Yeah, three great stuff. As meh as I am about Dragons and Tinkers, this actually sounds quite compelling, not gonna lie.
Same here. I'm not really a big fan of werewolves (although worgen at least have a pretty original lore) but the dark victorian aesthetic is amazing. And don't get me started on the muuuusic.
The description of the Dragonflight's leak is interesting given the recent discoveries that have lined up with it but my main argument against it is how extremely off the mark it was in predicting the dates of the expansion's announcement. I can't think of a reason why an announcement would be planned for February and then delayed by an entire two months.
When you aren't looking at it with confirmation bias, it is still totally possible that the leak just got very lucky with a handful of predictions.
There are other forms of leveling.
Leveling in WoW is archaic and holding WoW back, no similar game in 2022 has this tedious infinite level cap expansion. Most either use an account wide level cap paragon progression system (you still have bars to fill), or use ilevel as vertical progression and just squish that, then have some sort of supplemental seasonal XP bar. The developers arent going to just endlessly extend level cap and squish down over and over. Honestly it's insane it went on as long as it did.
ESO and Destiny 2 both have better systems to replace leveling. They're probably going to use something along these lines.
I could easily see them doing away with leveling. And actually I think the renown system was a test for it.
With scaling, leveling no longer serves any purpose other than to increase ilvl and gate certain content. Both of those things can be achieved by renown and already are in some ways in SL.
Something that I find particularly interesting about the Dragonflight leak:
"Balor. Halfling race dealing with primordial fel enemies (think proto-demons, like what the Shadowlands creatures are to undead)."
Whereas Balor is another classic zone we have yet to explore, the mention of a halfling race is particularly interesting... especially since they are fighting proto-demons.
In the Irish mythology, Balor is the king of the Fomorians, a group of creatures describe as hideous (sometimes demonic) giants, warriors of chaos and destruction.
Now, we have yet to have an Ireland-inspired zone in the game (Kul'Tiras doesn't dive too much into the Celtic aspect of the Irish culture), and Blizzard has a history of copy-pasting real life mythology into the game, twisting it only a little.
So, the island of Balor being home to halflings (tall humans? small ettins? something else?) fighting giant proto-demons (mirroring Zereth Mortis proto death creatures?) is something I could see.
I'd like for there to be more explanation than just "something happened to Dalaran textures" than just adding it to the list of support.
What does MrGM mean?
Also didn't the necropolis CG have crazy chromatic abberations that indicate some kind of post-Photoshop work?