Blizzard stepped out of the gates today with a slue of amazing announcements that have the World of Warcraft community buzzing. With three major announcements, it’s hard to figure out which one to get excited about first.
The first announcement was that the upcoming World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion would be dropping November 23rd, about four weeks from now. The second was that prepatch’s Scourge Invasion event would be dropping in a bit less than two weeks on November 10th.
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Third, we finally have an announcement on the release date of the first raid of the World of Warcraft: Shadowlandsexpansion. Players can expect to storm the gates of Castle Nathria on December 8th.
Castle Nathria is set to be the first tier of raiding for the expansion, helping to push through the lore – as well as grabbing some solid gear – early on for raiding. While the power creep of an expansion will eventually render the items obtained here obsolete, it provides a solid basis for 9.0.
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Lorewise, Castle Nathria is the home of Sire Denathrius, the ruler of the Venthyr people of Revendreth. One of the guardians over the realms of death in the Shadowlands, Sire Denathrius betrayed his duty in the darkest hour of the Shadowlands.
Within the raid, players will find ten raid bosses – Shriekwing, Huntsman Altimor, Sun King’s Salvation, Artificer Xy’mox, Hungering Destroyer, Lady Inerva Darkvein, the Council of Blood, Sludgefist, the Stone Legion generals, and Sire Denathrius himself.
But there’s more coming than just the opening of Castle Nathria. Blizzard also stepped forward with the release date for the raid’s hardest mythic difficulty, giving the players a new challenge to look forward to – as well as a new target for the World First runners.
Mythic Castle Nathria will launch on December 15th, but this is providing a bit of a problem. By releasing on this date, it could harm the personal lives of players, especially professional content pushers like the aforementioned World First runners.
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This is primarily because the 15th is right in the middle of the holiday season for plenty of nations, faiths, and cultures. It’s difficult for players to focus on playing video games, even professionally, at such a time.
Regardless, Blizzard doesn’t seem intent to change it. Hazzikostas himself stated that, while they try to keep situations like this away, delaying the entire release in the interest of the personal lives of some players would be incredibly unfair to those that have been looking forward to the release regardless of the time of year.