Something I mentioned in my last post about my alt-leveling journey (43 level 80s now, btw) is that the experience of Season 1 of The War Within is kinda meh. The expansion overall hits well for me, but there is something in the water with Season 1 that just doesn’t feel that enjoyable and I wanted to take some time today to list my feelings about it, echoing some you’ve probably already heard in the process and then discussing what I hope changes between now and Season 2 of the expansion.

Why Is The War Within Still Good?

So I think the first and perhaps most confusing part is how the entire season can feel a bit meh but the expansion is still pretty well received, so I wanted to start here.

TWW introduces a new set of talents that add extra layers of choice to each spec, making it functionally such that each spec is now two specs. On paper, this is a normal Blizzard failure point – there’s always going to be a winner, surely. Yet through a lot of tuning passes and tweaks, the vast majority of Hero talent options feel roughly on-par with each other. My Brewmaster raid main has viable talent builds for all content with either Hero talent tree available to them, and for a lot of specs, I’ve seen something similar. Even in cases with a clear frontrunner, there are still cases where you could take the other option and be happy – Discipline Priest thrives with Voidweaver in most content, but Oracle still has a clear niche in PvP (and tends to be one of the most-represented healer options in Arena, as an example). Some specs even have gameplay-style choices that you can make personally, which is cool (Mistweaver Monk can use either Hero talent tree with the style implication being a question of having an extra button you can hit with Conduit of the Celestials versus having passive bonus burst healing with Aspect of Harmony).

The problem with Hero talents has mainly been that not every choice is balanced to the pair as well, and that a lot of how Blizzard has gotten here at this point in the season has been with a dizzying array of mid-season changes to Hero talents that have often resulted in changing stat weights and regearing struggles for certain specs (Blood Death Knights play differing stat priorities for San’layn vs. Deathbringer, and Elemental Shamans on Stormbringer Hero talents had Mastery suddenly become secondary stat number 1 after the anniversary patch). However, for Blizzard, the overall state of balance of Hero talents is observably quite good with more hits than misses.

I think that Hero talents, combined with the Dragonflight talent revamps and some class reworks coming into TWW, have made most specs play pretty well overall. In leveling alts and talking to people, I haven’t seen too many examples of specs that feel totally awful to play (with a big caveat for dependence on role and content difficulty, which we will get to later). The general fun factor and playfeel of the game is still really good overall, and that means that even against content that otherwise feels a bit meh, there’s still fun to be had. TWW also does better at the presentational aspects of the game like story and worldbuilding, and while those have their own opportunities and improvements to be made, the total package of TWW is pretty well presented and built.

But, at the end of the day, WoW is about the content, and often specifically endgame content, and that is where we transition to discussing opportunities.

Support Roles in Shambles

As a tank main whose number 2 character is usually a healer, I kind of hate the way the game has massacred my boys.

Coming into TWW, Blizzard announced sweeping and yet narrow tank changes designed to target tank self-sustain and healer burst requirements. The stated goals were to make tanks need external healing more regularly but not too much so, and to help balance the healer role for dungeons by making the tank need regular-enough spot healing, balancing damage intake across the rest of the group to ensure that you could put some TLC on the tank without losing the party (and to, hopefully, reduce the “defensive or die” damage profiles that wrecked high-tier keys in Dragonflight’s later seasons).

The problems with these changes is that the damage profile on the party has not really meaningfully changed, but tank damage taken has increased and tank self-sustain has decreased, and these changes have been heavy enough that it makes playing a tank or healer feel kind of awful in sufficiently difficult content. For tanks, the issue is two-fold – firstly, that the self-sustain nerfs have been uneven, because a big problem WoW faces with this kind of tuning is how to impact everyone’s self-sustain when there’s a whole tank spec in Blood DK built around self-sustain as mitigation, and secondly that self-sustain failures are not always obvious until they become near-catastrophic, which means delayed healer reactions and the momentum of your health bar’s descent picks up speed as that situation spirals.

It is little coincidence that the meta tanks on live servers for Mythic Plus have mostly been Protection Warrior and Guardian Druid – both specs, played to baseline competence, take the least damage of any tank and can slow the descent so easily that they don’t even really feel changed. Blood DK makes such a balance hard because their whole model requires robust self-sustain as part of the baseline toolkit, so Blood feels pretty similar overall as well. Meanwhile, for me as a Brewmaster main, it feels like the bulk of self-sustain nerfs have landed upon my doorstep, because Celestial Brew as my main defensive feels weak as hell, my Stagger bar gets really big and red compared to Dragonflight even when cycling Purifying Brew, and Expel Harm creates this bad-feeling gameplay loop where I take a shitton of frontloaded damage, attempt to use my baseline defensive brews to smooth it out, still take a ton of damage, and then the self-heal of Expel Harm is rarely enough to restore a feeling of security. Heroic Queen Ansurek in the raid has a beastly tankbuster that requires extra long cooldown mitigations for me to even just survive, because a massive Purifying Brew and a full-buffed Celestial Brew up to start is not enough to allow me to live, even if I can hit a 3-5 stack Expel Harm right after the initial damage event. It is insane. Meanwhile, Vengeance DH tanks need to think very hard about defensives because they can be deleted just walking into a pull, and Protection Paladin can even suffer the same issue, especially since their core defensive ability requires a target to hit. I get that there’s absolutely a case to say that Dragonflight’s tank self-sustain was not a good model for the overall game, but this feels like too big a correction in the other direction, where as a tank I have some agency over my survival but not nearly enough.

On the healing side, the problem is that damage profiles just haven’t changed that much at all from Dragonflight. Sure, in a Mythic Plus you need to heal the tank more than before, so that’s kind of different, but the partywide hits are still massive and require defensives from the party to live at high-enough key levels, so now you have the same immediate burst healing demand as Dragonflight but also a needy tank requiring maintenance healing and DPS dying to a lack of mechanical awareness and blaming you and that creates a stressful, low-fun environment. I healed a low Siege of Boralus key on my Priest recently with two DPS (Quel’Thalas server so I should have known problems would emerge) who didn’t even have their interrupts talented and a Druid tank that was taking 70% of his health in damage every few seconds because he wasn’t mitigating properly, and despite being able to point at all of these errors in play, the two non-interrupting DPS were being assholes to me about health bars (not to mention not knowing that Discipline largely heals through damage and needs to be in combat to do ideal healing, so waiting between pulls and shouting “HEAL” in chat was totally non-productive on their part). I also had a Warlock who constantly died to the last boss’ web AoE on Ara-Kara (where you have to interrupt or kill the blood add holding you in place to move) because they didn’t know the mechanic, but blamed me anyways until I pointed out that they died to an avoidable AoE and, to their credit, the whole party clowned on them for being belligerent when they clearly didn’t understand the mechanic (and didn’t ask for help or clarification). Both of those incidents were basically me hanging it up on keys for the night because it just sucks and I hate being put into that spot as a healer.

In short – tanks changed negatively (but inconsistently), healers and damage profiles haven’t changed much (bad thing), and both roles get shit on by ignorant players, which makes playing them feel miserable in PUGs and even sometimes in friendly groups which reduces their presence in LFG and thus makes groups harder to find.

Mythic Plus Needs Immediate Fixes

I love Mythic Plus. One thing any long term reader should know is that since Shadowlands, I’ve been a massive M+ guy. I love pushing keys, playing even in PUGs, playing multiple characters at a high level per season.

I kind of hate this season of Mythic Plus and it has dampened my enthusiasm for the game a lot.

I don’t necessarily hate the dungeon pool, as I think it is mostly okay. Some dungeons could use some tweaks, like Grim Batol and Siege of Boralus. I like the number of quick 3-boss runs this season, as it no longer is this thing we only get 1 of a season, so that feels nice even.

Mythic Plus has a few compounding issues, which are the designs of the new affixes, the interaction of those affixes with the mode’s everpresent timer pressure, mechanical changes to stopping and interrupting mob casting, the role tuning I mentioned above already, and a wacked-out rewards track that makes it feel less rewarding than Dragonflight.

Let’s start with new affixes. I think they’re mostly okay at the base level, as each of the new Xal’atath affixes has some interesting play possibilities and work well enough when not stricken with bugs. Being able to eventually have both Fortified and Tyrannical active simultaneously isn’t my version of ideal, but it’s fine enough, although high-end key pushers tend to hate the overlap of these two affixes with the level 12 affix that turns everything into sponges. The biggest affix issue is that Challenger’s Peril affix at level 7. This affix, for those unaware, makes the Mythic Plus death penalty on time change from 5 seconds per death to 15 seconds, which, at launch, meant that one wipe killed your timer most of the time. Blizzard hotfixed this so that you get an extra 90 seconds of timer at level 7 and up, which covers one full wipe and one individual death on top of that, and that is better but also still feels really bad (and means that grindy but successful keys are way less of a thing at 7 and up). It creates a layer of toxicity that bundles with the other problems I’ve mentioned – people failing to use defensives, dying, running out the timer, yelling at the healer, ultimately leading to keys disbanding and higher levels of social tension in groups. It also sucks because Mythic Plus dungeons continue to have egregious run backs after wipes, so dying has multiple layers of punishment – losing cooldowns and having a trash pull or boss reset and full heal, the death penalty on the timer, the amount of time spent running back and rebuffing – all of these have measurable time impacts such that adding extra death penalty is a swift kick in the balls. At this point, I am on team Fuck Challenger’s Peril – remove it in Season 2 and you’ll see vastly higher participation rates in Mythic Plus, I would wager.

Next, the reward for Mythic Plus is very skewed in a bad way. While I am a proponent of improved gearing through Delves, a Tier 8 Delve isn’t nearly as hard as even a +3 key, and yet it takes until a +6 key for end of dungeon chest rewards to match a Tier 8 Bountiful Delve, and a +7 for the Great Vault reward to match. This means that dedicated lower-end M+ players will often have lower item levels than someone who powers through Delves, and while on mains that kind of player is rare, on alts they do exist! This extends to crest drops too, where while Blizzard’s new banding of Crest rewards for the upgrade system fixed a complaint I did have in Dragonflight Season 4, it has made a new problem – a lot of players can easily hardlock at 619 item level and then have to grind in the depths of hell to get enough Gilded crests to upgrade beyond that, even if they have an abundance of Hero track gear. Likewise, at the point you can even get Myth track items from Mythic Plus (+10s and only in the Great Vault so one per week max), they start one upgrade tier lower than they did in Dragonflight at the same relative difficulty level and require a bigger commitment to upgrade with more track steps. Gilded Crests are also in high demand for crafting upgrades, where you need an entire week’s worth of Gilded Crest cap room to be able to push one crafted item as high as 636. So for non-Mythic raiders who love doing keys, upgrades are slow going and the gear treadmill hits an awful pace in short order. This compounds a second issue which we will talk about later with alts, so put a pin in it. Oh and also your consolation prize for a Mythic Plus without loot is 50 gold, which doesn’t even cover consumables, much less repairs and other expenses, so that’s just peachy.

Continuing down my list, a huge change to how interrupts and stops work was implemented for TWW that makes dungeons feel awful. In Dragonflight, we saw the rise of the “stop” meta – where an average trash pull would have a mix of interruptible casts, but some that could only be interrupted through a stop – some form of CC that would end the cast on the mob. In DF, once a cast was stopped in this way, the spell went on cooldown and the mob was moveable and manageable. In TWW, once the mob recovers from the CC effect, they immediately resume casting the problem spell, which means that you can no longer effectively stop uninterruptable casts without an extreme amount of coordination. This makes PUGging keys harder than ever, puts increased strain on healers (who are already struggling here!), and creates another vector of problems, where overcommitting stops creates group tension if things spiral out of control. This change just feels unnecessary and it punishes groups that were actually doing things intelligently and learned that smart behavior in DF without feeling like it adds anything other than frustration to the mode.

So if you can gear nearly-equal solo through Delves, not have to struggle with social tension of timer pressure amplified by a poorly-designed affix and changes to managing bigger pulls, and upgrading gear to high Hero and Myth tracks feels basically out of reach anyways – then why would you do Mythic Plus? A lot of players are asking that and then not doing it, so…that’s probably got to change!

Raid Is Just Okay

I don’t hate Nerub-ar Palace. It actually is a pretty neat little raid, all told. It has a few problems, however.

Firstly, I think that the short single-raid first tier is still a bad design paradigm because it means unless that one raid is exceptionally good, the tier feels bad. Starting tiers in prior expansions with 2-4 raids are a sweet spot, even if a couple of the raids are 1-3 boss affairs. MoP Remix unintentionally, perhaps, pointed out how this feels – there was once a time where Blizzard gave us a whole shitton of raid content we could prioritize in our own way, and since BfA they just haven’t offered that. If we had a micro-raid in Hallowfall dealing with the shadow cultists or in the Ringing Deeps dealing with the corrupt Machine Speakers, that would be fun! I just dislike having a single 8 boss raid as the whole tier when in the past, Blizzard would put out 3 raids at launch with 14 total bosses and all these strategies would develop about what order to tackle bosses in and how to maximize your progression time.

Secondly, I think that Nerub-ar Palace’s theme and environment aren’t different enough from the Azj-Kahet overworld to make it feel distinct. If I look at a raid like Castle Nathria, while it felt very much like Revendreth, it used some key differentiators, the biggest being the warm and spacious interiors in pristine condition, to make it stand apart from the overworld zone it belonged to. There was a fair bit of distinction visually between Revendreth, Castle Nathria, and the two dungeons of the zone in Sanguine Depths and Halls of Atonement. While Azj-Kahet does have a distinct dungeon in Ara-Kara, both City of Threads and Nerub-ar Palace look very similar to the overworld zone in a negative way. Granted, a big chunk of that is that both the City of Threads dungeon and the majority of the Nerub-ar Palace raid environment are visible in (or a part of) the overworld, so that is also cool to a point, but it just kind of starts to run together a bit too much.

Thirdly, there’s just not a lot of replayability in the raid encounters. They’re fine enough, but once I kill one after prog I rarely feel excited to do it again – the fights just don’t have enough twists to them to really create that incentive.

Lastly, I think it is time, once again, to talk about raid loot.

Raid loot has perpetually been an issue in WoW with the addition and growth of Mythic Plus, and in this expansion, even with Mythic Plus loot being nerfed, raid loot is down bad once again. With the change in the Great Vault from the PvP track to a World track, it now means that Raid track loot is the only loot where the Great Vault does not reward higher item level loot than the base content you did to unlock the slot does. Even with the nerfs, Mythic Plus rewards better loot on average and now Delves also do. Mythic 0 dungeons are on one-day lockouts now so they are easy to farm, Mythic Plus remains as farmable as ever, and you can push Bountiful Delves as long as you have the keys, so there is a lot to gain outside of raid in such a way that raid loot feels even worse than it has previously (and it’s only available once per week per difficulty!). The raid has two saving graces on loot, which is that Crest farming in raid is optimal and that several cantrip items and strong trinkets remain raid-locked, but outside of that, there’s very little reason to farm item level via raid.

And the thing is, I don’t know how you fix that in the current ecosystem. Sure, theoretically making Normal raid drop Hero track items in the vault and Heroic drop Myth track could be neat, but then how do you make Mythic stand apart? Maybe the answer is that you don’t, but then that has knock-on effects elsewhere in the game, and it’s tricky as hell to balance all the things you need to. I do not envy Blizzard here, but I also know they need to try and do something here so that raid doesn’t feel like just a social event where I sometimes get a small increment of player power. Meanwhile, LFR is so truly outclassed by damn near every other loot option in the game that doing it feels like a very strange choice or like a choice you’d only make once to see the raid in full and get the story and experience of doing the raid (and that makes gating a full set of appearances behind it feel pretty bad!).

Delves Are Repetitive Even For WoW’s Repeatable Content

I actually really like Delves, but it has to be said that they aren’t varied enough to not start feeling samey after a handful of runs. WoW’s strengths in repeatable content often boil down to something feeling sufficiently different each time in spite of not being that different – raid changes based on who you run with, what role you play, raid comp and average skill level, while Mythic Plus changes for party comp, weekly affixes, and the various different counterplay options available based on those factors. Delves are…well, they’re about the same each time. Once you see each story variant, there aren’t really surprises and it begins to feel repetitive in a way that WoW’s repeatable content often doesn’t. And that’s fine to a point – sometimes you refine strategies and push harder to finish the Delve faster or with some other marker of change, but the baseline of the Delve model doesn’t exactly make things stand apart enough. Being soloable accentuates this, because when you can run it completely on your own, there is no human variable to account for and that makes runs blend together even more. I’d like to see a long tail vision for Delves that includes adding new Seasonal stories per Delve and maybe even making map tweaks or changes over time to show the ways that prior seasonal stories have impacted the Delve.

My concern is that unaddressed, we’ll end up being in a repetitive hole of Delving by the end of the expansion and they’ll be either demoted in rewards to be unviable or promoted in reward value in a way that harms the endgame ecosystem (more than you could argue they might already have).

Alt Gameplay Is Awesome, But Alt Gearing Is Awful

I can speak to this one super strongly, as it has become my project to push my entire alt army north of 580 item level and then start a slow grind on Delves and dungeons to reach north of 600.

Gearing an alt up right now feels terrible. You end leveling, on most routes, at around 530ish item level equipped, but most endgame activities require more – substantially more, at least in the 550s for basic stuff and going up sharply with each climb in difficulty. While Warband stuff helps with this a lot (both Warbound Until Equipped gear and Warband-wide rep rewards including being able to immediately buy reputation epic gear), you’re still going to struggle to bring an alt up to full viability. At every level, this looks different.

To start with, world content rewards remain pretty low, based in part off of equipped item level, so World Quests are only valuable to a point. They help, for sure, but at a pretty early point in gearing they fall off hard. World bosses almost never drop loot, so they’re out. Normal dungeons have never been less valuable, dropping 558 gear with no upgrade track at max level, and Heroics, while they drop 580 upgradeable gear, are stingy still and also generally not worth the time. The most valuable investment in that mid tier is doing world quests with War Mode on, since Bloody Tokens can buy upgradable and catalyst-compatible 593 gear, and then doing weekly event caches plus Delves, which can get you into the low 600s with ease. Then comes the problems.

Blizzard had a stone-discount in place for upgrades on alts throughout Dragonflight, and it’s nice. Joining it in TWW is a crest discount system, where if a character on your account has reached the “harbinger of the x” achievement for outgrowing a crest type, all upgrades on alts in that crest type are discounted down to 10 crests from 15. This is genuinely a nice quality of life update and system, and I like it a lot…but it has some big flaws.

Firstly, while the discount in crests is a huge savings, Valorstones remain the obstacle to gearing, as you either have none and need a lot or have a ton and need none – there is just never any in-between and it is frankly annoying as fuck because it feels very mathematically designed to piss you off. Here’s the kicker – PvP players can transfer Honor to alts via the Warband system, albeit at a 20% loss, but you cannot do the same with Valorstones. The intended Valorstone sink for your main is…buying the 593 caches of random Mythic dungeon loot, but you can only buy those on a character that has reached 1,000+ Mythic rating and that is not warbound attainment either, so only individual characters at that point can buy the caches. For me right now, that means a whopping two characters can buy a small amount of random, not even always useful as a result, gear. Great. If my main could give alts Valorstones, even at a loss like with Honor, I would like that very much. Of course, I continue to stand by the idea that the stone currency is pointless timegating and classic Blizzard obstruction of fun and should just simply be removed instead – but that’s a bit utopian even in WoW’s “third era.”

Secondly, farming crests on an alt is a giant pain for gearing past the low 600s. You’ll get a bazillion Weathered and Carved crests from rep rewards the second a character hits 80, so that isn’t a huge deal, but the second you start needing Runed, good fucking luck! Catching up a fresh alt on the crest grind is ridiculously hard, because for Runed and Gilded, you’d need to run like 100+ Mythic Plus dungeons in the appropriate key ranges to catch up for the season. That is just too many! Once a week in theory you could run a full Heroic and Mythic raid to get 90ish of each, but that is also a pipe-dream for most average players and their alts. Theoretically if you get incredibly lucky with Delver’s Bounty maps you could farm some Gilded that way, but each map is 3 crests, so hunker down and get to grinding!

And this is the part where we all go, “but hey, what about that crest discount system?” Yes, it helps a little bit, although there is one MAJOR flaw in the system with Gilded crests. In order to get the Harbinger achievement per crest level, you need every slot in your gear loadout to be at or above the item level that a crest maxes out at. So full 593 means Weathered, full 606 means Carved, full 619 for Runed, and full 639 for Gilded. The first 3 are fine enough, because maxed out upgradeable gear and max-rank crafted pieces in each tier reach this item level and count. For Gilded, however, this is a non-starter, because getting every slot to 639 is a Herculean task of slow-drip vaults, lucky Mythic raid loot, and oh, by the way, the max level for Gilded-level crafted gear is 636 which means that crafted gear, while it might be BiS given embellishments, does not count, so the only way to ever max out Gilded crests is to also have a standard Mythic raid drop or Mythic +10 vault piece in that same slot and max upgrade it.

So in short – Valorstones are an annoying bottleneck designed to piss you off, Crests are slow-going and require a ton of catchup, you need a character to be capable of spending an insane amount of crests with insane loot luck to be able to get the full range of crest discounts, and gear is generally bottlenecked in stages where you’ll feel like you breakthrough, but the process doesn’t feel the most rewarding or enjoyable.

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Something I want to be careful of here is to say that I am still enjoying the game overall, as the moment-to-moment combat gameplay still feels great and I enjoy getting together with my raiders to play. However, I think there are some massive issues with the ways in which Blizzard has cut the fun out of the seasonal model this time out by nerfing Mythic Plus rewards, keeping raid rewards relatively light, and then outside the seasonal model there are some serious issues with current tank tuning and healer tuning around damage profiles that are making the support role feel the worst it has in my 19+ years playing World of Warcraft. While Blizzard has been more responsive than I expected in some regards, they’ve been largely quiet and complacent as of late while the season withers on the vine, and I dislike that strongly. The upcoming patch doesn’t take nearly enough steps towards addressing the tuning problems with support roles and the season 1 model remains largely as-is with a new OP ring just like in DF to attempt to soft-nerf the content in a way. I want reasons to be excited to push keys again and have that be a fun experience, I want to want to play my alts in higher-end content like keys and even PUG raiding, I want Delves to stay a fun and light endgame experience with good rewards, but right now the intersection of the current design philosophy in each of these is just not as fun as it needs to be. We’re likely to be with this season until February or March, and so I need Blizzard to do more than just commit to making changes for Season 2 – there needs to be more immediate changes to the current season before players fall off even harder.

I like The War Within, but I want to engage with it more than basic gearing on alts and a weekly raid, and right now, the game just isn’t accommodating of that, which feels pretty bad.