Cautiously optimistic on Dragonflight #WorldofWarcraft

I’m breaking radio silence to post about the World of Warcraft expansion announcement that I just watched live on YouTube: Dragonflight (offical site page). Regular posts won’t resume until mid-late May due to work commitments but a new expansion for a treasured MMO is worthy of coverage for posterity.

So Dragonflight has been announced as the next expansion, with some key features so far listed:

• The Dracthyr race/class combo (new evoker class linked to and limited to the new Dracthyr race)
• The return of more traditional talent trees
• Dragonriding
• Profession revamp

So far so good. I’ve always found the modern “talent row” system unsatisfactory, personally, I want more character customisation in order to make leveling feel more individualistic. The devil’s in the detail, but the preview screenshot looked promising – the combo of class and spec trees (Druid was shown for a split second) looked promising.

The concept of race/class combo does have a prescendence in the genre: for example the Beorning in Lord of the Rings Online. It’s pretty restrictive, so there are bound to be some grumblings on this as not everyone likes a lizard-based character: personally I’m a fan so have no problem with this. I wasn’t expecting a new class in this expansion and that is a good way to increase an expansion’s appeal to me, I can never have too many alts. This class will be ranged dps and healer (mail-wearing), which is a dream combo for me.

Dragonriding looks like a combo of customisable dragon mounts plus “vehicle rides” from a WoW perspective. More broadly it looks a lot like gliding or the griffon mount from Guild Wars 2. Movement mechanics is something I’ve praised before, so this could be a good thing.

Lots more to come no doubt, but hey, the Tuskarr will make a return properly in this expansion, that alone could be enough to bring me back!