Lairs are coming back in patch 12.2 Eclipse. At the World of Warcraft: Midnight What’s Next panel at BlizzCon 2026, Associate Game Director Paul Kubit confirmed a new lair in the Mantle Vault called the Gearhold, home to an enormous Azerite bat that is also one of the new raid bosses.
“It is confirmed, we are bringing back lairs for Eclipse,” Kubit said, after a slide headed New Lair: The Gearhold showed the bat crouched inside a Titan chamber. The lair runs on world difficulty and also on normal, heroic and flexible mythic difficulty, which drew a cheer from the hall.
The bat, whose name Kubit spoke as Nachtenax, is part of the zone’s Azerite-based wildlife alongside stone worms and crystalline elementals. Kubit said it can be found within its lair in the zone and that it also appears inside the Worldcore raid at the end of the Eclipse story.
The panel did not say how many bosses the Gearhold holds beyond the bat, or what it drops. A date for Eclipse had not been given at this point in the panel.
