Nighthold Coming on January 17th

I don't know how most guilds are doing - in fact, I'm not even sure that most players really experience the WoW through guilds anymore - but my guild has, with the help of some former members who are mostly running heroic Emerald Nightmare, made decent progress through Emerald Nightmare. We're 4/7 at this point (Normal mode) and just have Ilgynoth, Cenarius, and Xavius left before we can officially declare the raid beaten.

We haven't actually touched any of those three bosses yet - scheduling can be hard for a guild that's mostly adults - but there's definitely a high ceiling on content to do. The Trial of Valor raid is a big step up from Emerald Nightmare, but I think its timing was really good - guilds that had exhausted the Nightmare on higher difficulties (it is actually a pretty good difficulty for the first raid of an expansion, but that means that more hardcore guilds might find it too easy) got a new raid to work on, and for those of us who are willing to do an half-hour-to-hour-long PUG for a mythic dungeon but are less inclined to do that with a raid, it gave us an LFR raid with worthwhile rewards.

But it's sort of funny to think that, months into this expansion, we still haven't technically gotten our first raid tier.

The Nighthold is the headlining raid for 7.0, despite the fact that it's already 7.1 (shush!) Nighthold will complete the first real raiding tier of Legion, with its real tier set and everything. Thankfully, we already know about the second tier, which I'd expect to launch some time in mid-to-late 2017. That second tier will be the Tomb of Sargeras, but right now that's pretty far off on the horizon.

Nighthold will consist of ten bosses, culminating with our ultimate confrontations against both Suramar tyrant and Legion collaborator Grand Magistrix Elisande (who I believe will be the second-to-last boss) and Gul'dan, who we have been trying to take down ever since we released him from the Dark Portal at the very start of Warlords of Draenor.

The raid will also finish the storyline of Suramar, with the Dusk Lily rebellion finally liberating the city from the reign of terror. It also leaves nothing but the Legion proper for us to fight (which is what we'll be doing in the Tomb of Sargeras raid.)

There is not yet a total schedule for the release of all the raid's various parts and difficulties, but we do know that Normal and Heroic modes will be coming out on January 17th. I think we can assume that Mythic will come out a week later, as well as, potentially, the first wing of LFR.

LFR should be divided into four wings, with three bosses each in the first three wings and then just the Gul'dan fight for the last wing (these are already in the LFR UI in-game.)

I don't know that there's any content outside the raid that will be launching with it, though in a sense we already got that with the 7.1 content. We will be getting 7.1.5 some time around then, likely a week or two beforehand. 7.1.5 does bring with it a few pieces of world content, including an updated Brawler's Guild, but the patch is primarily focused on class balance, reworking talents and legendaries that are either so weak that no one uses them or so strong that people feel they have to choose them.

We'll also be getting Mists of Pandaria timewalker dungeons, which includes all six of the original-to-Mists dungeons (no Scarlet Halls/Monastery or Scholomance.)

All in all, lots to look forward to in the new year for WoW.