World of Warcraft 10.0: Dragonflight Announced

By Starym — Apr 19 2022 13:55 PDT

After a long wait, we finally know what's ahead for WoW! Today, Blizzard revealed the next expansion and some of its major features! From a new race and class, to new flying tricks, tier sets, The Dragon Isles themselves and more, here's everything that was announced about Dragonflight.

New Class and Race

The biggest announcement was, of course, the new class and race, as the Dracthyr Evoker took a lot of the focus with the first new class since Legion. The race itself was created as an experiment by Neltharion with the essence of the dragons and imbued with their strength, nobility, wisdom, and adaptability to become the perfect soldiers.

The Evoker is a Hero class and will be getting its own starting zone, picking Horde or Alliance at character creation, with the Dracthyr race getting a lot of customization options between their draconic and humanoid forms!

The Evoker has two specs: Devastation, the DPS-oriented one which used the red and blue dragonflight powers, whereas Preservation is the healing spec, utilizing green and bronze dragonflight powers.

A New Type of Spell

Hidden away in all the big announcements is a new type of spell, as Empower lets you charge up your spell by holding the button down, and the longer you hold it, the more powerful it gets - whether that means adding more AoE targets, more damage or similar mechanics. There will also be a toggle option available to have it work differently, due to accessibility concerns, but no additional details were shared on that.

Dragonriding

One of the more exciting features of Dragonflight is the new mount customization system, as we’re all getting a dragon companion! But that’s not all, as we won’t only be customizing our own mount’s scales, horns, armor and similar, but will also be gaining new flying abilities throughout the expansion, including using momentum and dive-bombing to fly faster!

Technically, it won’t be “flying” in the sense we’ve seen so far, as these will be abilities exclusive to our new dragon companion mounts. However, it will be available from the expansion’s start, so we will finally be able to fly right off the bat! At max level, we will be gathering glyphs to upgrade the Dragonriding skill tree and add to our abilities while flying around on our very own dragon. This will come in handy when facing the special challenges around the Dragon Isles made specifically for the Dragonriding system, which will also reward us with more customization options.

You can also head to the official Dragonflight site and preview the 4 types of dragons you will be riding and customizing!

Four New Zones on the Dragon Isles

The Waking Shores, Ohn’ahran Plain, the Azure Span, and Thaldraszus are the four new zones we will be leveling inm with a brand new addition to WoW: DUCKS!

Talent Revamp

Big talent trees are back! And it is trees plural, as you get two to choose through: one for your class and one for your specialization. You will be able to mix and match spells and abilities that were not possible before and there should be some more build diversity present. You will be able to change talents the same way as you do now with preset options you can create and switch to easily, so it will be plenty flexible as well. Also, this means talent points at every level!

HUD and UI Update

The base UI is finally getting a big update, with a layout that allows for more customization and moving of the elements around the screen by default. Each element will also have its own set of options, and you can save, copy, edit, and name each of the option sets you make for the elements, with options to switch to them when swapping specs.

Profession Revamp

Big changes will arrive to crafting, starting with Crafting Orders, where any player can request an item from another, even from a profession they don’t have. You can offer up any mats you have yourself, including ones that may be exclusive to your profession, and then put that Crafting Order on a new Auction House NPC where you can get offers for crafting that item. You can also just find a player in person or send the order to your guild instead. And to top it all off, this also works for Soulbound items!

Quality is also arriving for both crafted gear and for gathered materials, as weapons, armor etc. can get higher item levels, and potions and similar can get better effects with a higher quality craft. One of the main ways to get higher quality crafting is through specializations, and you can earn specialization points through various means, whether it’s finding a book or an NPC out in the world that can teach you about Armorsmithing, for example.

There will also be profession-exclusive gear that will automatically be used and won’t take up a slot, which improves harvesting and other profession-related activities.

Primalist Tier Set

While it’s not exactly a huge system announcement, we did get to see some pretty awesome concept art for the first tier set!

Beta Opt-In

And finally, don’t forget to sign up for the eventual Dragonflight Beta (although we still don’t even have an Alpha time-frame), over on the bottom of the official site!

If you’re looking for even more details on all of the features above, you can check out Blizzard’s deep dive post here. And to wrap things up, here’s the awesome expansion key art piece in its full glory.

About the Author

Starym is an old-school raider with a wide history of World Firsts under his belt. He is a long-time news writer and interviewer for Icy Veins and formerly Manaflask. Having raided in the Race to World First (RWF) until the end of The Burning Crusade, he has been covering the events since Cataclysm and the RWF has become his greatest passion in WoW. A (Tauren, obviously) Warrior main at heart, when pushed, he will admit to loving Diablo more than WoW and, thus, should be punished.