0hp: World of Warcraft

BlizzCon 2026 has a running order, and WoW gets ten sessions across two days

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

BlizzCon 2026, which is Blizzard's own convention for its games, now has a running order. The studio published the schedule, stream plan and rewards detail on 1 September, eleven days out from the show on 12 and 13 September at the Anaheim Convention Center. The gap the first announcement left, whether any of it would be broadcast, is closed.

Three of the slots below are esports finals, which are competitive tournament matches. The MDI, which stands for Mythic Dungeon Invitational, is the studio's dungeon speedrun competition. The AWC is its arena tournament. One panel on day two is about Hardcore, a mode where a character who dies is gone for good.

The World of Warcraft slots, both days

The Warcraft slots and the two esports finals, taken from Blizzard's own longer list. All times Pacific, and all marked subject to change.

Day	Time	Segment
Sat 12 Sep	10:30 a.m.	Opening Ceremony
Sat 12 Sep	12:00 p.m.	World of Warcraft: What's Next
Sat 12 Sep	12:45 p.m.	MDI Grand Finals, first match
Sat 12 Sep	2:00 p.m.	Building Cutscenes in World of Warcraft
Sat 12 Sep	2:45 p.m.	World of Warcraft: What's Next II
Sat 12 Sep	3:30 p.m.	Developers x Creators Showcase
Sat 12 Sep	5:30 p.m.	MDI Grand Finals, championship match
Sun 13 Sep	10:00 a.m.	World of Warcraft: Deep Dive
Sun 13 Sep	10:45 a.m.	Crafting Coziness and Creative Freedom
Sun 13 Sep	11:45 a.m.	World Building in World of Warcraft
Sun 13 Sep	1:15 p.m.	World of Warcraft: Art Design
Sun 13 Sep	2:45 p.m.	World of Warcraft: Design Deep Dive
Sun 13 Sep	4:15 p.m.	World of Warcraft Hardcore: What's Next
Sun 13 Sep	5:00 p.m.	AWC Grand Finals, championship match
Sun 13 Sep	5:20 p.m.	Closing Remarks

Our take: what it means for players

Two "What's Next" panels on the same afternoon is the shape worth reading. A single roadmap panel is a year plan. Two back to back, with a cutscene panel wedged between them, reads as a roadmap split across a reveal and its detail. That is how a convention paces an announcement it wants to land twice.

The second signal is Hardcore getting its own forward-looking panel on day two, at 4:15 p.m., rather than a mention inside a broader session. A named "What's Next" slot is the smallest possible commitment a schedule can make to a mode, and it is still a commitment. We will take it. A mode where death is permanent, given a stage of its own, is the genre remembering what it is good at.

The fine print is where our complaint sits, and Blizzard states it plainly. The streams cover the opening ceremony, major panels and esports competitions. The musical performances are not part of that, and neither are what Blizzard calls some other elements. The band Le Sserafim plays at 6:00 p.m. on day two and the trophy ceremony follows at 6:30. Anyone attending in person has until 18 September to link a BlizzCon Pass, which is the in-person ticket, to a Battle.net account and still claim the rewards.

That deadline is the bit that will cost somebody something. A linking window that closes five days after the show, published inside a rewards section rather than on the ticket, quietly separates people from something they already paid for. Put it on the ticket.

What's next

Blizzard says the schedule updates after the opening ceremony, so the day two list is the one most likely to move. Both days, the two esports finals and the reward-linking deadline are on the calendar with the day we last checked each against Blizzard's page.

WoW's 1 September hotfixes lift thirteen specs and cut boss health in the easy queue

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

Blizzard's fix pass dated 1 September 2026 points in two directions at once. Thirteen character specialisations went up in World of Warcraft, while several healing and defensive numbers came down where players fight each other. Ten of the thirteen took a damage increase, two took healing and one took survivability. It all sits on Blizzard's running hotfix page, which is edited in place as fixes land rather than reposted each time.

Three words to carry through the rest of this. A hotfix is a small change applied to the live game without taking it down. A spec, short for specialisation, is the role and playstyle a character picks inside their class. A raid is a dungeon built for a large group.

The numbers, against monsters

Spec	Change
Frost Death Knight	Howling Blast and Obliterate +15%, Frost Strike +20%, melee +10%
Protection Paladin	Blaze of Glory +150%, Consecration +30%, Divine Guidance +30%
Feral Druid	all ability damage +5%, auto-attacks +10%, Ferocious Bite +10%
Beast Mastery and Survival Hunter	+7% each, Survival only +3% against other players
Frost Mage	+6%
Fire Mage	+3%
Restoration Druid	healing +4%
Fire Mage	+3%
Restoration Druid	healing +4%
Fire Mage	+3%
Restoration Druid	healing +4%
Fire Mage	+3%
Restoration Druid	healing +4%
Vengeance Demon Hunter	Demonic Wards 15% (was 12%), Fel Devastation healing +25%
Mistweaver Monk	healing +5%, tier 4-piece proc chance 25% (was 20%)
Havoc, Balance, Windwalker	+4% each, against monsters only

A tier set, which is a matched set of gear whose pieces give a bonus when worn together, is what the Mistweaver "four-piece" row is about: wearing four of them.

Five of those rows carry a developer note explaining the intent, and the notes are more specific than the numbers. Frost Death Knight is aimed at single target and two-target cleave. Vengeance is called out as still short defensively. Feral is called short in raids. Mistweaver is said to want more healing and more value from its four-piece. Protection Paladin is behind other tanks in dungeons.

Our take: what it means for players

This is a difficulty correction aimed at the bottom of the ladder rather than the top, and that is the right end to aim at.

The Venomous Abyss, which is the raid at the centre of the current season, has four difficulty settings. Raid Finder, the automatic queue that puts strangers into an easier version, sits at the bottom. Then Normal, then Heroic, then Mythic at the top. Every Venomous Abyss change on 1 September touching Raid Finder, or a smaller Normal or Heroic group, makes the fight easier. Inside that raid, Mythic is the only setting that gets stricter anywhere, on the Twin Fangs, though two abilities on the Coiled Altar, one of its boss fights, were cut there as well.

Nek'zali the Soulcoiler lost 15 percent of its health in Raid Finder, the Entombed Sentinels the same, and Vexhul and Ithraz 20 percent. On Mythic, Eternal Venom now takes ten applications to kill instead of fewer, and Ravenous Feast hits at least four people.

Read that split as a statement about whose evening matters. Midnight Season 2 is the game's current run of months, and Blizzard's own schedule for it puts wing 3 of that raid in the week of 1 September, so it opened the same week these numbers came down. A group walking in that night met a trimmed version rather than the one that had been standing. Nobody had to buy anything to get that. The fight moved. A player with a couple of evenings a week getting a fix in a hotfix, for free, is how this is supposed to work. Worth saying out loud in a genre where the same problem is often solved by selling somebody a shortcut.

The pass for fights between players runs both ways, and the healing cuts are unusually blunt about why. Healers keep topping people up too fast. So the Gladiator's Distinction set bonus now grants 5 percent primary stat for healing specialisations instead of 10, Restoration Druid's Swiftmend heals 20 percent less, and Mage barriers absorb a quarter less. Those are pace changes aimed at shortening matches rather than at any one class, and the studio saying so in the notes beats leaving people to guess from the numbers.

Where we would push: a fix pass this large arrives as edits to one running page, dated by day rather than laid out change by change with a build behind each one. Six weeks from now, working out which version your Tuesday night sat on means reading the whole page again.

Credit where it is due: Wowhead is where the community keeps a running record of these hotfixes.

What's next

The Venomous Abyss finishes opening with Raid Finder wing 4 in the week of 8 September, the last scheduled unlock of Midnight Season 2. That date, and BlizzCon, which is Blizzard's own convention and which we wrote up in our piece on its running order, are both on the calendar with the day we last checked them.

WoW's Midnight Season 2 finishes unlocking on 8 September

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

World of Warcraft's Midnight Season 2, the game's current run of months, finishes unlocking in the week of 8 September 2026. That is when the fourth and last chunk of its big group dungeon opens to the automatic queue. Blizzard staged the season across five weekly steps rather than one day, in its own announcement.

The names, in plain words. The Venomous Abyss is this season's raid, which is a dungeon built for a large group and the hardest thing on the schedule. Raid Finder is the automatic queue that puts strangers into an easier version of it, released in chunks called wings. Above Raid Finder sit three harder settings: Normal, then Heroic, then Mythic at the top. The Great Vault is the weekly chest a character earns just by playing. Delves are short solo dungeons.

The unlock timeline

Week of	What opened
11 August	Altar of Fangs, Heroic and Mythic 0 dungeons, the new eight-dungeon rotation, Tidebound Grotto on World difficulty, Prey Normal and Hard, Nemesis delves at the first difficulty, arena training grounds
18 August	The Venomous Abyss on Normal, Heroic, Mythic and Raid Finder wing 1, Mythic+ Season 2, player-versus-player Season 2, bountiful delves and keys, Prey Nightmare mode, Great Vault season rewards
25 August	Raid Finder wing 2 and the raid's story mode
1 September	Raid Finder wing 3
8 September	Raid Finder wing 4

Mythic 0 is the detail people miss in that table. It ran on a weekly lockout in the first week and moved to a daily reset in the second, at the same 292 item level either way. Item level is the number that says how strong a piece of gear is.

Our take: what it means for players

A five-week ramp is a decision about who the season is for. Read it in order and it tells you who Blizzard expects to be where.

The first week is a gearing week with no raid in it at all. The second carries almost everything competitive at once: the timed dungeons, the fighting between players, the raid on Normal, Heroic, Mythic and the first Raid Finder wing, and the Great Vault, all turning on together. The three weeks after that add the raid's story mode and three more Raid Finder wings, and nothing else.

That last part is the interesting choice, and we think it is a good one. A schedule whose back half is built entirely around pacing the story for people who do not raid on a fixed night treats a casual evening as a legitimate way to play rather than a lesser one. The competitive players got everything in week two and are not waiting on anybody.

For a returning player the practical read is that arriving now costs almost nothing. Every source of gear except the last two Raid Finder wings has been open since the week of 18 August. The dungeon rotation is fixed for the season. The rating thresholds are published up front: 1500 for the title "the Venomous", 2000 for the mount Breath of Blight, 3000 for Breath of Ruin. Rating here is the score a character builds from timed dungeon runs. The top one percent and top 0.1 percent of players in your region settle at the season's end rather than on the way through. Thresholds published up front are the difference between a goal and a treadmill.

The raid's rewards are unusually generous for housing, and this detail is worth copying. Defeating Ula'tek drops the Venomous Abyss trophy decor for every raid member at 100 percent, on every difficulty. Heroic adds a second trophy and Mythic a third. A guaranteed drop rather than a chance is the right way round for a cosmetic. It pays the group that finished the raid, rather than the one lucky person in it.

Credit where it is due: Raider.IO is where a lot of groups will actually watch those rating thresholds move.

What's next

After the week of 8 September the season has no further scheduled unlocks. The next dated Warcraft event is BlizzCon, which is Blizzard's own convention, on 12 and 13 September. Its published running order carries a "World of Warcraft: What's Next" session and a second one numbered II. Both sit on the calendar with the day we last checked them.

WoW's Curse of Ula'tek adds an island, an eight-boss raid and a Discord link

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

World of Warcraft's Curse of Ula'tek update went live on 11 August 2026. Blizzard's own summary leads with the Coiled Isle: a new outdoor area off the east coast of Zul'Aman, with an eight-boss raid, a three-boss dungeon and three new delves behind it. The raid arrived a week later.

Three words worth unpacking. A raid is a dungeon built for a large group, usually the hardest thing a game has. Delves are the small solo version. Zul'Aman is a region long-standing players already know, so the isle sits somewhere familiar.

What shipped, and when each piece opened

Piece	Detail	Live from
The Coiled Isle	Public events, Curse Surges, cursed fishing, an isle-only talent tree	11 August
Altar of Fangs	Three bosses, up to Mythic 0 (Mythic is the hardest difficulty setting)	11 August
Lairs	World bosses moved into private instanced fights; the notes describe scaling up to flexible Mythic with 15 to 25 players	11 August
Three delves	The Ring of Glory, Gnarldor Isle, and Venomfall Deeps as a Nemesis one	11 August
The Venomous Abyss	Eight bosses, Ula'tek last	18 August, with Season 2
Mythic+ rotation	Altar of Fangs joins seven others	18 August, with Season 2

Our take: what it means for players

Two changes in this update outlive the season around them, and neither of them is the raid.

The first is the Discord link. Discord is the chat app a great many guilds already run on the side. Connecting a Battle.net account to a Discord one and passing messages both ways closes a gap guilds have long papered over with a second app. It changes nothing about how the game plays and quite a lot about who reads guild chat, because the people who miss a raid signup are the ones not logged in. Unglamorous plumbing, and the best thing in the patch.

The second is housing blueprints, and this is the one we will actually praise. Exporting a whole house, an interior, an exterior or a single room and handing it to another player turns decorating from a private hobby into something shareable. The detail that makes it usable is the import screen: it lists what you are missing and still lets you import. A reset option puts everything back in storage, so experimenting costs nothing.

Note what is not there. Nothing in Blizzard's summary attaches a charge to any part of it. No shop entry, no bundle, no currency. In a genre where housing is very often the first thing put behind a shop, a sharing feature arriving with no price on it is worth saying out loud.

The area design earns a line too. Killing a rare tough monster at a Curse Surge unlocks cursed fishing in that spot, which chains a combat activity into a quiet one rather than running them in parallel. Those monsters rotate across five locations, so the isle rewards moving rather than camping. A world that pays you for walking around in it is a world rather than a menu.

Credit where it is due: Wowhead is where the community documents the blueprint format and the rare rotation.

What's next

The last dated step of this content cycle is the fourth Raid Finder wing, which is one chunk of the Venomous Abyss opened to the automatic queue that puts strangers into an easier version of it. Blizzard's own Midnight Season 2 schedule puts that wing in the week of 8 September.

After that the next Warcraft date is BlizzCon, which is Blizzard's own convention, and we have its dates and its running order in our piece on the schedule. Both sit on the calendar with the day we last checked them.

Black Temple opens on WoW's Burning Crusade Classic servers, with a new arena season

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

Black Temple, which is a big-group dungeon from an old World of Warcraft expansion, opened on the Burning Crusade Classic Anniversary Edition servers on 27 August 2026. It arrived alongside the Battle for Mount Hyjal, the Netherwing daily quest hub and epic gems. Blizzard's own notice lists them together under what it calls your journey ahead, and puts Arena Season 3 five days later on 1 September.

The short version for anyone who has never played. Burning Crusade Classic, which is a re-release of the game's first expansion, runs on its own servers so people can play it as it was. Each of Black Temple and Mount Hyjal is a raid, which is the game's word for a dungeon built for a large group. The Caverns of Time, where the second one sits, is the in-game hub that leads to dungeons set in the game's own past. Netherwing is a faction you build standing with to earn a flying mount. And an arena season is a numbered stretch of ranked small-team fighting, with its own gear.

The two raids, side by side

	Black Temple	Battle for Mount Hyjal
Level	70	70
Location	Shadowmoon Valley, Outland	Caverns of Time, Tanaris
Bosses	9, ending on Illidan Stormrage	5, ending on Archimonde
Reputation	Ashtongue Deathsworn	Scale of the Sands
Gate	An attunement chain	The Vials of Eternity questline
Extra vendor	Okuno, inside the raid	Indormi, inside the raid

An attunement is a chain of quests you finish before the game lets you in at all. Indormi is the row to note for anyone not raiding: the jewelcrafting designs for the new epic gems sell from inside Mount Hyjal, and the gems themselves come from mining in that raid at 375 skill or as rare drops in Black Temple. Blizzard's notice also says a raid group is not required to enter Mount Hyjal.

Our take: what it means for players

The arena rollover is the part with a deadline on it, and it has already passed for anyone holding points. Season 2 closed the week of 16 August, at 10:00 pm local time the night before each region's reset. Unspent Arena Points, which is the currency earned in ranked small-team matches, turned into Honor Points at ten each. Honor is the older currency, earned from fighting other players out in the world.

That is a conversion rather than a refund, and we think it is the wrong way round. Points saved for a Season 3 purchase became honor, which buys a different and older set of gear. Anyone who did the disciplined thing and banked their points for the next tier was paid out in the currency for the last one. The people who spent theirs immediately lost nothing. A rollover that punishes patience is a small unfairness with a real cost, and it was avoidable.

The upside of the same rollover is genuinely good, and worth being loud about, because it is the opposite of how a lot of this genre now solves the same problem. Two tiers of player-versus-player gear dropped their gates at once. Season 2 gear now sells at a discount from Area 52 with no rating requirement, and Season 1 gear moved to the Honor vendors in Orgrimmar and Stormwind. For a player arriving late to this phase that is a cheap way back in, and it costs time rather than money. No boost, no bundle, no shop page. A vendor and an afternoon.

Netherwing is the long tail and it makes no apology for it. The standing comes from daily quests on Netherwing Ledge. That is a floating outpost in southeastern Shadowmoon Valley, which the notice says needs a flying mount to reach, or a willingness to take a very strategic fall. The six Netherwing Drake colours all need exalted standing, artisan riding, and the Blood Oath of the Netherwing step of the quest chain. Nothing about that chain is fast. That is the point of putting it in beside a raid tier. It is the sort of reward that still means something a year later, precisely because nobody can shortcut it.

Credit where it is due: Blizzard's own notice links a community guide for the Netherwing chain, and Wowhead is where a lot of players will check the steps.

What's next

The anniversary servers have no further dated phase in Blizzard's notice. The next Warcraft date on the record is BlizzCon, which is Blizzard's own convention, on 12 and 13 September. Its published running order carries three forward-looking Warcraft sessions, one of them for Hardcore, the mode where a character who dies is gone for good. Both days are on the calendar with the day we last checked them.

BlizzCon is back in Anaheim on 12 and 13 September

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

BlizzCon, which is Blizzard's own convention for its games, is back on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September 2026 at the Anaheim Convention Center, per Blizzard's own announcement. Two days, one venue, and a named list of what is on: opening ceremony, panels, the Darkmoon Faire, friendly competition and hands-on gameplay.

The Darkmoon Faire, for anyone who has not played, is a recurring in-game carnival in World of Warcraft, and Blizzard names it among the show's staples.

What the announcement actually commits to

There is a difference between a date and a schedule, and this is a date.

	In the announcement	Not in the announcement
Days	Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September	any hour-by-hour timing
Venue	Anaheim Convention Center	hall or stage detail
Programme	opening ceremony, panels, Darkmoon Faire, competition, hands-on play	which tournaments, which finals
Tickets	sign up at BlizzCon.com for first notice	an on-sale date or a price
Broadcast	nothing	a stream plan, a paid at-home ticket, or Twitch reward drops

Blizzard says it aims to "meaningfully elevate this iconic celebration", which is the language of a company that knows the last few years have been uneven. The announcement dates the first BlizzCon to 2005.

Our take: what it means for players

A two-day, single-venue BlizzCon is the shape, and the shape is the news.

An opening ceremony still on the list means the ceremony carries whatever announcement weight the year has. That is worth planning around if you follow one of Blizzard's games: our reading is that the ceremony is where the year's dates arrive, and that everything after it is elaboration.

Now the part we were not gentle about, and the update it has since earned. Nothing in this announcement mentions a stream, a virtual ticket or drops. For most of the people reading it, who will watch from home rather than fly to Anaheim, that was the one fact they wanted. Blizzard said plans would be shared as they took shape, and it has since published them. We have the running order and the stream plan in full in our piece on the schedule. That is late for a question this basic, and it is answered.

The thing we like: a convention that comes back at all, in a hall, with a schedule, is a genre keeping a tradition that costs money and returns goodwill rather than revenue. Worth defending, even while we complain about the broadcast.

What's next

Tickets have no on-sale date in this announcement. Blizzard asks people to sign up at BlizzCon.com for first notice, and to follow it on social media. That is the whole of the call to action in it.

We carry the event on the calendar with both days and the day we last checked it against Blizzard's page. If a broadcast plan, a ticket date or a tournament schedule appears on a Blizzard page, that row moves and the date it moved sits on the row.