WoW patch 11.0.5 goes live today, after an extended (extended) maintenance

It’s patch day for World of Warcraft, so it’s no surprise that there’s a long maintenance today: The War Within servers will be offline from 7am – 3pm pacific today.

When the servers come back online, it will be with patch 11.0.5, which primarily features WoW’s big birthday bash, but also adds new classes for Dracthyr, new Ascendence forms for Shaman, and a whole lot of class changes for everybody else. WoW’s 20th anniversary celebration is going to be massive, with the new Blackrock Depths raid, vanilla Timewalking dungeons, more world bosses, and a big party outside the Caverns of Time with plenty of prizes to enjoy, including revamped Tier 2 sets.

Blizzard hasn’t had a great track record with maintenance during The War Within, which has had an above-average number of long and extended maintenances since launch. Hopefully Blizzard has given itself a reasonable time period today, and maintenance won’t drag on into the evening. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

But what shall we do while we wait? There’s always Warcraft Rumble, which is currently in the middle of its Hallow’s End celebrations, and post-expansion Diablo 4 is the best the game has ever been — even if you didn’t buy the expansion — plus the base game is on Xbox Game Pass if you don’t own it, either. There are worse ways to kill a day than by slaughtering demons. For my part, I’m refreshing my knowledge of all things Dragon Age before the next game comes out next week, and there’s plenty of game lore to keep me busy.

Whatever you’re up to during today’s downtime, I’ll keep you up to date with any maintenance updates right here.