I’ve had a busy Season 2 of The War Within, diving headfirst into all the content. What do I mean? Well, in the first 9 days of the season I…

-got Keystone Master knocked out (day 6)
-finished the Normal raid (day 3)
-defeated the Underpin seasonal delve boss on ? difficulty (day 2) and ?? (day 9)
-geared into Heroic-tier item levels on my main

So, what are my impressions?

Well, I think the first thing I can say is this – I’ve really and perhaps obviously enjoyed it, given the wide array of things I have done as opposed to a usual single-minded focus. I’ll use the bullet list of early season achievements above to break out into a list!

-Season 2 Dungeons

I had a lot of hope for this season, that it would save the Mythic Plus ecosystem from the doldrums of Season 1’s overtly high difficulty that was punishing on tanks, punishing for healers, and punishing for pickup-play with strangers. So far it has mostly delivered.

At the start of the season, everything is going to feel hard for two primary reasons – you haven’t been able to gear creep yet and the knowledge level of the average player about the new dungeon pool is pretty low. This season especially, Blizzard was tuning and making fundamentally large mechanical changes right up to and even a bit past season start, so a lot of players just haven’t seen the mechanics enough. This season also has a completely new dungeon that only came out with the patch, which means that the normal learning curve is worse than normal. If you’re having bad dungeon runs early, that’s kind of normal – people just don’t know (even the most raid-prepared players I know stumble like drunken weirdos into dungeons expecting to have everything explained to them without asking for it), and the best possible gear from last season is just the starting line for rewards this time around, so you can theoretically start with more power, but not so much so that you have a huge leg up.

I’ve actually had a good time, and was even prior to the global 10% health and damage nerfs that were stamped onto these dungeons. The changes made to tanking and trash mechanics have meant the keys where I’ve played Brewmaster or Guardian Druid have felt decently good, the increased time on interruptible major casts means I can sometimes even convince my most mechanically blind dungeon buddies to interrupt something for once, and the overall difficulty curve of progressing the key ladder this season is generally pretty smooth. The new Xal’atath affix; Pulsar, which is in rotation this week as I write this, is fine enough if annoying (a lot of players run from the balls instead of grabbing them and I’m yelling at my PC everytime someone shimmies away from my perfectly-aimed ball bait), and the progression of affixes means that at worst, with my best key at +9, I’ve only dealt with two affixes at a time, an easy Xal’atath affix and either Fortified or Tyrannical.

I actually kind of like all the dungeons this time, but in difficulty terms, Priory of the Sacred Flame, Operation: Floodgate, and Cinderbrew Meadery are a tier up in challenge while Darkflame Cleft and Rookery are two of the easiest and free-est keys I’ve ever seen in a season. Everything else is kind of in the mid-tier of difficulty and not particularly bad, and even the higher-difficulty examples just require players being more mechanically aware of the dungeons, which will improve naturally (god I’m an optimist) over the season.

It’s been a much better overall season start, although I am keeping in mind that at this point of Season 1, I felt pretty good too, although subconsciously in Season 1, I was bailing out of keys the second I hit KSM, where I have done several more keys and pushed alts already since I got KSM a few days ago this time around, so there is a clear difference so far for me at least.

-Liberation of Undermine

I have two competing thoughts about this current raid.

Firstly, it’s annoying. The navigation just being the Undermine map but with rails and lots of trash kinda blows, the trash density is bad (yeah I’m double-dipping here because the trash can go fuck itself), and some of the fun touches (being able to be one-shot in traffic accidents by roaming cars) are fun the first couple of times but quickly grow annoying if you raid with inattentive folks. Healing checks being largely based around healing to remove healing-absorbing shields is not particularly interesting or novel, tanking this raid comes with the usual caveat that you get exempted from a lot of mechanics so it can be a bit rote and repetitive, and while Blizzard has made a better effort for this raid to have add, cleave, and even a couple full-AoE scenarios, it is largely a continuation of modern WoW’s single-target raid obsession, where you just won’t swap off of your trusty top single-target damage talent build most of the time.

Having led with the negative, overall though, I actually really like Liberation of Undermine. The bosses are fun and flavorful, the novel mechanics that do exist are actually quite unique among the fights in the game (Stix’s Katamari-like trash balls, One-Armed Bandit’s high roller mechanic), and the overall pacing of the raid on Normal is pretty good, abundant trash pulls aside. The use of a Renown track with account-wide application for a damage buff and additional rewards both cosmetic and raid-affecting is pretty neat, and hopefully we see the Dinar-replacement that was originally in the Renown track sooner than later.

Overall, I think the raid is a win, annoyances aside. In moments, the annoyances can really stack up and create tension, but most of the raid so far in my experience has been a joy to play.

-The Underpin

The seasonal delve boss this time around, Underpin is a fight that, like Zek’vir, is available on two difficulties, a baseline mode which teaches some mechanics and gives a pathway to the second difficulty, a challenge fight, which rewards a mount appearance if done solo (allegedly, as the appearance is bugged currently and not rewarded when you win so you know that’s fun!).

Underpin is, no way around it, substantially easier than Zek’vir. That’s not to say it is an easy fight, but the single-question mark difficulty is straightforward to a point and can be done simply in pretty average gear – a number of my guildies have already successfully tackled the fight below the baseline normal raid item level and won.

Double-question mark is…well, a lot harder, and that is mostly down to positional demands but also to a single large bug that makes the fight potentially impossible. Unlike Zek’vir, the fight is almost identical to the lower difficulty, with the exception being that everything is scaled higher and that the bomb drops he does have flame circle AoE to dodge as bombs come out, which makes stopping to cast or staying in melee of the boss much harder. Otherwise, all the mechanics work identically – you dodge Crush circles, dodge Flamethrower, kick bombs to the adds to kill them while dodging their orb AoEs, and blast the shield on the boss before he finishes casting it and heals. The bug, which is a major damper on the fight, is that the adds can sometimes spawn into the stands, which means they cannot be hit by anything – not a bomb, not targeted ranged spells, nothing, and it also means that the indicator lines for their orb blasts sometimes disappear, leaving you to guess the angle of attack and react instead of being able to plan meticulously around it.

The trick is that the fight is really simple if broken down to a priority list of tasks. Safety over everything, shield over everything else, add management over other mechanics, and then finally you put damage into the Underpin. While his health pool looks daunting, and it kind of is (the fight is basically a DPS and execution check because the longer the fight goes on the worse off you will be), it also sort of intelligently aligns to your burst windows in a really satisfying way. All specs I tried both fights on get to the shield around cooldown timers, so while you push the first one and control it by pushing the boss to 80% on your schedule, if you full send cooldowns for that first shield, most of the time you’ll have some or all of them coming back by the next shield. It’s surprisingly elegant design for WoW, in that while the fight seems sort of random and chaotic, there is a controlled pace to everything that shines as you push harder through it.

But that elegance also makes it simpler than Zek’vir if you play well, so there’s just less to get excited about in terms of challenge or learning curve. If you’ve done single question mark, there’s not really a huge twist like the mid-fight phasing on Zek’vir ?? brought, once you see the first bomb drop, there’s no surprise or bonus phase, no real increase of challenge in execution, just higher failure penalties. Not even necessarily always insta-death – just a quick spiral, where getting hit by one thing takes away resources to put into proper execution and makes it difficult to get back on track. Not necessarily impossible, but improbable.

This is not helped by the fact that Brann seems to have stripped himself of armor or any defensiveness between seasons (and not in the presented way with lack of curios or his precious hat). Brann is observably weaker this season, and while Healer Brann was a necessity for me to tackle Zek’vir ?? as Windwalker last season where he died like twice and only ever in the last phase, this season on Underpin, if I did the fight as Windwalker with Healer Brann, he just died in the first 45 seconds no matter what. It’s not like my Brann is weak either, he’s level 69 (n i c e) and has full rank 4 curio loadouts, he just fucking eats shit no matter what, so you get no healing or DPS contribution from him. I had to switch to Brewmaster and DPS Brann, where somehow, DPS Brann survives far better and never died on any of my pulls at the ?? difficulty level despite being the same level and curio options! I haven’t even tried tank Brann in the scenario, but I did have my Discipline Priest blast the ? difficulty with DPS Brann and it took like 4 pulls at 640 item level! So now’s time I guess to segue into the proper full Delve discussion…

-Delves – Steps Forward and Back

Delves are tuned much lighter this season in terms of auto-attack damage and overall mechanical difficulty. The most annoying delves of last season have been adjusted, like Sporebits no longer being attackable mobs but instead being little AoEs that only respond if you stand near them for long stretches or the candle mechanic in Kriegval’s Rest being turned into a placeable candle with no fuel but instead charges that you can pick back up to keep for later. The overall challenge from basic stuff like auto-attacks is much more in-line with actual content, so tier 11 delves no longer blast you in the face for your entire health pool (or anywhere near it, thankfully). The new delves are fun maps with mostly simple layouts and objectives – both have one story mode I kinda dislike, but overall they’re pretty good.

The problem this season is Brann’s tuning, in that he’s been hit hard in a lot of weird and incomprehensible ways.

Firstly, we have the addition of Tank Brann. Tank Brann is intended, by Blizzard’s admission, to be exclusively for Healer players, because he gets walloped by stuff and his main DPS mechanic is that he does pulsing AoE damage based on effective healing received. Sure, in an offspec like Ret or Windwalker you can kinda cheese that by healing him, but the intent was clear and he primarily functions best in that role. For the first two weeks of the patch, he was fine – arguably a smidge overpowered, but fine. If you played him properly as a healer, you could quite easily do Tier 11 delves, which was great. Then Blizzard came and hit him with the nerf bat hard – less damage done, 60% increased damage taken, a large health reduction – all bad.

Now, if Brann had like actual intelligent scripting to manage his movement and positioning so that he wasn’t standing in bullshit all the time, that would be one thing, but he doesn’t, so he stands in AoEs, has no built-in AoE damage reduction so he gets trucked, and dies. Awesome change!

I’m only salty about this one because I did week 1 delves with Tank Brann as Disc Priest, and it was about as hard as doing them on my Monk or DH – I had to pay attention, but it was doable with a modicum of effort, and now it suddenly is harder than anything else to do them that way, to a point where I’ve mostly gone back to DPS Brann for my healers. DPS Brann lives and covers my potential gaps as a healer, and since auto-attacks are tuned down, I don’t get meleed for most of my health on a regular basis, so why not? Blizzard says they carefully considered the changes and tested them, but I have to ask here somewhat condescendingly – did you really though? Tank Brann exists to correct a deficiency that existed in Season 1, and by nerfing him into a hole, you’ve just created the same deficiency with more steps! At the point what tank Brann does matters and I need him most, he is the weakest and worst version of himself possible, which seems stupid, frankly.

So there’s that forward and back – Delves overall are better, the tuning of the Delves themselves is more on-point for solo players across roles, but the Brann changes peel back some of that improved tuning by still bearing a different kind of discrepancy for us to be concerned with. If they didn’t make it so that one of the best things you could do for weekly character progression was Tier 11 bountiful delves, then okay, fine – but now that I’m supposed to want and need to do Tier 11s (and can on most of my dedicated high-end characters), it makes little sense to take away a vital lifeline for healer players who would otherwise struggle to do them. And sure, yes, Blizzard recommends higher gear levels for those upper-tier delves (higher than you might reasonably have without doing them if they’re your main gameplay engagement with endgame!), but that still raises the question of the disparity between roles in what is supposed to be an endgame pillar for all players.

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I’ve really been enjoying my time with season 2 of The War Within and I still have a lot of content I can dive into, a lot of alts I haven’t even logged in on since the season began, and more activities still to go (Heroic raid and AotC, KSH and the new KSL achievements, even more delving, actually receiving my golden gob-trotter reward!), so I am quite happy to this point with the season as a whole. I think that in spite of my complaints, the overall quality of the season is higher and it has made good use of the feedback about Season 1 to bring about substantial overall improvements, which is great. We’ll see how I feel deeper into progression and as more walls present themselves, but so far, the season is a win for me.