PTR: 110 Level Requirement for Allied Races

This is all PTR datamining-based stuff, but apparently there is a string (little things that can pop up as messages in-game) that suggests that, in order to create an Allied Race character on a given realm, you'll need to have one character of level 110 there.

Much as Hero Classes have historically required leveling characters on the specific realm (you still, I believe, need a level 70 character to create a Demon Hunter on any given realm, though the old 55 requirement for Death Knights went account-wide a few expansions ago - and I don't know what its fate was after Warlords introduced level boosts,) it appears you'll need to have some investment in a particular server before creating Allied Race characters, who we should recall start at level 20.

I imagine the primary impetus for this is to prevent exploits, like creating characters only to vendor their gear and repeat - though with level 20 characters, I can't imagine the gear will be worth enough to do that (not to mention that starting gear for hero classes has tended to be worth the bare minimum of 1 copper a piece for the same reason.)

What I think is notable is that the required level will not be 120, but will be the current cap of 110. Now, this could just be to allow players to jump into Allied races from the launch of the expansion, but I continue to suspect that we might be getting at least four of the playable races (whose models and voice files are all in the 7.3.5 PTR patch) before the expansion launches.

One reason I think Monks never became quite as popular as Death Knights or Demon Hunters was that when Mists launched, if you wanted to play a Monk, you'd have to level up from 1 while everyone else was in the new continent already.

Allowing the Allied Races, or at least some of them, to start leveling early (not unlike the Demon Hunter) could get them mixed into their factions so that you could have Void Elves and Highmountain Tauren as players' new mains right out the gate.

So I highly suspect we'll get these races (probably not the Zandalari Trolls or Dark Iron Dwarves) before the expansion launches. The question is one of timing.

Demon Hunters were released in the Legion pre-patch, but they only have two levels worth of catch-up to do, and all of that could be accomplished in one unified questline (with a lot of forward momentum to carry people through.) Comparing those two levels to an Allied Race's 90 means that if you want Lightforged Draenei and Nightborne hitting the new continents at launch, you're going to have to give people more time to start them up.

So while I think 7.3.5 might not bring them immediately (something Blizzard has more or less explicitly told us,) I do think that they'll be packed and primed, allowing Blizzard to flip the switch some time in the middle of next year, which will also have the huge benefit of giving players something to do after Antorus has gotten stale and players are simply waiting for Battle for Azeroth to launch.

It's all speculation, but that's what I predict.