The beta of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight has entered its final phase. The time for experiments is probably over.
A few weeks ago, the concern among fans of World of Warcraft was quite large that the beta for Dragonflight was coming too late and a release still in 2022 seemed way too early. But Blizzard seems to want to stick to the plan and is now moving into the next phase of the beta. The talent trees are probably “finished,” now it’s about fine-tuning the numbers.
What did Blizzard say? In the official WoW forum, the developers spoke up and explained:
We felt it was useful to let you all know where we currently stand in developing classes and talents in Dragonflight. With the next beta/PTR build, we are moving away from spending most of our time on design iterations of the new talent trees and are now primarily focusing on bugs and tuning the game. This includes balancing talents and weighing individual talents against each other and adjusting the performance of each class. We want to ensure that we are releasing an expansion of the highest quality for this fantastic community.
What does this mean? In plain text, this probably means: The talent trees are finished except for minor adjustments, and Blizzard seems to be largely satisfied with all classes. For you, this means that you can slowly but surely start exploring the new talent trees, as the pre-patch should be relatively close.
Blizzard is already “polishing”: Some testers have already noticed that the last update of the beta for Dragonflight has brought a lot of small details. All talent trees now have a class-specific animation when changing talents. Such details are typically added very late when Blizzard is satisfied with the basic design. So one could argue that the beta for Dragonflight is indeed on the “home stretch” and the launch date at the end of 2022 can apparently be met, as the developers have already begun polishing.
However, a concrete release date for the expansion or pre-patch is still pending.
Are the talent trees set in stone? No. Blizzard has already announced that they will make minor adjustments to the talent trees based on feedback and experiences in the beta and live operations. So it could be that with patches 10.1 or 10.2 some talents change again or entirely new talents come in if there are significant problems. Blizzard also stated:
The new talent system represents a major shift for the game and a fundamental overhaul of how classes and specializations can be personalized by players. We expect to make further adjustments based on your feedback throughout the expansion. We appreciate all the testing and feedback and look forward to implementing improvements to the talent trees during the content updates of Dragonflight.
However, for the launch of Dragonflight, they seem to be satisfied with what they currently have – so the focus is now on adjusting numbers and bug fixing.
Everything about Dragonflight can be found in our comprehensive overview.
