If you’ve been waiting for the Ahn’Qiraj war effort to start, you have exactly one more month before you can start turning in all of the resources you’ve been gathering.
Blizzard announced on its forums today that the Ahn’Qiraj content will go live following World of Warcraft Classic’s weekly reset on July 29.
The new phase five content won’t immediately include a raid release. Instead, a war effort will commence on servers forcing Alliance and Horde players to collect resources and complete a quest chain before being able to open the AQ Gates, making two new raids available.
Blizzard has already been testing elements of the new content, including AQ’s 20-man instance. Additionally, the developers held a stress test on the public test realm earlier this month as a way to see what capacity servers had to handle the infamous AQ gate opening event that was plagued with lag when it originally happened during Vanilla in 2006.
While much of the phase five content is being tested, Blizzard announced that the larger 40-man Ahn’Qiraj raid instance, including final boss C’thun, won’t be available for testing. This will prevent top guilds looking to achieve “World First” kills from being able to effectively practice the raid repeatedly prior to its release.
The July 29 start time for phase five content is right in line with the way Blizzard originally released content for World of Warcraft in the mid-2000s. To this point, each Classic raid has become available within a week or so of the game’s original timeline.
