BlizzCon 2026 revealed where we are going next in World of Warcraft Midnight‘s next major patch. As part of 12.2, we are going deep underground to confront Xal’atath before she absorbs Azeroth’s worldsoul to become an unstoppable being.
Even with very little being revealed for The Last Titan, enough was said to whet appetites for more Midnight, and guaranteeing that whatever we’re doing is possibly causing more harm than good. We sat down with Game Director Ion Hazzikostas and Warcraft Executive Producer & Vice President Holly Longdale to talk about 12.2, Eclipse, and the overall differences between Modern and Forever.
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First, I asked about the stat squish that happened at the beginning of Midnight. At around the launch of the expansion, item levels were reduced significantly, along with every item having fewer stats on them.
But already at patch 12.1, Tanks have over a million health, DPS players are doing several hundred thousand DPS, and bosses are already over a billion HP. It doesn’t feel like the stat squish was as effective this time as it was before. Power growth between patches has gotten steeper and steeper.
According to Ion Hazzikostas, there is a balance that must be struck when implementing one and its disruptiveness. “People have a visceral attachment to a certain item level number or a certain number of hit points. What we found is that pretty quickly after just even a day or two playing in the new paradigm, you just get used to the new numbers. That said, we don’t want to do them too frequently because they remain disruptive.”
He continued, adding that the current numbers in the game may not be too bad yet. “I don’t know that having numbers like hundreds of thousands or millions are necessarily that inherently scary. We tend to look more at what a piece of gear looks like; how many digits are in the number of stamina or strength that you’re getting from something. As that starts to get unwieldy and every piece of gear starts to look like a spreadsheet, that’s when we feel one is due.”
So what about the current pacing of power scaling? According to Hazzikostas, they have a goal with each patch. “We want to make sure that with every new release of content, whether it’s a major season or whatever else, that there are goals to strive for. We found pretty consistently over the years that we need at least like a 10 to 15 percent increase in power for an item to feel like it’s making a difference.”
The discussion ended with a hint at what may come after The Last Titan. Ion Hazzikostas concluded, “Squishes are a necessary evil. Nothing to announce this time, but we’ll definitely do one again. And way down the line, I would say that as we hit level 100 again in The Last Titan, we’ll probably want to look at another level squish.”
Lastly, we talked about the differences between Modern and Forever. As announced at BlizzCon, Classic+ is actually World of Warcraft Forever. A new version of WoW that will include massively improved lighting and particle effects, as well as updates to server infrastructure. For Modern and Midnight players, the main arm of the game has fallen behind quickly in modernization.
Ion quickly clarified that the new server infrastructure for Forever doesn’t mean that all regions will be connected. “We’re going to have staggered rollouts of our updates in Forever across regions as well. That’s just that’s just a function of, not the tech not existing, just time zones. Ultimately, patching means taking down the servers for several hours.”
He added, “We want to coordinate with things like weekly resets to do that at off-peak times. We could do a theoretical simultaneous rollout. But I don’t think most players in Europe would love having the servers offline from like 5p.m. to 11 P.M. on a given day. So that’s why we’ve always done that, and that’s why we’re going to continue to do that in Forever.”
However, for the lighting and particle effects, Hazzikostas confirmed that there are parts of Forever that he would be very open to bringing to Modern. “Now, in other aspects, there are things that for sure we’re going to look for opportunities to bring over. Whether it’s improved server infrastructure or improvements to lighting, maybe even surnames, depending on how that plays out and how players feel about that in Forever. But a lot of it is not as simple as just flipping a switch.”
He clarified, detailing the amount of work that went into Forever to improve its lighting and particle effects. “Like the lighting tech that you see across the game, Forever isn’t just an engine improvement. It’s also work that was done by hand by our environment artists across the entirety of those zones to relight them to apply those new techniques. So that would need to be done to whatever relevant content exists in Modern. But we want our game to look as good as it possibly can, and that’s something I think players should look forward to down the line. No specifics on timeline now.”
To end the conversation, I asked a simple question. What shocked both Hazzikostas and Longdale about the improvements the Classic team pulled off with Forever? For both of them, it was the lighting and water updates. Hazzikostas gave the example of Duskwood, a darker, spookier zone located on the Eastern Kingdom Continent.
Ion detailed how much spookier the zone has become in Forever. “Duskwood at night with players carrying torches or lanterns, and real-time illumination from that. It‘s still the classic assets. It’s still the same setting, but boy, is the vibe just massively enhanced by those changes.”
While not much else was discussed about further updates to be expected in 12.2, it is exciting to know that Modern isn’t stopping its improvements while its sister versions leap ahead. We’re taking the fight to Xal’atath very soon, and next to Northrend for the fallout of whatever is about to happen. We asked for clarification on some looting changes in 12.1 and how 12.2 will change them. This will be updated once we get an official response.
World of Warcraft Midnight is available now for PC.
