Season 2 of The War Within is in the books. How was it?

The Raid

Liberation of Undermine was, to me, interesting in both positive and negative ways. Let’s start with the positive.

The flavor of the raid overall is excellent, and while I wasn’t a fan of using the overworld map with slight tweaks as the majority of the raid zone, it makes a certain amount of sense and also pays dividends in storytelling since you move into the casino for the high-ranking enemies, which adds that revolutionary feeling coupled with the notion of corrupt, self-serving leadership in Gallywix. From an encounter perspective, I enjoyed the variety of mechanics on-offer in the raid, especially the flexibility in tankbusters – some were very traditional taunt swaps, but then others have this weird design that is fun to engage with, like how both Stix and Sprocketmonger use debuff-stacking or just large hits in general that are a challenge because you do NOT taunt on those but instead on other mechanics that tail closely behind. I think the aesthetic design of the raid and loot is great and the overall vibe of everything is grungy fun goblin style in its way, even as what constitutes the goblin identity has shifted over WoW’s lifespan. I think that overall, with some exceptions I’ll get to, the difficulty curve of the raid is pretty satisfying.

Now, let’s talk downsides.

For me as a raid leader who plays with a roster that has mixed levels of investment into the game and mastering it, the difficulty curve posed some challenges. Mechanically, while I think Stix Bunkjunker is an easy-enough fight to get up to Heroic, it requires a measure of precision in play that a lot of my raiders simply didn’t reach, which made that fight very difficult and frustrating on a weekly basis until we started skipping to push Ahead of the Curve. It is a fight whose core mechanic, the Katamari Damacy style trash balls, isn’t difficult to understand but can be difficult to execute given the variables floating around it – where are the bombs, where is the trash in relation to the bombs, who will get the bombs if not assigned directly, etc – and sure, some of those could be eased if I could get the whole raid team onto a Liquid WeakAura package and to respect the assignments, but that was, realistically, never going to happen. Likewise, a fight like Sprocketmonger, which is actually pretty simple in execution, got messy nearly every week (not to the extent of Stix but close!) because there was a lot of absent-minded play with Screw Ups that led to me needing to make direct hand-holding voice calls to respect the mechanic. Stuff like Mug’zee jails or Rik Reverb amps played somewhat similarly – which is frustrating. About what I expect most of the time and so not too disappointing, but frustrating!

In terms of the difficulty, Heroic was clearly a step up this time much earlier on in terms of the raw DPS check needed. A big part of the Stix conundrum I found myself in was that we also had difficulties getting people to crash their balls into Stix (phrasing?) and so we lost a ton of free damage to that and thus had frustrating enrage wipes even into reclear pulls. For the first time ever this tier, I had to sit a DPS who was underperforming because it was making the DPS checks impossible, and that felt bad for me because my guiding principle has always been that anyone can do Heroic – but I had to consider that it might not be for everyone and a lot of the capability to do it is tied up in ability and willingness to learn and make focused improvements. Just one isn’t enough – I had willing participants trying to do better but sometimes the ability and focus just wasn’t there, and that feels bad because I felt like I couldn’t coach to it effectively enough. Similarly, healing this tier was a fascinating jaunt where much of the early part of the tier is pretty easy on healers but then Mug’zee and Gallywix on Heroic step up the healing requirements so substantially that it reveals your weaknesses. Our healer core has been a sore spot in terms of gearing and skill expression in a few ways and those fights became legitimate tests of will, because even with a skewed ratio in favor of healers, we needed to make some focused and quick improvements, both to the healer gameplay quality but also to mechanical execution at the full raid level, and it meant doing a lot of rapid-fire pulls on Gally in particular and being willing to bail out on pulls quickly to make those tweaks. I think having the last two bosses be strong healing checks isn’t exactly a bad thing, but it also feels kind of weird given that healing is not nearly as much of a factor in most of the other fights this tier.

The raid Renown track is a cool idea, but I think it needs to slim down, which is already the case for the next iteration of this concept coming next season. 20 weeks of raiding is a lot to ask of most guilds, who hit progression targets substantially earlier and then peace out, and the slow drip-feed of catchup (you can only ever earn 2 levels max a week if you are behind and only ever to catch-up to current) feels bad, especially since I have part-time raiders and swapping parents who play on different accounts and thus miss out on some amount of Renown that way. It is better than the weird currency gate they used for the raid buff in Nerub’ar Palace and especially because it also offers fun rewards, cosmetics, and such – but I think some tweaks could be nice. 15 levels next patch is nice, but I think a focused 12-level Renown track with a Paragon setup that rewards additional buff tiers and then eventually reward caches with potentially cosmetics or even actual gear in them could be really cool.

Lastly, I’m just going to say this – I hate the amount of trash and the density of trash in Undermine. The first time you get insta-killed by traffic is funny, but the 4th, 5th, or 6th time it happens to someone in a raid night is unamusing and sometimes annoying. I also wish the outside section of the zone was better signposted for where the bosses are and that the raid zone has the conditional trigger to make the car mount button appear even if you don’t have it keybound. A couple of small tweaks could have made that outdoor section way more palatable for me, but alas, I kind of started to dislike the raid based mostly on that!

The Dungeon Season

I think Season 2 of The War Within might be my favorite dungeon season of all time. No hyperbole either!

I liked this season a lot for a few reasons. Firstly, Blizzard showed a clear intent to listen and act on player feedback from Season 1 of the expansion, delivering a better-tuned and more-aligned dungeon experience. While I still think the Challenger’s Peril 15 second death penalty is bad even under the new name, at the key level it currently starts, it is far more understandable and far less frustrating just on that front. The overall tuning of the dungeon curve has been noticeably better this season and led to me doing a lot of keys. I have 7 Keystone Master toons this season, 2 Keystone Heroes, and 1 Keystone Legend, and it was an enjoyable process to get there.

Secondly, the dungeon pool this season was pretty enjoyable for me. While I have mixed opinions at times about Motherlode, Floodgate, and Priory of the Sacred Flame, I think I settled into a space where I enjoyed all the dungeons at least a bit, especially in different roles. Tanking Priory is great fun because when you pull off the hefty pulls well, especially the 5-pack + mini-boss pull at the start, it feels incredible. Likewise I found healing Floodgate to be a fun challenge, especially when I pushed my Enterprising Healer achievement on Resto Druid and was trying to find the right setup to spend maximum time in cat form. I think every dungeon has an overall positive aspect to it and I found myself constantly wanting to push keys, to the point that I accrued a total of 19,090 rating across 16 characters. I had several first time KSMs this season, with Druid, Warlock, and Mage all reaching that level for me for the first time, and my Druid marked my first-ever non-Monk KSH. The mid-season addition of the Triple Threat title led me to playing that Druid a ton, including knocking out all +10s on all 3 roles on that character, who I spent most of the season playing as my primary dungeon tank (and who I have made my main for Season 3).

Resilient keys has made doing higher-end content much easier and I know in my final push to Keystone Legend that having the option to just get a do-over was invaluable. I hope Blizzard expands this system in the future to deliver those benefits to players in lower-tier Mythic Plus!

Partially due to other players wanting to run deeper into the season than usual, this has been my most-played M+ season easily and probably my most enjoyed. I am excited that Blizzard is keeping the design philosophy expressed in Season 2 intact for next season, even if they aren’t quite there yet on PTR.

The Open-World and Story Content

I really like Undermine, but I also still find myself baffled by it.

It’s been a source of constant mystery and wonder since we got our first teases of it all the way back in the RTS games, much less WoW. It is a cool, well-made cityscape that captures the flavor of what goblins in WoW have become…but I also still find myself feeling like it doesn’t suit the story we’re in.

Inside of the confines of The War Within’s story, I still just feel like it doesn’t make a ton of sense. Gallywix being buyable and helping Xal’atath is fine, and even if my next instinct is to say that he’s not a skilled engineer in that way (in lore, we get multiple instances where he makes clear, with voice over, that he’s not so much the genius or inventor as he is the pursestrings allowing those people to work), he at least has the contact info of the goblins that can do the work. However, the Dark Heart being repaired by engineers is a bit left-field and it still feels kind of out of place. I am absolutely nitpicking here, and I know that, but after the whole thing with the Nerubians being the launch construct for the expansion, all of this feels remarkably strange and out of place in a way. With K’aresh as our next destination, I find it difficult to reconcile this new era of storytelling where our expansion to set the stage is 3 completely separate story arcs with only the vaguest of through-lines to connect them. And sure, a longer-tail story process might unveil some more info in the future – that is fine, but my growing fear is that Blizzard isn’t doing serialized storytelling but instead building a huge castle of lore to explore in like, The Last Titan, leaving TWW and Midnight bereft of good meaty main plots that can be followed while also building that future narrative. Gallywix with Black Blood weapons is a threat potentially, but we don’t really get to see the full extent of what could have happened with that. We’ve got some notions about how Xal’atath might be playing a long con against the Old Gods and Void Lords that loosely aligns her with us, but what the extent of that game is remains to be seen and has only barely been teased, even accounting for Lorewalking and 11.2 content.

If you’re a story-first kind of player, I could see how TWW might be offputting – it feels like Metzen is taking a second crack at rebuilding the foundation of the Warcraft mythos with the cool, cosmic ideas that the team and him have cooked up over the years, so we have a much more balanced and ambiguous Titan presence coupled with Old Gods, proper integration of the various retcons over the years like the Jailer, the nature of Sargeras’ corruption, and the origins of the Draenei, and this notion of Azeroth as the focal point of the universe as the only remaining Titan worldsoul still yet to reveal its secrets. And, done well, it could stick the landing and be cool, but just like the patch trajectory of 11.2, I fear that the rule of cool is the rule more than building out a coherent and well-reasoned universe while delivering excellent plots and lore hooks. I like some of what is there and I can see the silhouette of a great story that could be made from it, but right now, it’s just not there.

As for gameplay in the open-world, I liked patch 11.1 a lot. The addition of more world events that feed the Pinnacle Cache/Bountiful Coffer Keys system means there is more choice to get your guaranteed 4 weekly keys without needing to engage in something you don’t enjoy, Undermine’s content style was very enjoyable in terms of the flavor and gameplay coming together, and the small tweaks and additions to Delves and the existing open world content were great. My major beef from a gameplay perspective with Undermine in particular is that gaining Reputation with the individual Cartels within the zone is a painfully slow and dull process that seems increasingly poorly designed. Each of them has Paragon chests with unique gated mounts, you don’t get nearly enough rep from quests that also give Renown with the overarching faction, and while there is a cool concept in Darkfuse Solutions, it is implemented via one of the most tedious and obnoxious grinds Blizzard has ever made. What made the Severed Threads rep at launch work is that progress was bottom-up, so you picked a leader to represent and gained rep with them to push the main, unified Renown track higher, but Cartels of Undermine is confusingly laid out the opposite way with far less transference, where it is painfully simple to get your overall Cartels Renown maxed out and collecting on those Paragon chests but much worse to have to grind the base reputations of the underlying cartels separately a couple-hundred rep at a time. If the individual Cartels had been tracks where you earned the bulk of your rep and that rep then fed into the main Cartels of Undermine faction to increase Renown with them, I think it would have played substantially better, especially if you could then also pledge for Darkfuse and have ways to earn rep tokens for them.

And to touch upon it briefly, Delves remain pretty good in 11.1 and are likely to stay good in 11.2. They’re fun enough, short bursts of content with a lot of flexibility, the story variants added in 11.1 and the tweaks made to things like Sporbits or the Kobold mechanics make Delving more enjoyable. I think the Underpin as the season boss was a bit buggy and weirdly tuned, but I went in on a tank spec early in the season and steamrolled it so hey! Delves are a great mechanic in terms of both being something you can kinda just do on your own or with friends but also as a mechanism to up your gear and push into harder content, and the addition of semi-reliable Gilded Crests from them made doing them on my focus characters a lot easier to do and something that retained value throughout the season. My only real gripes are that some story variants are poorly tuned and that Brann’s new tank spec is very forcefully useless to anyone except healer players, and even then, they tuned a lot of the fun out of him such that I went back to just using DPS Brann on most of my healers.

The real problem I think WoW faces in the immediate future is a lack of novelty in these gameplay mechanisms – short of Delves, TWW feels basically like Dragonflight 2.0 in most ways, and that’s not necessarily bad, but retail WoW thrives on pushing forward with new gameplay mechanisms that are enjoyable and rewarding, and they haven’t captured that new thing in spite of some efforts. Surge Pricing ain’t it, SCRAP ain’t it, even the new Phase Diving in 11.2 ain’t it – Blizzard just has not found the next big thing that can change the model, and it is obvious they’re trying to find it.

Final Thoughts

The War Within’s second season marks an interesting point in WoW, where we’ve turned away from some of the assumptions made in TWW Season 1 that didn’t pan out and the game has been focused more on crafting a fun, engaging experience for more players. Dungeons are the key (ha!) beneficiary, but the continued development of Delves and focus on world content have created a game that is overall better for the changes being made. There is, as always, more to be done, but now we get to see how Season 3 unfolds and how the rapid unveiling of and launching of Midnight reshapes the game.