It’s a long maintenance for Midnight going into Season 1, but all servers are now back online!

This week’s WoW server maintenance is a big one, at least for some servers: Midnight realms are scheduled to be offline for four hours, while all versions of WoW Classic are scheduled to be back online within the hour. Hopefully things go as scheduled and Midnight downtime doesn’t lag into evening gaming hours, but it’s always a roll of the dice to guess at WoW server downtime.

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

• Midnight: Offline from 7am – 11am pacific (10am – 2pm eastern)
• Mists of Pandaria Classic: Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)
• WoW Classic (including Classic Era, Season of Discovery, and Hardcore realms): Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)
• The Burning Crusade Classic Anniversary realms: Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)

All WoW servers are back online!

Midnight Season 1 starts today, with the new Voidspire and Dreamrift raids, as well as a hefty balance patch that tries to bring classes in line before the competitive season starts. It’s a patch that’s getting pretty mixed reactions, mostly based on whether your class has gotten buffed or nerfed — but Blizzard had already warned us to expect a big balance patch before the season started. When the servers come back online, we’ll get in game and see how balanced our revised classes actually feel, but for now I recommend reading the patch notes so you can see what changes are coming for your class of choice.

Here’s the full list of new content launching today (or tomorrow for EU players) for Midnight Season 1:

• Heroic and Mythic 0 difficulty Season 1 Dungeons. Note that this does not include Mythic+ yet!  The dungeon pool is a mix of new and old dungeons:
  • Magister’s Terrace (Midnight)
  • Maisara Caverns (Midnight)
  • Nexus-Point Xenas (Midnight)
  • Windrunner Spire (Midnight)
  • Algeth’ar Academy (Dragonflight)
  • Seat of the Tiumvirate (Legion)
  • Skyreach (Warlords of Draenor)
  • Pit of Saron (Wrath of the Lich King)
• Normal, Heroic, and Raid Finder (Wing 1) of the Voidspire raid.
• Normal, Heroic, and Raid Finder of the Dreamrift raid.
• Bountiful Delves open, as well as Delves over tier 7.
• PvP Season 1 starts

Next week Mythic raids open along with Story Mode and another wing of LFR, but I doubt there will be another hefty maintenance as the seasonal content rollout continues. That means the Race to World First will kick off in earnest next week, for those of you who (like me) enjoy watching top guilds race through the raid, though Echo is starting its RWF stream this week (for those of you who like to watch heroic splits). We have links to when and where guilds will be streaming Race to World First if you’d like to watch.

Servers are now back online, so I’ll see you in Azeroth soon!