Quote Originally Posted by Vaer View Post
Churning out an expansion in 5 months after last major patch is pretty quick by MMO standards (They've done this twice already, perhaps it might take longer this time?) so I'm guessing they start working on it way ahead of time. They dropped the last Ultimate since they probably need the fight designer for one of the 2 EX primals they usually release, to start working on the new expansion raid or maybe even the first Ultimate for 5.0. Maybe the expansion will have radically different stuff this time but I doubt it.
This is not how development works. Development has started since 4.0 was released. As the release date approaches they add more and more of their team to work on finishing it. So no, they do not "churn out" an expansion in a mere 5 months.