Blizzard's World of Warcraft patch schedule suggests The War Within expansion will launch in August

Today marks the launch of World of Warcraft patch 10.2.6 and Plunderstorm, Blizzard's new battle royale PvP experiment. Based on my interviews with Blizzard representatives and WoW's past update cycles, I've figured out when the MMO's next expansion will probably release.

More precisely, it puts the The War Within expansion launch as sometime in August, perhaps around August 20.

I have a decent track record of predicting patch and expansion launch dates, as I've been covering the game for 20-plus years at this point, have predicted the last few on the nose, and broke the original release date for WoW as part of an interview with a then-VP of Vivendi.

But don't take my word for it. Here's the deep dive on why an August 20 launch date might be true.

In my interview with Blizzard representatives for this patch, we discussed elements of the schedule. The new patch will last six weeks, season 4 will be available on the Public Test Realm later this week, and that next season will start «a few weeks in.»

«The first half of it, you'll see the Plunderstorm event, and then the second half of it, you'll see season 4,» a Blizzard representative said about 10.2.6. Assuming that Blizzard is using its standard definition of «a few» to mean three–supported by the use of «half»—that puts season 4 as starting April 9.

Blizzard confirmed for me that the Cutting Edge achievement in the Amirdrassil raid will end as usual when Season 4 begins, though the nifty fire owl mount from killing Mythic-difficulty end boss Fyrakk will continue to be a guaranteed drop throughout the rest of the expansion.

The new season will launch what is basically a victory lap for Dragonflight dungeons and raids: All eight of the original Dragonflight dungeons will return for Mythic Plus difficulty, and all of the expansion's three raids (Vault of the Incarnates, Aberrus and Amirdrassil) will return in rotation in a system very similar to Shadowlands' Fated raids system.

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