The War Within Season 1 is now live!

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 10, though, as this is a global release, for certain time zones, this will be September 11. 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).

Want to know more about The War Within? We have everything you need to know to get started with WoW’s latest expansion!

The seasonal rotation in WoW includes:

• Raid: Nerub-ar Palace

The new Nerub-ar Palace raid will open in Normal, Heroic, and Raid Finder difficulties when the season starts. Mythic difficulty, Story difficulty, and LFR wing 2 will launch on September 17, followed by LFR wing 3 on September 24. It’s a very casual-friendly schedule, with LFR launching earlier than usual and the new Story raid difficulty following soon after. This new mode will let experience the story of the raid in an even more relaxed, smaller setting than LFR — and with it launching so soon, everyone should be able to check out the story in the raid as they play through the story of the expansion.

With the launch of a new raid also comes one of our favorite de facto esports events, The Race to World First, starting when Mythic difficulty launches on September 17.

• PVP: New season

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.

• Mythic+: New rotation

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. Mythic 0 will be available when the season starts on September 9, and Mythic+ will open on September 17.

The affixes keystone masters will be seeing in Season 1 are somewhat in flux (in that they keep changing), with the latest iteration of Mythic+ affixes removing all previous affixes except for Fortified and Tyrannical, and adding new Xal’atath-themed affixes.

but we’ve seen some being discussed — both new affixes and changes to old — that are quite interesting.

So get ready to squash some bugs, because season 1 of The War Within is now live!

Originally published July 3, 2024; updated September 11, 2024.