Sirus, the long-running Russian WotLK+ network, has spent more than a decade building custom content on top of Wrath of the Lich King. On October 21, 2026 it opened a public test of Sirus Reborn — not a new realm, but the same 3.3.5a game moved onto a newer game client, with 64-bit and DirectX 11 support and a brand new playable class, the Monk. Access opened in three waves: accounts at loyalty level 30 or above on October 21, level 20 and above on October 22, and every account from October 23.

The framing matters. Players had been asking for a fresh realm, and Sirus answered with a client test instead. The team is explicit that the build running now is far from a release version, that this is not a new game world, and that once the client is ready it will run on every Sirus realm rather than becoming one more realm in the list.

Original editorial illustration by RealmList, generated for this article. This is artwork, not game footage or official promotional material.

What Sirus says it is doing

The clearest first-party text we could read is an excerpt of the official announcement reposted on a third-party forum on October 23. In it, Sirus frames the move as a way to keep telling the Wrath story rather than leaving it behind:

"This is a major step forward for the project: a new technical foundation, improved graphics, and features that will allow us to go beyond the usual boundaries. Wrath of the Lich King remains at the heart of our world: its atmosphere, familiar locations, dungeons, and raids... The new client will bring support for 64-bit architecture and DirectX 11... One of the major new features will be the Monk class. There is still a lot of work to do. We are not simply porting WotLK 3.3.5 to a new client — we are also porting more than 10 years of custom content and modifications, which is an entirely different challenge."

That last sentence is the honest one. Porting Wrath's content is a known problem; porting a decade of bespoke systems, scripts and items on top of it is a different category of work, and the gap between "the client boots" and "the realm is ready" is where projects like this usually spend a year or more.

One figure circulating alongside this — that the new client is based on version 5.4.8, build 18414 — comes from the forum poster describing the project, not from the quoted announcement and not from Sirus directly. Treat it as a community claim until Sirus confirms it in its own documentation.

How to get into the test

Per Private Server Hub's write-up of Sirus's post, the Reborn client is distributed by torrent from a new "Reborn (Open Beta)" section in the settings of launcher version 2.0.24. It installs into its own folder and does not touch your main client, so you can run both. You launch the beta from the .exe in the game folder, and there is a dedicated forum section for feedback.

That is a deliberately low-risk rollout: separate folder, separate executable, no migration pressure. It also tells you how far from finished this is — a project confident in a near-term switch would put it behind a single Play button.

The Monk is the part nobody can explain yet

Sirus says the Monk is playable on the test server and that it will explain the class in a separate post. As of October 27 that post has not been summarised anywhere we could verify in English, so anything you read about how the class plays on Sirus — its resource, its specs, whether it borrows the Mists of Pandaria design or something custom — is speculation. The only defensible statement is the one Sirus itself made: a new class exists, and it is in the test build.

For a WotLK+ server this is a bigger deal than it sounds. Adding a class means talent trees, abilities, itemisation, class-specific quests or trainers, and balance work against ten years of tuned Wrath content. Sirus has the advantage of already being a heavily customised server — its players are not expecting blizzlike purity — which is probably why it is the kind of project that can attempt this at all.

A new PvP season started October 26

Alongside the beta announcement, Sirus posted details of the next PvP season, which runs from October 26, 2026 to January 17, 2027, starting some time during the day on October 26 rather than at midnight.

The changes differ sharply by realm:

• Soulseeker x1 — Honor and arena points are converted to gold, at 2 silver per Honor point and 50 silver per arena point. Everyone keeps one minimum weekly cap: 261 arena points and 1,044 Honor points. Nine items are deleted permanently, including gladiator seals from strategic pack deliveries and Battle Pass chests, with no compensation. Soulseeker also receives a new tier of gladiator PvP gear, labelled a12.
• Sirus x5 and Neverest x3 — nothing is converted and nothing is deleted; existing currency tokens run out on their own timers.

Every realm gets a new arena, the Crucible of Secrets, and a new Battle Pass. The arena name is translated from Russian and may appear differently in the English client.

The Soulseeker deletions are the part players will notice, and they are worth restating plainly: permanent, uncompensated item removal on a live realm is a rare and aggressive move. Anyone who has been stockpiling those items should assume they are gone.

What we could and could not verify

Sirus's posts are Russian-language and we could not open the original announcements directly — the project site loads, but its news section is not readable without the same access the launcher provides. Everything above therefore rests on two independent secondary sources: Private Server Hub's summary of the two October 21 posts, and a verbatim excerpt of the official Reborn announcement reposted by a player on the WRobot forums on October 23. The two agree on the substance — 64-bit, DirectX 11, a Monk class, porting custom content, and the phased access dates — which is why we are reporting it.

The PvP-season specifics rest on Private Server Hub alone. Treat the conversion rates, the item deletions and the a12 label as reported rather than confirmed, and check the in-game or launcher notices before acting on them.

Sirus is not currently listed in the RealmList directory, and this article is not an endorsement. If you are weighing whether a server like this is worth your time, the same checks apply as anywhere else: see how to verify population claims and read our October 2026 private server roundup for how the wider scene is moving.

Why this is worth watching anyway

Client modernisation is the private server problem that nobody talks about because it is not glamorous. The 3.3.5a client is a 32-bit DirectX 9 executable from 2010; it breaks on modern drivers, it cannot use more than a couple of gigabytes of address space, and every year it gets harder to run. A large network moving its entire content library onto a newer technical foundation is the kind of infrastructure work that keeps a scene alive, and if Sirus pulls it off, the pressure on every other long-running WotLK server to do the same rises.

It also lands at an awkward moment. WoW: Forever opens Early Name Reservation on October 27 and launches November 4, and the custom-server corner of this niche is about to be measured against a first-party vanilla-plus product. A 64-bit client and a new class are exactly the kind of thing a private server can offer that Forever cannot.

::note Verified on October 27, 2026. Sirus's own announcements could not be opened directly; this article rests on Private Server Hub's October 24 summary of Sirus's two October 21 posts and on a verbatim excerpt of the official Reborn announcement reposted on the WRobot forums on October 23. The claim that the new client is based on version 5.4.8 build 18414 comes from that forum poster, not from Sirus, and is unconfirmed. PvP-season details (the October 26 to January 17 window, the Soulseeker currency conversion rates, the nine deleted items, the a12 tier and the Crucible of Secrets arena name) come from a single secondary source and should be checked against the launcher or in-game notices. The Monk class is playable on the test server but Sirus has not published how it works. Reborn is an open beta of a new client, not a new realm, and no release date has been announced. ::