The War Within’s first season has been interesting for me as I try to reconcile two key points about it and my interaction with it – it wasn’t a particularly great season of content but I also engaged with it so thoroughly that it is difficult for me to have much bad to say about it.

On the surface, here’s the challenge – the game has certainly seen better seasons of content. The raid tier in Nerub-ar Palace was by no means bad, but it also feels burdened with first raid curse – it’s not going to be particularly memorable save for maybe aspects of the Queen fight, the WeakAura debate over Mythic-level fights like Broodtwister Ovi’nax and Silken Court, and the novelty of having a dungeon boss in Rasha’nan crash into the raid implying a sequence of events that is actually pretty neat. Mythic Plus in Season 1 was marked by a sharp difficulty curve with higher-than-average tuning of most dungeons, the unfun addition of Challenger’s Peril at a key range where it was in the way of a lot of players in the Keystone Master-attaining range, and rewards for Mythic Plus being designed in a way that took a lot of the early reward out of the system while making the top-end of achievement a little worse than Dragonflight was as well. Class and spec tuning was inconsistent, marked with major mid-season shifts to talent and especially Hero Talent tuning that forced new builds and even new stat priorities for existing builds long into the gearing process. Tanks and healers were overly taxing to play with changes that shifted self-sustain away from tanks while also not changing damage profiles or healing requirements in a way to let healers have breathing room within those changes in the dungeon scene.

The War Within as an expansion is an interesting collection of zones, albeit a bit too underground for my tastes, even with measures taken to ease that. The storytelling of The War Within’s first bit of content has marked a step up from Blizzard, but it is also a safe and relatively minor improvement that leans on the stay awhile and listen dialogue options to add a lot of the best details while the main story makes a few obvious strides towards trope city (the Titans might not be good guys and while we view the Light as good and Anduin’s attempt to reconnect to it as good, it might also be evil). The concept of Delves further advance modern WoW’s convenience-oriented core gameplay outside of the major existing pillars, giving players a way to solo or party-tackle simple PvE content with high rewards, rewards that sort of pulled players out of the low-end of Mythic Plus and Normal raiding in favor of these small bites of content that can be tackled in 15-30 minutes for decent payoff. Dragonflight’s advances of world events continue with each zone now having a major world event that can be done weekly for a reward, with the caches all tied together into a cohesive system where any mix of activities can reward you done in any order, with the first two of any number of weekly activities always rewarding a reasonable piece of gear for open world content. Profession design, likewise, continues on the Dragonflight model, albeit shifting away from weekly NPC quests and more towards use of the Work Order system as the primary source of knowledge points for crafting.

The launch window contained a lot of interesting overlap of events and celebrations within the game, with the multiple in-game fall and winter holidays coupled with the major addition of the 20th Anniversary celebration, Classic Timewalking, and revamps to timewalking scaling and rewards with new rewards added for all the existing eras of timewalking (still no BfA or Shadowlands timewalking yet, though, too busy milking those dungeons for reworks in M+!). The expansion also got its first added zone with Siren Isle, a repurposed Island Expedition originally planned for BfA but never released, and it got the full Forbidden Reach treatment – a borrowed power ring that will lose effectiveness against Season 2 loot and an island whose sole reason for existing is filler questing that will be forgotten in just a few weeks as people get fresh level 80s their ring and push into Season 2 content.

So I’ve done all this recapping and negativity up top to show the scale of the problem that TWW faces and has faced for many players. And yet, I kinda really enjoy this expansion, I’ve played it voraciously, and I wanted today in my typical season recap to explore that and discuss the future.

Warband Wins, Warbound Wishes

The single biggest helper to my joy in WoW this expansion is one word – warbands.

I play a lot of alts and I enjoy being able to push multiple alts to seasonal goals – KSM, AOTC, finishing the raid in general, and gearing up. In Dragonflight, as Season 1 rode off into the sunset, I remember spending nearly a whole weekend preparing for Season 2 goals. I had to log onto every character I had at the time – around 20 with 13 at max level – and mail my gold and trade supplies to a central character I designated as my banker (my prot paladin stepped up to be the mule). I then had to take those pooled resources and reallocate them across my account, which I did by using the supplies and funds to purchase a set amount of each character’s chosen spec food, flasks (sorry, phials at the time, ick), weapon enhancers, and some spare enchants, and then mail them back out along with an evenly divided amount of gold I had mathed out accounting for postage fees. It was tedious and unenjoyable, and then Season 2 of Dragonflight was a wet fucking fart that kinda pushed me back into FFXIV for a minute. Oof.

For as much as Blizzard had, over the years, made the alt and multi-character experience of playing WoW easier and more enjoyable, the core of it, especially as you scale up in alt gameplay, was a tedious timesuck built around restrictions that were designed when the game had massive difficulties with RMT and account hacking, which modern advances in authentication technology and improvements in-game with the WoW Token have largely mitigated. I have alts spread across 3 servers, and a large amount of what I wanted to do wasn’t possible then, which is why all my original main alts were on the same server. But I wanted to be prepared and I put in the time of allocating my total hoard of resources across the characters I intended to play, but the season lost steam for me quickly and a lot of those resources sat unused until Season 3, and even then it wasn’t enough for me to use them all because I had bought assuming I was going to play so much more – I ended up liquidating them a few weeks into this expansion.

But in The War Within, so much has changed with a few simple (on the surface) tweaks through Warbands. I’ve consistently used the Warbank as my central repository, holding all my current expansion trade materials, BoEs and Warbound Until Equipped gear, and the vast majority of my gold there (the addon Warbank ATM is so good for this, you set a gold floor for your characters and then when you open a Warband bank access point it auto-dumps anything over or withdraws to keep you at that level). Spinning up an alt for a push to KSM or a random weekend community PUG raid is super easy, because I have weapon augments, buff food, flasks, and all manner of things easily available on that character with a stop to the bank. No need to log out, log in on another toon, find and mail the stuff, then log back out and back in on the original character just to pull that stuff out of a mailbox – it’s instant and easy, go to bank, go to Warband tab, pull what you need, done. Likewise, keeping up with crafting has been so much easier this expansion since I can make reagents, drop them in the warbank, and they are accessible to any character without even having to stop at the bank! I actually have multiple extremely viable crafters to a point of self-sufficiency this expansion because it takes barely any time to run around each week on a small handful of trade characters and just blast through Patron work orders for easy knowledge points. Odds are good that by the end of Season 2, I’ll be maxed out or near maxed out on knowledge for every single TWW profession, where in Dragonflight, I maxed one – Alchemy, on my main.

The Warband concept and systems are a thing that has vastly increased the enjoyment of just playing the game, because I certainly would never have managed or wanted to manage 45 maximum-level characters without it. My season prep this time for Season 2, compared to what I just described in Dragonflight, was way simpler – I made some hearty food for my band of designated content pushers to eat, I made a stockpile of flasks based on what those characters would use, and I dumped a big batch of mana oils and stones for weapons. I bought a ton of Magnificent Jeweler’s Settings while they were cheap so that all of my push characters can socket their jewelry immediately (56 settings in total!). It took nearly no added gameplay time or commitment and I was able to just quickly grab them and drop them into the warbank without so much as a second thought. As I play alts into the season, all I have to do to be ready is drop by the warbank and grab out a couple handfuls of materials, no character switches, no mailboxes, and no real hassle.

I never actually thought we’d get to this point with WoW, where it mirrors a lot of what makes the job system in FFXIV compelling. Sure, in that game it is one character doing all the stuff, but by aligning the incentive structure and storage of resources in the game to the player level instead of per-character, WoW is at a similar level of overall ease of play and ability to quickly swap to do something else (in some ways better, given how gearing one character through multiple jobs is bottlenecked in XIV, but that’s not the topic here today!). It means so much more of my WoW time is actually just playing the game, which means I can accomplish other goals faster, which I did – all of my 45 level 80s hit at least a 600 item level equipped, 3 hit Keystone Master with one at Keystone Hero, 1 was close to KSM, and I cleared Nerub-ar Palace on Normal fully on 4 character, on heroic fully on two (with a resto Druid at 7/8 heroic!), and my main Monk reached for my first-ever current-content Mythic raid boss kill on a whim, all of which was relatively easy to do given the structures in the game through Warbands that support it.

Now, I do have things I would like to see improved in the Warband system. Currently, there’s a very awkward shuffle with crafting where anything you make has to be dropped back into the bank manually, and it would be nice, especially for intermediate crafts like ingots or bolts of cloth, for me to be able to designate the warbank as the destination for those crafts. Likewise, since a majority of my account’s gold stockpile is in the warbank, I would love for there to be an option to enable warbank repairs so that any character on my account could use those funds without needing to make a stop to withdraw first. This could get messy with guild repairs, but I’d like to see a way to set a hierarchical approach where I can use guild funds first, and then at guild limit start using warbank gold instead, maybe with an option to set a per-character limit (or even a way to rank and sort alts such that I could set unique limits, but that would be more complex). With the initial revelation Warbands have been generally though, I think the view I have of WoW’s possibility space for what can be done with account-wide interaction is so much more open and interesting than it has been since they first started slowly nudging things to account-wide ease all the way back in Warlords of Draenor.

Seasonal Affective Disorder

The thing about TWW’s first content season is this – it was pretty bad, but also not really that bad. I’m going to contextualize this so put down the pitchfork for a minute.

On the one hand, as I started the post with, this season made some awful design and balance decisions. Tank and healer balance was atrocious (pretty much every key beyond a 15 or so is tanked by a protection Paladin and healed by a Discipline Priest. The DPS meta was so defined that at high keys you basically had one flexible DPS slot that was generally 1 of 3 different specs depending on the regional preference. Sure, that doesn’t mean that was all that could be played, but those kind of high-key pressures slide down into lower keys and meant that getting a PUG could be a nightmare. The season was punishing enough that meta-slaving became the norm, more than it even already is. Challenger’s Peril made playing more casual M+ keys was a nightmare at a certain point, making the KSM breakpoint a lot more stress-inducing than it generally has been. Raid was better, but also generally not exciting or memorable in a way that I’ll hold onto thoughts of this tier for. Given that my primary raid role is tank, it has in fact, been somewhat boring, as the extent of mechanics most fights give tanks is a mitigation check, a positioning check or movement requirement, and a taunt swap. Sure, they tried varying taunt swaps with more combo-busters that ask you to hand off the boss mid-combo or else, and that is fine, but very little about tanking this tier felt new or novel. I ended up playing every role in the raid between alt runs and PUGS, including in Heroic, and honestly, the tier was generally kind of mechanically straightforward outside of a few twists (Ovi’nax egg pops, Ky’veza’s Twilight Massacre). Now, to be fair, for the first tier of an expansion, that isn’t necessarily bad – you gotta learn the new talents and play dynamics somehow, but as a near 20 year vet of this game, it felt a bit samey to me.

At the same time, I am also a flexible player, and some of the shortcomings of the season were fine to me because I could adapt around them. I don’t normally play tank as a main role in M+, so I pushed to KSM and later KSH on my main Monk via Windwalker DPS – a spec that was often meta-locked out, but it only took a few invites to 10-11 range keys to knock out those last rating points. I still healed on Discipline Priest almost all the way to KSM – I at least got my nearly-full Mythic colorway for the Priest set and adapted to the gameplay enough that I had some genuinely enjoyable healer keys that way. I played multiple DPS, including keeping my blog namesake DH up to KSM level and getting a new first-ever KSM on my Horde Retribution Paladin, which was both my first Horde toon to achieve that level and my first Paladin to do the same. I PUG raided a lot, including my first current tier Mythic raid boss and my first time pushing multiple alts, in PUGs, though the full extent of Heroic.

In spite of the season’s shortcomings, I had a lot of fun just playing the game. I kept to my trend of playing with every single spec in the game in group content, kept my swelling alt roster in a relatively decent state of gearing, and joined new PUG communities that have expanded my possibilities for content in the game. Intellectually, I totally understand it – for a lot of reasons, this season felt awful at times, and that reflects in how delayed my push from KSM to KSH was. But I also found other ways to enjoy the game outside of those standard endgame activities.

Altoholism Sets In

In Dragonflight, I made a goal and posted here about it that I wanted, eventually, to have every spec in the game on a unique character at max level. I didn’t get there in DF – close, I had the characters rolled and ready, but I didn’t quite get there. During the time in MoP Remix I could have pushed harder, I was deep into Dawntrail on the FFXIV side, so I only leveled a few alts that way. TWW’s first season hit with me near to 30 max level characters at 70 now needing 10 more levels to keep that title. Once I hit most of my seasonal goals, I just kept leveling alts, which Blizzard made easy with constant XP bonus events rolling nearly the entire duration of the first season, at least past like October. This high-gain period coincided with a lack of in-game goals I was chasing, as I had very nearly done the whole gamut of seasonal content quite early – KSM by day 10, Glory of the Delver early on, Zekvir ?? difficulty at about a 20 item level disadvantage, and so I was just working through raid content with my guild and slowly grinding up tradeskills across my account. It made sense at that time to push alts, to use the bonuses provided to maximize XP gains and go hard. Slowly but surely, I over-achieved my original alt goal – sitting now at 45 max level characters, all of whom are geared and could step into endgame content relatively easily. I did hundreds of Delves, world quests, dungeon bosses – and now for the rest of the expansion, I can focus fully on endgame as it (hopefully) makes pointed improvements from season 1.

This feels like a concession in some ways – the game was iffy in the stuff I normally enjoy, so just do this thing instead – and it kinda was! But it was also enjoyable to me, and it felt like fun to be able to just push a new alt, explore the new zones at my leisure, and develop strategies for how to level more characters. I was rotating rest XP. I was doing the pop quiz on lore at the 20th Anniversary event like every day on every lowbie alt. I leveled my Earthen from 10-70 off of exploration experience primarily due to their racial bonus to it. I started doing 70-80 using speedrunner strats. It was fun, and I enjoyed it more than I expected, given that my stated baseline stance has nearly always been that I hate leveling and generally see it as a nuisance in the way of doing the things I want to do on a given character.

Goals Made, Goals Attained

I set out with a big list of Season 1 goals. How’d I do?

KSM – Done x3!
KSH – Done
Immortal Spelunker – Done
Zekvir ?/?? – Double-done
Delver’s Journey S1 – Done
All Delves at Tier 11 – Done
Brann at Max Level S1 – Done
AotC – Done x3
Alt-Leveling – 45/39, super done!
Professions to Max Skill and at least halfway through Knowledge Points – Done!

I wrote about nearly all of these, so the only new one was the profession one, but as time went on, it became obvious to me that I needed to engage more with tradeskills and I wanted to create a full state of self-sufficiency where I could make and provide all the things I needed for regular play. I’m happy to say that I am entering Season 2 in pretty much exactly the state I want – bank full of materials, decent-enough gold stash for things I might need to buy, tradeskills and recipes leveled and obtained in a way that I can 5-star nearly every combat craft I can make on any profession, and an army of alts that can farm more stuff and keep things rolling as we progress the season.

Season 2 In View

Like I put forward in my recent post about M+ and approachability, I am hyped for Season 2 of TWW. I think a lot of the changes made reflect feedback from players in a positive way, it seems like the game is going to be more fun, both to play but also in terms of theme and story, and I’m looking forward to trying some new things as the season winds on.

I’ll do my basic goals outline here, although I expect I’ll write in more detail about them later in their own post.

Firstly, I have a squad of characters I intend to play and push as mains – my Monk (tank in raid, DPS in keys, my Havoc DH, my Ret Paladin, a Destro Warlock, a Guardian Druid, and a Discipline Priest. My plan is to see Season 2 from every POV and eventually take all of these characters through the raid and hopefully to KSM as well. I’ve stashed all the materials and upgrade items they’ll need to succeed and intend to push them pretty hard this season.

I’m also aiming at a new goal – to reach KSM on day 1 of the season. I am going to stream this as a charity event for Extra Life over at twitch.tv/kaylriene on March 4th here in the US if you want to see me try (and perhaps fail). I plan to continue on beyond that to KSH and the new Keystone Legend achievement as well, which will be the hardest I have ever pushed in terms of key levels. My hope is that long-term, I can gear all of my alts to near Heroic base item level as well – I got to mid-Normal raid level this season, which is great, but without needing to level characters, the time I spent there can be redirected to gearing instead, so I expect to be doing many more Delves. I also want to ensure I hit the season Delve goals – full Journey, new boss beaten solo at max difficulty for the bling blimp, and any new story, Brann, or difficulty-related achievements.

Raid-wise, I plan to push harder, including PUGging outside of my normal raid to try and reach AotC early and get more hands-on experience with the fights to learn them better for leading. I want to ensure all of my designated pushers get through the full raid on Heroic at least once. I also want to ensure I collect full tier set appearances for at least LFR and Normal, a goal I rather easily hit this season.

In Closing

While I don’t think that TWW’s first season was all that bad, it also won’t go down as a particularly good season that people look back on fondly. In some ways, it will get off easy because it was the first season of an expansion, with the multi-directional goals and gameplay that entails. However, I do think that the groundwork laid through new systems this expansion, which we got our first real taste of in this season, are strong, and with a more stable and enjoyable gameplay structure built atop them, I think the game will be in a much better state. Will Season 2 be that structure we need? Well…we’ll find out soon enough. For now, though, I hold onto hope that it will be an enjoyable season and it is one I am looking forward to.