The War Within’s endgame activities have the usual focus of a WoW expansion – dungeons, raids, PvP seasons, and all of it tied to gear progression. There’s Delves, which are new, and we discussed previously, and with the Delves, Blizzard made an interesting change to the Great Vault -removing the PvP row in favor of more direct and deterministic PvP gearing to make room for a World row. At first, that World row seemed like a trickery of wordplay – it’s just Delves, right? Well…no. That, in and of itself, marks a huge change that I wanted to talk about in a short post today.

World of Warcraft has generally had two true statements you can make about the world and its content – WoW’s overworld is one of the best in MMOs, with continents that generally feel very expansive, interconnected, and alive, but the game’s design philosophy for rewarding doing world content has often been pretty piss-poor. In Dragonflight, Blizzard started to make a concerted effort to change that with the weekly event design rewarding players caches with high-level loot for doing things in the open world, with activities varying from cooking soup to planting seeds to all the normal and expected combat gameplay that WoW generally offers. In The War Within, Blizzard brought out Delves, which are kinda open-world content in that you travel to and move into them without a loading screen, but the proper overworld has maintained the Dragonflight philosophy with each zone having some sort of weekly activity you can do that rewards you with a weekly cache of loot and other prizes.

But there’s one big difference – these activities also feed the Great Vault, so the row that is labeled World is not, as expected, a misdirection but is instead fully accurate – world activities reward Vault slots.

In the past, Blizzard has caught flak for the fact that WoW is primarily an instanced-content game at this point in time. PvP? Usually means battlegrounds and arenas. Dungeons? All instanced, all the time. Raids? Same deal. Even Delves are instances with cool tech to make that less obvious. But a truth about WoW is that a majority of its audience, based on what we can parse externally, doesn’t raid, doesn’t do dungeons beyond Normal and maybe Heroic, and doesn’t PvP through the instanced, rated content forms available. And in the past, a lot of those players have criticized the game for not giving them enough to chew on, or for favoring the dungeon and raid audiences in particular. I’ve even pushed back on that at times, but it is true – Blizzard’s design priorities have always given precedence to instanced PvE content, then instanced PvP, before focusing on world content in any serious form. World content players have always had stuff to do, but it has existed in this parallel universe outside of the standard gear progression, where months of work in the overworld can get you…just barely to the level of a Normal raider. Maybe slightly beyond, especially in Dragonflight, but not much further than that.

By adding the Great Vault into the mix, there’s now an easy, low pressure gear path that exists for all players and creates a self-sustaining cycle of rewards and progression for playing the game. Just like with dungeons and raids, there’s an initial tier that rewards well based on the hardest or highest-tier activity you did in a week, and then a scale where adding new rewards gets progressively harder but is doable in a relatively short amount of playtime.

In terms of rewards, it is relatively generous too – with the base world activities counting as Tier 1 (to correspond to the Delve ranking) and rewarding 584 item level gear (the same as LFR’s first tier bosses), all the way up to the Tier 8 rewards from Delves at 616 (corresponding to late Heroic raid bosses). It is possible, given enough time and effort, for a player to gear entirely to Heroic raid level without ever doing a dungeon or raid at all. And I think that’s actually quite good!

With WoW’s design as it has been, Blizzard has always hesitated to let any content eat the lunch of their instanced PvE gold standards. Even letting outdoor content encroach on LFR item level was inconceivable in the past, and Blizzard has often made world content enjoyers go to great lengths to get gear at that item level – Korthia’s insane grinds for upgrades to gear tokens comes to mind immediately, where it could match the Normal raid, but it took hours of grinding per item slot to get there, literal months of overall gameplay. Dragonflight did ease this up a fair bit, especially once 10.1 brought the current upgrade system into the game, but it has remained a general guiding truth that getting a full set of gear up to and beyond LFR item level required a fair mix of luck, grinding, and time – since the weekly cache system meant that you only had so many shots per week of getting something useful and it was a diceroll as to whether or not a given drop would be what you wanted.

But now, that has somewhat changed, as Delves have mechanisms in place to allow you multiple attempts per week and to farm more attempts at Bountiful Coffers, on top of world events and the Great Vault. A player doing all the available rewarding world content can get 8 pieces of epic loot per week split between 4 Bountiful Delves and 4 world events, with a 9th from the Vault and more if you farm Bountiful Coffer Keys via world quests and Worldsoul Echoes events. On top of all of that, if you get a Hidden Cache map for a Delve, you can get an additional epic coffer at the end of a Delve that can be as high as 610 item level and doesn’t count against any of those other mentioned available loot options! This all combines into something somewhat magical – right now, it is far easier to gear from Delves than it is from Mythic Plus, because it takes doing a +5 to get loot matching a Tier 8 Bountiful Delve coffer and a +7 to have the Great Vault reward match item level with a Tier 8 Delve! For once, not only is world gameplay good for rewards, it is even optimal in many cases, and while that can mean that there might be a pressure to do it for those in the dungeon and raid audiences, to WoW’s player majority, this means that world content gets to enjoy the rewards that those of us who do instanced content have always taken for granted. The Delve loot can be put into the Catalyst to make Tier pieces, and the Great Vault slots for world content can also be Tier pieces, which also means that getting four piece bonuses without dungeons or raids is very possible now!

I’ve been a big dungeon and raid fan and those are the things that draw me into and keep me into World of Warcraft, but I think it is really cool to see Blizzard finally step out to acknowledge that they haven’t always rewarded a majority of the playerbase well and to make measurable changes towards remedying that. I hope that this philosophy continues, not just in patch content of The War Within, but into expansions going forward.