Blizzard will take it slow with World of Warcraft balance updates after the Midnight expansion drops

A screencap of the announcement trailer for World of Warcraft: Midnight. A grey-haired elven warrior readies his sword while looking at the viewer. He's wearing golden plated armor. His long eyebrows are slanted as he looks forward with a stoic determination. — (Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

World of Warcraft's next expansion is almost here and with it will be a mountain of changes to how the game is played. Not only has Blizzard pruned many of the combat mods, or addons, that people have relied on for years, but every class in the game has seen significant changes to how they work.

With so much in flux, Blizzard has come out with a blog post to set expectations for how balance updates will go in the first few weeks of the expansion. Apart from any emergency tuning that might be needed should something be absolutely broken, Blizzard isn't going to issue any balance updates until March 17, a little over two weeks into Midnight. That date is also when the first season of the expansion starts, so it probably wants to level the playing field as much as possible before players start tackling the most challenging endgame dungeons.

It will then take the data from that week and use it to drop a follow-up balance patch on March 24. This date is right before the first raid opens up and the race for a world first completion begins. Needless to say, this is a critical moment for WoW to be at its most reliable so that the race remains as fair as possible. A patch will go out when the mythic raid becomes available and from then on Blizzard is only going to tweak things at major milestones in the race "to avoid being overly disruptive to progression."

I don't envy the developers at Blizzard for trying to be extremely careful with balance in an expansion that is upending a lot of crucial things all at once. Most players want their class to feel powerful and fun to play regardless of how it matches up against others, but having a whole professional raid scene means some semblance of competitive balance has to exist to keep things interesting. Juggling all that in just a few weeks is going to be a heroic feat.

Blizzard has made a concerted effort to reduce the amount of busywork for the most complicated classes. Addons that told you when to press certain abilities are largely gone, so its goal was to make classes more intuitive on their own. The results haven't all been winners. Some players think certain classes have lost some of their identity or nuance, while others love the ability to actually understand what spells to use and when. However, Blizzard's general philosophy of unshackling the game from addons seems to be generally well received by everyone—it's just going to take time for all the kinks to be ironed out.

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Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his specialty is in action RPGs and MMOs, he's driven to cover all sorts of games whether they're broken, beautiful, or bizarre.

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