Shen'dralas and the Shen'dralar

The Shen'dralar are exiled highborne elves living in the Athenaeum, a library inside Dire Maul West in Feralas. In Classic they exist as a reputation faction with a book turn-in mechanic and a handful of rewards, and that is very nearly the whole of what the game ever did with them — a self-contained group with a large amount of implied history and almost no content attached.

WoW Forever adds Shen'dralas as a new zone tied to them. That is a confirmed connection, and it is the single clearest example of the new game picking up a thread Classic left hanging rather than adding something from nowhere. What was shown at BlizzCon puts the zone between Desolace and Mulgore: murky, full of old ruins, continuing the story of the Kolkar, Gelkis and Magram centaur clans, with quests that reach into Razorfen Downs and Maraudon as well as Dire Maul and its Prince Tortheldrin.

Dire Maul stops being a legacy instance. Of the whole classic dungeon list, it is the one Forever points at most directly, and Dire Maul West in particular — the wing that holds the Athenaeum, the reputation grind and the book turn-ins — becomes content the new game is building on rather than content it merely retains.

Practically, that makes the Shen'dralar reputation grind a more interesting purchase than it was, because a zone built around the faction is the obvious place for new rewards to appear. It does not pay into the Legacy System, though. The launch list of Legacy Challenges is now known, and the only reputations on it are the four battleground factions. In the beta's list the three Dire Maul wings count instead towards the top dungeon challenge.

If you are booking Dire Maul West work now, know what a seller can and cannot have seen. The beta is capped at level 30, and Dire Maul is a level 58–60 instance, so nobody has run the Forever version of the wing. Until launch, every Dire Maul listing is built on Classic experience, which is a reasonable basis and still an assumption.

Of the four new zones, three are essentially names. Shen'dralas is the one that tells you something about how Forever is being designed, because it takes a faction that Classic implemented and then ignored and builds a zone around it. That is a different creative move from adding a new island or a new mountain — it is the game going back through its own content looking for threads worth pulling.

If that pattern holds, it has implications beyond this zone. Ruins of Lordaeron and City of Dalaran are the same move applied to dungeons: places players have looked at for two decades without being able to enter. Three separate pieces of announced content following the same logic is a reasonable basis for expecting more of it, and a poor basis for predicting which loose end gets picked up next.

• Confirmed: Shen'dralas is a new zone tied to the Shen'dralar
• Confirmed: the Shen'dralar exist in Dire Maul West and have a reputation faction there
• Shown at BlizzCon: a location between Desolace and Mulgore, and centaur storylines
• Not confirmed: the zone's level range, entrance, or any change to Dire Maul
• Worth watching: whether the Shen'dralar reputation gains new rewards at launch