After Conquest of Azeroth shut down on September 4 2026, the custom class project did not disappear. It forked. This morning a thread on r/wowservers asked the practical question: there are four different Conquest of Azeroth servers now, which one should you play.
The honest answer is that they are not four versions of the same product. They are four different bets, at four different stages, and at least one of them is not a place to build a character at all.
| Server | Stage | Classes | Level cap | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conquest Reborn | Live, updated daily | 21 | 60, raids opening in stages | Free, nothing sold for money |
| GrimfallWoW CoA realm | Live since 16 October | 21 | 20 in Phase 1, rising | Free |
| Conquest of AzerothCore | Public test realm | 22 | Test realm | Free, open source |
| ArdenWoW | Closed alpha, applications | 21 | Alpha | Free |
Conquest Reborn: the one you can play tonight
The most complete of the four. Its homepage reads "21 CLASSES. ONE REALM.", and the systems underneath are the ones you would expect from a project that has been running for months rather than weeks: three specialisation slots per character with their own action bars, every classic dungeon on Normal, Heroic and Mythic, keystones into Mythic+, PvE Mode with War Mode and High-Risk opt-ins from level 15, and Alliance and Horde grouping, chatting and queueing together.
Its store is the thing people get wrong. The page is titled Collections & the Store, which sounds like a cash shop, and it is not: "Free, and nothing for sale" and "Nothing here is sold for real money." The currency is Bazaar Tokens, earned from the welcome gift (1,000 per new character) and Callboard quests, spent on XP and reputation potions, the Customization Potion and other classes' heirlooms.
We recorded 35 players online and release-11 with Blackrock Caverns at Normal, Heroic and Mythic at our October 19 read, so it is small but alive.
GrimfallWoW: the phased one
Grimfall took a different route. It was already running a Classless realm, where leveling unlocks abilities at random across every class ("every level is a roll of fate"), and on October 16 2026 it opened a separate Conquest of Azeroth realm with the 21 custom classes.
The design choice is progression. Phase 1 has a level cap of 20, and the cap comes with scaled Heroic and Mythic dungeons rather than an empty endgame. Later phases raise the cap and move into more of Azeroth, and the site runs scaled Wrath dungeons for the level 48 to 60 range on the Classless side. Setup is a Windows launcher that patches itself, and the site does not state a required client version anywhere we could read.
That makes Grimfall the best option if you like the idea of a shared, staged race rather than a realm where everyone is already at the cap.
Conquest of AzerothCore: not a realm, a test
This is the correction worth making, because the popular summary calls it a restoration of the original Ascension experience with bots for solo players.
Its own front page says something narrower. It is a public test realm for an open-source continuation on the AzerothCore core: "Help us test the realm, reproduce bugs and validate fixes for the emu core." It tells visitors plainly: "Please don't treat anything you build here as permanent." It publishes an armory, a bug tracker, a Discord, and per-class pages listing what is known to be broken.
At our read its live panel showed 0 online, 0 characters, 0 classes, and the account form on the same page still shows a REALMLIST.HERE placeholder. That is what an early test deployment looks like, not a finished realm.
If you want to contribute to the open-source core, this is the door. If you want to play a character, it is not.
ArdenWoW: not open yet
ArdenWoW is the fourth, and it is the least available. It advertises 21 custom classes with the same archetypes as the others (Barbarian, Bloodmage, Chronomancer, Cultist, Felsworn, Knight of Xoroth, Necromancer, Primalist, Pyromancer, Ranger, Reaper, Runemaster, Starcaller, Stormbringer, Sun Cleric and more), plus scaled dungeon finder, new zones and Worldforged RPG items.
The gate is real: closed alpha, applications open. You create an account, confirm the email, and apply; keys go out by email daily and "applying does not guarantee an invitation". There is nothing to log into until you have a key.
How to choose
- I want to play now, at 60, with dungeons and raids: Conquest Reborn.
- I want a fresh start and a staged race with everyone else: Grimfall's CoA realm, currently capped at 20.
- I want to test or contribute to the open-source core: Conquest of AzerothCore.
- I want to wait for another take on the class design: ArdenWoW's alpha.
Two caveats. We have not played any of these, so nothing here is a verdict on class balance or endgame quality, only on what each project says about itself. And ArdenWoW and Grimfall are not yet on our tracker, because the tracker records the client a project requires and neither site states one in text we could read. We would rather leave them off than guess a tag, which is the same rule we applied to the tag correction last week.
The larger point is that the CoA story did not end with the shutdown. It scattered into a live realm, a phased experiment, a test bench and a closed alpha, and the community is now doing the sorting in public. That is a healthier outcome than a single successor inheriting the name.