Midnight is approaching with today’s World of Warcraft maintenance — all WoW servers are currently offline

It’s a big week for World of Warcraft maintenance as the Midnight pre-patch finally hits live realms. Last week we had a mega-maintenance to launch The Burning Crusade pre-patch on WoW Classic Anniversary realms, lasting over 24 hours — and perhaps that’s why today’s eight-hour downtime for modern WoW feels reasonable. This week, Classic realms have a standard hour-long maintenance while modern WoW is scheduled to be offline all day for the launch of the Midnight pre-patch.

But we survived last week’s maintenance, and we’ll survive this week’s too. Here’s the WoW maintenance schedule for Tuesday, January 20:

• The War Within: Offline from 7am – 3pm pacific (10am – 6pm eastern)
• Mists of Pandaria Classic: Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)
• WoW Classic (including Classic Era, Season of Discovery, Anniversary, and Hardcore realms): Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)

All World of Warcraft servers are currently offline.

Midnight comes with some of the most sweeping changes we’ve ever seen in World of Warcraft, with an overhaul to addons that restricts them from accessing combat data — which is breaking a lot of our favorite addons, some of which will never be seen again. And some of those that survive won’t have quite as many features as they did before. You might assume that only means raid helpers, but this data is used by things like unitframes, nameplates, cooldown notifications, damage meters, and more. Many addons that accessed this information have had to be rebuilt to comply with Blizzard’s new restrictions, and your game could look a lot different when the pre-patch goes live.

As part of this change, Blizzard has added new built-in tools to do some of the things addons used to be able to do. A built-in Cooldown Manager offers an easy way to track cooldowns — like you may have done with WeakAuras before — though it’s less flexible than its addon alternatives. Modern WoW will finally have its own damage meter and boss alerts, though they aren’t as full-featured as the addons you might have been using previously. It’s part of a scheme to level the playing field, so players don’t need to download addons to be able to play at the same level as their friends. Blizzard’s new tools cover the basics, and will be good enough for most players, but it’s going to be a lot to get used to. Here’s a look at some of the addons that are (and aren’t) continuing, or you can browse CurseForge filtering for addons that are 12.0 or 12.0.1 compatible to see what’s up to date.

There’s also been a flurry of new addon development as players create addons that build on Blizzard’s new tools, offering extra customization to the cooldown manager and other new features. I expect this to continue, and we’ll see more addons spring up to replace, customize, and reskin the built-in UI. But even with new addons coming up to fill the gaps, the transition is certainly jarring, and if you use any addons at all, you should expect to spend time reconfiguring them or finding replacements when you log back on. It’s a proper addon apocalypse.

Of course there’s a lot more changes in the pre-patch. We’re getting Devourer (and Void Elf) Demon Hunters, a ton of class changes, an overhaul of the transmog system, Endeavors in Player Housing (which will help you level your house), Elven housing exteriors for both factions, and a pretty serious stat squish. A pre-patch event, which will be a great way to level and collect catch-up gear for alts, launches next week.

There’s a lot to look forward to as Midnight descends, but I still think today’s addon changes are the biggest thing to hit World of Warcraft in a while, and they’ll be the cause of a great deal of patch day chaos.

Now there’s nothing to do but watch the clock. I’ll keep you up to date right here on the status of today’s maintenance and let you know if the servers are up early — or if maintenance runs long. Hopefully I’ll see you in Azeroth soon.