World of Warcraft is an overwhelmingly large MMORPG game spanning over 18 years and eight distinctive expansions. To keep the game up to modern standards and player demands, Blizzard tends to make major changes coming into each new expansion. Dragonflight is no exception to this rule. What’s more, Blizzard sees Dragonflight as the third era of WoW that will surely redeem design failures from Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands.
Starting its redemption with Dragonflight, Blizzard went above and beyond to return the game to its previous glory by introducing a new class and race combination called Dracthyr Evokers, bringing back the talent tree system and revamping HUD UI to fit the players’ needs better. On top of that, Blizzard finally addressed major issues players have had with the game for over a decade now, like auto-targeting, personal loot, and Resurrection Sickness.
Since the list of all quality-of-life changes coming with Dragonflight is quite lengthy, we’ve collected them all in one place and categorized them so that you can easily check them out and prepare for the release of expansion on Nov. 28.
All quality-of-life changes coming to WoW Dragonflight
Dragonflight is predominantly concerned with bringing WoW to its previous glory and giving the community the features they’ve been yearning for years. We are making a return to Azeroth after spending two full years beyond the veil contemplating questions like life and death. Dragonflight is definitely a more grounded expansion centered around the evergreen topics of dragons and recovery from ashes. Extending these ideas beyond the mere lore, Blizzard made Dragonflight the expansion that begins its redemption arc.
Bags quality-of-life changes in Dragonflight
With the release of Dragonflight, you can merge all of your bags into one without using the addon Bagnon. To merge all your bags into one, you’ll need to press the Escape button on your keyboard, go to Options, and under Controls, you’ll find the option to merge all your bags into one.
When speaking of bags, we mustn’t forget you can now filter your bags more efficiently than you could in the previous expansions. You can set each bag to be reserved solely for equipment, consumables, trade goods, junk, and quest items.
Dragonflight is also increasing the number of currencies you can track from your bag interface. During Shadowlands and previous expansions, you could only track three currencies. But, in the upcoming expansion, you will be able to track up to eight separate currencies.
Since Dragonflight is introducing major changes to professions and there will be a lot of materials circling around, you will have a profession bag for materials tied to your profession.
Interaction quality-of-life changes in Dragonflight
The first feature that made its way to the game is Interact Key. In simple terms, it allows you to choose a hotkey you can press and interact with every interactable NPC or object in your immediate proximity. To turn on Interact Key, go to Options by pressing the Escape button on your keyboard. Once you have your Options opened, go to Keybindings and under Targeting, you’ll find Interact with Target. After you chose your hotkey, go to Controls and enable Interact Key.
Action combat is a feature that also landed with the pre-patch. If you enable this, you will auto-target the closest interactable target, especially hostile mobs. To enable this, open your options, click Combat, and scroll down until you see Enable Action Target button. Once you tick this box, you’re set and ready.
Press and Hold feature is an amazing quality-of-life feature that solves all of your raiding problems. Now, you don’t have to spam that one key to repeatedly cast your Frost Bold, but you can simply press and hold the hotkey you use for Frost Bolt and your character will repeatedly fire them until you release your hotkey. You can find the full guide on how to enable this here.
With the talent tree revamp, the WoW community got loads of new features that help you understand the new system and find your way among all of these talents. So, we got a search bar for talents, loadout, and export options, and an option to search talent that’s missing from spell bars.
Concerning HUD and UI, we now have a search bar for Options that allows us to go through all customizable options in an instant. On top of this, we can now change the entire user interface to our liking without the need to have ElvUI or similar addons that are simply too difficult to follow if you don’t put at least an hour or two into research.
Open world changes in Dragonflight
World quests in Dragonflight follow Legion’s and BfA’s philosophy, instead of Shadowlands. This means quests will be easier to complete and won’t have as many stages as some quests in Shadowlands had. On top of that, world quests won’t play such a big role in your overall experience, so they will stay available for two to three days.
One of the biggest selling points of the upcoming expansion is Dragonriding. Essentially, it’s flying but with a twist. With Dragonriding you can use the laws of physics to your advantage, soaring through the skies of the Dragon Isles with the speed of light. You’ll get your own Dragonriding drake early in the expansion that will have its own customizations and talent points. Luckily, all unlockable customizations and talents will be account-wide, so you don’t have to re-grind them on your alts. On top of that, you can turn on the Ride Along option at any Dragonriding trainer that allows your timid friends to follow you in a whelp form while Dragonriding.
Loot changes
After years and years of players complaining to Blizzard about Personal loot, it’s finally getting removed from the game. Instead, we will have the traditional Group loot with options to Need, Greed, Disenchant, and Pass. The system will, when rolling, take into consideration your spec and off-spec so you won’t be able to roll on all items you planned.
For raid loot, Blizzard is adding one more item level tier and special loot dropping from each boss. Special loot will be higher item level than other items dropped from that boss. For example, the last boss of Vault of the Incarnates drops loot item level 398, but the special item, which is a bow in this scenario, will be item level 405. Besides that, trash in between the bosses won’t drop Binds-when-equipped items and instead, there will be mini-bosses scattered across the raid that have a higher chance to drop BoE items the more people are in your raid.
For Mythic+ dungeons, item levels will increase up to level 20. In the past, the items scaled only to level 15, and you would only get better gear from the Mythic Vault. There’s also a new Valor point tier for upgrades that can be unlocked when you reach a 2400 rating.
Other quality-of-life changes in Dragonflight
Resurrection Sickness debuff has been reduced from 10 minutes to only a single minute. But now, you’ll get a bigger hit to the durability of your gear, with gear losing 50 percent of its durability upon having the debuff.
With Dragonflight, boats and zeppelins will now have timers that show you when will you ship or zeppelin return to that specific harbor. You’ll see the timer below the NPC offering you the ride, and on hover, you can see exactly how many minutes are left until the ship arrives. Unfortunately, only newer NPC have this feature for now.
