It’s an extra-long maintenance day for the launch of World of Warcraft patch 12.1.5

It’s patch day for Midnight servers, and that means extended maintenance for World of Warcraft. Modern players face a full eight hours of downtime for the rollout of patch 12.1.5, but WoW Classic players are safe with just the standard hour of downtime.

Here’s the WoW maintenance schedule for Tuesday, October 13:

• Midnight: 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, 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 World of Warcraft servers are currently offline.

Patch 12.1.5 is a minor patch, but has quite a lot of content with a new one-boss raid, a new invasion event, new “mega-delves” called Labyrinths, additional levels of gear upgrades with Ascendant Venomstones, and some good quality of life improvements, like making Legion and Battle for Azeroth reputations Warband-wide. They’re good improvements… except for a new invasion event in which we are swarmed by insects, something that literally no one wants… but it’s still somewhat light content to be excited about with World of Warcraft: Forever launching in early November, something that literally everyone wants.

But whether you’re playing Midnight or Forever, you’re staying subscribed, so Blizzard (and parent company Microsoft) should be happy. And we have games to play, so we should be happy too.

Meanwhile in Classic, The Burning Crusade Anniversary realms will be upgrading to Phase 3.5 next week, which adds the Zul’Aman raid. The phase rolls out next Thursday, on October 22, but it’s possible TBC servers will get some extra maintenance next Tuesday in advance of the phase. There’s nothing on the agenda for any other Classic realms this week or in the future.

For now, all World of Warcraft realms are offline, but Classic servers should be back online soon. So if you need to kill time while you wait, take a restful vacation in Classic, or give the WoW: Forever beta a spin. While I imagine Forever will be joining this maintenance recap soon, for the moment it’s doing maintenance later in the week, usually on Thursdays.

Whatever you play, I’ll keep you up to date on the current WoW server status right here, and let you know when the servers are back online.