The ninth expansion of World of Warcraft has started. Dragonflight is now live and everyone is rushing to the Dragon Islands to become level 70.
Update 12:10 am: On some realms, the ship bound for the Dragon Isles just doesn’t seem to be arriving… a lot of people are kicking themselves.
Update 12:15 am: Blizzard has now spawned portals on the jetty that teleport directly to the Dragon Isles.
Original message: It’s finally done. The time of “Shadowlands” is finally over and World of Warcraft has successfully started its 9th expansion. The launch of Dragonflight took place punctually at 00:00 on November 29th, 2022 and thousands of players are already cavorting on the Dragon Islands to reach level 70.
How did the launch go? As expected, the launch – at least according to the current status – was relatively uneventful. At midnight, the new quests for all Dragonflight owners simply popped up and off they went to the Dragon Islands. Only those who were not logged in at the time could have minor problems, because there were sometimes queues when logging in.
What’s in the new addon? The “Dragonflight” extension is relatively classic and does without a particularly large number of features. Instead, one reflects on the old strengths and therefore gets a well-rounded package with only a few innovations that should build on old successes:
- New max level of 70
- 4 new areas (+1 as a starting area for the Dracthyr)
- 8 new dungeons
- Reworked professions with a new order system
- Return and improvement of talent trees
- Hang gliding as a new way of locomotion – significantly faster than conventional flying
Is there more to come? Basically yes. For one thing, many endgame features won’t unlock until tomorrow, Wednesday, after the weekly reset at 5:00 a.m. So nobody should feel “rushed” to reach level 70 on the first day.
Even then it is far from over. The first raid opens just a few weeks later and Blizzard has already promised that they want to release significantly more patches and updates much more frequently than in Shadowlands. For this purpose, World of Warcraft even had a few months ago 100 new developers hiredin order to be able to satisfy the content hunger of the community.
Whether these goals will be achieved will probably only be seen in 2023 – but by then most should have enough to do on the Dragon Islands.
Do you also gamble through this night and will you regret it Tuesday morning at work, school or university? Or did you take a vacation to “dig really hard”?
All information about Dragonflight can be found in our large overview.