With the official launch of Midnight upon us, we want to take the opportunity to give you a sneak peek at our tuning and class update roadmap as we head into the first season of Midnight.
With the Midnight expansion, players will gain access to the new Apex Talents and their additional talent points as they level toward 90. Similar to how we approached The War Within class changes, we will continue to look at class performance and any emergent pain points to see where we might have opportunities to make changes during major content updates. In Midnight, many specializations have undergone large changes in order to meet our design goals for the expansion. While the scope and full list of class updates are still being worked on, we are paying close attention to both internal metrics as well as player sentiment as we assess how to proceed.
When it comes to tuning adjustments, our next planned pass is expected to arrive with the Midnight Season 1 launch on March 17. Our next pass will follow immediately afterwards utilizing data gathered during the week Heroic difficulties are available; these changes will go live with the launch of Mythic raid difficulty and Mythic+ on March 24.
Beyond these dates, we will look to perform more tuning passes based on data gathered during the starting weeks of Mythic difficulty for Season 1 and the March on Quel’Danas available the week of March 31.For these two passes we err on the side of caution with the amount of tuning we do until their respective Mythic end-bosses die to avoid being overly disruptive to progression. After these key dates we will have several check-in passes planned roughly a month apart. Once players obtain higher item level and better optimized gear sets, the throughput of several specs will shift up or down relative to others and we feel it’s important to be diligent in looking at the current state of class balance as time goes on.
For a more specific timeline we’ve listed the dates we plan to perform tuning adjustments below. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list of Season 1 tuning, just the ones immediately coming up. All of these changes will be applied with weekly restarts in each region.
March 17: Midnight Season 1 Launch
March 24: Mythic Raid Difficulty and Mythic Keystone Dungeon Launch
March 31: March on Quel’Danas Live
April 7: Post March on Quel’Danas Release Worldwide
We want to emphasize that these dates may change as needed. We may also hotfix any especially disruptive bugs or tuning issues at any point in time; the above dates are only for our currently planned tuning passes.
Thank you for your continued feedback and we look forward to seeing you in Midnight!