Dragonflight updates the Renown system to allow you to level all reputations at once

The Renown system is making a return in Dragonflight, albeit in a modified, friendlier form. In an interview with AusGamers, Lead Game Designer Jeremy Feasel explained that the next World of Warcraft expansion will feature the same sort of reputation advancement system that debuted in Shadowlands, Renown — gated by both time and player activity — but with an enormous quality of life change in the form of simultaneous progression of all of the different reputations.

Players won’t need to choose a single line to focus on, like they had to with Covenants in Shadowlands. According to Feasel, Dragonflight will feature four different reputations, each with their own set of Renown levels and rewards that are exclusive to it. Those rewards can be cosmetic, but they can also be additional questlines associated with that reputation, or additional gameplay.

Feasel went on to add that your day-to-day gameplay will take the shape of “a very activity-centric system that feels like you’re always making progress.” That makes us think of something like an evolved form of the Callings system from Shadowlands, although he hasn’t really specified if that’s going to be the case. What he did mention, however, is that the team is also looking to “incorporate alt-friendliness in the same way that [they] did in 9.1.5,” which is very good news.

Since the system in Shadowlands would allow you to earn a Renown level by partaking in pretty much any activity in the game — dailies, world bosses, dungeons, PVP, virtually anything could contribute and make you level up on your currently selected Renown — that does make us wonder about the biggest difference with the system in Dragonflight. Namely, if I’m leveling up all of my Renown levels at the same time, how does the game determine which activity contributes to each reputation? If I run a dungeon, will I advance in all of them, or in only one of them? Will it be random, or are players going to be able to know which activity leads to which reputation?

We definitely still have a lot of questions, and the interview didn’t go into any more detail than that — which is to be expected. It’s very early to tell how this system will play out, but I do feel like Renown succeeded in many aspects in Shadowlands. It gave players the feeling of making progress no matter which avenue of play they chose, which is an excellent paradigm to have in an MMO. Having this system return in an evolved form, letting players progress in multiple reputations at once, sounds like it has a lot of potential.