There is an encrypted patch coming down the line for the PTR, which is pretty exciting as, once it's open to datamining (or just goes "live" on the PTR) we'll get our first big glimpse of 8.3.
I think it's possible that they'll save the reveal for that for Blizzcon, though they haven't really done "final patch" announcements with a new expansion announcement since, like, the end of Wrath. It's also very possible that we'll get a big flood of info on 8.3 this month, which could happen any day now if that's the case, though I think it's unlikely it will actually come out this month.
My prediction is that the patch will truly revolve around N'zoth. The Old God of the Depths has been built up - subtly and not subtly - as the expansion's big bad all along, and I think that the people who say he couldn't be the final boss are holding out for something that could never happen. Already, N'zoth would be the first Old God to actually be a final boss (C'thun kind of retroactively became the final boss of Classic, but only after Naxxramas became a level 80 raid.) He's also the only one we got to hear about before the expansion in which we fight him - Yogg-Saron was new lore in Wrath, but we've been hearing about N'zoth since Cataclysm.
Will fighting and even killing him actually mean he's, you know, defeated? Certainly not (necessarily.) N'zoth has been built up since the beginning as a master schemer, and we keep hearing that his "losses" tend to wind up just being part of a larger chess game, so Blizzard has full license to bring him or at least his long-term plans back into the picture later down the line - much as they locked Sargeras away rather than killing him (I really wish we'd been able to fight him, though...)
So: If, as I've suspected, Ny'alotha refers to the physical location of N'zoth's body (I think maybe it was not just a cheap trick to have him appear as that shadow-monster at the end of the Eternal Palace and that perhaps the Titans imprisoned his body and essence separately,) then I think 8.3 will be, essentially, a journey to the Warcraft equivalent of R'lyeh, the sunken city from the Cthulhu mythos where big bad tentacle-face slumbers in death (for now.) The ominous city we glimpse in the Azshara Warbringers short would probably be Ny'alotha (and given how similar it looks to Ahn Qiraj in terms of architecture, I wonder if they're retconning Ahn Qiraj's status as being originally a titan facility - I actually like it better if the quasi-Egyptian/Babylonian ruins are really fragmentary remnants of the Black Empire.)
And I actually think that the events of 8.2.5 might mean that Sylvanas and whatever faction conflict remains (though it seems to be shifting from an inter-faction conflict to one or, possibly, two intra-faction conflicts) are getting placed on the back burner.
Indeed, I actually want 8.3 to really focus deep on N'zoth and Old God stuff, because A: we could use some interesting lore there and B: the cinematic Mak'gora scene felt like a real end of this volume of the faction war narrative, and bringing it back so soon would cheapen the results.
But then we turn to 9.0 and expansion 8.
So much of this is contingent on what actually happens in 8.3. After all, BFA wouldn't have happened (at least not in this way) had Sargeras not stabbed the planet. While the first few expansions were sort of their own plots happening independently, since I suppose Cataclysm, they've tried to have some sort of logical link between them. The Cataclysm broke the Mists that shrouded Pandaria. Garrosh's breakout led to Warlords. Gul'dan's reintroduction to the world caused Legion, and then Sargeras pushed us into BFA.
Which means that the exact story beats that will lead us into 9.0 aren't really something I can predict until we know more.
I do have my theory, which involves the World Soul dying after we kill N'zoth, forcing us to travel to the Shadowlands to find a way to retrieve it from the land of the dead. But I have no idea if that's actually what will happen.
That being said, I feel like there are three popular theories of the next expansion's major themes. And I'll save my favorite for last (though if you read that last paragraph, you already know what it is.)
First is the theory that the next expansion will be some kind of resurgence of the Black Empire, and be a heavily Old God-based expansion.
I'm actually fairly skeptical of this. Given that it is looking very unlikely that the faction conflict will play a central role in the climax of BFA, I think that puts N'zoth as the obvious final boss. Is it possible that 8.3 will actually see Sylvanas playing the final boss role? Possible, sure, but man if they don't want this to be Garrosh 2.0 that would be a terrible way to avoid it. I think we've had the big confrontation with her for now, and it's time for N'zoth.
Now, there are some who speculate that N'zoth is actually plotting to use his death to bring back C'thun and Yogg-Saron. Again, not unthinkable, but that doesn't quite feel right to me. There may certainly be an expansion in the future where we ultimately root out the Old Gods once and for all, but I think that BFA is already an Old God expansion. Sure, Warlords wound up getting very demon-themed by the end before going into Legion, so I could be wrong, but I just don't really believe this is where we're going.
Next, there's the theory that we're going to the Dragon Isles, and that it will be a dragon-themed expansion. I think that such an expansion makes a lot of sense - you could easily create a new "continent" with five zones - one for each dragonflight - and there has certainly been some dragon theming in BFA to foreshadow it. What I wonder, though, is if we could have a kind of Broken Isles situation here. The Broken Isles had plenty of stuff that wasn't directly related to demons or the Burning Legion, but it nevertheless made a perfectly good location for an expansion about them. I'll confess that I think an entire expansion set on Argus could have been cool, but on the other hand, I think we were given just enough of Argus to leave us wanting more, which might have been the right call. The Broken Isles had plenty of other things going on that we didn't feel bogged down in "demons, nothing but demons" for an entire expansion.
In other words, I could imagine the Dragon Isles as the location of an expansion that isn't 100% about the dragons. It could even be about some larger cosmic force. Hell, the Void has been the downfall of three of the original Aspects (or in the case of Nozdormu, will be the downfall,) so it would make sense for a heavily void-themed expansion to be set there.
Finally, we come to my preferred expansion 8: the Shadowlands. Throughout Legion, an expansion that was built around the Burning Legion, fel stuff, and demons, we got a lot of references to the Old Gods sprinkled throughout. And as it turned out, the next expansion wound up being pretty heavily Old God-themed, with N'zoth as the likely final boss.
And so, upon coming into BFA, we've been seeing tons of references to Death as a cosmic force. We've got Bwonsamdi and his unidentified boss. We've got the Drust using death magic to curse the Kul Tirans. We've got this big question surrounding who brought Vol'jin's spirit back and who told him to name Sylvanas his successor. We've got the Lich King's daughter showing up in Kul Tiras. And we've got a focus on Sylvanas using new necromantic powers that we can't explain. It's arguably a bigger factor in BFA than the Old Gods were in Legion.
Also, despite the big Old God presence in BFA, for the most part this expansion has been about fighting a war against a (relatively) mundane enemy - humanoid versus humanoid. I'd really like for the next one to be a truly supernatural threat.
Lastly, I also think that it would behoove Blizzard to build up a new cosmic-level threat. With the Legion pretty decisively beaten, that leaves pretty much just the Old Gods as the apocalyptic danger. For a world as heightened as WoW, we could use more. The Scourge used to be that. Now, I'd actually be pretty happy to get another Scourge expansion, except that it would risk just undoing what happened in Wrath. What I could see if we get a Shadowlands expansion is, essentially, the discovery that the Scourge was just the tip of the undead iceberg.
As of today, we're less than a month out from Blizzcon. So this is the time to keep your eyes open for rumors and trademarks. There's also going to be a ton of fake "leaks" to sort through, but I'll also say that sometimes those obvious fakes wind up being accurate (like when I saw the "Chinese Leak" that said, absurdly, that Sylvanas was going to become Warchief so soon after Vol'jin had, and that Demon Hunters would only be available to Night Elves and Blood Elves. So absurd, right?)
I'll confess that I've felt pretty burned out on BFA, for reasons I can't exactly articulate. I still have yet to even set foot in the Eternal Palace (and thus haven't done those Wrathion quests that came with 8.2.5) and I have not felt very motivated to play for a while now. I don't know to what extent that means I'm just burned out on WoW after playing for twelve years or if there's just some aspect to BFA that hasn't really done it for me (on paper at least, it definitely seems superior to Warlords of Draenor.) So I hope that the next expansion gets me feeling passionate about the game again like Legion did. If we believe in the "pattern," every other expansion is a "good" one, so hopefully the next one will join the ranks of Wrath, Mists, and Legion.
Oh, I didn't even get into speculation on the mechanics of 9.0, which I intended to do in this post. Might make that the next one.
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