A perfectly modest World of Warcraft maintenance day

It’s a pretty modest maintenance day for World of Warcraft, with a quick hour of downtime for Mists of Pandaria and The Burning Crusade, and a relatively short two-hour maintenance for Midnight and WoW Classic. That’s a little more maintenance than normal but not by much. As long as today’s downtime runs as scheduled, we’ll all be back in Azeroth soon.

Here’s the WoW maintenance schedule for Tuesday, August 4:

• Midnight: Offline from 7am – 9am pacific (10am – 12pm 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 – 9am pacific (10am – 12pm eastern)
• The Burning Crusade Classic Anniversary realms: Offline from 7am – 8am pacific (10am – 11am eastern)

All World of Warcraft servers are currently offline.

But there’s one more worry on maintenance day, because we also have Blizzard services maintenance that started at 5am pacific and runs through 9am pacific (8am – 12pm eastern). If you had problems sneaking in just one last quest before today’s maintenance, that was probably why. While Blizzard services maintenance doesn’t mean the servers are down, sometimes it means you may have trouble connecting or staying connected. Because services maintenance lasts longer than server maintenance, you may still have trouble logging in after the servers are back up.

If you’re playing on Midnight realms, you can expect one oddity on maintenance day: when the servers come back online, you will not be able to buy, sell, or trade player housing dyes. The dyes will become Warbound, so you can trade them amongst your characters, but not with other players. This is a temporary change being put in place before patch 12.1 rolls out next week, with significant changes to the dye system. Instead of turning herbs into pigments and pigments into dyes, you will simply turn herbs into pigments and then use the appropriate color pigments to dye decor directly. It’s a more straightforward system, and it will save you some inventory space. However, it will be a little annoying if you planned to customize your home this week.

That’s the only change announced to be coming with this week’s maintenance, so I don’t expect any hiccups with today’s downtime. Watch this space and I’ll keep you updated on current WoW server status, and let you know when the servers come back online. I’ll see you in Azeroth soon!