World of Warcraft Dragonflight keeps marching along with the consistent updates, and our next one is hitting on January 16th. The 10.2.5 Seeds of Renewal patch brings many story and system updates that tie up loose ends from this expansion and start the lead into The War Within. Having diligently avoided the PTR spoilers as much as possible, I am looking forward to many of the updates in this patch, so let’s jump in and get to the highlights.

Dragon Isles Story Epilogue

If you haven’t killed Fyrrak or watched the cutscenes at the end of the Amirdrassil raid and everything that happened after that, go ahead and skip to the next section because this is all spoilers. For everyone else, the end of the 10.2 storyline saw the Aspects recover their lost power and Amirdrassil also left the Emerald Dream to find its place in the waking world. A fantastic party also tied up story threads from Dragonflight, past expansions, and there were many easter eggs for long-time night elf players.

Continuing on these threads, the Seed of Renewal storyline sees the new night elf city Bel’ameth in its early stages of forming. I can’t wait to roam around the new fledgling city and experience it for myself. Threading the needle between making it feel Night Elfish without making it feel like a Darnassus 2.0 will be difficult, but seeing the new digs will be interesting. One of my most iconic memories was walking into Darnassus for the first time, I heard the incredible music swell up, and I was in love with it. It was my first time entering a major city in WoW, and it was incredible. I’m not expecting that experience to be recreated, but Bel’ameth has much to live up to.

I know there’s been a lot of concern in the community over the fact horde can also enter Bel’ameth because it is the new night elf capital, and there’s no other racial capital that is cross-faction. However, from what I have seen horde are allowed there, but they can’t do much, so it isn’t the same way that Valdrakken is cross-faction. It also makes sense to allow horde in the city at least provisionally, since it is both horde and alliance who fought to save Amirdrassil from Fyrrak, and throughout this expansion. Of course, I’m also someone who used to sneak into Ogrimmar on my night elf warrior and just chilled on the rooftops, so it could be argued I’ve always wanted the faction wall to be removed.

Additionally, during the previously mentioned party, there were several NPCs talking about hearing whispers and that they didn’t know who or what they were. These were the first bits to lead us into The War Within story, and I’d expect we’d get some more tidbits along the way with this patch's new storyline. I would expect these tidbits to stay as mostly side mentions rather than being a main focus for now since we also have 10.3 coming up, in which I’d expect them to put in a lot more content focusing on the next expansion. Regardless, I hope they do keep developing on these threads a bit in Seeds of Renewal.

Reclaiming Gilneas

The worgen starting storyline has always been one of my favorites, after all you really can’t go wrong with overt Victorian gothic themes. Also, it has a great storyline, and I highly recommend playing through it if you haven’t. However, it’s been an open question if we’d ever go back and recover the lost territory. Considering worgens have been in exile since 2010 when Cataclysm was released, I’m tempted to say it is far past time when we should have done something about the state of Gilneas. However, thematically it does fit in here really well..

Thankfully, this story thread will be picked up and hopefully tied off neatly in Seeds of Renewal. It’ll be interesting to see how everything pans out with Calia Menethil helping out with the reclaiming as well, considering the forsaken are why Gilneas was lost in the first place. Of course, neither Calia nor Lilian Voss were part of that attack previously, and there is a new spirit of cooperation between horde and alliance, so it might not be an issue. 

I am heading straight for this questline after finishing the epilogue for the Dragon Isles. There’s also a new mount and transmog set, which will be rewarded for completing this storyline.

Dracthyr Soar is Fixed

Along with the cool story updates, we are also getting dragonriding in all areas we can currently fly in, and dracthyr will finally fly using the dragonriding system. This means they have access to the different abilities we have while dragonriding, vigor, and vigor regen. Additionally, the cooldown for soar is being reduced by 10 seconds. All that needs to be done to access this improved flight for dracthyr is any character on the account needs to learn dragonriding, and the dracthyr character needs to finish the Forbidden Reach starting experience.

I cannot overstate the level of disappointment I felt the first time I used soar as a dracthyr and realized it wasn’t the same as dragonriding. I had just assumed it would work that way. So, this update is one I have been waiting on for a while. I’m also incredibly happy that for those of us who already have a dracthyr character, we won’t have to do anything new to unlock this ability; it’ll just be there. Having minimal hoops for new players to jump through to get this is also very welcome.

Follower Dungeons

This is a feature I have been wanting to have in World of Warcraft for years. This new system will allow payers to fill their party with NPCs to tackle any of the eight Dragoinflight dungeons on normal difficulty. Loot appropriate for the player's specs that would drop in a regular normal dungeon will drop during follower dungeons, so there is no real penalty to doing normal dungeons this way. A group of players can use this system to fill out their group, or a solo player can use it to get four other NPCs. Follower Dungeons are accessed through the LFG tool, which makes it extremely easy to use.

I’m not really the target audience for this tool since I already do a lot of group content. I could see one use for me when I need to run Brakenhide on normal to complete a leatherworking order. Having a group of NPCs with me would make it go even faster. Nonetheless, I am excited about this for all the players it will help. From people who have various reasons for not wanting to group up with others, to people who want to learn a new role/class/spec without the pressure of being in a dungeon with other players, this system will help bridge a needed gap. It may even help people transition from being a solo player to doing group content. Hopefully, Follower Dungeons will include every dungeon in WoW before too long.

There’s plenty more coming with the next update; they’ve posted a helpful list of everything coming with Seeds of Renewal on the World of Warcraft site.