The icy winds of Northrend have begun their mournful wail, warning the heroes of Azeroth of the imminent danger the Lich King and his undead Scourge present to all life. Gather your allies, stock up on supplies, and prepare to face the threat ahead.

With the release of the Wrath of the Lich King pre-patch, players can create their first Death Knight Hero class, take up the way of the scribe with the new Inscription Profession, and experience a host of new system updates.

Players in Burning Crusade Classic will get the Joyous Journeys buff to help prepare for Wrath of the Lich King Classic. This buff will increase your experience gains by 50%!

The Road Ahead

To set you on the path to success, we’ve laid out the roadmap of the events ahead.

• August 30
  • Pre-patch Begins: Wrath of the Lich King Pre-patch Launches and Fresh Start Realms go live during regional maintenance.
• September 6–13
  • Zombie Plague Event: A mysterious affliction begins to make its way through the capital cities. Players must be vigilant to avoid falling victim to its deadly effects.
• September 13 – Launch
  • Scourge Invasion Event: In several locations throughout Azeroth, players must coordinate a defensive stand against the attacking Necropolis and defeat Scourge forces to gain powerful rewards.
• September 20–October 6
  • Brewfest Begins: Do you love eating delicious fair food, drinking bountiful beverages, and riding rams around barrels of apples? Partake in activities and timed events to earn Brewfest souvenirs and achievements during this brewtiful holiday event.
• September 26
  • Wrath of the Lich King Classic Launches: At 3:00 p.m. PDT, Wrath of the Lich King Classic will launch, and players are welcome to log in.
• October 4 and 5
  • Arena Season 5 Begins: Season 5 will begin with the weekly reset.
• October 6
  • Naxxramas, The Eye of Eternity, and The Obsidian Sanctum are Available at 3:00 p.m. PDT
    • Naxxramas, the giant Necropolis and the seat of the dreaded lich Kel’Thuzad, floats over Wintergarde Keep in Dragonblight, eager to aid the Lich King and his deadly machinations.
    • Located in the center of Coldarra, the Eye of Eternity will challenge players to defeat the blue dragon aspect, Malygos.
    • Dragonblight is home to the Obsidian Sanctum where players must venture below Wyrmrest Temple to bring an end to Sartharion and his lieutenants, Shadron, Tenebron, and Vesperon.

Stay tuned to the official World of Warcraft site to learn more in the weeks ahead. We look forward to meeting you once more in Northrend.

We’ve developed some adjustments to a few items that we want to see more available early in Season of Mastery (than they were in WoW Classic).

We’re increasing the availability of Plaguebloom, adding a small chance for Black Lotus to drop from high level Herbalism nodes, and increasing the availability of Elemental Fire, Elemental Earth, and Elemental Water.

These adjustments are not yet testable on the Season of Mastery Beta, but they will be deployed there at some point over the next few days.

We’ll let you know when this slate of adjustments is in place in the Beta.

First and foremost, thank you to everyone who played Battlegrounds last week and sent us thoughtful and informed feedback on same-faction play. While we don’t plan to re-enable it again over the next few days, we’re analyzing the data we collected, and we’re planning to test more soon.

Here are some of our initial findings that will inform our next test:

• Before this test, most players who joined the queue were unable to get a match, sometimes after waiting for over an hour and/or dropping out of the queue altogether. This was particularly unfortunate at some times of day or in some regions. During the test, BG queue times became short and reliable for both factions.
• Prior to the first test, we wondered if the queue was having an effect on PvP in the outdoor world, and we now have data showing that when same-faction Battlegrounds were available, PvP deaths in the outdoor world were very close to 50/50 between the factions.
• Similarly, win-rates for the two factions when facing the other faction in Battlegrounds were close to 50/50.

We’ll let you know as soon as we’ve completed our analysis, have decided on any further tweaks to the system, and are ready to test it again.

Hello, Battleground enthusiasts!

As soon as we saw Battleground queue times go way up a few weeks ago, we got to work on our options for addressing the situation. They’ve all been discussed here and elsewhere, as you know, and in addition to following your discussions closely, we looked at game history and data. What was most evident from all of your feedback was: players want to continue to play on their chosen side of the faction conflict, players don’t want to wait in long queues for BGs, and players don’t want a highly convoluted mechanism for getting into a BG.

To solve those issues as best we can, we’ve been internally testing a configuration where the War Games system is used to bring about Horde vs. Horde or Alliance vs. Alliance Battlegrounds from the regular queue, and we’re ready to test it in the live game. Here’s the plan:

• Starting tomorrow (Friday, July 2), we’re going to enable same-faction Battlegrounds.
• You’ll queue for BGs as usual, and the matchmaker will first try to make an opposite-faction match for you.
• If an opposite-faction match cannot be quickly made, you’ll be matched against a team from your faction.
• Rewards such as Honor and Reputation will be assigned as usual.

We’ve been thinking of these like military training exercises, and to help get that feeling across in-game, we’re testing putting masks and tabards on the team playing out of the enemy faction’s base.

Please note that same-faction play won’t be available for Alterac Valley, which was never hooked up for War Games and would be particularly awkward for the team that found themselves fighting alongside a great number of enemy NPCs.

We’ll follow the action closely throughout the weekend, and with scheduled maintenance next week (July 6 in this region), we’re going to return the matchmaker to its regular configuration and analyze what happened.

When same-faction play goes live tomorrow, we’ll open a new feedback thread in this forum. After you’ve played some BGs, please come to that new thread and let us know how it went.

Thank you!