One of the expected bits of news out of Blizzcon, after confirmation that 10.2 would be the last major content patch of Dragonflight, was that we would get a Season 4 of content. In Shadowlands, we got our first taste of a season 4 of WoW content that wasn’t defined by a new raid or dungeon (as was the case previously in Battle for Azeroth), but instead a way to smartly reuse the raids that had come out that expansion, alongside a new Mythic Plus dungeon pool largely composed of older dungeons, a move that paved the way for the seasonal model we’ve had for M+ in Dragonflight ever since.

When I first thought about a season 4 of Dragonflight, it felt kind of similar in concept – rotate the raids, some raid-level affix that creates a modest mechanic you can almost entirely ignore, new dungeon pool – easy enough. But Blizzard has been talking about new content every 8 weeks for the rest of Dragonflight, and that kind of got my brain going, thinking of the different possibilities. In truth, is it just that easy? Maybe not, in some predictable and less-so ways. So I’ve busted out my tinfoil and I’m ready to wildly speculate about the possibilities of Dragonflight season 4!

The Dungeon Pool Is (Not) New

Dragonflight capitalized on how well-received the season 4 Shadowlands M+ pool was by introducing us to the idea of mixed seasons. Every season of Dragonflight, including tomorrow’s Season 3, has been a composite of a portion of Dragonflight dungeons (2 in Season 3, 4 in Seasons 1 and 2) and older dungeons, some of which have already had M+ tuning (or at least Challenge Mode tuning prior to that) and some older dungeons that have been revitalized with new mechanics, new art, and Mythic Plus (mostly, somewhat humorously, Cataclysm dungeons). This means every season is unique, as so far no dungeons have repeated at all between seasons, which works from the player standpoint as each dungeon season is fresh content and from the Blizzard perspective as it prevents players from needing to farm and refarm the same BiS items in new versions every 6-8 months (Inscrutable Quantum Device, anyone?).

In Shadowlands Season 4, the dungeon pool mixup was an answer to the fact that the prior 3 seasons were all the same dungeons, with only season 3 introducing broad changes via Tazavesh being added to the pool. However, while at first I thought that Dragonflight Season 4 might just be a brand new pool of dungeons, the thought occurs to me that we could see Season 4 just be Dragonflight dungeons, 10 deep including the two-part split of Dawn of the Infinite, and it would be an ideal, underexposed season of content given that it would be only the second time we see each of those dungeons return to the pool, and all but the DOTI split-runs would be coming back in fresh off of a multi-month (or even year-long) absence. In thematic terms, you could then either introduce a seasonal affix again that would fit perfectly since these dungeons all belong to the same story and era of WoW, or without it, you can still sell the season as a Dragonflight victory lap – one last chacne to enjoy the scenery before those dungeons retire to the vaults to wait an expansion before being eligible to rotate into and out of seasonal pools in the future.

Of the speculation I will put forward today, I think this is the most likely – it feels like it fits, it still gels with the reasons why Blizzard has moved to the new seasonal model, and it is a fun farewell to the content of the current expansion as it rides off into the sunset. Easy enough to predict, to my eyes.

Draconic(?) Raid Season

Just like how we had Fated raids, I expect some modifier season called something dragon-y to take over and rotate the 3 Dragonflight raids through. We’ve already heard that a Dinar-like system will return, and if it works the same, it should be a good incentive to play and keep killing bosses throughout the season and moving up the difficulty ladder as high as you can go.

But I think there’s an opportunity for more.

Specifically, I think we should get a transitional new raid that is a part of the season, running simultaneously to the current Fated raid.

In the past, Blizzard would use transitional raids to bridge seasons or themes in the story. Ruby Sanctum in Wrath gave us the preview of Cataclysm as a story (however basic that was), Trial of Valor gave us a hook to close out the Stormheim story in Legion, and Crucible of Storms in BfA served to bring Old Gods into frame as a part of the BfA story (for all the good that was worth). I think there’s an opportunity here to do something similar, to compliment the Shadowlands Season 4 model by having another, small raid that is up perpetually alongside the rotation.

But who would it be?

Well…

The Story Hooks Between Dragonflight and The War Within

One thing I absolutely loathe about the more recent WoW expansions is the way that Blizzard gave up on having connecting lore events between expansions. When they started the serialized format back in Mists, every expansion ended with a hook that was quite clearly setting up the next expansion. Garrosh is jailed and breaks free to go back to AU Draenor, Gul’dan is rocketed through the makeshift replacement Dark Portal by Archimonde so he can setup the new Legion invasion, Sargeras pierced Azeroth with his big sword so the wound would heal with Azerite, leading to BfA (and also TWW but hey), and ever since then we’ve kind of just…not done setup anymore? Like, Shadowlands has small bits of content hinting at it in BfA, but no conclusive plot thread we follow to it, and Dragonflight likewise kind of just…happened.

I think a connective raid and story between Dragonflight and TWW is another thing I need to see to know that their commitment to a “saga” of storytelling is a serious thing and not just something being done for marketing. If you want to create a world in which WoW is a continous, well-developed story, the effort needs to be put in now, starting with giving us a clear and solid bridge between the current plot and TWW, and then again between each expansion of the Worldsoul Saga.

So how do I suggest that? Simple – Iridikron.

Iridikron has kind of abandoned his Primal Incarnate partners and gone off with a force of the Void, whose silhouette is unmistakably Xalatath – the very same void entity who will be our primary antagonist in TWW. Iridikron is an Incarnate of earth, who travelled the deep places of Azeroth, and I find it more than a mere coincidence that so many of the zones we’ll journey to in Khaz Algar are underground zones. We know that the servants of the Void are not exactly relationship-builders and will take on allies and discard them when they serve their purpose. Iridikron’s purpose, to me, feels like it would be to grant Xalatath access to the deeps, to show her the way to Khaz Algar and to the target of Sargeras’ piercing blade. After that, his purpose is spent, and I think that his anger and rage for the forces of Order would be effectively turned on us directly by Xalatath once she has what she needs from Iridikron.

To that end, I suspect that we could see a transitional raid with a story, tied to TWW and designed to move us from the Dragonflight story to the TWW story, with Iridikron as the main boss and perhaps 1-4 others. It could be Ruby Sanctum style, where the bosses are minibosses that offer upgrade Crests and Flightstones while Iridikron would be the main boss with actual rewards, or it could be like Trial of Valor or Crucible of Storms, with multiple bosses each with loot.

The story hook here, to me, is something I want as a show of good faith in the idea of WoW’s renewed claim to focus on storytelling. If you want everything to be a sweeping saga in serialized fashion, now is the time to prove it – give us a real story hook, end Dragonflight in a 10.x patch with a clear hook for what comes next that ties a neat bow on Dragonflight and moves the plot forward. Shadowlands’ epilogue quests during Season 4 of that expansion were not quite that – they wrapped up the Shadowlands story, but created no real hooks for Dragonflight, which didn’t come until later and were just rushed and slapdash plot hooks introduced in the pre-patch for the expansion. Let us kill Iridikron, or at least let us fight him for real and establish his motivations and ideas more, let us glimpse a bit of Xalatath’s master plan, just anything to make that transition non-abrupt.

Season…5?

Season 4 of Shadowlands worked, by and large, because it was an abridged short season of old content that didn’t overstay its welcome and offered a reasonable mix of things to do. At this point, as I write this, we likely have a full calendar year between now and the relase of The War Within. If we use the Dragonflight cadence of content, Season 3, launching this week, should last for around half that year and then Season 4 the other half, taking us right up to the release of the expansion. At the same time, however…Blizzard is teasing this idea of 8-week content drops to come from now until TWW. That’s something every 2 months, or roughly 6 content drops in the time between now and the likely TWW launch.

Season 4 as a concept cannot hold the same interest as a normal season, because it’s reruns – and even if you apply a fresh lens, lessons learned, and new mechanical ideas, it’s still the same old raids and dungeons we’ve done before. It’s not entirely novel and thus a 6-month run threatens to wear interest thin, compared to the shorter run of Season 4 in Shadowlands (at 3-ish months, it was the shortest season in Shadowlands by 4-6 months!).

So why not have a Season 5? If you assume 3 months is a good victory-lap season timeframe, then why not have two of them? Run Season 3 for 6 months, let players work on that 2H Axe legendary, then a 3 month season 4 and a 3 month Season 5? It’d be a bit time-compressed but there’s room to scale things up again, run another experiment and see what a Season 5 (the first time ever in WoW) would be like. You could offer players a Dinar system in both seasons, maybe scale things up again…or, crazy idea, rotate in old raids and dungeons too. What if Season 5 was dragon-themed raids from the past to offer context and history to new players? Imagine running BWL, Onyxia’s Lair, Dragon Soul, BWD, or even all of them on a rotation throughout the season? Imagine finding dragon-themed dungeons from the past we could run in the same way. Imagine getting a modernized and up-rezzed Tier 2 armor set as the tier set for Season 5, with new modern-game appropriate tier bonuses.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff they could do within the model they’ve put forward to still surprise and delight players, I think – so why not? Let’s do it, get new content, old updated content, all the stuff – let’s try it all and see what sticks. You might not ever have to do it again (if the release cadence of WoW expansions is faster) but it would be an interesting experiement to see executed and it opens the potential to revisit more old WoW content in the future or to help the lull period of an expansion so it doesn’t feel like limping the long way over the finish line.

In Closing

Season 3 hasn’t even started as I write this and it is probably extremely premature to be thinking about Season 4, much less a hypothetical Season 5 or TWW content, but here we are. I think this is going to end up being a fascinating chapter in WoW’s history as it approaches the 20th anniversary mark and I am eager to see what happens.