Highmaul came out on December 2nd, and Blackrock Foundry came out February 10th, giving us a little over two months between the releases of these two raids.
While I doubt anyone's utterly sick of Highmaul (indeed, I think only pretty intense guilds have everything farmed to exhaustion there,) it's pretty exciting that there's a new raid to go explore already. Blackrock Foundry is, of course, really the centerpiece to tier 17, with Highmaul as technically just the "small raid" leading up to it (hey, remember how Firelands was an entire raid tier? Never again, Blizzard, please.)
I have, at most, done a three-man pull of the first group of trash in Blackrock Foundry (and died spectacularly.) While my guild has started to push in a little deeper into Highmaul (we've got Kargath and the Butcher down, and are working on Brackenspore now,) I'm eagerly anticipating the release of the LFR version so that I can see the place, start getting a basic understanding of the fights, and of course get some nice 650 loot to supplement the 655 stuff I'm getting out of Highmaul Normal (most of my alts will likely stick to LFR, unless we wind up with a really long final raid tier, in which case I'll try to pug it on Normal with some of my more central toons.)
Anyway, what's interesting is that we're not really seeing a new raid tier. This is still, in a way, launch content. So it's not that surprising to see this big raid opening up this soon. Highmaul has had its brief time in the sun, but it's time for the Foundry.
The question, then, is how long will BRF last?
I think it should be obvious that it'll be longer than the two months plus Highmaul got. And this is for a number of reasons. The first is that it's just a bigger raid. BRF has ten bosses to Highmaul's seven, and while that's of a "medium" sized raid (albeit probably the upper limit on a size you could call medium,) it's going to take people longer to work through. Also, take into account that a lot of people are still working on Highmaul. Granted, most serious raiding guilds are probably a lot farther into it than we are, I imagine quite a few people have not gotten Mar'gok down yet (I've tried that fight on Normal, and while it's doable, it ain't easy.) But with people still doing Highmaul, or at least still needing gear out of there, it's not unreasonable to think that we could give BRF a bit of extra time, especially as it really seems to be tuned for people who are mostly suited up in Highmaul garb (though I expect LFR will help close this gap.)
There's also the fact that this is still technically Warlords' first raid tier, meaning that whatever comes next has to be big. There's still some ambiguity on how many raid tiers Warlords is actually going to have, and it seems unlikely that we'll be jumping into the final tier a mere six months after the expansion launched - unless we already know when the next expansion is coming.
If Blizzard really wants to launch the next expansion a year after Warlords' release, they'll need to let us know very soon - this month or next, I'd say. But assuming that's not the case, and that there's another raid tier to be found there, I still think we're not going to see it in two months.
There's enough to digest with Blackrock Foundry - indeed, it'll be late March before the whole thing is on LFR - that I don't expect to see anything new for quite a while.
So let's talk predictions. Whatever raid follows BRF, whether it be the final tier (which I'm going to predict here will be the equivalent of Hellfire Citadel, though maybe it'll be called The Iron Citadel) or something else, will come some time in the middle of 2015. At the absolute earliest, it could be May, but more likely it will come some time in the summer (as has been the case with most "second tiers.") If it's the final raid tier, then it depends somewhat on when they expect to get the next expansion out.
If expansion six is announced within the next two months, and it goes into Beta this summer, then we could see it coming out this fall, and in that case, I'd expect to see the final raid tier in early summer. If we know about the next expansion but the next tier is not the final one, then I imagine they'll try to release it earlier rather than later, keeping up the pace of content, and that would push it even to late spring.
If we find ourselves stuck with a 2-year expansion cycle and the next tier is a middle tier, then I'd expect it to be late summer, with he final tier coming out either in early winter or some time next year. The reason for this is that they burned themselves releasing Siege of Orgrimmar so early. We had SoO before we even knew about Warlords of Draenor, and the subsequent 14 months with no new content really devastated WoW's subscription numbers.
If they find themselves running out of content to release, I think it would be far wiser to pace the whole expansion's patch cycle slower, rather than frontload a bunch of stuff and then suffer a drought. Remember, everyone was very happy in the first half of Mists of Pandaria (ok, some people weren't crazy about the Pandas or the Dailies,) but I think we would have all preferred an extra month or two of tier 14 and Throne of Thunder instead of 14 straight months of Siege of Orgrimmar.
Anyway, only time will tell how these predictions turn out. There are some rumors that Expansion Six is "Feature Complete," whatever the hell that means. So perhaps we'll know more and be able to guess with better accuracy in the near future.
But now that you've read all that, don't worry too much about it. Go kill Blackhand and then we'll worry about what comes next.
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