World of Warcraft Midnight: Release Date, Class Changes And More

World of Warcraft: Midnight will be the second part of the World-Soul-Saga. Blizzard announced the new expansion during this year's Gamescom, and now we already have a set date for its release, and it's not as far away as you might think. On February 3 you will be able to dive back into the world of Azeroth, with some new exiting features waiting for you, as you level up to 90.

Player Housing – The Long Awaited Feature

With Midnight, we will finally be able to settle down and build our own unique house and neighbourhood. We will pick out of a few locations to build our home, and obviously decorate it to our own liking. Multiple floors as well as redeemable rooms were already announced. Blizzard mentioned that they want our small little place of Azeroth to feel alive and ever-changing.

New Class Specialization: The Devourer Demon Hunter

With the new Demon Hunter Spec, Blizzard will introduce a mid-range melee DPS, that is going to use a mixture of range and melee abilities, whilst dealing Void and cosmic damage to enemies. This specialization plays right into the Void-theme of this expansion (and to be honest, I might actually main demon hunter again...). The rotation focuses on creating and spending soul fragments to blast powerful void spells at your opponent.

Here's a short overview of the abilities that the Devourer comes with:

• Reap: A scythe attack that will consume all soul fragments around you
  
• Void Blade & Hungering Slash: A melee combo with a retreat movement
• Void Ray: The Devourer type of eye beam
• Void Metamorphosis: The Devourer Metamorphosis form that lets you cast the powerful ability "Collapsing Star" as soon as you have harvested enough soul fragments

To round up the new Spec, Void Elves will finally join their demonic brothers and sisters, as the demon hunter class will also be available to them.

New Allied Race: The Haranir

As we all know by now: Blizzard loves their allied races. In this expansion, the Haranir will join the fight against evil. We already got to know this allied race during The War Within, as we briefly had some contact with Orweyna while questing in Azj-Kahet.

Coming from the wilderness of Harandar, near the roots of the world trees, the Haranir are ancient guardians. This allied race will be available for both Horde and Alliance.

Classes available to the wild Haranir will be:

• Druid
• Hunter
• Mage
• Monk
• Priest
• Rogue
• Shaman
• Warlock
• Warrior

Revisit The Golden Eversong Woods And Silvermoon

As usual, a new expansion means new zones for us to explore. The four zones for Midnight are:

• Eversong Woods
• Zul'Aman
• Harandar
• Void Storm

And yes, you heard that right. Eversong Woods also means Silvermoon. The city has been rebuilt from the ground up and will be the centre of everything that is going on for both Alliance and Horde. One third will be under the total control of the Horde, it's a little bit like Dalaran, where both factions had their own unique building (just bigger this time). The other two thirds of the city will be shared between Alliance and Horde.

New Delves, Dungeons and Raids

Treasure and Adventure awaits us, with 11 new delves coming our way:

• Twilight Crypts
• Atal'Aman
• The Grudge Pit
• The Gulf of Memory
• Parhelion Plaza
• Collegiate Calamity
• The Shadow Enclave
• Den of Echoes
• Shadowguard Point
• Sunkiller Sanctum
• Torment's Rise

Four new dungeons will be available to us as we level up to 90, the other four will be our max-level dungeons:

Level-up Dungeons:

• Winderunner Spire
• Magister's Terrace
• Murder Row
• Den of Nalorakk

Max-Level Dungeons:

• Maisara Caverns
• The Blinding Vale
• Voidscar Arena
• Nexus Point Xenas

To drive the story from Midnight forward, we will be able to jump into the first two raids in Season 1, while the quests will lead us to the last raid, coming March 31 later.

• The Voidspire
• The Dreamrift
• March on Quel'Danas

Hunt Or Be Hunted:

Midnight will introduce a new outdoor mode for us. You will be able to hunt down powerful targets across the new zones, but careful, maybe they are already hunting you. The activity will be separated into three difficulties: Normal, Hard and Nightmare.

"Prey" will be completely optional, even though it might be worth a try. After all, cosmetic rewards and mounts are just waiting for you to grab them.

Transmog Updates Make Player's Hold Onto Their Gold In Shock

Devs also implemented a new transmogrification system that will be slot based. No running back and forth again just to spend 500 Gold to change your weapon because the staff you just equipped looks like a traffic light (my mage was rocking it though). After its implementation on the test-servers, the first thing players did was gasp.

Prizes for a transmogrification itself went up by 600%, but that's not all. To buy all the 20 outfit slots, you would have to spend around 800,000 Gold. The worst part: This would have not been shared across your account.

Gladly, Blizzard's community manager Kaivax kept the peace. During the live version of Midnight, the outfit slots will be shared across your account. A prize change was also talked about:

• Costs for a full outfit will be reduced by about 60%
• Costs to unlock the slots will be significantly reduced
• Total number of slots are planned to increase from 20 to 50

Add-on Free WoW, These Are The User Interface Updates:

I think I'm talking for a few players when I say: As soon as you deep-dive into heroic or mythic content, you will have a hard time without the right add-ons. In Midnight, devs are trying to make as many add-ons available in the base game as possible:

• Combat Tools: Nameplates, damage meters and boss ability timelines
• New Journey's Tab: To keep up with Renowns, Delves, Great Vault and Prey progress
• Cooldown Manager: Aura tracking, debuff states, sound alerts
• Combat Assistant: For Assisted Highlights and Single-Button play
• Personal Resource Bar: HUD element with full customization
• Edit Mode: got expanded to include more UI elements
• Accessibility: Text sizing and tooltips

An Updated Experience For New And Returning Players

To get all of us up to date on the new questline, Blizzard has come up with some interesting ideas:

• Exile's Reach has been updated to tie more into Dragonflight, with major lore characters being included inside the campaign. Alts can still be levelled through Chromie's Timeline. The Dragonflight-beginner-version will last until level 70. A major change is that new players can now experience story-mode versions of the raids to get the full picture
• Returning players will be able to tour through the Arathi Highlands to get themselves up to speed. The experience is especially tailored for returning players.
• To get to level 80, there is a small War Within questline that goes through all the story highlights.

Class Changes

Right now, it's hard to tell which direction Blizzard will take with each class. What's already confirmed though are some major changes to the Talent Tree. Some new talents will be added due to the new level cap, alongside the introduction of the "Apex Talents". Abilities are also being removed to make rotations a little bit clearer. Also, attacks are receiving a major buff in the current Beta.

We will keep you updated while the launch for midnight draws nearer and things get clearer, at the current state we can only guess where Blizzard is going with this.

To find out more, you can have a look at the current Beta Patch Notes.

Changes to the Great Vault

With Midnight, Blizzard will be making several changes to the Great Vault. In short, there will be additional rewards in the Vault for players who run keystones higher than +10, but upgrading gear will also become slightly more expensive.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Great Vault yet: by completing activities, dungeons, delves, and raids, the Vault is filled over the course of a week. After that week, it can be opened. The more difficult the activities were, the higher the item level of the rewards.

For Mythic Dungeons, nothing changes up to +10 compared to The War Within. From +10 onward, the scale in Midnight goes up to +18, where you can obtain Mythic gear that is already upgraded to 4/6. If you’re interested in a complete overview of the different gear tiers, we recommend checking out WoWhead.

With these changes, it will unfortunately cost you a bit more to upgrade your gear using crests. In addition, there will be a small namechange to make it clearer which type of gear can be upgraded with which crest. Keep in mind, however, that this information comes from data miners, so some details are still unclear.

Paladin Available for More Races

By now, it’s no secret that Midnight will revolve around the conflict between light and darkness. It’s therefore no surprise that classes like the Priest and the Paladin are moving into the spotlight of the story.

The appearance of several significant Paladin NPCs in Midnight, along with leaked information from data miners, suggests that you might be getting new playable races for the Paladin class.

There are a total of three NPCs at the start of the Midnight questline: a Night Elf Paladin, a Kul'Tiran Paladin, and a Void Elf Paladin. On their own, these characters playing an important role in the story wouldn’t be enough to fuel speculation.

However, two spells have actually been found that are classified as Paladin spells: the Starcursed Voidstrider, a Void Elf hawkstrider, and the Waycrest Gryphon, a mount for Kul'Tirans.

It definitely wouldn’t be surprising if Blizzard also takes a Paladin-focused direction in World of Warcraft, especially after the Paladin class was announced for Diablo 4.

Are you excited for Midnight? Did you already decide on your new main? What do you think about those upcoming changes? Let us know in the comments!