When does the next World of Warcraft expansion release?

World of Warcraft’s Shadowlands is the latest expansion that saw global release on Nov. 23, 2020. With only two major content patches, the Chains of Domination and the Eternity’s End, and several minor ones, with the latest one being the Season 4 patch, Shadowlands is finally nearing its end. As we celebrate the near end of Shadowlands, we have the Dragonflight expansion to look forward to. 

Important changes coming with Dragonflight

Revealed on April 19, Dragonflight is bringing a series of quality-of-life changes that will drastically reshape modern WoW. After six long years, Dragonflight will introduce a new class-race combination of humanoid dragonkin otherwise known as Dracthyr Evokers. Not only will Dracthyr have never-before-seen spells and effects, but they will also have a unique gameplay mechanic that allows you to increase your damage output if you press and hold a button on your keyboard.

Another selling point of Dragonflight will be Dragonriding. With Dragonriding, you’ll be able to fly the Dragon Isles from day one, and you can use physics to your advantage to gain momentum as you soar the skies of the Dragon Isles.

The Blizzard developers are also remaking the talent system from scratch on a similar note to the WoW Classic talent trees. The current system of specialization rather limits your character to a singular specialization, however, Dragonflight will encourage you to experiment with your talent points and limit-test your classes, which will now have a distinct flavor and class fantasy. 

On top of this, the devs are looking to reduce the number of necessary addons with their HUD and UI revamp that will now support UI customization without Bartender or ElvUI. The goal of this overhaul is to keep the defining features of UI while still modernizing it and making it more accessible. 

Dragonflight release date

Unfortunately, there is still no official release date for Dragonflight at the time of writing. here are, however, some newfound pieces of information that hint at the possible release date. Since the life expectancy of an average WoW expansion is two years, and Shadowlands is slowly nearing its two-year birthday on Nov. 23, seeing Dragonflight before the end of the year is far from unrealistic expectations. What’s more, it’s highly probable we will be playing Dragonflight on our PCs by the end of this year since the expansion recently transitioned to beta, and even opened up for everyone on the Public Test Realm. 

On top of this, we recently saw potential leaks saying the global launch of Dragonflight is set on Nov.28. Although these are unconfirmed leaks that could easily be disregarded, Ion Hazzikostas himself hinted in his interview with Liquid Guild’s Arthur “Maximum” Smith that this date might be true. 

Ion Hazzikostas asked Maximum and the community for their opinion on a simultaneous release of Normal, Heroic, and Mythic raids. “There are holidays coming up, there’s stuff going on,” Hazzikostas said. So, if we take this into consideration, there’s a strong possibility we might actually see Dragonflight’s global release on Nov. 28.

This article will be updated when new information is made available.