World of Warcraft development team has announced their next, tenth expansion for the beloved franchise: Dragonflight. In their feature presentation, developers have demonstrated a bunch of new features, changes and new systems that will enrich the Dragon Isles. In this blogpost we will showcase said features.

 1. Dragonriding

    Probably the most drastically new features that will be included with Dragonflight is the addition of the new type of flying called Dragonriding. On Dragon Isles you won't be able to just use your normal flying mount and swim through the air: you will have to befriend a dragon and explore new zones with a new physics flying system. During the flight you will have to build up the momentum to reach new heights, dive bomb and barrel roll to avoid dangers in the air. You won't be able to just reach any height with this flying system opposed to our usual swim flying, your dragon will have a stamina meter and will gain exhaustion during the flight so it will require some thinking to use. Normal flying itself will be available later down the road in the future patches, according to the developers.

    The dragon itself will have it's own abilities and customization. On release, the abilities that your dragon mount has will be limited and will be unlocked, probably, by completing time-gated questline, gaining reputations with different factions, or maybe there will be some training involved with your dragon. According to official blogpost, you will have to hunt down some special ancient glyphs to advance your dragonriding skill tree, which will improve your dragon's stats and give him new abilities. Hopefully we will get more information and showcase of how this new system works.

    We believe this new Dragonriding system might be a good new mini-game of sorts which will make traversing the land much more fun, depending on how developers will implement it.

 2. New race and class: Dracthyr Evoker

    Dracthyr Evoker is a hybrid of humanoid dragonkin created by Deathwing for his own evil schemes. The new race will have only one class that is unique to the Dracthyr themselves called Evoker.

    This class will have two specialization, Devastation and Preservation. Devastation, the damage dealing specialization, will be a mid-range caster that will use red and blue dragonflight to breathe fire and cast magic down on their enemies. Preservation, the healer specialization, will use the power of green and bronze dragonflight to create healing zones and reverse damage done to their allies in order to heal them.

    Both specialization will be able to Empower their abilities by holding down the button until it is fully charged, increasing or changing the effect of the spell, or you'll be able to release the button early to cast the ability faster, but producing the weaker effect. The race will be neutral, just like Pandaren, and will have to choose their allegiance with one of the factions, Alliance or Horde. Although, that last part will have the effect only on questing experience with your friends since in-doors content will have become cross-faction by that point.

 3. New Talent Trees

    World of Warcraft will finally have back it's talent trees for all classes! Each specialization will have two talent trees that your class will have to work with.

    First talent tree is the Class Tree. It will have general talents for your class that will improve your overall effectiveness of basic abilities and characteristics, making your character a bit more sturdy, maybe increasing cast speed of certain abilities, or making their general tools more convenient to use. We don't know yet in-depth details of how big of an impact this tree will make on the playstyle of your class, but it's safe to assume it will have some impact on your day-to-day abilities.

    The second one is the Specialization Tree. It will be the keypoint that will define how you play your class. At the current moment in Shadowlands your class has a choice between three passives/abilities per row that, while offer some choice to your playstyle, in reality don't make much of a difference because one thing is almost always better than the other. While the meta-gaming part of the game will not just be gone with this change, it will for sure welcome experimentation for old and new players as there is more choice to branch off to. Hopefully it will make the gameplay of each class more diverce for different situation and not just stagnate to the same old same things is the most efficient way to play the game.

 4. Profession System Revamp

    Dragonflight will change and expand on how the Profession will impact your daily life on Dragon Isles, introduce new mechanics making mastering your professions more meaningful and impactful on your performance in outdoor and indoor content in the game.

    First and foremost, crafted items will now have a Crafting Quality. Quality will determine how strong an item you crafted will become, making gear a higher item level or giving it better stats, a potion stronger or last longer, or increasing the damage or effects of trinkets and special rings. Crafting quality can be affected by the quality of reagents and specializations.

    Players will be able to create Crafting Orders to request other players with that profession skill to create items for them. Browse through recipes of any profession, choose what you want crafted, and create a Crafting Order to request its manufacture. You will have the option to add some or all of the necessary reagents and a commission.

    You will now also be able to place Crafting Orders for people to create. It's sort of an auction house for creation of the items: a Player places an order to create a certain item; he can choose specific qualities for it and even attach materials to the crafting order, and then the Crafter with qualified abilities will create the said item, for a small fee or for free if you choose so. You will be able to make the order public, specific to your guild or to certain player. This will also allow the crafting of soulbound items for other players, whenever they created the item or not.

    Profession Specializations are also coming back. If you remember Vanilla WoW, you could specialize in your profession to learn how to make certain items not available for an average crafter. It was most apparent with Engineering, when you could become a gnomish or goblin inventor and use their recipes to create unique trinkets and mounts. With Specialization you'll be able to create items of better quality quality, such as armorsmithing will help to create better armor, weaponsmithing for weapons and so on. You will level your specialization by earning points for it by completing quests, crafting, finding certain NPCs and completing other activities.

    Profession interface is also getting completely changed to accommodate the new changes, and it gives us a peek on how the new system will work. It looks like each profession will have new stats; as you can see on the image, in Alchemy crafting Potion of Frozen Focus will require Resourcefulness and Inspiration. It is unknown what those stats are at the moment and how they will play the part in creating stronger potions. Also, as you can see, you can level up the recipe by making more of it, and to addition you will be able to add Finishing Reagents to increase the quality of the final craft even further, giving it unique effects or just straightforward strengthening of the thing you created.