Last week, Blizzard returned to retail WoW with the battle royale mini-mode Plunderstorm, enabling it for a monthlong window during the doldrums of Season 1 of The War Within. Plunderstorm is an interesting and contentious mode, largely because of some flaws with that first round implementation, and Blizzard did something really commendable here…they actually kinda fixed it. Let’s get into it.

Why Plunderstorm Blundered

Plunderstorm’s initial rollout was with WoW’s patch 10.2.7 back in early 2024. At the time, Plunderstorm was promised as innovative on the backs of what it wasn’t – announced ahead of time (short of teases), tested on PTR, or made available in PTR patch files for datamining. It was kept completely under-wraps until patch day when suddenly, the files hit the live game CDN and a coordinated info dump from Blizzard and dataminers pushed the mode into public awareness. Plunderstorm had been promised as new retail WoW content, and it being a mode that existed more in parallel to Retail and not as new, actual Retail content to play with your existing character for new power progression and rewards was a bit disappointing. It had cosmetics for the real game and even the raid loot token that you could use once per account, but outside of that, Plunderstorm was an island unto itself.

Plunderstorm’s biggest issue besides the nature of its rollout was the atrocious rewards grind it had in store. In the first iteration, rewards were given out piecemeal over a 40-level Renown track, requiring you to loot 2,500 Plunder per rank in order to receive 1-2 rewards at a time, distributed in an order that put the most desirable stuff at the end of the track. If you wanted to finish a transmog set, there wasn’t just a full set unlock – no, you had to grind 8-12 Renown levels per set to get every piece individually. The biggest buzzkill for everyone I knew, including myself, about the first iteration was exactly that – if you wanted the coolest pirate getup, you had to commit to grinding for weeks. The full Renown track required around 100,000 Plunder to be earned in total – which, if you were lucky, was around 40 matches, but if you were unlucky, was substantially more than that. Even if you only wanted select rewards, the grind towards them was real, because you had to work your way to whatever Renown rank that reward rested at, likely playing dozens of matches to get there. Even if you enjoyed the game mode, it was a lot of effort for some cosmetics!

So the mode was not pre-announced and players were given a grindy gameplay mode that was a diversion from normal Retail WoW instead of an addition to it, but at least you could plan ahead and try to map out a route to the rewards you wanted, right? Well, wrong! Blizzard didn’t give OG Plunderstorm an end-date until much later into its run, so there was a perpetual feeling of FOMO – it could end next reset, so you better grind those rewards now!

All of these factors coalesced into begrudging acceptance and disappointment. Plunderstorm could be fun! – but for the average player, it was just a huge grind that sanded the fun right off of it. I came to this feeling about Plunderstorm – even as I understood it better and came to have some amount of enjoyment from it, the rewards track sucked the fun right out. I finished that grind and never looked back.

So what has changed with the 2.0 version?

Every Issue Addressed (Yes, Really)

Blizzard actually targeted virtually every complaint you could have about the original version of Plunderstorm and fixed it. It was announced far ahead of time and even available to test in brief windows on the PTR! The rewards switched from a fixed-track Renown system to the Plunderstore, which allows you to buy the rewards from both the newest run and the original run, and the total cost of all rewards is less than it took in Plunder to progress the full Renown track from the first time (70,000 to buy everything versus 100,000 in Renown)! There’s a practice mode so you can grab powers, read tooltips, and understand the ideas in play prior to queuing up a match! You can queue for Plunderstorm from the PvP interface in Retail and not just through a dedicated lobby that requires a full switch! Matches no longer require exiting to the lobby to requeue, you can just requeue while spectating your current match, browse the Plunderstore, and get dropped right into the pre-match staging area as soon as your next match is available! These are all small-ish tweaks, but they make Plunderstorm 2.0 a snappier and more fun experience.

Blizzard Didn’t Blizzard-Out

When the Plunderstore was announced, I fully suspected that they’d have a conversion rate on Plunder in-game versus Plunder the currency. I expected a 2-1, 3-1, 4-1, hell even a 5-1 ratio of conversion, so that you’d keep grinding and the grind would take about as long as the first iteration. Nope! They did a good thing and made it no conversion – every Plunder you earn in-match is a Plunder you can spend right after. That means there is a real reward for succeeding at your matches – my one win this cycle earned me 3,500 Plunder so I could buy a lot of things immediately, and even losses where you make sure to hit your Captain’s Orders quest can still be lucrative. If you can hit a winning streak and play well consistently, you can progress quickly through the store until nothing remains for you to buy. By keeping the first run items available, Blizzard has also made it so that Plunderstorm feels less like a FOMO factory – if it comes back in this style every season, I could see it working out very well, although I do feel like a chump for grinding out the original track back in Dragonflight given the new style.

By comparison, it took me just over a month of nearly daily Plunderstorm to fully progress the Renown track in Plunderstorm 1.0. In 2.0, it took me about 6 hours of play to earn enough Plunder to buy everything new in the event, and at that rate, I could have bought everything from the original run in another 6 hours of play. It took nearly 40 hours of gameplay in the first run to get half the rewards I would have received in 12 hours of the new version, which is actually kind of nuts.

There’s Still Room To Grow

Plunderstorm has a few gaps I still would like to see Blizzard address. One, I dislike that we have to queue in as our Battletags and customize a Plunderstorm character. Especially given that we can queue from Retail through the PvP interface, it would be cool to be able to queue in as the character I am playing at the moment, customized as they are – maybe even transmog included, but especially name and identity. It is jarring to queue through the Retail game and then get dropped in on a different character elsewhere with a username instead of a character identity.

Secondly, I think taking away Trios was a mistake and regression from last time, even though Trios came later there. I’d like to have an option to play with more friends or not have to make decisions to go with Friend A over B if all 3 of us want to play together. Adding practice is great but right now it looks like it came at the cost of Trios, so that feels a bit meh.

Thirdly, I want more maps. I get that the BfA version of Arathi Highlands is like a quintessential portrait of the Warcraft universe, but I think there are a lot of existing maps that could be so cool to play with. I’d love a Maw map, a Zereth Mortis map, an Ohn’ahran Plains map, hell maybe even a fusion map of Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge so you can run through Blackrock Mountain in the middle – there are a lot of interesting maps that could be used in this kind of gameplay that already exist in WoW, and Plunderstorm’s inspiration in Fortnite has varied seasonal maps, so each season of Plunderstorm having a unique map and themed transmogs for it would be neat – imagine a Maw season with Hellforged Pirate gear and a skeletal, iron-made parrot mount, or the Blackrock idea with magma-infused Plunderstorm gear and a burning mount. There’s room to do unique stuff that can closely mirror the existing assets and ideas while adding enough to them to not just be palette swaps.

Lastly, and this is a bigger WoW problem…I think that there’s room to make Plunderstom more enjoyable outside the rewards track. This is a problem I have with WoW in general in stuff I like even, like Mythic Plus or raid, but WoW has an awesome reward system that gives players a reason to play up until an achievement or reward breakpoint, where you are then supposed to play for love of the game. And I like the game a lot, but like, I don’t do M+ past KSH level, I don’t push raid past AOTC and the Glory achievements, and as soon as I finished buying my last Plunderstore reward, I stopped playing Plunderstorm. I like it a lot more this time! – but there’s just not enough meat on those bones for me to want to keep going beyond that. I’ll likely help friends finish their rewards, the same as I would a repeat AOTC kill or M+ push, but outside of that, Plunderstorm, barely 6 days old in this run as I type this, is already functionally dead for me. There’s just nothing to see in it that I haven’t already seen. And some of that is a me problem, sure – but I also know that even in other WoW content, I am far from unique and this is something I would like to see Blizzard take a stab at. If there was some added variety to Plunderstorm – maps, unique rewards, maybe even some from of retail gear reward like the first time – I’d be considering continuing on. But at this point, it has served its purpose – and I enjoyed it, but enjoying it enough to finish the rewards is maybe not the pinnacle of achievement here.

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Plunderstorm is actually substantially better this time due to these small changes, and I would like to see it continue iteration and reruns down the road. This newest version does a lot to restore my faith in Blizzard as a design team, although there is room to see this level of adaptability and responsiveness in the real game. I’m optimistic that over time, Blizzard could make Plunderstorm a well-loved fan-favorite mode across a wider swath of the playerbase, but for this time, I think a fun little diversion that can completely quickly and enjoyably is an improvement to 1.0 and well worth another look if you even just kind of liked the core idea last time!