It's no secret that World of Warcraft's development team has historically focused on group content as the main selling point of each expansion - new raids, new dungeons, new battlegrounds, with other ways of playing generally taking a backseat. Things are changing with Dragonflight! Now, before we go ahead and talk about both some exciting upcoming items from the 10.1.5 PTR as well as what DF has done so far, let us make a distinction between completionists and collectors:

  • A collector can be of any kind: A collector of transmog, mounts, pets achievement or toys etc. or all of them at once!
  • A completionist aims to collect everything, either in a specific part of the game, or the game as a whole (nigh impossible to do in WoW).

The following additions Dragonflight has done so far (and will do next patch) benefit both groups of players, but completionists will reap the grandest rewards.

Patch 10.1.5: Eon's Fringe & Dawn of the Infinite Mega-Dungeon

Dragonflight's upcoming patch, releasing July 11th (July 12th in Europe), is adding content to a region of Thaldraszus that's sort of been uselessly hanging around in limbo (like The Forbidden Reach until 10.0.7). Eon's Fringe is hiding in the hills of southern Thaldraszus and the area seems to be frozen in time.

With 10.1.5, Eon's Fringe is receiving content: [Presumably] daily repeatable content that has you fixing the timeways and receiving some very interesting rewards. For an example, check the image below:

Now, disclaimer, this is the PTR and we're assuming these Quantum items drop from Eon's Fringe content (since it makes the most sense), but there's also what's shaping up to be a rarer event, "Secrets of Azeroth", coming in late summer that may very well be the source.

Quantum items exist for every equippable slot in the game that also has an appearance, as well as every type of weapon. We do not know how common they will be to acquire, and from what 'pool' of items it will draw. Our best guess for how they work are as follows:

  • Each Quantum item used selects an unlearned appearance from a pre-determined, curated pool.
  • An appearance 'from the past' indicates it at least won't include Dragonflight transmog. We're pretty sure it includes all content from vanilla up to Legion (more on how we're sure of this later). Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands may or may not be in the appearance pool.
  • It's safe to assume these Quantum items won't grant the appearances of Legendary (or other super-important) items.
  • The pool of available appearances is likely to be of still obtainable ones, and unlikely to include appearances that can no longer be acquired in-game through playing.

Additionally, the Dawn of the Infinite mega-dungeon has an even more exciting item that can drop from the final boss. Have a look:

It was confirmed by MrGM on Twitter that the item, once used, awarded Midnight's Eternal Reins, a rare horse mount from Legion's Return to Karazhan mega-dungeon (hence why we believe anything up to Legion can be acquired with these new items). Assuming all of the above also applies in the context of getting a random mount from the past you don't own, there's a few additional things to consider:

  • It is unknown what the final drop rate of this 'mount of mounts' will be, or whether it'll be locked behind some sort of hard mode.
  • It's a quantum horse, and the person who got Midnight's Eternal Reins on the PTR got a horse as well. We have no way of knowing, but this 'mount generator' may only grant horses you don't already own (rip getting Ashes of Al'ar if true).

Completionists Rejoice!

Here's where this patch is great if you're a completionist, more so than it is for the specialized collector. The more stuff you're already collected (transmog and mounts), the smaller the pool of stuff you can collect from the quantum items. The way things usually go, you collect a lot of the stuff that's easy to collect (quest mogs, mounts with a respectable drop chance), leaving the rarer ones 'chase items'. If you've been chipping away at all the stuff WoW has available to collect, using these quantum items will have a much higher chance to give you extremely rare, or extremely expensive items compared to someone that didn't put in the effort to, say, run an entire zone or an entire raid on all four armor types in order to get all the appearances up for grabs.

This is the first time in WoW's history that completionists are getting a reward commensurate with the time investment required to collect things. The more time you spent grinding away at old content, the better those quantum rewards will be. It's awesome.

Dragonflight: The Golden Era of Completionism

This isn't the first foray into giving completionists content tailor-made for them in Dragonflight. Patch 10.1.5 added a lot of new recipes that craft a lot of old appearances from items that no longer dropped in Zul'gurub, with the raid's facelift during Cataclysm (more than a decade ago!) removing them from the drop pool. It's important to note that while the appearances are the same, the items and the new recipes are technically a new set of items, but that shouldn't be a concern for most people who are only after more appearances and a bigger number on their total collected recipes.

The same is happening even more ancient, removed appearances from Naxxramas in 10.1.5! The raid is getting the same treatment, with new recipes crafting new items that grant previously-removed appearances. With Naxx getting its removed stuff added back, there'll now be few pieces of removed content for Blizzard to restore, bar the big obvious stuff like the entirely of old Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms - though it should be noted, many of the old continents' appearances & other rewards did survive the Sundering.

To close out this article, I'd like to draw a parallel between the way Dragonflight has approached collecting & completionism compared to Shadowlands. We've gone at length about the new ways players can collect old content, something never-before done in WoW (Torghast was a huge missed opportunity to throw in loot tables of old stuff as rewards). Eon's Fringe is optional, repeatable content, and looking at Dragonflight's other forms of repeatable content, I'm doubtful it'll be an absolute slog.

Shadowlands also added a lot, and I mean a lot, of new things to collect in the form of Covenant-specific transmog, mounts, pets and toys (a looooooot of transmog). The issue, of course, is that almost everything there is to collect in that dreaded expansion is locked behind some of the biggest chores in the entire game's history. Here's some major examples:

  • An army of transmog, for all types of armor and weapons, is locked behind an absurd amount of Anima. Somewhere in the ballpark of 150,000-200,000 for each Covenant (4), for each armor class (4). That's right, to collect everything from the Covenants, you need more than one million Anima. Anima is terrible to grind to this day, with a reasonable amount of weekly afford netting you 6000-12000 per character. The best way to farm Anima is by endlessly, mindlessly opening chests in Zereth Mortis.
  • Two full sets of transmog for each Covenant are locked behind a random chance of their quest being up on any given day in Korthia. Better visit it for the rest of your life to make sure you don't miss out! If you don't know about Korthia, it's perhaps one of the worst 'patch zones' in the game's history. I personally find another Shadowlands zone to be worse, which brings me to...
  • Zereth Mortis. Dozens of mounts, dozens of pets you can craft, locked behind needing ~23,000 Genesis Motes, which drop from killing stuff in the zone. Said stuff generally drop 1-3. You can do the math on how long it takes to craft everything! To make it worse, when you're in Zereth Mortis, you basically have to choose: Do I farm chests for a million Anima, or do I farm creatures for tens of thousands of motes? At least let people convert the other useless Shadowlands currency (Cosmic Flux etc.) into them!

Oh god why.

I've ranted for long enough about how unfriendly Shadowlands is to completionists. Dragonflight is a complete 180 and a welcome change - keep it up, Blizzard. It is the weirdest feeling that, after the horror of Shadowlands, Dragonflight has turned into WoW's best expansion in years.

Are you a completionist in WoW? What do you think of its upcoming content? How has Dragonflight been for you so far? Let us know in the comments below!