Between the continuing pandemic and the fallout from the sexual harassment lawsuits, we shouldn’t be surprised if the length of time required to get 9.2 on to live servers is greater than in the past. Of course, 2021 is a vastly different world than 2017 or even 2019 were. In both cases, patch 7.2 and 8.2 spent 10 weeks on the PTR before release so if 9.2 follows a similar pattern, we can expect it in the second half of January. Since Warlords of Draenor famously cancelled their original patch 6.2, we need to look at Legion and Battle for Azeroth to get a sense of the timing. The first place to look when attempting a prediction for the 9.2 release date is in the history of previous patches.

While this testing delay will likely mean a later live date, it should still result in a patch release in early March. The arrival and datamining of patch 9.2 began exactly a week later, but the developers stated it won’t be available for users to access until after the Thanksgiving holiday. On November 10th, the official Twitter account posted some enigmatic runes, which was followed immediately by news that there would be a patch 9.2 developer video shown on the 11th. Typically when a build lands on the CDN it means the next PTR testing cycle has moved from “Soon™” to soon, with the new PTR frequently launching within a week. The World of Warcraft Shadowlands patch 9.2 hype train started rolling on November 5th when news an encrypted 9.2 build was placed on Blizzard’s vendor content delivery network (CDN).

Starcraft release date