It’s another long Tuesday maintenance for Midnight, but WoW Classic is already back online

We’re starting the second week of Midnight season 1, and the second long maintenance for modern World of Warcraft servers, with four hours of downtime scheduled. But all variants of WoW Classic have the standard hour of downtime scheduled, and should be up online quickly. So if you’re looking forward to the first Great Vault of Midnight, you’re in for a wait… but at least you can play Classic while you wait.

Here’s the WoW maintenance schedule for Tuesday, March 24:

• 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)

Midnight realms remain offline, but all eras of WoW Classic are online for play.

Midnight does have a fair amount of new content this week that may account for some of this downtime. A significant balance patch is going out today in advance of Mythic Voidspire and Dreamrift raids launching. That marks the real start of the Race to World First, as guilds race to be the first to finish out the raid. Blizzard wants balance to be just right going into the latest raid, but a perfectly balanced game is a tall order (and if you read the comments on that post, you’ll quickly see that a lot of people do not think the game is there yet). But we’ll see how the latest changes play out when the servers come online.

Personally, my favorite spec got a small buff so I’m feeling pretty good… but no one rules the DPS meters forever.

Whether you’re waiting to watch another Race to World First or are just eager to check your vault for the week, modern WoW players have a wait in store. I’ll let you know right here whether today’s WoW maintenance runs long, and keep you updated on current WoW server status.

Hopefully I’ll see you in Azeroth soon… as long as your definition of “soon”stretches to four hours.