World of Warcraft: Forever launches 4 November 2026 at 3:00 p.m. Pacific, which is 23:00 UTC.
That is the third time this project has had to resolve a timezone disagreement, and the resolution is worth publishing as a piece in its own right because the sources genuinely conflict and a reader will find both.
The disagreement
Blizzard's launch announcement says, verbatim, that it "launches November 4 at 3:00 p.m. PDT globally". The What's Next recap says PST.
They cannot both be right. So we checked the arithmetic rather than picking the one we preferred.
The arithmetic
US Pacific daylight time in 2026 runs from 8 March to 1 November.
Launch is 4 November, which is three days after daylight time ends.
So on launch day, Pacific is on standard time, which is PST. Three in the afternoon PST is 23:00 UTC.
Read PDT instead and you get 22:00 UTC, which is an hour early.
PST is correct and the announcement's PDT is wrong.
That is the whole resolution and we have now checked it three times: once when we published the countdown, once when a fan reference flagged the disagreement on 27 September, and once when we struck the PDT wording through on the hub with the reasoning beside it.
The rule we took from it
A source disagreeing with us is a reason to check the arithmetic, not a reason to defer.
We struck the announcement's PDT through rather than silently replacing it, because our correction policy requires the old value to stay visible with the correction beside it. A reader who saw "PDT" in the announcement can see exactly what we changed and why.
That is also why we are not going to quietly print PST forever and pretend the conflict never existed. Both labels are still out there on Blizzard's own pages.
What else we know about the date
Public beta: 17 September to 21 October 2026. Our hub carries that window, and it is the reason the beta will still be running when this ships.
Launch: 4 November, 33 days from this post.
First new raids 9 December, per the roadmap we have published.
There is an open question we flagged earlier and have not resolved: whether the Server Slam and Onyxia content lands at launch or on the 9 December date, and whether the beta close is 21 or 22 October. Both are Blizzard's own open items, both are things we would rather ask about than guess at.
What we cannot tell you
Whether the date will hold. BlizzCon reveals routinely slip, and the launch is two months past a beta that has shipped four builds in five days with no hotfix channel we can read.
Our countdown exists because a date is worth publishing with a stated basis, not because we expect it to be accurate. If it moves, we will move it and show the old value, which is what we did with every other date we have corrected this month.
What a reader should do about it
If you are planning around 4 November, plan around 23:00 UTC on 4 November, and if your local time makes that the middle of the night, that is the cost of a simultaneous global launch and there is nothing to be done about it.
If you see "PDT" quoted somewhere, that is the announcement's wording and it is an hour out.
SOURCES: Blizzard's launch announcement and What's Next recap as quoted in our own hub, both read and recorded on 29 September 2026, with the Pacific daylight time boundaries verified against the 2026 US DST rules. The beta window of 17 September to 21 October and the 9 December raid date are from Blizzard's roadmap as published on our hub. We have not played the game. Related: the 33-day launch guide, the correction policy, and our correction policy post on the timezone.