It’s been a little bit over a month since early access for World of Warcraft's latest expansion, The War Within, launched. In that time, I’ve leveled characters, geared up, done a ton of dungeons, raided, and a plethora of delves. Now that the first season has started - although M+ and Mythic raiding don’t begin until September 17th - it’s finally time to take stock of where we are and put a score to this expansion. If you missed the first half of this review, take a quick detour to my Review in Progress to catch up on my leveling experience and some of the issues I ran into the first few weeks. This part will focus on the max-level story experience, dungeons & raiding, and delves. There will be story spoilers, so if you aren’t fully caught up, you may want to skip to the dungeons & raiding section.
Max Level Story Campaign
I knew there would be more story unlocking after the full expansion launch, but before the raid released. However, I didn’t expect the new story to kick off with Jaina and Thrall returning with help from the Alliance and Horde. It may be because of how slowly things like that have happened in past expansions, but I wasn’t expecting them to turn up until the second season of content or maybe, at the earliest, in the bridge content between the first and second seasons. Their return was pitch perfect, though, and I loved Jaina - as the only other person who had been through almost the exact same experience as Alleria in Dalaran - comforting and offering Alleria understanding for the rash actions she had taken.
The campaign's first half followed a ‘readying the troops’ flow as everyone prepared to strike back against the nerubians. There was one section where I had to help train the ground troops, but it didn’t quite land for me. It wasn’t helped that when I arrived, Turalyon made a snide comment about another horde arriving to yell at the troops. It felt really out of place, especially since it happened shortly after a very sweet “stay awhile and listen” between him and Alleria. Plus, nothing was done with it. There was no resolution to it or anything. All I can figure is someone thought it was essential to remind us that he doesn’t like the horde… for reasons.
However, I enjoyed the entire questline to help the Earthen find their new stormwarden. Thrall tagged along on this section, and it was pretty cool to have him in the midst of everything again. His role seemed more “elder giving perspective” than taking control of everything, which also felt good and fit with what I would expect of him now. That questline was also about forging a new path that respects what came before but isn’t afraid to do things differently, which works on multiple levels. One way is it parallels the Earthan's decision to set their edicts aside to band together and protect the world.
Once we head out to fight the nerubians directly, everything seems fine at first. We make headway, they push back, and we return the favor until it starts to look like we might be able to get them on the run. Then, we get our first look at how much Alleria has grown. She quickly realizes that this has also been a trap laid by Xal’atath, and we are playing right into her hands. Alleria and Anduin promptly set off after her, and when we catch up, she has the Dark Heart. Rather than trying to kill Xal’atath again, Alleria shatters the Dark Heart. It was a smart move, and Xal’atath didn’t expect it. Of course, she insists it changes nothing, but perhaps she protests too much.
Surprisingly, Khadgar flies out of the shattered Dark Heart as a spectral raven. He quickly changes back into human form and is seriously injured. Anduin finally reaches for the light and can heal Khadgar, although not entirely. It is a great moment told brilliantly in a cinematic. I have heard some people say they think it’s too soon for this to happen for Anduin, but you have to remember he’s been struggling with this for years. There was a bit of a time skip between the end of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands and Dragonflight, followed by all the events in Dragonflight, which took a couple of years. Anduin mentioned that he’s afraid to reach for the light because he fears what it might mean if it doesn’t respond to him anymore. That indicates he hasn’t tried in all those years. His fear has stopped him. This was built up throughout Hallowfall, in particular, and the expansion launch story as a whole.
One of my favorite parts of The War Within experience has been the voiced “stay awhile and listen” dialogues. Every single one of them has been fantastic and well worth my time. Often, these dialogues are extra interesting bits of information, but they usually don’t fill in critical parts of what happened in the main storyline. However, after completing the campaign story, there is one with Alleria and Khadgar, which is crucial to understanding what happened with him.
When he first came back, I was confused about how he possibly could have survived. After all, we saw Dalaran get vaporized. He explains that he was able to transmute his body into arcane energy, and then he was sucked into the Dark Heart. This is an incredible feat of magic, but it also makes sense. I wish that dialogue wasn’t easy to miss because I have talked to many friends who have missed it, and so they think Xal’atath purposefully didn’t kill him and then released him.
After I hit max level, I also started leveling some alts, and I chose to focus on the side quests in each zone. I hadn’t done those while leveling my main because I knew I would level at least three other characters. Some side quests align closely with standard quests, but most offer much more knowledge and understanding of the people involved. However, some tie quite closely to other big parts of the story. For example, I understood through doing the Priory dungeon why the people we were fighting in there were bad, but I had no idea how we discovered that in the first place. As it happens, a whole storyline explains how all of that happened. It was a fantastic questline, but it makes me sad that it is easily missed.
Dungeons & Raiding
One of the odd bits for raid prep in World of Warcraft: The War Within is we didn’t have any mythic dungeons available before raiding started. Since delves were also capped at tier 3 and there was no great vault, I was pretty much left with doing many heroics and hoping for good drops. Additionally, since the number of valorstones I was receiving felt really low, I was also hesitant to upgrade the gear I did receive, which is a frustrating position to be in. The worst part was the low difficulty of heroic dungeons, which made them boring to run repeatedly. This however will only be an issue for this first season, so it isn’t the end of the world.
Additionally, once mythic dungeons were available, the ilvl of gear dropping in heroic dungeons increased, and in turn, the ilvl required for queuing for them also increased. I’m not sure why the ilvl of gear dropping in the heroic dungeons was increased instead of them having the same loot thresholds all along. Having items drop at 571 instead of 580 meant a lot more resources needed to be expended to gear up, but it doesn’t feel like a worthwhile limitation. Additionally, some people were queuing for heroics on September 9th and couldn’t the next day, which feels terrible. Especially when you consider the difficulty of the heroics didn’t increase. Hopefully, they will remember this and do it better when World of Warcraft: Midnight comes around.
I will say mythic dungeons feel like a significant step up from heroics, but in the best way possible. Some of it is that since the bosses have more health, they live longer, which means seeing more of their mechanics. There are also some mythic-only mechanics that spice things up nicely. I have also appreciated having this week to focus on mythic dungeons and work through them without the pressure of a timer. In past expansions, mythic dungeons would become obsolete just as quickly as heroics - so some mechanics would only be seen in an M+ - and trying to figure out new mechanics on a timer can be extremely frustrating. As much as I enjoy pushing keys and rolling things, I always enjoy talking things through with my friends and figuring them out together. That’s been my favorite part of WoW from the beginning.
A new raid is always a point of excitement and anxiety for me, as it is something my guild will be spending a lot of time in for months on end. A good raid that’s a lot of fun can be incredible, but one that lacks that spark can be a slog that brings everyone down. Having done most of it on normal, I think Nerub-ar Palace will be one of the good ones. Although there’s far too much trash and traversing through it can be incredibly confusing. The flight points within the raid are very helpful, but knowing which one to take can be quite confusing unless you already know the name of the wings.
As far as the boss fights go, there aren’t any that I don’t like, which is a good sign. The difficulty curve from boss to boss felt smooth, and nothing felt like it wasn’t doable. However, Rasha'nan is likely going to be the one that annoys me the most. As someone who needs to maintain melee distance on bosses, the way he moves around the platform is frustrating. I also suspect he’ll be an actual DPS check on heroic. Silken Court gave us the most trouble by far, and I didn’t walk away from that thinking it was an awful boss. There are mechanics that, if they aren’t done correctly, the group will die. It was a big step up from the other bosses, but still an exciting fight. I may feel differently on the far side of a couple of months, but there aren’t any bosses that stick out as awful, which is an encouraging sign.
Delves
First, I love delves. They are the perfect little bite-sized content I can hop into when I don’t have time for anything more time-consuming. I love having the flexibility of doing them with a group or on my own. Additionally, the fact that each delve has three different storylines goes a long way towards keeping them from getting stale. I also found the difficulty scaling mostly smooth, although the difficulty between a tier 7 and an 8 did feel a bit larger. This makes sense, though as they are intended to be a challenge.
Unfortunately, it is difficult for me to say how effective they will be as a solo/small group activity since many hotfixes have made the balance in delves swing wildly. Early on, groups completely trivialized delves as they didn’t seem to scale up much, and as long as a player didn’t release when they died it didn’t count against the death counter. So, of course, Blizzard decided to try to fix this, but the pendulum went a bit too far. After one hotfix, we went from being able to faceroll everything in a five-person group to being unable to complete a tier 8. This happened after quickly completing one tier 8 delve and going to the next one. At that point, doing them in groups of two or three people became ideal.
When it comes to doing delves solo, how difficult it is depends on what role and class you are. For example, there are often many spells and abilities that need to be interrupted, so a priest with limited interrupts and cc would have a much harder time than a protection paladin. Unlike in the mage tower where the fights are tailored to specific specs and they have a smaller pool to balance across, all delves need to work for every spec and class. This is especially the case because they were positioned as the content for players who preferred to play solo and would like a challenge.
There’s also been quite a few bugs with Brann that have popped up over the last week. The main one is he’ll randomly stop doing anything during a delve or on the last boss. The only way I’ve seen to snap him out of that is to drop combat and then enter combat again, but that’s also not reliable. I’ve also seen some reports of him taking extraordinary amounts of damage from things and dying a lot. I haven’t seen that one happen; in fact, he hasn’t died at all in any of my delves. However, losing his help, no matter how it happens, can be quite detrimental.
All of these things have added up to make delves a frustrating experience quite often. Blizzard has said getting delves working correctly is a high priority for them, and the frequent hotfixes are evidence of that. I don’t doubt they will get them in a good place to provide the fun and challenging solo and small group content they are meant to be. The only question is how long that will take.
Conclusion
All in all, The War Within has been a banger of an expansion so far. The storytelling feels well done and has been paying off on moments that have been building for years. The dungeon and raiding scene is off and running and fun so far. Lastly, delves have a solid foundation that needs to be tweaked to make them the jewel they can be. I had thought it would be an impossible task to surpass Dragonflight, but The War Within may end up doing that.
