World Of Warcraft Classic's Next Phase Is Coming Soon

All settled into World of Warcraft Classic? Finally getting close to level 60? Good. Get ready for the next batch of content coming your way, as Blizzard will be launching new dungeons, raids, and PVP features later this year.

During his interview with PC Gamer, game director Ion Hazzikostas wasn't able to confirm a hard release date for phase 2 of Classic due to the "layering" strategy that Blizzard had to implement in order to keep its servers from making like Teladrassil and catching fire. But there isn't a lot of "later this year" left, so you can likely expect phase 2 to happen relatively soon.

Layering, by the way, is what allowed the WoW Classic servers to handle the massive influx of players at launch (and long after) by creating copies of a world and spreading them out among the incoming players. This made it so that everyone wasn't forced to be in the same area at the same time, queuing up to finish quests as if they were at the grocery store.

The WoW Classic team are waiting until they can retire layering to release phase 2, because world bosses like the doomlord Kazzak and the blue dragon Azuregos are meant to appear in only one time, in one place. Otherwise, ne'er-do-well players could exploit layering in order to farm these bosses for loot, and that's not in the spirit of the game, which has proven to be a pretty wholesome environment (all helpful players and polite lines and such). 

When will layering be put aside and phase 2 be initiated? Sooner than we think. According to community manager Kaivax, the busiest of servers are down to just two layers and a total of thirteen are locked to just one. Hazzikostas says that WoW Classic could get down to a single layer in "a matter of weeks." Please excuse us now as we desperately grind and level.