The launch window fervor for The War Within continues, as I am ready today to share some thoughts about the raid experience of Nerub’ar Palace, having done the full raid on Normal, the first two bosses on Heroic, the first wing on LFR, and the Queen Ansurek story mode encounter twice.

First raids in WoW tend to follow a couple of patterns – they’re either insanely good or overwhelmingly mid. Uldir in BfA? Overwhelmingly mid. Cool-ish aesthetic, sorta interesting fights, but nothing about it really stands out to me except the elevator boss after six years (BfA is six, oh dear god). Castle Nathria in Shadowlands is probably the opposite, incredible aesthetic dialed in on every level, memorable boss fights that are still quotable years later, and a generally good overall design.

So where does Nerub’ar Palace land, in my estimation?

Well…it’s overwhelmingly mid.

It’s not a bad raid, I feel a need to say. I’ve enjoyed my time in it well enough so far, the aesthetic of the raid is quite neat, and some of the fights have some interesting ideas going on – I like how we defeat Rasha’nan in the Dawnbreaker dungeon so they can fly away into the palace where they start the fight there at the same percentage of health they end Dawnbreaker at, Ulgrax’s feeding mechanic is a fun idea, and the relatively new model of AoE puddle usage through a central bubble “button” is pretty cool, even if the last two fights both use it for pivotal mechanics. There are some cool setpiece moments as well, like destroying the central pathway which forces the raid down into the depths for a couple of bosses and the slow feeling of conquering the palace by replacing flight masters with members of the Severed Threads and moving up through the palace in a methodical fashion.

It’s just that when I think about the fights, none of them are going to be particularly memorable in a way that really stands out for me in a year or two.

It’s also the case that this raid suffers from some common Blizzard design issues. Time to go point by point and explore it.

The Raid Environment

The raid itself is very cool looking. It has a spider aesthetic, but not too over the top, has a Nerubian palatial vibe akin to what we saw in Wrath of the Lich King but with modern WoW fidelity, and it was clear that effort was made to distinguish the bosses with a variety of different models and concepts. The void aesthetic present throughout the zone is very in-line with what the outdoor zone of Azj-Kahet it resides in has going on, and the art team has made a lot of effort to not just make it a bug sanctuary but to give it a character and life that can sometimes be missing, which aligns with places like the City of Threads area.

As a gameplay setting, however, there is a key shortfall here, which is Blizzard’s insistence on traversal of these massive raid zones as a gameplay enhancer, which ends up often having the opposite effect. Replacing flightmasters inside with friendly ones is a cool idea and thematically very neat, but in gameplay terms, it makes wipe recovery incredibly tedious for most of the raid, without mentioning that the flight paths can sometimes bug out (heh) and be unavailable unless you go and talk to the new friendly flightmasters, which means wipe recovery is both tedious and sometimes drawn out. Lovely! Making this even worse is the fact that a large portion of the zone is technically outdoors, so you can mount, but there are chokepoints every so often that are indoors and dismount you, which is exceptionally annoying added to the other problems with traversing the zone. To top it all off, the major prog points where you’re likely to wipe on Normal and likely even more so on Heroic are all in a building and up or down large staircases, which means a big chunk of wipe recovery happens with no mounts and past a flight point that still requires a minute of running from or more. The slime potions to speed you up are great, but the random chance of becoming a slime (and needing a magic dispel to be able to do any precast openers) is funny the first time and then just kind of annoying after. It takes away the wonder of the raid setting for it to be reduced to a big space you’re annoyed to run through, which I think could have been remedied by teleports, faster flight with more flight paths inside, or consistent rules on mounting without forcing you to dismount at regular intervals.

Lastly, the flight path idea is novel and I like it, but the map used for the flight interface needs a little more visual clarity. I’d love to see boss icons near flight paths to indicate the general route you might take instead of having to learn what bosses are in the Narthex vs any other flight point. Queen Ansurek gets her own flight path, which is great! – but the icon for it is in a featureless void on the map which is kind of baffling!

The Encounter Design

Nerub’ar Palace suffers a bit from a weird difficulty curve that means there’s an easy 6 kills in normal waiting that will take maybe 7 pulls in a competent group, with the penultimate boss being the absolute hardest thing in the raid by a mile and then an almost disappointingly easy final boss.

The first few fights are fine and I enjoyed them the first time, but they’re also very simple encounters without a lot going on. There are some places where you can fail mechanical checks, but a lot of mistakes are recoverable, which is probably ideal for a first-tier normal raid in a new expansion but also can feel a bit dull. This also ends up being wrecked by the Silken Court fight, which places an enormous mechanical pressure onto a couple of players your raid will have to designate and this puts a very large spotlight on them for what is a simple-seeming but surprisingly difficult mechanic of stretching out a tether. Why is it difficult? Well, you have to coordinate multiple players in a short period of time who will take heavy initial and sustained damage until the mechanic resolves, and if either of them dies, uses a movement impair remover like Druid shapeshifts, or is out of position, the mechanic fails and it is a wipe, basically. You have to pull this off twice in the first phase with designated raiders and then in the last phase at least once with random players since everyone gets webs, which makes actually coordinating it a challenging endeavor. On Heroic, the major change to the fight is (was prior to hotfixes during the writing of this post, that is) that you have to use two tethers, which communicates a lot about how difficult Blizzard sees the mechanic.

My raid spent nearly 35 pulls on that fight, most of which were just getting people tether-trained and able to adapt quickly to handle the mechanic in a timely manner, and once we had it down relatively comfortably, it was an easier slide past the last phases of the fight into a win. It made Queen Ansurek especially anticlimactic because after almost 40 pulls on Silken Court, it took 4 to beat the end boss. Four!

The difficulty difference probably wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t both so abrupt and also immediately stepped back from within the space of two encounters, but that made it feel a bit whiplash-adjacent. For what it’s worth, the average item level of my raid is a bit low (most people are in the 590s which isn’t bad, but a couple are in the low 580s and then I’m at 613 lol) so some of the mechanics on Silken Court were difficult just because the incoming damage against the health pools available was pretty tough to manage, especially when it was primarily healers at the lower end of the item level spread, but then at the same time, that same group with a 0.1 item level average increase due to Silken Court loot was able to 4-shot Ansurek, which feels particularly strange. I’m not a fan of endboss slogs, but I am even less a fan of gatekeeper boss slogs, so the difficulty curve of normal Nerub’ar Palace felt pretty bad and that did temper my enjoyment of the raid as a whole slightly.

Story Mode?

A major touted addition to The War Within was Story Mode, the ability to tackle the raid on a solo, follower-dungeon style mode of play to see the encounter and the story beats in-context. I didn’t follow the idea closely and thought it might have been a whole-raid story mode, or would exist as a queueable activity you could do to pass some time, but instead it is gatekept through a story quest chain (it doesn’t take particularly long but requires doing the whole story campaign to that point) and then an NPC outside the raid sneaks you in with follower dungeon NPCs in a raid of 10 to tackle a neutered version of just the Queen Ansurek fight. I did this version of Ansurek first, before even watching a guide video, and I did it again today after having done the fight on Normal, and it…feels a bit weird? To be perfectly clear, I very much like the concept and want it to be continued in future raids, but the gameplay of it was weird. I wish we got the full raid in this form so that the full story context and moments within the raid could be shown to non-raiders, so just being the endboss is weird (if perhaps a bit understandable). The version of the Ansurek fight on Story Mode is also kind of lacking the setpiece cool moments of the Normal fight, like the knockback mechanics to move up the sides of the room to the upper level, the intermission where Ansurek webs the whole raid and tries to pull them in for a snack, or even at least a weird approximation of the knock-up riding mechanics to get over the various ring mechanics. You just take everything to the face (nothing seems to be able to kill you) and then when the boss ends phase 1, you skip intermission and phase 2 and just take a portal up to the upper deck for the last phase, which ends pretty quickly and then plays the cutscene from the end of the raid.

From a lore perspective, the idea that we could be snuck inside the raid seems to be dissonant with the whole theme of the actual raid being a meticulous step-by-step takeover of the palace, but I also get the impression that Blizzard is building this for an audience that literally never raids and won’t see that dissonance unfold before them. Which is probably not the worst thing, but it was also challenging because doing the story mode quest in story mode was also the optimal way to get yourself an Enchanted Runed Harbinger Crest for making some higher level crafted gear! There’s at least a cursory effort put into handwaving it away (you’re going in during the ruckus which implies there is a canonical different raid team roaming the halls doing the work of clearing the first seven bosses and the trash before Ansurek), but it still felt a bit odd as a concept.

Overall though, it is a very cool idea and one I hope the team continues for all raids. I’d like to see it expand to include the full raid, and perhaps even count towards the raid row of the Great Vault at least, if not have a chance to drop some gear (maybe like a tier below LFR item level so it doesn’t eat LFR’s lunch). WoW is, as Shintar put it discussing the concept, a solo-heavy game that somehow also expects large group content to gate story, and looking at ways to peel that back is a good call!

The Story

With the raid out, we now have a good sense of the totality of the launch story of The War Within. And it’s not altogether bad.

Firstly, we have an obvious shape-up to a multi-expansion story arc for Xal’atath. I mean, besides the whole idea of the Worldsoul Saga being that the game is a 3-part story unfolding over years, Xal’atath is an interesting villain but also one that is still steeped in a lot of mystery. She seems unlikely to die in The War Within at all, as her plan is still very much unclear. To what ends she enlisted the Nerubians and offered the power of the Void to Ansurek is a curiosity we have no answer for as of yet. Our current expansion narratives, just off the surface of what we’ve seen so far, are the struggle of the Earthen with their allegiance to the oaths of the Titans as Xal’atath and our efforts both pull in different directions like a triangular pattern (freedom of choice, the Void, the Titans), the resolution of the tension of the Nerubians between the Severed Threads and the Ascended, the rift in Hallowfall between the servants of Light and those who have succumbed to Shadow, and within our main cast we have Anduin’s tenuous reconnection to the light, Alleria’s difficulty reconciling between her duties as a Void Elf and her familial bonds, and the resolution of the Radiant Song. We’ve also got Khadgar in an arcane wheelchair who will likely have some future role to play and then there’s whatever Xal’atah might do next with the relic from Dawn of the Infinites destroyed. Lastly, we have hints at a bigger interconnected Titan complex, with this conversation from the Archives quest this week about the “Manifold” and how that might relate to the Titan complexes we’ve already seen and stormed in the past.

What I like here is that a lot of this discovery feels organic within the story. In the past, we’ve seen a lot of weird villain monologues that give way to the next story or things that feel very contrived in setup and that we know will ultimately start and conclude in the space of one expansion. Just knowing that Xal’atath is going to persist is something that makes her story worth investing in, as is the case for Alleria’s story quite obviously giving us the foundation for a substantial part of what Midnight is likely to focus on (prepare yourselves for the Sylvanas return, a topic I’ve been cooking in the drafts on). Like I said when first discussing TWW’s story, the thing that it has done best overall is giving Warcraft a back-to-basics fundamental storytelling and development, which the prior team lacked and I do absolutely mean as an insult to the prior head writers (not just Danuser but also Afrasiabi) who were barely writing details only when it suited the moment of cool they wanted to make. A good story and real significant cool setpieces are built on solid bases of lore and story that leads there and makes them feel more interesting and well-made.

There is one challenge in that idea, though, which is that the story so far of TWW is also kind of open-ended in an unsatisfying way. In Dragonflight, as a contrast, Raszageth’s defeat immediately set the remaining Primal Incarnates as threats and gave us a direction which the story could end up taking, and while Dragonflight’s story had its own issues, it is worth saying that the majority of the content that followed did deal heavily with those 3 characters and kept them in view, if not in focus, the entire time. Right now we have Xal’atath lingering, which is interesting, but her mysterious machinations also have this vagueness that could be interpreted through the lens of Warcraft past, where cool and interesting plot threads peter out and go nowhere. I have some small amount of faith in a writing team led by Metzen to come back to that and fulfill it, but the last 8 years of WoW don’t exactly inspire confidence, so there’s a bit of push and pull there. Xal’atath plotting in the shadows is perfect for a Void character and so it works for now, but there’s always that thought in the back of my mind that Blizzard will fumble the bag in the eleventh hour which means until I see more, it is hard to be unreservedly excited for what comes next, especially since we still don’t have many leads in the current story as to what that might be. Compounding this, the very idea of the Worldsoul Saga means that it is hard to get immediately invested in lore tidbits like the idea of the Manifold since that might not even be a TWW story beat but instead establishing and building towards something that happens in 1-2 expansions.

But to return to the raid story specifically for a moment, I actually like it overall as a contained narrative. Ansurek betrayed her mother for power, and that power came with strings attached that she wasn’t prepared to fulfill, which led to the fracturing of her queendom and the end of her rule and life, while we have the prior queen still alive in poor condition after she suffered as an experiment under her daughter. It leaves an interesting post-raid possibility to tell more stories in Azj-Kahet, to show the process of the Nerubians reckoning with Ansurek’s bid for power and potentially realigning as allies to their neighbors in Khaz Algar, which would be pretty neat and novel in WoW. One thing that I think WoW’s competitor Final Fantasy XIV does really well with stories is having moments of reckoning where enemy forces slowly become allies and have to deal with the fallout of their actions, events that extend far beyond the initial defeat in a raid or dungeon encounter. I would love to see WoW lean into that more and capitalize on what is sitting right there in front of them – a chance to work with the new parameters in the story after the raid to integrate the Nerubians into the story, even potentially as protagonists, and perhaps even with the new humanoid forms we’ve seen, as an Allied Race (I hope?).

Overall, the raid story continues my general trend thus far with TWW – there are some signs of hope for the story, that the team is putting an appropriate focus and weight to the story being told and rectifying years of shoddy and incomplete lore and narrative while still working within the lore that those years have left them with. It isn’t the best story, but it is suitably engaging and enjoyable, adding to the game in a way that WoW’s story hasn’t in a while, which is a marked improvement and one worth acknowledging and celebrating.

The End (For Now)

With Heroic prog in sight, I won’t have much else to say about the raid for probably another month or two. Normal Nerub’ar Palace, in my estimation, is an okay raid – the story is better than I expected, but the flow of Normal progression, difficulty, and the overall novelty of the gameplay isn’t terribly high and it hasn’t been a raid that has exactly filled me with glee to play through. It is fine enough and fun in measure, but it reminds me much more of Uldir than Castle Nathria – an okay-enough first raid of the expansion that will be relatively easy to forget in a year. It could be more, but I think that the overall content of TWW has been relatively good to great, so the raid being a smidge disappointing still means the average is high for this expansion. Heroic may change my mind, and I hope it does, but I won’t know that for a while yet. As it stands now, the expansion as a whole is off to a good start and raiding is off to an okay start that can get better, as it tends to in expansions with disappointing first tiers.