Shadowlands: Overview of the new World of Warcraft Expansion

With the release of Patch 9.1, players will be able to go to the new zone, Korthia, as well as grind reputation with 2 new factions, The Archivists' Codex and Death's Advance, both of which have multiple cosmetic rewards, as well as new PvE and PvP seasons.

All information pertaining to Patch 9.1 can be found on our hub, linked below, as well as links to all of the guides that were newly released for this patch.

Along with new content being released in Patch 9.1, many classes are also seeing multiple changes being made to each of their specialisations. You can find lists of all of the class changes coming in 9.1 on the hub linked below.

The Shadowlands expansion sends players into the afterlife after Sylvanas broke the Helm of Domination and opened a portal to the Shadowlands.

There, you will tasked with trying to find the reason for the huge anima drought that is currently happening and put a stop to it.

If you want to know more about how we enter the Shadowlands, you can read through our walkthrough of the Introduction questline below.

There are 4 main story zones in the Shadowlands currently, as well as a fifth that predominantly exists as a max-level zone.

There are 4 leveling zones in the Shadowlands, all of which can be looked at in our dedicated zone overviews below.

There are 4 main reputations being introduced in the expansion, with each being linked to one of the leveling zones.

You can find more information about all of these below, in our reputations hub.

There are also 2 other reputations, Ve'nari and the Avowed, which function somewhat differently to the others. You can find guides for both of them below.

There is currently 1 max-level zone in the expansion, The Maw.

While you will visit The Maw multiple times while leveling, the majority of your activity there is spent after reaching Level 60, especially when taking into account Torghast.

The new capital city for the Shadowlands will be Oribos, the Eternal City, a neutral city for both factions to use as a hub.

Despite class balancing changing each week with constant balance patches, we have put together a list of all of the changes for each class, with one page per class, as linked below.

Players will have 8 new dungeons to play through, with 4 leveling dungeons and 4 end-game dungeons, as well as a new raid.

Guides to all of these can be found in our Dungeons and Raids hub below.

There are new affixes coming with Season 1 of Mythic+ in Shadowlands, as well as changes to already existing ones. You can read all about it and more in our Mythic+ overview below.

NOTE: The rankings on the pages below are NOT FINAL. They are constantly in flux due to the rebalancing being done by Blizzard on the beta. These are purely intended to give an outlook on the general ranking of specialisations in Mythic+ and raiding in the current beta build. If you wish to know which build the pages are updated for, please make sure to check the watermarks on the respective pages.

For those of you that are either struggling to pick a character for Shadowlands or simply want to know how your main is doing, you can check out our rankings pages, which place the specialisations of each role in a simple numerical ranking, based on numerical performance and utility.

Torghast will be an infinite dungeon that continuously changes to give players an endlessly replayable experience. The further you progress into it, the better your rewards will be.

You will learn everything we know about Torghast, Tower of the Damned in our Torghast overview linked below.

Legendary gear is once again returning in Shadowlands, this time in the form of crafted legendaries from Torghast.

Each of the leveling zones in the Shadowlands has a covenant associated with it. Once players reach Level 60, they will be able to align themselves with a chosen covenant and reap the rewards they offer.

You can learn more about these in our Covenants hub, which contains all of the information pertaining to them, as well as overviews of each individually.

Soulbinding allows you to choose a member of your covenant and bind your soul to theirs, granting power increases in return as you move through the soulbinding tree.

After countless complaints about the current weekly loot system in WoW, Shadowlands brings with it a new format of weekly loot that gives players far more choice in the item they receive.

You can read more on it in our overview of the Great Vault below.

In the Shadowlands expansion, players will have their level reduced to Level 50 and will have to level to Level 60 in the new areas.

For players that wish to level from 1-50, there will be new zones for Level 1-10, followed by players being able to level from 10-50 in any expansion of their choosing.

You can learn more about the changes and what they mean for players in our overview of leveling in Shadowlands.

As with every expansion, Shadowlands brings with it a number of changes to every profession, including new recipes and materials to be crafted and gathered.

You can find all of the profession changes on our hub, linked below.