WoW patch 10.0.7 will take players back to the Forbidden Reach with more Dracthyr story

The World of Warcraft Dragonflight team is coming out swinging in 2023 with an ambitious plan for six patches. After patch 10.0.5 — which is now on the PTR — goes live early next year, we’ll get patch 10.0.7 in the spring. This patch will focus on story, with a return to the Forbidden Reach, the Dracthyr Evoker starting zone. The Forbidden Reach is visible on the Dragon Isles map, but there’s no way to return until patch 10.0.7 lets everyone explore the zone… and hopefully venture into the vaults and other areas we didn’t get to explore as the Dracthyr raced to escape during their introductory quests.

Blizzard explains that the patch will include a new quest campaign and world content “as the dracthyr return to their place of confinement (along with some unexpected guests) to learn more about their origins and their destiny.” For now, we can only guess on what they’ll find (and who those unexpected guests) might be.

The Chronicle books revealed that dragons were descended from the elementals of Azeroth, a bit of lore that seems well-suited to the story of the Primalist Rebellion and the Incarnates. Are there clues to these mysterious elemental ancestors of proto-drakes and dragons hidden in the Forbidden Reach? Perhaps Neltharion was exploring the origins of dragonkind as well and what he discovered caused him to create the Dracthyr, or perhaps even showed him how to do that.

There are lots of places to explore in the Forbidden Reach

We didn’t get a chance to explore the Forbidden Reach during the Dracthyr starting experience. The confusion of their waking, the new Primalist threat, and the return of Raszegeth kept them pretty busy. The Evokers woke in vaults, but we didn’t actually see all of them — and the ones we did see we ran through quickly. And looking at the zone map, we can see places we didn’t get a chance to visit at all. The starting zone was bracketed by impassible mountains to the north and south which could be expanded into a larger zone. There are also unexplored islands to the east and west of the zone. If we’re looking into the Dracthyr’s origins, there’s plenty of ground to cover in the Forbidden Reach.

But the Forbidden Reach is also where Raszageth was imprisoned. Exploring the place could answer big questions about Neltharion and the Old Gods. We know that Neltharion turned to the Old Gods to help him imprison Raszageth, but how exactly did they empower him to seal Raszageth away? The Earth-Warder had many secrets, and we may learn a few of them in this patch.

Blizzard tells us that patch 10.0.7 “will set up the next major chapter of Dragonflight, and by its conclusion, it should be obvious what our next destination must be.”

I for one am very curious as to what we’ll find in the Forbidden Reach, and where we go next.