World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth's major 8.1 update is coming December 11

World of Warcraft's next major update, called Tides of Vengeance, will be arriving on December 11 for US players, and a day later for those in Europe. First announced back in September on a livestream, Tides of Vengeance promises to fix many of the bigger problems that players have been complaining about since launch. Oh, and it'll also add heaps of new activities too, which is just as exciting.

For starters, Tides of Vengeance will continue the War Campaign main story and bring more reasons to hate the opposing faction. The supplement that feeling of war, a new Warfront will be available in Dark Shore with fighting happening primarily between the night elves and Forsaken undead. Two new Island Expeditions, a new raid, and a lot more will also be coming as well. You can read a more complete breakdown of everything coming in 8.1 here.

Just as importantly, though, patch 8.1 will also introduce a suite of fixes to Azerite Armor to make the unlockable traits more exciting. Island Expeditions will have their rewards tuned to be more generous, and game director Ion Hazzikostas mentioned that Warfronts will be restructured to provide more activities on a daily basis.

While I'm not as upset about Battle for Azeroth as many players, I'm still real excited to jump into Tides of Vengeance, which will hopefully get me back to playing every night again.

Tides of Vengeance will be available on December 11/12 for US and EU players. Stay tuned, as we'll have lots more coverage of World of Warcraft this weekend.

Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.