It’s been a busy summer since Dawntrail launched in late June, and now the last week of August marked another MMO expansion for me – World of Warcraft’s The War Within.

So, how is it?

Well, the short answer is that we can’t even really say yet. There’s more to come in terms of the repeatable content loop, with Mythic dungeons not launching until the first season, Mythic Plus another week behind that, and with the raid launching on the old-school schedule that will see week 1 with only wing 1 of LFR, Normal, and Heroic, while that second week will see Mythic drop. There’s also higher-difficulty Delves tied to that seasonal launch date and so the meat and potatoes of a WoW content experience are all basically MIA for now.

But we can make some statements based on what we have seen to date.

Leveling Experience

The leveling experience of WoW is basically dressed up to appeal but also minimized so that it doesn’t stand in the way of players getting through it to get to the endgame. TWW exemplifies this by being the most streamlined and smoothed-out leveling experience Blizzard has probably ever made. If you do it endgame-style and just chain-run dungeons, you can be done in 2-4 hours, and even if you do a full main story quest playthrough, you’re barely looking at 10 hours. Even after the launch week changes to scaling that made the experience harder for those geared at level 70, the curve is very gentle and non-threatening, and most mobs in the overworld, even Elites, are generally little more than nuisances in the leveling process. This is fine in parts (leveling healers is way less tedious this way) but it also makes the world feel a little less interesting for content.

Overall though, it’s a good experience. It’s cohesive, fast, with a decent story beat lining the story quests of it and with some very nice quality of life that we’ll touch upon later in the post.

The Warband

The biggest marquee feature of The War Within is the Warband system, the conversion of your characters from a list of playable entities to a shared and interconnected ecosystem where you as the player are the primary recognized entity by the game and the gameplay you put in anywhere carries over to benefit all of your characters.

Warbands are fascinating because while they are a major feature and system overhaul to how WoW has traditionally done things, it is also the least intrusive and attention-seeking thing in the whole expansion. You log in and they exist, and short of ordering your character list to include a MySpace-esque Top 4 for your campfire (Myspace reference, millennial alert!) and the purchase of Warbank tabs to store things in, it just kind of…works. There’s nothing you really have to do, short of a minor quest chain to unlock access to your Warbank from anywhere on a 10 minute cooldown, and everything just kind of feeds into the system.

But what is the system behind Warbands?

Well, the biggest thing and main game-changer is shared reputations. In the launch window of TWW, you can earn rep on any character and it applies to all of them. The caveat here is that you can only earn rep from any given source one time, so repeat plays of story quests and even the same world quests on alts won’t earn you extra, but it means that you can functionally do whatever you want and still have carryover progress for your main character. If you do rep quests on an alt, that helps your main too, and the progress you make on your main feeds your alts in a really satisfying way. One fun discovery I had is that when seeking to gear alts, I could just use the Renown I had already earned to purchase reputation gear on my fresh 80 alts, and that was a revelation.

The second-biggest game changer is shared crafting. When you deposit items into the Warbank, you can include reagents, and reagents in the Warbank are accessible to craft with to any character on your account without having to first withdraw them – with the exception of crafting orders, which for some reason demand that you have the reagents in-hand on a character to use them. This is something that was transformative for me, because a big part of my alt-itis and chain leveling at the end of Dragonflight was to prepare for multiple tradeskills to be leveled quickly, but this lets you do so much more in a shorter time window. Your gatherers can make their rounds, take their bounty and dump it into the Warbank, and then you can roll onto a different character and immediately use those mats to level trades and make items without ever vising another vendor or needing to do a handoff. It’s wonderful and enables a lot of great gameplay choices, like up-valuing the idea of having gathering-only characters who can now feed their supplies into your war chest to keep trades leveling and powerful crafted gear moving on the assembly lines. When your herbalist/alchemist is done with their crafts, they can dump the herbs into the warbank and your scribe can roll online and use them right away. It’s such a simple and insanely nice change and I love it.

For transmog, the Warband is a god-send. When you loot a BoE, you can drop it into the bank or simply right-click it to learn the appearance if that’s all you want. Any epics looted that aren’t your characters armor or weapon type are learned as appearances once they bind to you (right-clicked to learn or vendored) and the automatic learning of appearances when vendoring gear of any type is awesome. In old raids, tier tokens are now given the Warbound designation so they can be freely looted and passed through the Warbank to any character of yours that can use the token, and tier gear that drops freely (non-token form) is just learned, so you can quickly plug the holes in your wardrobe with ease.

Lastly, the Warband provides a bonus experience boost for each character you reach the new level cap of 80 with, boosting XP gains on all characters across the account by 5% up to level 80 and up to a maximum bonus of 25%, so 5 max-level characters will let you speed through the experience curve and push your characters ever-higher.

All around, I cannot say enough good things about Warbands. It is unobtrusive as a feature and system but you quickly and delightfully find all the ways in which it enhances your gameplay experience and meaningfully allows you to make new and different choices. To the extent that Dragonflight was alt-friendly at endgame, it has nothing on TWW, where I feel such a lightness about being able to level alts and having that still also let me focus on goals for my raiding main.

The Core Gameplay Loops

TWW continues much of what made Dragonflight great to play. The stone and crest upgrade system (now with Valorstones instead of Flightstones) is here from day 1 and works as we’ve grown accustomed to, the world quest design is pretty similar to Dragonflight including the same added types of world quests like photography excursions and rock-climbing, professions continue the Dragonflight redesign with new specialization trees and tools (and a couple minor changes to remove the RNG from crafting a bit), and the general gameplay loop of open-world content is centered on doing stuff out in the world with a weekly quest design that pushes you to do stuff out there and events in parts of the world designed to push you through the environments Blizzard has crafted for this expansion. That open world content is generally a bit less exciting and interesting than early Dragonflight – I miss soup! – but the inspiration is clear. Dungeon gameplay remains a template from Season 4 of Dragonflight in terms of overall difficulty scaling and concept, and the raid is likely to maintain rather than push boundaries (short of the story-mode option that is coming in to let you play the raid moments in small groups so you can get more of that experience). There are 10 levels of new progression with a new talent system tied to them that we should discuss now…

Hero Talents

So Hero Talents. Okay, where do I start this?

I like the concept of class skins and the idea of being able to choose something that adds a flavor to my gameplay more than just raw numbers. In theory, this is fantastic. A big part of why I decided to switch my main for raiding to protection Warrior is that the Mountain Thane Hero Talents sounded awesome, like they would add the right balance of flavor to the kit I already enjoyed so that I could be a jumpy, shouty, thunderstorming badass swinging my shield and sword around at all enemies I see, with crackling lightning constantly erupting to smite my foes. In practice, Mountain Thane means I use Thunderclap a little bit more, which hits harder and sometimes has a different animation and random lightning bolts sometimes hit my enemies. While it isn’t completely uninteresting, it also isn’t quite what I wanted it to be, to the point that I might be switching mains back to Monk before the season launch.

My problem with a lot of the Hero Talents I’ve played so far (Mountain Thane Prot and Slayer Arms for Warrior, Fel-Scarred Havoc for Demon Hunter, Archon Shadow for Priest, and Shado-Pan Windwalker for Monk) is that they don’t change the gameplay of the spec much, if at all – most of these actually changed more for base talent tree changes, in fact. It also introduces my pet peeve issue that I previously wrote at length about, which is passive damage – so much of what Hero Talents add is just passive bonus damage or healing that is tied to things you already use rotationally, so there’s no real skill reward or much of an opportunity for skill expression – if you already play Prot Warrior well, then Mountain Thane isn’t giving you anything but a damage amp on Thunderclap and random occurrences of nature damage mixed in, so it just doesn’t feel distinct in the way I was hoping it would.

And to some extent, I get it, right? Hotkeys are a premium and having more active buttons to bind isn’t particularly appealing, and Hero Talents also solve a problem that existed in Talents v1 way back in the day, where each expansion just made the base trees more convoluted and opened up more combos that had to be designed around and accounted for, so containing the new 10 points to their own tree where you can get every node isn’t a bad idea. Talents are sometimes just passive and that’s just how things are sometimes, but I think getting every tree to have one new active ability that’s really interesting and fun to press would be cool – and from what I’ve seen, the Hero Talents where you get a new button are awesome on flavor!

The pros are that Hero Talents add fun customization that is a decent flavor without requiring relearning a spec and that they are powerful – the stated design intent is that they can and should be near 33% of your overall throughput, which is a very-potent 10 points to spend. The cons are that they just aren’t flavorful enough, they’re largely passive bonuses that take agency out of your hands, and oh yeah – it’s WoW and mathematically you have a top pick for every spec and every mode of play that’s already mathed out and written up on Wowhead guides, Icy Veins, and the class Discords. My longer-term wait-and-see con for them is that they also feel like a trap that is going to be designed around in just one expansion – by using this solution, Blizzard has functionally trapped themselves to either expanding the Hero Talent trees for a couple of expansions until they’re as big as the class and spec trees or pruning them down and making the big marquee rollout of them a bit of a waste, and neither of these is a particularly good outcome. I hope there’s a secret third option and that Blizzard has already identified this as a priority.

Delves

The new endgame pillar of play is Delves, an instanced mode of “world” content where you go out to an expedition site, move through a Dark Souls-esque smoke portal that shuffles you to an instance sans loading screen, and then do a short bit of PvE content that takes about 15 minutes (Blizzard’s advertising, not mine). Delves have tiered difficulty, reward reasonably good PvE gear, and are fun little bits of content to play.

I have little to say about Delves so far because we can’t see the whole system, but I enjoy them well enough. They’re fun little bits of content, the little random elements and changes run to run are nice, and the fact that I can smash them solo (and that there’s a Mage Tower styled target at max difficulty that I can chew on for the season) is quite nice. The main limiter of high-level loot is the Bountiful key system, where only certain Delves are marked to be Bountiful, which makes them reward better gear and count for your Great Vault provided you bring a Bountiful Coffer key which is rewarded from lots of different outdoor content sources, and this limiter is okay enough – easy to stock up on your max keys for the week and slowly farm more. Until we can do more than Tier 3 of 13 and see the full reward structure, all I can say is that they’re fun and I enjoy them, but also without being able to gear extensively through them as of now, are generally a thing I’ve avoided doing too much of given the lack of rewards at the current moment.

The World of War(craft) Within

I’m going to hit you with two seemingly contradictory statements here and explain, okay? Here goes:

The War Within has some of the best zones ever in World of Warcraft, and the worst-designed continent.

Each zone is beautiful and full of interesting storytelling items and locations that say so much. The Ringing Deeps are overrun with pipes and give way to an open nature area, while Hallowfall is defined by the light and shadow cycle of Beledar and feels so interesting for it. Azj-Kahet makes me so mad we never got that Azjol-Nerub zone in Wrath because I would have loved to see it and loved to see that style evolve into how good Azj-Kahet is. The Isle of Dorn is a picturesque modern WoW zone with lush greenery, interesting flourishes of crystal, forests, and a piece of Dalaran wedged into it. Dornogal is big and vertical in a more compressed and fitting manner from Valdrakken, but feels good once you learn how to navigate it (get better signposting for the in-game map and while Skyriding above it, please!).

But the thing is that none of these coalesce together to feel like a singular place. They feel like a disconnected set of zones. Each of them is great on its own, but I can feel the hard lines between each zone and how that shapes the perception I have of Khaz Algar as an overall place. There’s no real sense of unity or connection, even when the theme feels like it should fit (Dorn and the Ringing Deeps are both ostensibly Earthen spots with their culture but short of a couple copy-paste buildings it just feels weirdly non-unified).

When I think of what makes WoW feel like its best, the thing I love about good expansions is that unity of zones and the ability to look out and see them. Legion and Dragonflight are both exceptional examples of this – you can reach a summit in the continent and look out to see everything. In both of those expansions, even patch-added content is visible right from the base continent at a lot of vantage points and it makes the world feel like this massive living place, an actual world. WoW’s biggest strength compared to its biggest competitors like Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 is that it isn’t just a series of disconnected zones but a whole world – which limits Blizzard from doing setpieces like those games can do, but also makes the whole game feel so much more immersive. TWW loses some luster for that in my opinion.

It’s a shame because Hallowfall in particular is probably the best, most incredible zone they’ve ever made, but the overall cohesiveness of the world is lacking and that hurts it slightly.

Also, I’m gonna be fully subjective here and say this – I hate being in the cave expansion. I was not a fan of Zaralek Caverns in Dragonflight and the way that TWW is just 3 zones with the same issues hampering their otherwise incredible presentation and design feels awful. They already have to work around an engine limitation to stack two zones which leads to problems like the airlock tunnel failing between them and not handing you off, the map markers for quests in other zones being wrong if you’re on the surface of Dorn, and just the whole general vibe is off – I dislike the ceilings, of having this relatively-new mode of travel feel constrained (granted Hallowfall and Azj-Kahet have very high ceilings throughout so it isn’t too bad there), and it does hurt the immersion slightly to consider how that Warcraft-level brightness is maintained in these musty caves (again, Hallowfall stays winning since it answers that in-universe with Beledar). I already feel like the mood of the world is just too gloomy and cave-locked and it does hurt my opinion of the overworld of this expansion slightly. I’m especially concerned given that there are a non-zero number of signs that we’re likely going to be staying underground for a minute, given that there is some amount of hinting towards Undermine finally being introduced to the game – and it would be fitting, but then we’d be up to 4 cavey underground zones in one expansion, and I want to see the (virtual) sun at least every now and then!

Dungeons

I have…conflicting feelings about the dungeons of The War Within.

On the one hand, I really like the concepts and the variety of different ideas and execution within them. Spending most of my summer in Final Fantasy XIV with linear, wall-guided dungeons that offer no choice short of pulling correctly (everything to the wall) or incorrectly (baby steps one pull at a time) created a noticeably sharp contrast with TWW’s dungeons, which are open almost to a fault. Even linear-styled dungeons like Stonevault still have multiple choices for where to go and how to pull that are pretty neat.

What I find myself disliking, then, is the dungeons that are a little too open and poorly explained in the game. The first time I ran Ara-Kara, the routing felt very odd, especially the path to the second boss requiring a hard U-turn through a small, barely-noticeable door (with an add to signpost it, at least). City of Threads is likewise confusing to a point that I still can’t fully explain how you’re supposed to navigate it (just haven’t run it much), and while the concept is cool, the execution feels a bit off. However, my biggest disappointment is the Dawnbreaker, because I love the concept of the dungeon and the way it weaves in the overworld map…but the way it does that feels really half-baked and is damn near impossible to do gracefully in a PUG. Hell, even in a group in voice, flying down to boss 2 and to clear trash was this frustrating experience of staring down the tank and hoping they knew where to go and how to pull it. It also has a lot of weird issues with boarding the boats from flight, where the boats have their own semi-magnetic pull that also pushes you away in a weird way and can cause problems like a healer getting stuck in a nook of the boat and dying. Love the concept, absolutely want it to succeed, but the execution of the airships and the city segment together really sour the experience.

In some ways, I can see almost a counterpush that answers complaints people have about FFXIV dungeons, which is funny to me. FFXIV dungeons are linear with prescribed pulls, so every TWW dungeon is a non-linear festival where you can pull as much as you want, even too much! It’s not a bad recipe, and I have to withhold full judgment until we see Mythic and keystones in these new dungeons, but overall…there are some hits and some misses, and some of the misses feel a bit spectacularly off the mark to me.

The Story

Hoo boy, okay, let’s get seated and take a deep breath for this one.

The story of The War Within is…kinda good?

For WoW, it takes some interesting risks that make it stand out. There are more cutscenes in-engine, more voice acting, and a higher level of production on story elements. The main story characters are present and compliment the process of leveling through the zones, as opposed to Shadowlands, BfA, or even a large chunk of Dragonflight, where the main characters swoop in late after most of the action has resolved. The story feels a bit darker and less Disney-fied, probably in some ways as a direct response to critique of Amirdrassil’s ending in particular.

But overall, it feels interesting in a way that the WoW story has not for a while. Xal’atath is a compelling villain who hasn’t laid her cards out all the way (and won’t be immediately snuffed out as the endboss of raid number 1), the Nerubians rising up has a logical story and payoff that we’ll likely get to see more of post-raid, and there are big hints at a future state that sees Alleria’s family as a point of contention and weakness, along with Anduin’s connection to the Light. Of the natives, the Earthen get a lot of story build in the Allied Race quests that is actually interesting (and ties to the main narrative too!), the Nerubians get a great build of story, and the Arathi are open mysteries that I hope we see expanded upon.

There’s very little in TWW that made my eyes roll or felt too campy, cartoony, or off-kilter, and I think that is a solid state of affairs compared to the recent expansions. I’m a big proponent of letting the main story shine even in level-up content, which the team took to heart here as each zone story ties together and integrates the main cast in a lot of ways that help set up plot threads and build on a solid foundation of narrative.

My early beefs with the story are minimal, but there are two big points. Firstly, I feel like our initial victory over Xal’atath, destroying the relic she got from Dawn of the Infinites, was an unearned victory and I hope it is a fakeout that we’ll get to see unfold with time. Secondly, I feel bad for my Horde brothers, sisters, and non-binary siblings, because the Horde representation in this expansion might as well not exist. Thrall is there, but that’s about all that can be said about him, and his presence in the story so far is mainly just to go “aha, lightning, a shaman thing” and then help us with its wielder – for all intents and purposes, he could be any character and it would have worked about the same, which makes me think that Blizzard is afraid of having him too present for risk of opening the old wounds of “Green Jesus.” We get some Lillian Voss time, which is cool, but it is minimal and the story significance isn’t quite there. If you’re a Horde loyalist wanting this expansion to look at your faction in an interesting, non-villainous light, well, it’s just not there, and that feels kind of bad. It’s nice as an Alliance main to have my faction finally being an active force for change in the story and leading the charge, but I think there’s a balance that needs to be sought after here.

Otherwise, I actually kind of like the story so far in TWW. It isn’t going to be my favorite narrative in an MMO or game, but it’s the best WoW story since Legion so far in my estimation, and in some ways, it’s better – it has a mastery of fundamental storytelling chops that help keep things interesting. I’m holding on being more positive (or going negative) because I have kept myself unspoiled from datamining and so I don’t know what exists on the other side of the raid and there is obviously a full patch cycle of content still to come, but what’s there now? It’s good, interesting stuff.

Overall First Thoughts

Dragonflight was a rebuilding expansion. Blizzard got really experimental, open to change, and kind of threw a lot at the wall to see what stuck and what fell aside. In that way, Dragonflight has become the foundation for everything to come after, building a base on revamped talent trees, fully-available upgrade systems to make gear a journey for players of all types, and an increased focus on world content, and we can see all of those things being expanded upon in The War Within.

If you enjoyed Dragonflight, TWW is going to be enjoyable, because it takes the same base package and refines it in some good (and a couple iffy) ways. The element of free choice from a larger buffet of content is there, the focus on gear as the power journey with a bevy of cosmetics and fun rewards is there, and the refinement of seasonal content models is there. On those fronts, it is a solid expansion of what Dragonflight offered.

Is it everything it needed to be to pull back disaffected players who still weren’t sold on Dragonflight? Eh, I guess it depends. On the one hand, there is a winning formula here and I think the commitment to staying that course while adding substantial quality of life to it is very solid. On the other hand, story is a big point of contention and it is also very subjective – will TWW win back the story-focused? I…don’t really know. It could, certainly – I think there’s a plot here that is shaping up very well and it is the most I’ve personally enjoyed the Warcraft story in years. At the same time, though, I think it largely depends on what you want from WoW’s story. It is more of a Metzen plot to be sure – darker, focused on conflict and violence, with world-shattering stakes and a sense of weight that can at times feel out of place. But it also has some of modern WoW’s more low-level, delicate character takes – there are family stories and plots about what defending the world against those high stakes means to the characters involved. It’s not the pinnacle of execution of those ideas, but it is more than simply competent here – there’s a good basis to think that TWW will end up being one of the best WoW stories to date, but that is subjective.

In short – I like it, I like it a lot, and I think there’s reason to believe the hype on a WoW turnaround that I was waiting to see throughout Dragonflight. The confirmation of that direction shift is valuable and it feels like the team is more engaged and offering a better deal this time out. We’ll see how the season influences that!