens on December 9 with Barrow Deeps for 10 players and Hyjal Summit for 20. Onyxia’s Lair returns as the larger 40-player encounter. As we covered in our look at Forever’s permanent 10-player and 20-player raid structure, Blizzard intends every normal raid tier to provide both group sizes, while 40-player raids remain occasional events.
None of the new launch raids require players to complete a mandatory attunement before entry. That immediately removes one of Classic WoW’s more famous organizational headaches.
Attunements can be excellent storytelling tools. They can send players through dungeons, introduce raid villains and make entering a major instance feel like the end of a journey rather than selecting another activity from a menu.
They can also produce the memorable sentence:
“Wait. Who here isn’t attuned?”
Followed by silence.
Blizzard Is Not Saying What Happens Later
This is where the story becomes more interesting.
When asked whether future Forever raids will also avoid attunements, Stone deliberately refused to answer. Blizzard wants players to discover that later rather than establishing a permanent rule today.
So the correct conclusion is not that Forever has abolished raid attunements.
It has abolished them for the opening raids.
Future tiers could still introduce quest chains, reputation requirements, dungeon keys or some entirely new form of progression before a raid becomes available. Considering how aggressively Blizzard is hiding raid loot and encounter information to restore discovery, that uncertainty is probably intentional.
Forever Wants Classic Difficulty Without Dynamic Scaling
The same interview also reinforces how different Forever’s raid philosophy is from Modern WoW. Blizzard does not want encounters dynamically adapting to the group. Raid sizes remain fixed, and difficulty stays fixed as well. If a raid is difficult today, you can return later with better equipment and make it easier the traditional way.
That means Forever is comfortable preserving old-fashioned progression while discarding some of the bureaucracy surrounding it.
This is becoming a recurring design pattern. Layer changes now give players a five-minute warning instead of unexpectedly rearranging the world around them. Blizzard has modernized server technology, interface systems and account-wide progression without automatically making the outdoor world or endgame frictionless.
The developers seem to be asking a fairly sensible question:
Did this old mechanic make Azeroth better, or did we merely tolerate it because it was 2004?
Attunements Could Still Return When They Actually Add Something
That may ultimately be why Blizzard is refusing to establish a permanent policy.
An attunement attached to an introductory raid could simply slow down guild formation during Forever’s first month. An attunement attached to a later raid could become an important story campaign, a profession challenge or a reason to revisit older dungeons.
Those are very different uses of the same system.
Forever does not appear interested in bringing features back merely because Vanilla once had them. It wants to reuse them when they make the world stronger.
So on December 9, the door is open.
You still need ten or twenty people.
You still need gear.
You still need somebody willing to tank.
But at least nobody has to discover five minutes before raid time that Steve never finished the attunement quest.
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