Before Brewfest on September 20th
As we can see from the updated roadmap, one of several pieces of content coming with the patch is a Holiday Refresh – specifically updating Brewfest and Hallow’s End. Assuming Blizzard sticks to this schedule, we can presume that the Patch will arrive sometime before the Brewfest holiday event begins on September 20th.
The new Roadmap, updated for Patch 10.1.7.
Two Months of Testing
We can also look back at previous patches for reference, with each of the smaller X.5 and X.7 content patches averaging around 50 days of PTR testing.
- Patch 10.0.5 PTR testing lasted 41 days from December 15th to January 24th.
- Patch 10.0.7 PTR testing lasted 50 days from January 31st to March 21st.
- Patch 10.1.5 PTR testing lasted 56 days from May 17th to July 11th.
With Patch 10.1.7 PTR beginning today on July 13th, 50 days of testing would take us to September 1st, giving another 19 days before Brewfest begins on the 20th. This gives us a fairly compelling reason to believe the patch could launch any time in September, both staying ahead of the holiday start date and in keeping with other general testing windows for these smaller content patches.
Not a Guarantee
As we know, anything can happen. In a recent interview with Wowhead, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas commented on the delayed Rogue updates that were set to appear in Patch 10.1.5, reminding us that sometimes plans do change for unforeseen reasons, causing updates to be delayed to the next content update, though a benefit of Dragonflight’s faster patch cycle is that we don’t have as long of a wait in between those content updates anymore either.
Ion Hazzikostas
That’s not gonna be in 10.1.5 at this point, if that wasn’t clear. We’re planning it in a later patch coming up soon. Ultimately, and this is part of the peril of announcing stuff ahead of time – stuff changes, stuff moves around just based on… honestly something as simple as the person flagged to do the work may have real life situations come up, be out on an extended illness, and then we have to reshuffle things. Often it’s better to wait for the right person, who’s the expert to be able to do that work, than to have someone else pick it up, who may not be as familiar with it. We make those moves all the time, but with our faster patch cadence this time around, this expansion, we don’t want to delay entire patches for small individual pieces, so we’re going to be a bit more nimble in moving things around. Understandable that Rogues were led to expect something are understandably frustrated waiting for something that isn’t coming yet, but I ask the community’s patience and understanding – we want to be transparent and try to communicate upfront as to what our plans are, but it’s the nature of the beast that maybe 10-15% of those plans are going to change. We’d like to keep communicating them, but also set the expectation that until you see something in the patch or PTR notes as a definitive part of what’s coming, it’s not set in stone.
So, it’s certainly possible that Patch 10.1.7 may fall out of the Brewfest timeline, though at this point it seems very likely that we’ll see WoW’s next content update reach live servers sometime before September 20th.
