Azeroth

Next year brings both a new expansion -- if we expect the cadence of the past several releases to hold -- and the 20th Anniversary of World of Warcraft.

I mean, with World of Warcraft: Dragonflight and the Dragon Isles, we're more or less going to the absolutely last place on Azeroth we've ever heard of.

I've been thinking a lot about the story reveals in patch 9.2 and all of the tantalizing bits of narrative we're getting from dataminers.

We all have stories about this.

The whole Shadowlands idea -- the fact that we're traveling to the land of the dead, seeing new realms we've never seen and exploring whole new concepts that change and grow the Warcraft setting in ways we've never really thought about -- has me looking at that infamous Warcraft cosmology image and wondering about where we could possibly go that we haven't been to yet.

Every time a new World of Warcraft expansion comes out, I think about what I want.

I haven't bothered with WoW Classic very much at all since it went live, since the thing I'm interested in about it -- getting to see the old world of Azeroth I remember from launch -- is wrapped up in stuff I very much don't want, like actually playing the game I remember from launch.

Oh the places you can go!

There are weapons, and then there are weapons.

What makes Azerite so alluring for both sides in Battle for Azeroth? Why exactly is it so valuable – and what other strange minerals does Azeroth hold?