Raiding Expectations for the Holiday Season

With the reveal at BlizzCon of the upcoming Shadowlands expansion, we’ve been getting a lot of questions regarding the schedule for the previously announced Visions of N’Zoth content update. To that end, we want to share that Visions of N’Zoth and the raid—Ny’alotha, The Waking City—will go live early next year.

Visions of N’Zoth is making good progress on the PTR, and currently with your help, we have been comprehensively testing the new content along with iterating on new systems like Corruption.

During the holiday season, we want to be considerate of all our players with the release timing of new content. Many guilds are still progressing through The Eternal Palace, and we want to give them enough time to finish the raid and earn their Cutting Edge: Queen Azshara and Ahead of the Curve achievements before opening the new raid. We try to avoid releasing new content tiers during the holiday season so that players are not encouraged to choose between progression and spending time with their families and friends. This also helps ensure us that we’re fully staffed to support any required hotfixes or turning issues that may emerge.

This will also give everyone extra time to enjoy the WoW 15th Anniversary event starting today, so you can play through the limited-time Memories of Azeroth raids and Korrak’s Revenge without having to rush through the festivities.

We’ll have more info on the new raid and content update in the next few weeks, so stay tuned to the forums and worldofwarcraft.com for the latest news as we head into the holiday season.

53 Likes

Sounds good! I’m super excited for Shadowlands AND Ny’alotha! Two beautiful places that we’ll get to visit in 2020!

19 Likes

Any updates from the PvP side of things coming? Seems like you guys have dropped the ball on PvP and have been fixated solely on PVE.

All with an expansion titled ‘Battle for Azeroth’ and marketed as a Horde vs Alliance war.

25 Likes

Thanks for the holiday considerations and the extended Anniversary event!

20 Likes

I am in no hurry for the new content. Take your time Developers.

16 Likes

Please do stuff like this more often. Communication + logical plan. Nice to see for a change.

42 Likes

Do you plan on fixing the queue issues with these raids any time soon? When I tried to queue as tank Chromie kept queueing me as DPS even though I was in Blood spec with tank selected in Raid finder.

4 Likes

What a relief! We’ve been worried about this and are glad to hear the new raid won’t be til next year. Thank you!

3 Likes

I’d love to see all these iterations on the Corruption system, considering there hasn’t been a PTR update since you told us what we currently have is a rough-draft, yet teased internal changes we have no idea will help or further hurt us.

It’s funny reading this when Crucible of Storms, just one tier ago, was abruptly interrupted even before Alliance managed to finish their Hall of Fame.

4 Likes

TYVM for this.

3 Likes

Why cant we get the Allied races and DKs early to have the holiday to level them up in time for the raid?

25 Likes

2+ more months of this snoozefest of log in -> stand around -> log out.

yay…

This is surprising because december is generally a month where people have a lot of time on their hands to be at home playing video games; so you’d expect at least the patch content being released during that time, and the raid delayed til after new years.

With this kind of delay on the patch I expect this corruption gear system and the other content is bloody immaculate and completely smoothed out.

16 Likes

So at least 2 more months of content drought. REAL COOL Blizzard!

11 Likes

That means we will have done over two complete (12 week) cycles of the M+ affixes in one season. Neck has been at 70 for sixish weeks already…

I just really hope you take this time to completely reconsider the Corruptforging system as well as the iLvl reward from end game content outside of Mythic Raid with the loss of Titan/Warforging.

Good news is, with that much time I might actually be able to roll a proper 445 tanking helm I guess =\

Did you forget you can release raids after a patch goes live? Is that one of those retcons?

Just how many weeks is this anniversary event going to keep people entertained?

I’ll just unsub for a while. Yea, I was expecting it to release in January-ish, but I just don’t like the company positive spin. That’s not why I’m unsubbing, rather that’s just a purely honest ‘I have nothing to do for now’ reason-- it isn’t some protest in disgust or anything.

Anyway I bet 98% of people will be playing just as much World of Warcraft over the holidays (less time at work) with maybe the exception of Christmas Day. The 0.1% of Mythic pushers might lose a day? Oh well woe, should we be designing things for that tiny tiny minority?

14 Likes

What they should do is make a vote thing, and one option release the patch holiday season like alot of us want or release the patch after.

1 Like

Blizzard probably knows this patch won’t be able to do squat on getting players back with all the competition at Christmas for our entertainment dollars. Better release it when people might want to resub.

1 Like

Hopefully its super early 2020