WoW Classic, the second phase will likely be released later this year

World of Warcraft Classic has been out for just over a month, and in that time many of its most hardcore players have hit level 60 and cleared Molten Core and Onyxia, the two endgame raids. Since well before launch Blizzard has said that Classic's new dungeons, raids, and PVP features would be released in six main phases, but until now hasn't indicated when those updates will arrive. In an interview with game director Ion Hazzikostas, which will appear in full on the site early next week, I got a partial answer on when to expect phase 2: This year.

Key among them is layering, a server system that helped WoW Classic handle the massive wave of players that tried to log into WoW Classic on launch day. Layering allowed Blizzard to create copies of a world and spread out the incoming player population. This made it so that Blizzard’s servers could handle more players at once, while preventing underpopulated servers from being created later down the line.

"Without layering, we simply would not have been able to accommodate anywhere close to the number of players we have on our servers," Hazzikostas explained. "And with some of the natural attrition that we've seen, we would've had a number of servers right now that are underpopulated. Instead we had servers that were, due to layering, effectively massively overpopulated even with login queues, during the first couple of weeks, that have now stabilized at large, healthy populations that can endure for the months and years to come."

Once every server is down to one layer, phase 2 will be much closer to launching. That's good news for everyone: Phase 2 adds powerful new world bosses to fight over, in addition to the Dire Maul dungeon (which will undoubtedly spark a bloody new chapter in Classic's silliest ongoing argument) for veterans. But even players who aren't max level yet will still have something to look forward to with the new Honor system, which rewards (or punishes) killing enemy players.

Eliminating layers isn’t the only thing stopping Blizzard from just releasing phase 2 of WoW Classic, which includes the world bosses, the Dire Maul dungeon, and a new Honor System, but it’s a big one.

To be the core player, you can't leave without WOW Classic Gold. Earning gold in World of Warcraft is no longer the daunting prospect it used to be, but farming for WOW Classic gold can be tedious. Good thing you can always buy some from us here at WOWTT.COM.