United in Stormwind Mini-Set Releasing In Next Major Patch After Mercenaries, Late October/Early November?

The latest patch notes had an interesting sentence that not many people paid attention to. Here it is:

Some of these changes are on the lighter side, in anticipation of the mini-set coming in the next major patch after the patch launching Mercenaries.

Now, what does it mean? Mercenaries game mode releases on October 12, most likely in Patch 21.4 (patch itself might drop some time before the official Mercenaries launch, already adding all the assets to the game files). Normally that’s when we would expect the mini-set to drop – at least if we go by the previous two and Blizzard’s statement that they want to release them in the middle of expansion cycle.  But we can now know for certain that Stormwind’s mini-set will be late.

If we look at the previous expansions, the next “major patch” would be Patch 21.6, X.6 patches are usually released around 3 months after expansion. If that’s correct, we could expect Stormwind mini-set to drop late in October or early in November. Previous mini-sets have released on Thursdays, so if I had to guess, October 28 or November 4 seem most likely dates (November 11 is also possible, but it seems too late). (Update: Changed the dates because I looked at Tuesdays instead of Thursdays, haha.)

I expect that tomorrow’s update (21.3) will impact the meta quite significantly, but it means that we’ll probably have to wait up to ~1.5 months for another meta shift, assuming Team 5 doesn’t release some smaller balance patches in the meantime (which is certainly possible).

This theoretical schedule would also mean that mini-set meta will be rather short-lived. During the last two expansions, the shake-up happened exactly in the middle between releases – we had ~2 months of “regular” expansion meta and then ~2 more months of “mini-set” meta (they weren’t completely different, but both of the previous mini-sets made a pretty significant impact). This time we might have ~3 months of expansion meta and just ~1 month of mini-set meta before the 3rd set of Year of the Gryphon launches. In theory, the third set could be delayed into mid-late December, but it’s pretty unlikely – devs have stated in the past that they don’t want releases too close to Christmas since any bug fixes, patches etc. would have to wait until after New Year because most of the team is on a holiday break. So my best guesses for 3rd expansion release dates would be December 7 or 14 – that would leave enough time for the mini-set to make an impact, but still quite shorter than the last two.

Keep in mind that it’s all speculation. We don’t have any official dates yet, but if what patch notes said is true (and I see no reason why it wouldn’t be), we’ll have to wait a lot more for the mini-set. The good news is that the new game mode is coming out pretty soon and while I can’t speak about the gameplay yet, concerns about it being too expensive or “gacha” seem to be overblown. So as long as it’s fun to play, it can make the mini-set wait more bearable. At the same time, I don’t recommend pre-ordering game mode you couldn’t play yet and don’t know whether you will enjoy – I’m sure that Blizzard will release more Mercenaries bundles in the future, once you actually know if you like the mode.