When does The War Within Season 1 start?

Blizzard has been great about laying out the timing of their upcoming releases lately, so it’s not surprising that, ahead of World of Warcraft‘s launch of The War Within expansion, we already have a start date for season 1: September 9, though, as this is a global release, for certain time zones, this will be September 10. Usually the specific time is set off of midnight CEST in Europe, and this would mark exactly three weeks since the launch of the expansion (ignoring the 3-day early access window, of course).

The seasonal rotation in WoW has a few features to expect.

The first raid of TWW, Nerub’ar Palace, will release as Season 1 starts, staggered with Normal and Heroic available a week before Mythic. Though we don’t have the exact schedule yet, the LFR release will be staggered as well, with the new Story Mode raid difficulty launching with the last LFR wing to offer players the chance to experience the story of the raid in an even more relaxed, smaller setting than LFR. With the launch of a new raid also comes one of our favorite de facto esports events, The Race to World First, starting a week after the Season 1 launch.

As usual, PVP rankings will reset, so players thirsty for blood will get to claw their way to the top of the leaderboard again, with a slew of new rewards to earn. Significant for PVP players though, is that the Great Vault will no longer be offering rewards for PVP. The official statement seems to implicate the new Delves feature in this decision.

Perhaps the most complicated aspect of seasonal rotation, the Mythic+ dungeon rotation features a mix of new and old for both dungeons and affixes. Ara-Kara, City of Echoes, City of Threads, The Dawnbreaker, Grim Batol, Mists of Tirna Scithe, The Necrotic Wake, Siege of Boralus, and The Stonevault are the dungeons featured this season. The affixes keystone masters will be seeing in season 1 are currently somewhat unconfirmed (in that they keep changing), but we’ve seen some being discussed — both new affixes and changes to old — that are quite interesting.

So mark your calendars and get ready to squash some bugs, because season 1 of The War Within is coming September 9!