Tomorrow brings with it the 9.0 pre-expansion patch for Shadowlands. While the expansion itself was originally slated to release two weeks later, on the 27th, its launch has been pushed back due to the need for additional testing and polish (something that, as a beta player, I can attest to as a wise decision - the expansion has the potential to be amazing, but it's not ready to launch just yet, and another month or so could really make things way, way better.)
Given that the expansion launch is no longer imminent, the 9.0 patch won't immediately bring the pre-expansion events, which I believe are designed to keep us entertained and hyped for about two weeks before the launch of the expansion.
So: what actually comes with 9.0?
Exile's Reach:
Exile's Reach is the new 1-10 starting zone for all characters (except those who start at higher levels, such as allied races and hero classes.) Notably, you are only forced to run this experience once per account. Afterward, you can choose to go through the old starting zones like Elwynn Forest or Durotar. I also believe that veteran players will be able to skip it as well, though having run it on the PTR, I'd actually recommend even players who are full up on alts to check it out, as it's a pretty quick and streamlined little experience, which ends with a pretty cool simulated dungeon with NPC party members (I don't believe you can choose any role other than DPS, but it's still a decent introduction to the idea of how dungeons work.)
The Level Squish:
Your level 120 characters will find themselves now level 50, and other characters will be proportionately squished to lower levels as well. Likewise, the scaling of the world will also adjust appropriately.
New players will need to do Exile's Reach and then level from 10-50 within the Battle for Azeroth zones - and experience gains should mean that doing these quests will be enough to get you up all those 40 levels. So, over the course of a zone like Drustvar, you should be getting roughly 13 levels.
Veterans can choose "Chromie Time," which will allow you to choose an expansion's content to level through. Say you loved the Broken Isles or Pandaria, you can choose your 10-50 experience to take place in those continents.
Upon hitting level 50, you'll be sent to start Shadowlands content, and the old content will become, well, "old content," which allows you to do things like soloing raids and such.
Character Customization Options:
Vastly more options will open up in the barbershop for you to recustomize your character with new hair-styles, separated components of facial hair, picking your eye color, in many cases tattoos and/or war paint, and perhaps most notably, giving humans new facial shape options to more accurately reflect the diversity of, you know, actual humans.
Also, both Void Elves and Blood Elves will get new eye-color and skin-tone options to effectively let us have High Elves on both the Alliance and Horde.
Class Changes:
As with any X.0 patch, we're seeing some changes to the mechanics of various classes. Certainly some are getting more dramatic changes than others, but the overall trend here is to allow greater access to "out of spec" abilities that were pared down in Warlords of Draenor and Legion.
Ultimately, this will largely mean a lot of new buttons to potentially put on your action bars. I have yet to read any 9.0+ class guides, so I don't know, for example, if Death and Decay will be good for Frost Death Knights, but your options are going to get a lot broader.
Some of the odd consequences of this are going to be that some abilities actually come later - as in, you'll need to be a few levels into Shadowlands (Paladins getting to use Hammer of Wrath during Avenging Wrath regardless of the target's health, for example.) Some specs are going to experience only some small changes, while others (DPS Shamans, I'm looking at you) are going to experience serious re-works.
And that more or less covers it - I suspect we'll be in 9.0 for a good while, perhaps a month to around a month and a half, before the expansion proper launches.
I'll eagerly go on my various toons and do some barbershopping (I'm sure that my Undead Rogue is far too vain not to go with the concealed bone options) and then I think I'll finish leveling up the rest of my Allied Race characters and get them their heritage armor.
Oh, there's another note: you no longer need exalted reputations to unlock allied races, which should make things like Mechagnomes a lot easier to get.
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