Each of those details shaped how the TWW Season 1 timeline played out for guilds at every level of progression.
Heroic Week is a structured delay Blizzard inserts between the opening of a new raid tier's Heroic difficulty and the release of Mythic difficulty and Mythic+ keystones. During the window, players can progress through the new raid on Normal and Heroic, run Mythic 0 dungeons to build their gear baseline, and earn loot from world bosses and World of Warcraft's other weekly reset content. What they cannot do is climb the Mythic+ seasonal ladder or attempt the race-defining Mythic raid encounters.
The pause is deliberate: Blizzard uses the live Heroic data to verify that class balance is in a reasonable state before the patch's highest-stakes content opens. A broken class tuning pass is far easier to correct at Heroic week two than after the Race to World First has already started.
📌 Common confusion: Heroic Week is not the same as the expansion's early access window. TWW's early access (August 22–26, 2024) blocked Mythic 0 and gave Epic Edition buyers three days to level and experience story quests before the global launch. Global launch (August 26) opened Mythic 0. Heroic Week started at Season 1's launch (September 10) and ran one additional week. These are two distinct gates, not one.
Heroic Week was absent for the entirety of Dragonflight. Blizzard's reasoning was that removing the delay would give every player, not just raid guilds, an immediate path to Mythic+ progression at the start of the season. The intent was generous, but the practical outcome created friction the community had not anticipated.
Without a dedicated Heroic-only week, top guilds running the Race to World First immediately pivoted to Heroic split raiding at a far higher intensity than before. Because Mythic was live on day one, the efficiency gap between a guild running clean Heroic splits and a guild jumping straight into Mythic progression was enormous. Splits dominated the early days of every Dragonflight tier, and Mythic raid content launched with fewer tuning passes than it would have received with a buffer week of live data.
Guild-level power disparities also widened. Casual and semi-hardcore guilds who entered Mythic on day one did so against encounters that had not yet received their first real-data tuning pass. Several Dragonflight tiers saw significant Mythic adjustments in the first two weeks — adjustments that Heroic Week data would have caught before Mythic launched.
At a content creator summit in April 2024, TWW Production Director Michael Bybee confirmed that Heroic Week was returning for The War Within's first season. The decision addressed the Dragonflight feedback directly: splits still happened during Heroic Week (they are structurally incentivised by how gear accumulates), but Blizzard had seven days of Heroic data before Mythic opened, which enabled a tuning pass that had not been possible in Dragonflight's same-day Mythic launches.
The announcement also confirmed that Heroic Week would not carry over to Season 2 as a permanent fixture. It was explicitly positioned as a Season 1 structural choice rather than a renewed standing policy.
✏️ What Heroic Week actually meant for raid teams: Heroic splits ran at maximum efficiency during the September 10–17 window. Guilds farming Heroic Nerub-ar Palace for split loot brought in multiple alt characters per raider to push item level as high as possible before the Mythic race clock started. Smaller guilds who did not run splits could still make meaningful Heroic progress and use Mythic 0 dungeon gear to close the ilvl gap before attempting Mythic on September 17.
The full release sequence for The War Within Season 1 broke into three distinct phases:
⚠️ Season 2 note: Heroic Week did not return for TWW Season 2 (Liberation of Undermine). Mythic difficulty and Mythic+ both launched alongside Heroic on Season 2's opening day. Players who expected the same staggered structure from Season 1 were caught off-guard by the compressed timeline.
Players looking to get ahead for current Midnight season content can compare Mythic+ key carry packages for the current dungeon pool.
Heroic Week is a one-week period at the start of a new raid tier where Normal and Heroic raid difficulties are available but Mythic difficulty and Mythic+ keystones remain locked. Blizzard uses the week to collect live tuning data before opening the patch's highest-difficulty content.
Yes — Heroic Week returned for TWW Season 1, running September 10–17, 2024. Production Director Michael Bybee confirmed its return at the TWW Content Creator Summit in April 2024. It was a Season 1–only decision and did not carry over to Season 2.
Yes. Blizzard removed Heroic Week for all of Dragonflight, opting to open Mythic difficulty and Mythic+ on the same day as Heroic. The decision was reversed for TWW Season 1 after player and guild feedback about the consequences of same-day Mythic launches.
During September 10–17, 2024, players could run Nerub-ar Palace on Normal, Heroic, and Raid Finder (Wing 1), run Mythic 0 dungeons, fight world bosses, and complete weekly seasonal activities. Mythic+ keystones and Mythic Nerub-ar Palace were locked until September 17.
Split raiding means bringing many alt characters through Heroic to maximise the total gear drops, then trading the best pieces to main-spec raiders before Mythic opens. Because Mythic was locked for the full week, splits were the only gear-acceleration strategy available, and guilds competing in the Race to World First used every available raid lockout to close the item-level gap going into September 17.
No. Liberation of Undermine's Season 2 opened with Mythic difficulty and Mythic+ concurrent with Heroic on day one. Heroic Week's return was explicitly a Season 1 experiment, not a permanent return to the pre-Dragonflight model.
The Race to World First is an unofficial competition where the top Mythic raiding guilds in the world race to be the first to clear the new raid tier on Mythic difficulty. In TWW Season 1, the race began when Mythic Nerub-ar Palace opened on September 17, 2024.
Last reviewed 2026-06-20 against The War Within Season 1 release schedule — Maintained by WowCarry's WoW team.
