Patch 5.3 – Escalation arrives on Sheilun on Wednesday, 13 August 2025 at 8 PM CET.

Conflict in Pandaria between the Horde and the Alliance escalates further! The Darkspear Rebellion rises against Hellscream’s tyranny, liberating the Echo Isles and capturing Razor Hill—cutting off key routes to the Northern Barrens. Vol’jin allies with the Alliance to lay siege to Orgrimmar and challenge Garrosh’s reign.

The Upgrade Vendors and Valor Changes

After a long absence, the Voidbinders have returned to capital cities and shrines, once again offering powerful upgrades for adventurers’ equipment. You’ll be able to upgrade your gear using Honor, Justice, and Valor Points.

To help players catch up and accelerate gearing, the weekly Valor Point cap is being raised to 3000. Paired with the return of item upgrades, this should significantly improve the gearing experience.

Conflict in The Barrens

Patch 5.3 provides new ways to quickly gear up before the Siege of Orgrimmar. A special NPC, Ravika, will appear in the Shrines to help you recover lost-in-time Kor’kron items (item level 489, and upgradable).

New Brawler's Guild encounters

Two new tiers of bosses await in Bizmo’s Brawlpub (Stormwind) and the Brawl’gar Arena (Orgrimmar). Test your strength in the Brawl—defeat your foes or fall trying.

New Scenarios

• Battle on the High Seas;
• Blood in the Snow;
• Dark Heart of Pandaria;
• The Secrets of Ragefire.

Patch 5.3 also introduces Heroic Scenarios, offering greater challenges and more rewarding loot.

Legendary Quest follow-up

Meet with Wrathion and journey across Pandaria to consult the August Celestials. Take the next step in your quest for legendary gear.

The Arsenal

A new Stormforge Store section, The Arsenal, lets players purchase select gear from previous raid tiers—never the current one. For now, it's exclusive to Sheilun, as Mists of Pandaria's linear item progression makes it less disruptive compared to other expansions.

We made this decision to ensure the future of Stormforge. The costs of maintaining and developing high-quality realms, especially Legion, are massive. The Arsenal helps us cover those costs, invest in better support, hire new developers to support both existing and future projects, improve server stability, and most importantly - continue pushing Legion development forward at full steam. And Legion is a beast - it demands a level of resources that goes far beyond what most people expect.

We know this might raise some eyebrows, so let’s be upfront. This was not an easy decision, and we understand it will be controversial for a lot of you. But given the current landscape around WoW, private servers, and Stormforge itself, launching the Arsenal is something we genuinely believe is necessary to keep the project healthy and growing. We want to continue providing quality servers for a multitude of expansions all under one roof, and the work for that is well underway behind the scenes even if we haven't revealed all of it yet. That being said, these are long term goals which not only cost money but requires a lot of development time we simply don't have. We're simply spread too thin to provide an adequate experience in a reasonable amount of time. Finally, we'd like to stress that we did not take this decision lightly, but as of right now we believe this to be a necessary evil in order to keep going.

As a small thank you, all Stormforge+ members will receive 10% off all shop purchases, including the arsenal - your ongoing support means the world to us and lets us continue doing what we do and giving you quality realms to play on.

We hope you’ll understand where we’re coming from - and stick with us as we keep building something great.

Thanks again for choosing Stormforge!