WoW patch 11.0.5 is now live, 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 were scheduled be offline from 7am – 3pm pacific today, but came back online an hour early. The World of Warcraft servers are now live!

The servers are now live with 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. However it seems like Blizzard made a reasonable time estimate today, getting the servers online early. Kudos to the server team!

Fortunately there’s plenty to do while you wait to download the new patch. 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.

The servers are now up, so I’ll see you in game soon!