Picked PvP and regret it? In Forever, the way out is a new character

Forever has no realm list. You choose a ruleset instead: Normal, PvP, Roleplaying, or Hardcore once it arrives after launch. Blizzard’s ruleset guide, updated on 22 October, adds that Roleplay-PvP will be available at launch on 4 November, and that Blizzard plans to offer it when Early Name Reservation opens on 27 October.

The guide also makes clear that this choice is hard to undo.

No hopping, and one planned exception

Players cannot move freely between rulesets. To play under a different one, you create a new character there. Blizzard says the limit is deliberate, because each ruleset is meant to hold its own community.

The guide names one exception, and it is a plan rather than something live. Once Hardcore is available, a Hardcore character that dies can transfer to another ruleset, PvP included. The guide describes no such route for characters on Normal, PvP or Roleplaying.

What a fresh start keeps

A reroll still means leveling from the beginning. But according to the guide, Collections and Legacy Points are account-wide across rulesets, so those follow you to the new character.

Hardcore works differently, in one direction only. What you earn there, including progress, collections and rewards, can later become available on other rulesets, but progress made elsewhere does not carry into Hardcore.

The guide does not mention gold, items or profession progress, so do not plan on any of them moving with you.

Who you can play with

Grouping, dungeons and raids stay inside a ruleset, because cross-ruleset grouping is not supported. Battlegrounds are the exception: they may include players from other rulesets, though Hardcore stays separate. On every ruleset, Horde and Alliance still cannot group together.

So picking Normal does not take you out of PvP. Battlegrounds are still there.

Does turning on PvP on Normal change who you see?

A player weighing up Normal asked the European forums on 27 October whether turning on their PvP flag there would mean meeting only other flagged players, or whether they would still see players who had it off. They liked the idea of PvP on demand as a best-of-both-worlds option. The only reply in the thread, from another player, said they would still share the layer with unflagged players, and that anyone who wanted to attack them could flag themselves and engage.

That reply is a player's answer, not Blizzard's. The guide describes Normal as a ruleset where players fight other players when they choose to engage in it, and it keeps grouping inside a ruleset. It does not say how a PvP flag affects which players share your part of the world. If that matters to your choice, treat it as an open question until Blizzard or the launch client answers it.

The PvP ruleset’s faction rule

On the PvP ruleset, you can create characters for only one faction. Once you make an Alliance character there, you cannot make a Horde one, and the reverse is also true. Normal, Roleplaying and Hardcore allow both factions.

Blizzard also says the PvP ruleset will have systems meant to keep the two factions’ numbers closer. It compares them to Season of Discovery, where creating new characters on one faction could be temporarily limited. The guide does not say whether the one-faction rule also applies to Roleplay-PvP.

Before you reserve

Here is our suggestion, given those rules. Choose for the way you expect to play most evenings, not for one exciting night. If open-world conflict is the point for you, PvP is built for it, but it also commits you to one faction on that ruleset. If you mostly want to quest without interruption and still queue for battlegrounds, Normal does both. Either way, changing your mind later means a new character on the other ruleset. Your Collections and Legacy Points come with you; your levels do not.