The Midnight Pre-Patch Guide (Features and Content Overview)

The Midnight Pre-Patch, as its name suggests, officially kicks off the Midnight patch cycles, and brings with it a number of new changes that will carry forward into Midnight. The Pre-Patch will release on January 20, 2026, in North America and one day later in Europe. Read on to learn all about the features coming to live servers on January 20.

While every spec in the game receives significant changes with the Pre-Patch, Demon Hunters have a little more going for them; not only do they receive a brand new specialization in Devourer, but Void Elves are also now able to become Demon Hunters.

You will also be able to play a new race with your Demon Hunter: Void Elves. Unlocking this option requires the completion of a quest-line, and while the final steps are not available until the Pre-Patch actually launches, you can already get parts of it done right now! If you haven't done so yet, make sure to check out our detail guide on it, so you can unlock the new Void Elf Demon Hunter racial option as fast as possible.

A few new bits of content are arriving for Player Housing, including:

• Charter Neighborhoods, for those who wish to create private Neighborhoods without managing a guild roster; up to 55 people can belong to a Charter Neighborhood.
• Neighborhood Endeavors, which will provide Housing Experience, exclusive decor, and even physically change your Neighborhood as they are active. Endeavors offer activities for all kinds of players, allowing every member of a Neighborhood to participate and earn rewards.

Retiring many addons has been a hotly-contested topic since the earliest days of Midnight alpha, but now with the Midnight Pre-Patch, Blizzard will officially introduce many of their own native replacements for the most popular combat addons. Now, addons will no longer be able to access the majority of combat information. Instead, Blizzard has worked to improve their own UI elements, including the Cooldown Manager, Raid Frames, and Nameplates. Within the Midnight beta cycle, a new Damage Meter and Boss Timers (including the ever-popular ability timeline format) were also tested.

For more on Blizzard's Midnight addon changes, read their news post here.

Every pre-patch brings us a fun event to kill some time and gear up some alts while we wait for the expansion, and the Midnight Pre-Patch is no exception. The Twilight Ascension event grants us:

• New World Quests in Twilight Highlands;
• Event-exclusive rares;
• Access to the Twilight Cultist transmog set (which had previously disappeared with the Cataclysm revamp);
• Event-exclusive mounts, battle pets, weapon appearances, and Player Housing decor;
• 1/8 Champion catch-up gear at Item Level 121.

The Midnight Pre-Patch brings with it many class changes, new talents, and new Hero Talent Rows for each spec, many of which are straight from the Midnight Beta. All our Spec Guides will be updated for launch, so make sure to head over there to find out how to talent, build, and play your favorite spec come Pre-Patch:

Midnight arrives with a massive stat squish, dropping current raid gear from Item Level 700+ all the way to roughly Item Level 100+. Below, see a comparison between a fully-geared and upgraded Mythic raider with The War Within stats (left), versus the same raider after the Midnight stat squish (right):

Transmog fans rejoice, as Midnight also introduces some major improvements to the current Transmog system. Coming in the Midnight Pre-Patch, we will finally have access to two exciting changes.

Outfits will resolve the issue of needing to fix your transmog every single time you receive a new piece of gear. Now, players can save their favorite sets as Outfits; applying an Outfit will ensure that all gear will automatically update to the set Outfit's appearance when equipped.

Situations permit players to automatically change their transmogs depending on set parameters. Players can thus automatically apply new appearances for different specializations, different types of content, different forms (like Dracthyr, Worgen, or Human), and more!

Read more about these exciting changes in Blizzard's blog on the subject, or head over to our new Transmogrification Overview!