When it finally releases we are going to fight Sylvanas and the Jailer who are our current antagonists. Which leads me to assume 9.1 is going to be the final content update for shadowlands.
It will also be roughly 28 months after 9.1 before the next expansion.
Thoughts?
A 9.2 patch has been confirmed by Lord Ion. And a 9.1.5 in between.
This raid of 9.1 is the finale of Sylvanas. Zovy the Jailer is still very much alive, we aren’t fighting him anywhere here. And he’s about to become a bigger problem.
It might even go to a 9.2.5 and 9.3 too. There’s no real sign the expansion is ending early at 9.2.
While true, I don’t really believe much of what that man says anymore. Yes I’m still salty about “you can solo at 50 what you could at 120”.
I like your optimism but something just feels massively off with this expansion and the stall on the update.
Lets hope I’m wrong on this. Don’t want to see another gravestone next to Ray D. Tear’s.
Other than at the rate they’re going and how far behind they appear to be they might have to end at 9.1 to get 10.0 out before 2023
Financially they need to release another expansion so either we get a short patch or we get 9.2 to into another expansion
They don’t seem to be making progress to catching up to their schedule.
My guess is 9.2 will be the last patch of expansion. they will likely ditch Slands like they did WOD and work on next expansion.
Shadowlands is good it just suffers from system
So much positivity here. 
It’s completely not possible to end at 9.1 though. The story has not finished in any conceivable way. We didn’t beat the final boss, we didn’t solve any problems. There’s no end to an expansion happening here. Even without Ion’s confirmation we can still see at least a 9.2 being obvious.
10.0 is already going to be a 2023 release anyways. They’ll certainly announce it at Blizzcon next February. Give a year for development as usual and it’s definitely not coming out in 2022. Still leaving plenty of time for a 9.3 in the meantime. 9.2 ought to be out somewhere between November-January.
We thought Sylvanas was going to be the last boss in BFA and look how that turned out.
I kinda feel like all bets are off at this point.
My feeling is that the company is in crisis after so many top employees leaving, and given the pattern of periodic layoffs, probably even more mid and lower level workers abandoning ship, too.
The first step is to admit there’s a problem.
I truthfully don’t see a 9.3 happening. Nobody knows when 9.1 is coming out, so I’m going to just throw out the guess of mid July. That puts it at almost 8 months after release, a horrifically long wait time. If 9.2 takes the same amount of time, it will be 16 months after release, and 24 months after release will be the next expansion. So if 9.2 came out earlier, say 6 months after, that would be 14 months after and give us a 10 month window for either a major patch, or nothing until the next expansion.
None of these are ideal, however. Players who did the 6 month subscription on launch day will have it run out with no patches. Imagine a player letting their sub run out, then checking back 2 months afterwards only to see that there is still no new content.
Incorrect. They’ve already said they’re working on 9.2 and bringing back tier sets.
My guess is they’re putting all their eggs into 9.1, they’ll ride that as long as they can, shift almost all their efforts to 10.0 and 9.2 will be something like a 3 boss mini raid to tie up the story.
I suspect they borrowed way too much from the future to get 8.2 out. That was a very decent patch especially once you had flight. 8.3 looked like they were already in a state of panic, then 11 months to get 9.0 out and that was before Covid.
Guys.
WoD had scrapped content all over the place. Shadowlands doesn’t appear to have that problem. It’s just like… 2 months behind schedule. I fully expect a 9.2 and a 9.3. MAYBE 9.2 ends up not having a raid tier, or being a mini-raid with 9.3 being the Jailer raid, but I expect the patch nonetheless.
Y’all are acting like being < 2 months late on 9.1 is the end of the world when expansions last for 2 years.
I mean…
The expansion and its first content patch were largely developed in the middle of a global pandemic.
I think the expansion had every reason to release a month late and 9.1 has every reason to be as delayed as it is, but that will absolutely not be an excuse for the inevitable 9.2.
And yes, 9.2 is happening. It was literally confirmed. We don’t know what else is in it apart from it existing, but it is confirmed to be happening.
Eh. These days just cause blizz says something doesn’t necessarily mean anything anymore. They could easily turn around later and say: “After extensively reviewing our current situation, we have decided that the killing of Sylvanas was a natural break point for shadowlands. The jailer has been trapped once more. But hark! What’s this?! Wrathion has gone missing in the Dragon Isles and Magni has finally OD’d on Azeritre powder! Champion! You must investigate these disturbing events! It’s time to leave the Shadowlands and return to Azeroth!”
I can see this happening. They could sit on the update and drop it close to another game’s release date, I know blizzard has had a history of doing this to other games. Dunno what other games they could snipe though.
Things are kinda different this time. WoD, Legion and BfA all kept their final bosses secret. Sylvanas was just one possibility of many speculations because Blizz never said anything. We had no idea where it was going.
But here they’ve made no secret the Jailer is the big evil mastermind we’re here to stop. Like Wrath and Cata we have a face of focus this time. As 9.1 goes though the finale is very clear. We’re only fighting Sylvanas. Zovaal is not going to die in an epilogue cinematic without even a fight.
They’ve also commented many times on plans they have for future SL patches and types of things they intend to do in them. So it’s not a lie. WoD was the only expansion that had patch issues and that was because of other issues in its making. Every other expansion has been a full scale patch routine. No reason yet to assume SL will be any different. A few month delay in a patch means nothing. 
We fight Sylvanas in 9.1 more then likely the Jailer will be 9.2
And where did you come up with this conclusion ?
If 9.1 was to be the last patch of SL there is no way they would stretch it out to the length of a full expansion time wise .
9.1 will be out by July or August figure 9.2 by between Dec 2021 and Jan 2022.
Next expansion will be out either late 2022 or like TBC out right at the beggining of Jan 2023 either way it will be less then 28 months.