World of Warcraft Dragonflight New Features

World of Warcraft, a legendary MMO RPG game released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment will have its 10th expansion World of Warcraft Dragonflight released on 28th November 2022. Similar to previous expansions, Dragonflight will turn the game upside down in terms of class balance, new features, and systems. In this article, we will take a closer look at some of the more interesting changes.

Table of content:

• Talent changes
• New Class and Race
• Dragon Riding
• New Zones & Dungeons
• Professions

Let's start with one of the most important changes, talents, as we knew them in the previous expansions, have been a thing since the release of World of Warcraft Cataclysm pre-patch back in 2010 when Blizzard decided to get rid of old-school RPG-style talent tree with a lot of talent points, small bonuses and only a handful of active skills. In the newest World of Warcraft Dragonflight expansion, the old-school talent tree is back but not without new features, every character will have not just one but two talent trees with separate talent point pools to put into.

There are approximately 40 (38 to be exact) specializations in World of Warcraft Dragonflight across 13 classes so it is easier to talk about talents if we choose one class and specialization as an example, we will go with Arcane Mage.
Every character has two aforementioned talent trees, one based on its class and one based on the chosen specialization, every level up starting from level 10, a character gets one point to put into one of the trees, the points alternate every level, so at level 10 it is a point for mage talent tree and on level 11 it is a point for arcane talent tree.

 
Each tree has a combination of both active and passive skills, you can choose what to pick in each row but rows placed later down the tree require a minimum number of points spent in previous rows.

An additional restriction is that some points require specific allocated points from the previous rows or rows to be allocated in the first place, those points are connected with arrow-ending lines that indicate what points are required in order to choose the specific talent you want.

As an example let's take a 4th and 5th row of the arcane talent tree, in order to pick Resonance passive talent (3rd from left in the 5th row), you need to allocate either Arcane Surge talent(middle in 4th row) or fully allocate two points of Improved Arcane Missiles talent (2nd from left in 4th row) otherwise the Resonance talent is grayed out and unable to be chosen.

Now after showing the exact rules of how to allocate the talent trees, the question is, why is this change good and exciting?

New class and specialization talent trees along with new ideology that specific class utilizes shouldn’t be limited to specific specialization only bring new possibilities and more tools for players to work with.

If you never played an arcane mage, this specialization was always lacking in any group play utility, for years the best crowd control ability accessible to arcane mages was basically just Ice Nova allowing for a brief snare of enemies. The new talent system allows arcane mages to use previously fire specialization-locked abilities like Dragon Breath(disorient effect) and Blast Wave(knockback) improving the specialization viability for group content and closing the utility gap between all mage specializations.

As mentioned before, there are a lot of classes and specializations, each class receiving its own talent tree it is simply impossible to cover all of them in this single article so let's move to the next World of Warcraft Dragonflight feature.

Every now and then with the release of a new expansion we either get a new class or a new race, this time with WoW newest expansion we get something new, a class that is only playable on a single race, the race that is also newly introduced. Dragonflight is all about dragons' new playable race a humanoid dragonkin race called Dracthyr with only one selectable class to play as, Evoker.

Normally when discussing a new class or race it would be done separately, however, due to the fact that simply every Dracthyr character will be an Evoker and vice versa, it is somehow natural to take i.e racial abilities as just another Evoker feature.

Dracthyr race has special racial abilities:

Three active abilities:

Tail Swipe - AoE knock-up around your character

Wing Buffet - Knockback in front of a character

Glide – lets you glide on your wings when mid-air, similar to demon hunter gliding

Three passive abilities:

Discerning Eye - Increased perception by 2%

Awakened - Increased mastery by 1%

Familiar Skies - Reduced Soar cooldown in fully explored continents

Dracthyr can also take a visage form when they are not in combat, the ability works similarly to Worgen transformation but allows for more customization and the visage form is a blood elf model instead of a human.

The Evoker class has two specializations a healer specialization called Preservation and a DPS specialization called Devastation, this new class is 3rd mail wearer in World of Warcraft, for weapons, it can equip: maces, axes, swords, staves, daggers, and first weapons.

Each class in World of Warcraft has its own special features and gimmicks to keep it different from other classes, Evoker, wields the magic of all five dragon aspects and main dragon races: Red, Blue, Green, Bronze, and Black and has the ability to empower its spells.

Similar to talents, there is a lot to cover about the new class so let us move to probably the most interesting and promising feature of World of Warcraft Dragonflight: Dragonriding

Flying mounts in World of Warcraft are something that players got used to, they were first introduced in World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade so almost 16 years ago. Years went by and Blizzard realized that they would rather have players spending time on the ground than just skip everything about the new and exciting world they introduce with each expansion. Since the World of Warcraft Warlords of Draenor expansion, flying in new zones required a tedious achievement that usually required completing multiple quest lines, exploring the full map, and even grinding adequate reputation levels with several factions. It is very obvious that a lot of players really didn’t like the solution that Blizzard came up with to prolong the exposure of new regions to players.

In World of Warcraft Dragonflight, there is a completely new feature that, by the looks of it, solves the issue both from players and developers' perspectives.

So what exactly is Dragon riding  

Dragon riding is a new movement system specific to dragon Isles (a new continent introduced with Dragonflight expansion) that allows you to fly a dragon working with both momentum and gravity management. Regular flying mounts on dragon isles will be disabled entirely.

How to unlock Dragon riding

Once the expansion releases, dragon-riding will be unlocked after around an hour and a half of following the main campaign storyline.

How does Dragon riding work  

You can summon and dismiss your dragon just as you would do with regular mount, however, once you mount up, your action bars will be replaced with UI designed to help you control your dragon movement. There is a number of skills that command your dragon to do your bidding, at the beginning of your flying you will have access to two abilities:

Skyward Ascent – Fly upward.

Surge Forward – Flap forward.

Each ability requires one point of vigor to be used, at the start your dragon will have three points of vigor with a recharge time of 30 seconds per vigor point.

Down the line, there will be more abilities associated with Dragon riding to unlock, like passives that let you recharge your vigor faster or let you use existing gale winds to propel and redirect your flight without using your vigor.

Another thing unlocked with time are Dragon riding talents providing further improvement to your dragon flying capabilities, talent points for the Dragon riding talent tree are unlocked by collecting Glyphs, glyphs are golden markings located mid-air in the sky that you need to fly thru to collect the glyph.

Dragon Race  

Along with Dragon riding, a new minigame called Dragon Racing is introduced, dragon racing works similarly to World of Warcraft Mist of Pandaria Jade Serpent courses but the specifics are:

There is a race location, one in each new zone

The race requires three players to start

You need to fly thru golden circles in the fastest possible time

At the end of the race, a bronze, silver, or gold medal is awarded based on time.

Dragon Customization  

There are four different modeled dragons you can unlock for your dragon riding but also each of them has a full set of customizable options like changing color, style, and patterns. Different customization options can be unlocked by collecting customization scrolls, the scrolls themselves come from a wide array of activities like PVP, world quests, achievements, and dragon-riding itself.

This is pretty much everything you will need to know about dragon-riding when the expansion releases to enjoy flying across the new zones with your fierce dragon, speaking of zones let's move to another section of this article

The new expansion brings us a whole new continent called The Dragon Isles, there are 4 primary zones on the dragon isles and one additional zone that is a starting location for the Dracthyr race.

Zones:

- Waking Shores

- Ohn’arhan Plains

- Azure Span

- Thaldraszus

- Forbidden Reach ( Dracthyr starting zone )

- Waking Shores

This is the first zone you encounter when visiting Dragon Isles, waking shores are home to Red Dragonflight and the ancestral home of Black Dragonflight, it is a green jungle-like zone with fire-themed enemies featuring two new dungeons: Ruby Life Pools and Neltharus

Ruby Life Pools will be accessible to players during leveling, and Neltharus is reserved for max-level adventurers.

Ohn’ahran Plains

The second area in Dragon Isles are vast plains named after a wild god of wind, they feature the Green Dragonflight and Centaur clan that learned to live together in peace and harmony. The new dungeon is The Nokhud Offensive and will be available to players during the leveling.

Azure Span

The third zone is one of the biggest zones ever created in World of Warcraft, a snowy forest similar to Northend Grizzly Hills in design that will feature Blue Dragonflight along with the return of the Tuskar race.

Azure span has two dungeons: Brackenhide Hollow and Max level dungeon, The Azure Vault

Thaldraszus

The last zone and the one you will probably spend the most time in is home to bronze Dragonflight, a new hub city Valdrakken is located here and the whole area is surrounded by beautiful mountains and caves ready to be explored.

Halls of Infusion and Algeth’ar Academy two of the max-level dungeons are located in this zone.

One dungeon that will be a new leveling dungeon is a reworked Uldaman, Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr which is located in Eastern Kingdoms in the badlands.

Overall the new zones are told to be bigger overall than an area of Northrend, it is impossible to describe the majestic nature of new zones without playing the game for yourself so let us move to the last section of this article.

Professions are getting a huge overhaul in World of Warcraft Dragonflight, biggest changes are being applied to crafting professions such as tailoring, leatherworking, or alchemy.

Upcoming changes feature the following:

Quality system – a new feature that separates the same item craft into 5 quality tiers, each quality has a different item level and stats, and the quality is determined by your level of crafting, for items that don’t have specific stats like consumables, quality will be different from item to item.

Crafting Specialization – you can specialize your profession in crafting specific types of items to increase the quality of crafted items

Crafting Orders – a new system that allows you to request other players to craft an item you want.

New Profession gear – gear that increases your stat within your profession, the state is one of four new crafting-specific stats such as:

Inspiration - % chance to gain extra skill on craft.

Resourcefulness - % chance to use fewer reagents.

Multicraft - % chance to craft more stackable items (like flasks or potions)

Crafting Speed – crafting faster by %

An additional new feature for crafting professions is item recrafting, allowing you to recraft an already crafted item to increase its quality.

There is a number of specific changes for each profession but as with every other section of this article, it is too big to cover here.

With the release of the newest expansion, there is a lot of stuff to do, hundreds of achievements and collectibles to obtain, new bosses, dungeons and raids to conquer and millions of other players to compete with. World of Warcraft is probably one of the most diverse games out there where it is simply impossible to excel at all of them if there ever is any loot you want to get, an achievement you just can’t stand or simply doesn’t have time to grind for, don’t hesitate to contact us for help.

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