Usually, the downtime between World of Warcraft expansions is a perfect time to catch up on old content, grind out any reputations you may have fallen behind on during the current expansion, and even head back to old dungeons and raids to farm your long-coveted transmog pieces and mounts. In between Dragonflight and The War Within, though, Blizzard is making sure players stay sated and the content remains flowing.
Last year around this time, the WoW dev team announced all of its plans with a roadmap that detailed the entire release schedule for 2023—and Blizzard stuck to that roadmap like gospel. Today, the team showed off its plans for 2024 with another fully detailed timeline, complete with the release window for The War Within, as well as plans for the wrapping up of Dragonflight.
The game’s next expansion, The War Within, will be released in the latter half of 2024, with a tentative release slate around the fall currently on the radar. All but one WoW expansion (The Burning Crusade) was released in the second half of its release year, and the last two—Shadowlands and Dragonflight—have each come out in November. It’s possible that Blizzard could be sticking to the release formula that’s worked for the developer in the past and release The War Within in November 2024, although nothing is certain at this time.
The War Within’s pre-patch will go live in the summer of next year, according to Blizzard, with the Alpha/Beta cycle taking place in the first half of 2024. During that time, though, there will still be live updates coming to active Dragonflight servers. The current iteration of the game will be receiving two new halfway-patches, as well as a fourth season of PvE and PvP content. The previously announced Patch 10.2.5 will be the first update that goes live in 2024 (currently slated for a winter launch time frame), while Patch 10.2.7 and Dragonflight season four will both hit the live servers in the spring.
Dragonflight season four will feature fated versions of the expansion’s three raids—Amirdrassil, Aberrus, and the Vault of the Incarnates—as well as a new Mythic+ map pool. PvP players will also see the ladder refreshed for the final time in this expansion.
Patch 10.2.7, the final content update of Dragonflight, will be titled “Dark Heart,” and will introduce new quests, as well as a new holiday event that has yet to be given a name. Also, at long last, Trolls and Draenei will receive their long-awaited Heritage Armor sets, making them two of the final races to receive race-specific sets.
WoW’s next update, Patch 10.2.5, will likely go live in the first few weeks of the new year, and 2024 will be capped off with the launch of The War Within at its back end.
