It’s a medium-size World of Warcraft maintenance day — all servers currently offline

All World of Warcraft realms have a longer than usual maintenance today, but hopefully not too long: all servers are scheduled for two hours of maintenance this morning. And while it’s always nice when the servers come back online quickly, two hours isn’t too bad.

Here’s the WoW maintenance schedule for Tuesday, February 17:

• Midnight: Offline from 7am – 9am pacific (10am – 12pm eastern)
• Mists of Pandaria Classic: Offline from 7am – 9am pacific (10am – 12pm eastern)
• WoW Classic (including Classic Era, Season of Discovery, and Hardcore realms): Offline from 7am – 9am pacific (10am – 12pm eastern)
• The Burning Crusade Classic Anniversary realms: Offline from 7am – 9am pacific (10am – 12pm eastern)

All World of Warcraft servers are currently offline.

Now that we’ve gotten through maintenance, we can get on to the bad news: when modern WoW servers come back online, they come with a host of class changes that include a number of nerfs, though healers across the board are getting a significant damage buff. (For whenever they have free mana to do that damage.) Classes remain in a significant amount of flux leading into the Midnight launch as Blizzard figures out final balance of each class and spec, and this probably won’t be the last swath of class updates. We’re all just waiting to see how the pendulum swings when the servers come up on launch day.

For other WoW realms, this is set to be a quiet week, with no major updates announced. But in game we have a few events, as Love in the Air continues for another week and Lunar Festival just began. Modern servers also have the Winds of Mysterious Fortune buff going through February 22, so you still have a little time to take advantage of this experience and reputation buff.

So what’s there to do while you wait? There’s always Heroes of the Storm, which just got a significant balance patch last week, as well as a new cartoon Gul’dan skin, which Blizzard describes as “straight from the toon of Sargeras,” a pun that physically pains me to type. Still, the game has been getting surprisingly frequent updates… certainly more than Diablo 3, a game similarly in maintenance mode but far more neglected. But if you do feel like playing some old-school Diablo, there’s always Diablo 2 Resurrected which got a new DLC last week, nearly 26 years after it was first launched. If you want the next two hours to vanish in a puff of smoke, just download the Reign of the Warlock DLC and check out the new Warlock class. (Though be warned, Diablo 2 can easily take up more of your time than plan.)

Hopefully the servers come up soon, but in the meanwhile I’ll keep you updated on maintenance status right here. If the servers come back early — or if maintenance is extended into the afternoon — I’ll let you know.