Thinking about Mists of Pandaria, it's clear that there were some errors in pacing. We all kind of marveled at how quickly the patch updates were coming at us, but we're now paying the price for it with an incredibly long stretch of content that hasn't been updated in nearly a year. I know we'd all love to see an expansion a year, but I no longer believe that's ever going to happen. Two years is fine for an expansion cycle, but only if you plan accordingly.
So I've got my own little projection of how Warlords could work out. This is not a prediction, mind you - I expect there to be at least a few twists and turns here and there. But I think the Mists model of little-big-little-big is a good possibility, as regardless of timing, it worked pretty well.
I'm only guessing at raid content and zones here, so bear with me.
We learn the launch date in two days (so I'm prepared to look foolish.) But here's a guess:
Late September-October 2014: Pre-launch event. Iron Horde invades. There will be a quest line that hopefully evolves over the course of the two weeks leading up to launch. This is the big invasion that threatens our homes. Players fend of the Iron Horde, pushing them back into the Blasted Lands. Part of these quests might be what's already up on the beta (though hopefully there will be more.)
October-November 2014: Warlords launches. We have all of Draenor, plus the eight new dungeons and the two new raids. Basically, everything we're testing on the Beta.
January-Feburary 2015: 6.1. First major content patch. No new raid, but we head down to the Ogre continent south of Nagrand, where there is a timeless-isle-style exploration zone. Possibly new dungeons, though I think it's more likely it'll just be the zone. (And some big story quests, possibly involving Cho'gall.) We'll also get new Blood Elf models, and flying will be enabled in all the 6.0 zones, but not the Ogre continent.
June-July 2015: 6.2. Farahlon (aka Netherstorm) zone opens. More exploration zone (or possibly dailies, if they decide to bring them back by then.) Tier 18 raid opens, possibly demon/shadow council themed with Gul'dan as final boss. (Plus Teron'gor, who I think survives Auchindoun, as well as Socrethar.) New dungeons associated with Shadow Council raid open (probably two or three.)
September-October 2015: 6.3 Tanaan Jungle opens, with quests, story, and exploration areas. Initial hints about the next expansion begin to be seeded. Blizzcon 2015 will be some time around this, and we'll either already know or dissect what we can figure out from 6.3 to find clues. Hellfire Citadel (or the Iron Citadel, or whatever they call it in this universe) sits in center of the zone, but is locked down like ICC was before 3.3.
January-February 2016: 6.4: Final raid tier, Hellfire Citadel. We kill Grommash and end the Iron Horde. We get three dungeons that lead up to this final raid, Frozen Halls/Hour of Twilight style. Some grand new feature gets introduced (like Dungeon Finder, Raid Finder, and Flex Raids were in the last three expansions.)
September-October 2016: Launch of following expansion.
Obviously, this is going to be wrong in more ways than it's correct (though wouldn't it be awesome if I got it all right? Just, like, impressive?) Essentially, this takes the patch structure of Mists of Pandaria (though with the dungeon releases of Wrath and Cataclysm) but just stretches it out a little more to fill in the big, second year gap. You always want your final patch to last the longest, but a year is a hell of a lot of time for people to keep raiding the same place (especially in this era of LFR, which is how most people experience the raids.)
The way this is set up, tier 17 lasts 6-8 months, tier 18 lasts 6-8 months, and tier 19 lasts 7-9 months. Obviously, none of these dates can be rigid. If Blizzard were to declare now that tier 19 is going to come in January of 2016, they're either going to hit a snag and find themselves rushing to get it out, or they're going to be sitting, twiddling their thumbs, wonder what else they can add to the patch without breaking anything.
And this also assumes that things are going to take about the same amount of time as they usually do.
Fundamentally, the reason I suspect we tend to get these huge spans of nothing new for the back half of each expansion is just the simple nature of putting an entire expansion together. The last raid tier is never going to take as much effort as creating an entirely new continent with thousands of quests (many of which need gear rewards,) along with new classes or new race models or totally new features like garrisons. Yes, they do start to work on the expansion before the final patch is out, but it's always going to take them a little longer to get the whole team up to speed to pump out that last patch.
And it's mostly ok, because players should have that final patch for a long time. The final patch is when you know that there's a ceiling, and you can take your time if you're catching up. Letting that patch be there, and current, for a while, reduces the sense of a rush. It's not like 5.3, when you had a very brief window if you wanted to, say, level your Troll so that he could have the Darkspear Revolutionary title (actually, that might be going account-wide. Oh well.)
But you still don't want to go for an entire year without anything new. There's a kind of ethical need for Blizzard to produce content. We pay our subscription fees, and while a lot of that is just to cover the server maintenance and such, there's also an expectation that the subscriptions pay for patch content. You give them an extra bit of cash for each expansion because of how big that effort is, but you expect the subscription to mean new content on a regular basis. And this ain't regular!
So I think Blizzard needs to assess more reasonably what they can accomplish in a given amount of time, and plan accordingly. I'm sure they do this, but the pacing of Mists was a big error in their calculations.
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