Undead Paladins Lead the Way in World of Warcraft: Forever, and Blizzard Adjusts Faction Balance

Undead Paladins are the most-played race and class pairing in World of Warcraft: Forever, and Blizzard is changing how new characters can be created on some servers to keep the two factions closer together.

The game launched on 4 November 2026. In its first week, the fan-run tracker Raider.IO reported close to 3.9 million characters had been created across all regions and rulesets. A ruleset is the set of server rules a character plays under. The main options are normal, PvP (player-versus-player, where players from opposing factions can fight each other), and roleplaying (RP), which is built around character storytelling.

The two factions are the Alliance and the Horde. GameSpot reported that about 48% of characters are Alliance and nearly 52% are Horde. Undead make up nearly 40% of the Horde, while Humans make up 37% of the Alliance.

Paladin is the most-played class. Undead is currently the only Horde race that can play one, which helps explain the pairing. Raider.IO's population page lists 283,490 Undead Paladins, or 51.5% of all Paladins in the game. Among Shamans, Dwarves are the largest group, at 39.5%.

Skyborne elves are a playable race open to both factions. GameSpot reported that they make up around 10% of all characters.

The normal ruleset has the most characters, with over 2 million. The PvP ruleset has around 1.5 million, and the two RP rulesets combined have around 250,000. Every ruleset except standard RP has a larger Horde population.

On 10 November, Blizzard community manager Kaivax posted "PvP Faction Balance Updates" on the official forums. Blizzard said its goal is for PvP servers to be as close to a 50/50 faction split as possible. The most extreme regional imbalance it identified was roughly 55/45.

Blizzard named Horde as the larger faction on North American PvP rulesets, and Alliance as the larger faction on EU Roleplay-PvP. It also said it had changed the character creation system. Instead of reacting to a single moment in time, the system now looks at the overall faction balance in each region's PvP rulesets. Blizzard said creating characters on the more populous faction in each region would become increasingly difficult in the short term. It also said it would place restrictions on creating Horde characters on PvP rulesets.

For players, the practical result is that choosing a faction on a PvP server may come with more limits than before. Players who want a particular race or class on a busy server should check the current balance in their region before they create a character.