Season 3, the last season of The War Within, is in full swing and I wanted to write today to document my journey with it. Unlike other times, I don’t have an in-progress update or anything, because short of some fresh KSM alts and my guild getting AotC…I’m done. I hit Keystone Legend and Resilient +12s, I have all the crest achievements except the Gilded one (need another 5 ilvl average on my Druid for that!), I personally got AotC this last week, I’ve done the raid on both normal and heroic on a few characters, and so yeah, my goals are just a few more KSM alts, that Gilded crest achievement, AotC with my guild, and knocking out the rest of the LFR and Normal transmogs for tier sets (I’m already 4 classes deep with more to go!).

Season 3 builds on what I see as the strength of WoW in this modern era – it’s very open-ended and accommodating and so I wanted to share my experience with the grinds this season and how I pushed to success much faster.

Keystone Goals

In the past, I’ve sought out KSM fastest, then usually slowed my pace and eased into KSH. Last season, when Keystone Legend was added, I spent some time after KSH thinking really hard about if I wanted to do it, and the answer was yes, so I went after it. My total grind on my main last season was 53 days from season start to KSL.

This season, I finished the full grind on my main in 22 days total. Why this much faster?

I did a few things this season to lock in on KSL faster and to give myself some space around the grind before focusing on alts. Firstly, I had a new main in Druid and one I was much more comfortable tanking dungeons on, so I pushed up to +10s the first week by going as Guardian. It’s what I play my Druid as in-raid anyways and what I spent much of last season playing him as through keys, so it made sense. I ended up slowing my prog past that point by exclusively doing DPS as Feral past +10s, so I did the full grind to 11s, 12s, a couple of 13s, and my first post-key squish timed 14 all as a kitty cat. I don’t know that I could tell you why I decided to do that to be honest – I like playing Guardian! – but I found DPS more challenging and interesting at those key levels and because I was done with +10s around the first week of the season, I found it easy to get into groups early on for higher keys even as an off-meta DPS. It was fun to be on the frontier at the high-end for once – I did a key with a main raider from Liquid at one point! – and like I noted last season in the KSL push, if you’re in those high ranges before general population catches up, it is a fun, almost relaxing experience to just blast before route choice is calcified and people are stuck in their ways.

I also just had far fewer “yips” about the process compared to last time. I genuinely wasn’t sure that I was the kind of player that could push 3k rating quickly last season, but doing it that first time sort of broke the dam that was walling-off my confidence in my skill. This season, I looked at KSL as the endpoint from the start and I made a lot of effort to very specifically push in that direction right from the jump – I geared differently, played more cautiously with upgrades, and ensured that from every role I was playing I understood how the dungeons worked and what was being asked of me. WoW is primarily a knowledge game, so knowing and understanding how things work and how to meet the challenges posed by the game gives you a lot back in return, and I reaped the benefits of studying quickly, pushing harder, and also, as much as some people hate it, failing along the way so I could learn where I needed to adjust. I was more okay with failing at keys and letting myself go into groups where I didn’t expect the best outcomes just so I could see more and understand better – not to say I failed a ton of keys or anything, but I went against my rules for group selection sometimes to try some harder dungeons at higher key levels and see what the breaking points were.

In the end, I reached Keystone Legend on September 3rd, less than a month into the season, and for a brief moment I was in the top 1,000 Feral Druids in the world which was a very satisfying feeling. As it stands now, I’m still top 1,000 for Feral Druids in the NA region and top 5,000 for Guardian in NA, so I am very happy with my progress on a new main (who is already my old main as I write this but a topic for another time).

On alts, only my DH has pushed to KSM so far, although my project Resto Shaman has healed a +10, and most of my push alts are at gear levels from solo content that they can start pushing pretty easily. My goals to round out the season are to push first-time KSMs as Hunter, Shaman, and Rogue, and then I have a project baby Shadow Priest I leveled during Winds of Mysterious Fortune that I want to push to KSM just from DPS, since I’ve never had a Shadow Priest KSM (but have done both Holy and Disc through that grind!).

This season has been fairly enjoyable in dungeons so far for me. The dungeon pool I generally like, I appreciate that there are tweaks and changes to the two returning Season 2 dungeons, and I think the only dungeon I really hate running is Ara-Kara, just because the DPS have to have their heads on straight about defensive play and smart interrupts to time it, which means getting it done, even post-nerfs, is a bit iffy. This is also the first season where I basically did all my grinding before any actual dungeon nerfs, so I get to do the memes about how it’s great for those who do it now (but I did it when it was harder) lol, so it’s hard for me to complain too much about any of the dungeons since I breezed through relatively quickly.

I’ll probably push more before the rollout of 11.2.5, although I look forward to the Turbo Boost returning with uncapped crests because pushing at high power last season was a lot of fun!

Raid Goals

Manaforge Omega is a cool raid, but also one that I think cements some of what I disliked in Liberation of Undermine.

The raid theme is excellent and it really captures the idea of what we’re doing in there well. Us having to take a literal back door to the final stretch after watching Dimensius ominously hang in the middle the whole first half of the raid is a cool flavor element, as is the whole nature of the Dimensius fight moving us seamlessly between the Manaforge, the depths of space, and finally the inside of the Dark Heart. On a visual and artistic basis, I really enjoy the raid overall, although I do fear that we might get purpled-out too much in the coming months between this and Midnight.

From a gameplay perspective, I enjoy the raid overall, although on Heroic, I have some mixed feelings about difficulty distribution. On Normal, the curve is smooth and mostly fine, so while it has some snags that can present at the same points as Heroic, the overall curve is appropriately gentle and thus not worth getting too worked up over. On Heroic, I think the biggest challenge is that there are a couple of very tight execution checks with Forgeweaver Araz and Soul Hunters, where a lack of tight execution can cost you a good pull, and then Fractillus, who isn’t hard but requires the full raid to be attentive to walls and breaks in a way that a lot of players just aren’t. Nexus-King is a fun fight that goes pretty well, although managing the balls on Heroic is actually kind of a crazy challenge, and Dimensius on Heroic is defined by how well you can execute puddles in P1, Nullbinders in P2, and the tank yank in P3 – the P3 part being the easiest stretch of it overall. Like with Undermine, my concern here is that the last two bosses in particular just pile on damage to the raid as a way to keep healers engaged, which means throughput gets stretched pretty hard and you can notice quickly if a healer is not keeping up with the demands of the encounter. WoW’s switch towards a ramp-based healing model for most healer specs offers a distinctive advantage to players who know the damage profile of a fight and who can respond quickly to prepare a ramp prior to predictable incoming spikes, but I do think it leaves some specs as very challenging in a way that feels bad, like Preservation Evoker or Restoration Druid. The upside is that knowing how to ramp those specs means you can do crazy numbers, but if you can’t ramp well, then you heal about as well as the Mistweaver Monk I had the misfortune of pugging H Dimensius with who was wearing his tank gear including trinkets and weapons for it. One hope I have for Midnight, raid design in general, and the split raid tier design we get to start next expansion is that healers will have less necessity on ramp, although I think it’s fine if the model stays shifted towards low or no-ramp healers as one side you can play and then the setup-heavy, high-payoff specs like Resto Druid.

That all being said, I pushed harder earlier in Manaforge Omega because I think the raid is enjoyable more than Liberation of Undermine, at least partially because it is far less gimmicky. I hated the traffic gimmick in Undermine after the first week and while the flavor was fun, it became grating on longer wipe sessions, so this tier is a breath of fresh air after the stale, polluted fumes of Undermine.

Delve Goals

Contract Killer, qu’est-ce que c’est?

I have enjoyed delving this season a bit more than last season and more than Season 1. The additions this season have smoothed out some Delve gaps and made things more enjoyable overall, and at the point where I tire of delving, skip portals are a godsend. The new delve is a bit on the puzzly side, especially going for the chest achievement, but it was a fun puzzle to noodle over for a couple of afternoons in the pre-season week.

As for the seasonal nemesis, well…I liked it a lot, actually! I did that one 3 weeks post-patch on the ?? difficulty, and I found the fight mostly fair and interesting in that it doesn’t really scale well to gear, meaning the challenge is largely consistent regardless of player power. The one thing I come back to with it, which I found problematic in similar ways in past season nemesis fights, is that there is definitely a better role to run for it, and it is DPS. Against Zek’vir in Season 1, DPS was needed to burst through the first phase and then to unleash cooldowns during the downtime transition, which made DPS specs the way to play, while Underpin in Season 2 was a very tank-friendly fight – low burst and high survivability requirements, which favored a slower approach with controlled burst at shield phases afforded by tank specs, and this season…DPS kinda wins again. Granted, this season’s nemesis is very functionally friendly, as the mechanics don’t really favor any one role that much, so if you do the mechanics well, you can get to the end since there’s no change other than ramping damage throughout – but this also means that while a DPS player has less defensive ability, they have an advantage in blasting before the buff on Ky’veza gets too big. Tanks and healers have the same 1 billion+ health pool on her but less ability to do high damage, and having Brann as DPS is a liability in this fight since if he does his big gryphon mount and blast burst cooldown, he fucks up the sucky triangle (that’s the real mechanic name, don’t look it up) so it makes pulling with him frustrating. Having him set to healer with me playing DPS smoothed out the fight’s damage intake and ensured that Brann wouldn’t cowboy up at an inopportune time, so hey – success!

Overall, while I think Delves are kind of a weird addition to WoW in some ways, I actually like what they bring to the game in terms of gearing, gameplay flexibility, and progression content outside of the traditional PvE confines of WoW, and that’s really neat. With a full expansion behind us now to review, I dig Delves far more than I expected, so while I hope for some changes and tweaks going into Midnight, I’m overall quite content with Delves.

The Lack of Season 4

I wanted to discuss this here because I don’t think it merits a post to itself, but TWW officially marks the death of the recap/fated season at the end of an expansion while work goes into the next expansion pack. I like this overall and I think that Blizzard is on a good formula here, provided they can continue to deliver content at this pace and relative quality of content. They’ve taken some of the favorable aspects of the Season 4 design (Dinars, mostly) and folded those into the Turbo Boost concept so each season now has a sort of mid-season refresh component where we get more power and get to come back with fresh eyes to do the content. I liked the Season 4 concept overall, but in Dragonflight, the raid rotation was not something I liked and the lack of a new tier set look to chase meant that there was just no value for me in pushing alts or even pushing my main all that hard – I did what I wanted to get my chosen rewards (the raid and KSM mounts) and then kind of just fucked off to Mists of Pandaria Remix and later Dawntrail (remember when I was high on Final Fantasy XIV? Let’s chat about that soon!). 18 months does not a meaningful nostalgia make, so I am glad that we are instead pushing 18 month expansion durations, since it seems increasingly likely that February 2026 is time for Midnight, and while I have quibbles about the Dinar approach taken last Turbo Boost (which seems likely to be the model this season as well), I think taking the best ideas of that concept and folding them into the game more regularly is a good idea. Maybe we could just have deterministic loot more often to start with? Maybe we earn it in a fun and challenging way, yeah? I dunno, just shouting out ideas here…

Season 3’s Other Content

K’aresh is a cool zone, but it really feels like a step down from Undermine in most ways. The world quests are so sparse that they repeat even on the mid-week refresh, the world design is very cool but also feels a bit too sparse, and while I like the ideas of expanding what you can do through more weekly activities and the Phase-Diving system, there is just a lot of repetition in this zone. Phase-Diving is needlessly limited in terms of travel, Tazavesh being a separate zone within K’aresh makes world quests working between it and the main zone cumbersome, and the world boss feels almost literally designed to be a waste of time with the swoops back and forth across his little canyon. While I respect not doing the Renown hijinks that marred Undermine (between Darkfuse Solutions as a grind and the whole multiple cartels super slow rep thing), K’aresh feels like an overcorrection to feedback about that topic – it’s just kind of bland from a gameplay POV. I want to love K’aresh because the aesthetic and overall presentation are neat, but man, the gameplay is just kind of a drag, and I don’t like feeling that way about the zone. It also, from a story standpoint, kind of just happens and it feels so barely connected to anything else in TWW that I still am shocked they went this route. Maybe not shocked because bad lore writing and decision-making is the hallmark of modern WoW (zing!) but it feels relatively weak here, in a similar sort of way to how Undermine felt left-field for me on the story notes. I think Blizzard has rule of cool-ed too close to the (black hole) sun and needs to start thinking a bit harder about this whole saga thing they’re claiming to do because it increasingly feels like a bunch of loose plot threads being thrown at the wall while we’re told we’ll peel them back off of there in some future expansion. Midnight needs to deliver quickly on getting this story onto something resembling rails, because I would love to be after-the-fact wrong about the story here, but I am increasingly skeptical that will happen!

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Season 3 of TWW retains the strengths I’ve enjoyed this expansion and in Dragonflight – a solid, gameplay-focused experience that is very fun to play and a story that is interesting in moments even if it feels like it’s being told by your drunk uncle who forgets most of the connective tissue. While I want WoW to have a strong story and compelling lore to keep me deep into the game as an interest, I am quite happy on the gameplay side and provided that Midnight continues that, my long-term status as a WoW player is nowhere near in question. That’s still a ringing endorsement, to be clear – even with improvements needed, I am having fun and in the end, that’s what I want from a game, so hey! Success!