I joined the World of Warcraft: The War Within Beta early May 2024, and I’m so glad to experience the game as a launched product. Of course, now I can watch those cutscenes and cinematics to complement what I already knew about the expansion.
Playing the game is much slower than everyone else’s experience, because I record videos of each campaign quest and upload them. Then do the same for non-campaign quests, and rare elites. I tend not to play while I am uploading 40+ videos.
Blizzplanet Reviews The War Within
Launch
Usually, past expansions have met bad launches with massive lag and server disconnections. The developers were quick to solve The War Within lag issues. While not a flawless launch, certainly better.
Every expansion, I go about completing purely campaign quests. You can do this up to level 76, where the campaigns for each zone comes to a close until you reach level 80.
In The War Within, each zone only provides 3 chapters. This is in contrast with Battle for Azeroth which offered 6-8 chapters per zone. Shadowlands had about 6-8 chapters per zone. Dragonflight had 4-5 chapters per zone.
Adding multiple chapters to each zone can sometimes feel overwhelming for a 10-level leveling experience. The War Within narrows it down to only 3 chapters each zone. You can quickly get into the bottomline of the story as a primer for what comes next in the story in 11.1, 11.5, 11.2. I feel that this is the best approach to new expansions.
The War Within’s story was masterfully executed, and even if you don’t play beyond 11.0, it feels like a well-spent investment in the story, with great cutscenes and cinematics. You can see character growth for Alleria, Anduin, and Thrall. Each has a burden and a shame.
Story-wise, The War Within wraps up old stories and loose threads. In Shadowlands, Anduin lost his connection to the Light mostly out of shame and self-exile. Thrall lost his connection to the Elementals after killing Garrosh, and hasn’t been able to reconnect ever since. Alleria is no longer welcome to Quel’Thalas after the incident she caused at the Sunwell some time ago. She can visit the city for as long as she has guards follow her every move. That’s difficult not only because this was her former home, but because her son lives here now, and she can only be a visitor.
Throughout The War Within campaign, we can see these three characters go through different stages of growth. We also experience Xal’atath present throughout the campaign, but in a more evolved way than what we did in Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm.
Dungeons
Solo Players will be delighted to find a feature that should have arrived to World of Warcraft in Cataclysm or earlier: AI Followers. You no longer need to queue to join a dungeon, you no longer need to play with other players. Whether it is because of the toxicity or because you feel shame for underperforming or causing a team wipe — that’s a thing of the past.
Dungeons now provide an NPC next to the Meeting Stone where you can choose to join a dungeon without players — instead a dungeon with an AI Follower group made of computer-generated players. You can command your team or the tank to start attacking enemies.
I play as melee DPS, and I haven’t died once. I did die for overpulling 4-5 groups of enemies. But your AI team can handle 3 groups of enemies just fine and the healer is the best at keeping the team alive. Now if there were a Heroic Dungeon AI followers, that would be great — but not available at the moment.
Delves
Delves is a mini-dungeon with specific objectives. It feels like a Diablo IV dungeon. Except you have Brann Bronzebeard as a follower, and you can assign him to be supporting you as a Healer, or as a DPS follower. Brann can also level up and expand the amount of abilities he can use. You can also loot curios that add additional abilities to aid you.
The rewards are not as great as what you can find in Dungeons, but we will see how that changes when Season 1 starts. Each Season will have a new roster of Delves and objectives — which sounds like what you would expect from a paid service. So far there are 11 tiers of difficulty. Tier 3 is unlocked when Season 1 launches. Sounds like Mythic solo content.
Rare Elites
Same as with past expansions, there are plenty of Rare Elites to kill in each zone. You have the Adventurer achievement to farm most of them. However, I feel like more could be done with this type of content.
At the moment, most rare elites can be farmed each daily reset for Renown. Not all rare elites provide gear loot, which is not good for those leveling up or for Enchanting players.
What most bothers me is that Rare Elites are not properly identified. You might find a Rare Elite that requires more than 3 players, but there is no skull in their portrait frame to identify them as lethal to you.
For example, you would never want to fight Skirmisher Sa’zryk or Spore-Infused Shalewing all by yourself. These will kill you multiple times if there are no more than 3 players to help. These should be appropriately labeled with a skull icon, but they are not.
Most rare elites, however, can be killed as a solo player.
Another thing that I dislike about Rare Elites in The War Within — a few of them are required to camp for 4-6+ hours. For example, Tka’ktath in Azj-Kahet is a special group-requirement Rare Elite that drops an item that starts a series of quests to obtain a mount.
The quests alone require multiple hours of farming items. The first quest requires 1000 chitin parts. You can farm nearly 100 per Ara-Kara dungeon run. Then another 1000 items, and then 500 blood. This alone will take you approximately 4-6 hours of gameplay to collect these parts. Therefore the camping of Tka’ktath should be reduced to match the effort required to farm the parts.
Here is an example of why this type of content should never be in World of Warcraft. I recorded videos of each Rare Elite in each Zone, and then it was Tka’ktath’s turn.
I arrived at Azj-Kahet at 8:43am EST. I camped Tka’ktath waiting for him to respawn. At 11:00am EST, I saw a message that the daily quests had been reset. This message in no way says rare elites respawn are reset. I am going to assume it did. Because …. a Rare Elite that is allegedly respawning 6-hours after it dies, actually respawned at 7:28pm EST.
In my personal experience, that was an 11-hour camping — to then have to deal with the 2,500 parts requirement of the quests to unlock the mount.
Rare Elite respawns shouldn’t take longer than 2-hours. Not everyone has time to spend camping elusive Rare Elites.
World Quests
There are less World Quests active per zone than in previous expansions and these have up to 3 days timer. I think this is better. Previous expansions have been overcrowded with World Quests all over the map. Felt like too much of a homework to complete all of them.
Easier now to focus on small amounts of World Quests that reward gear upgrades, or Valorstones, or Resonance Crystals.
There is a new type of World Quest that is locked. You can unlock it by completing 3 World Quests in the zone. The reward is a weekly Pinnacle Cache that might contain an assortment of these items:
- Gear Upgrade
- Gold
- Valorstones
- Kej
- Carved Harbinger Crests
- Restored Coffer Keys
- Resonance Crystals
With fewer World Quests active at a time, that means more variety. I have seen at least 20 different World Quests so far in Isle of Dorn.
The only complaint I keep reminding people of every expansion is that World Quests are too intrusive. I am flying from Point A to Point B, and I get spammed with text and voiceover of a World Quest as I fly through passively to my destination.
Destiny 2 is the example I always use. You see the World Quest marker on the map. The World Quest doesn’t become active until you click this item on the ground that triggers the phase/shard. Then the voiceover and quest objectives are shown to you onscreen. That is by far the least intrusive World Quest system I have seen.
Another complaint I have in The War Within is located in Hallowfall. There can be up to 10 Keyflame world quests (to name it something) active in such a small area that it becomes overwhelming to figure out what all the bunch of yellow highlights on the minimap mean. What my objective target is. Etc. To top it off, all mobs in the area are Elites, and you can aggro patrolling elites.
Too overcrowded means, no room to run away, in certain situations. Prepare to die often. This feels like the type of content that you are forced to group up with other players to be successful.
Pacts
This is not a new feature. The first time this type of content was introduced — if memory serves — was in Nazjatar with the followers.
You choose a Kaheti Pact with The General, The Vizier, or the Weaver, and you earn Renown by completing City Rumors from Nerubian Spies. These are sort of World Quests that work the way Destiny 2’s version of World Quests works.
You find a nerubian spy in The City of Threads, talk to it. Accept the dialogue, and the world quest is marked as a scarab in your map, and the objectives area is outlined.
None of the nerubian spies are marked in the map … so this feature requires exploration. Hopefully, all World Quests evolve eventually into this type of content where you choose to activate it and engage in it.
The World
It kinda feels too soon to have an underground zone after experiencing Zaralek Cavern, especially 3 underground zones, but somehow it works in The War Within.
Azj-Kahet and Hallowfall are massive in size, and the ceiling is high enough that one can fly through the zone without much of a problem. The irregular ceiling in The Ringing Deeps and the inclination from high ground in the north to low ground in the south makes it a bit less comfortable to navigate. Requires more spamming of Skyward Ascent. You would think the developers learned not to craft vertical zones like Darkshore.
There are some good areas in The Ringing Deeps, but the lower portion feels kinda empty at the moment. Makes me wonder if some content is on queue to be added there in future content patches.
The Races
The Earthen in the Isle of Dorn feel different to the ones we met in Northrend. There are factions of them, however. Some are Unbound and do no longer follow the edicts. Those within Dornogal are still following edicts as if the Titans were still their masters. Following their intended programming. However, their memory bank machine hasn’t worked for some time, and Dagran is actively helping Brinthe to fix it. In chapter 5 of the campaign, we finally get to see a lot of info about the Titans from the core matrix beneath Dornogal, and I have a feeling there is much more to unlock in future content patches.
This place looks like the Heart Chamber in Silithus, and there is a gate similar to the one we accessed in Battle for Azeroth with Wrathion to fight the Visions of N’zoth. This Dornogal gate is currently inactive in The War Within which makes you think what’s in the horizon.
The Arathi in Hallowfall have a vast chunk of info about their people, through quests or simply by reading dialogues. There is a lot of mystery still surrounding the Beledar crystal atop Hallowfall, and the fact there is an Arathi empire out there still to be discovered in a future expansion.
The least players would have thought is to find nerubian allies within Azj-Kahet. There are some power dynamics there between factions, and those who follow Xal’atath and the new nerubian queen. We might learn more once the Raid launches in Season 1.
The most mysterious of the races introduced in the War Within is the Harronir. This race of undertrolls, and by definition underelves(?) have been protecting the roots in Azj-Kahet for milennia and hide their existence from others by shapeshifting into animal forms and staying in the shadows.
There is a book in the Emerald Dream zone in the Dragon Isles that seems to talk about this Harronir (not by name) and the roots they protect are probably the ones mentioned in the book. The story involves the Titans: Aman’thul and Eonar. Eonar planted a tree and Aman’thul tore it from the ground in rage, scorning Eonar. Eonar wept, but discovered the roots were still alive in the depths and didn’t reveal this to Aman’thul. You can learn more in my video — including the location of this in-game book.
As of the end of The War Within campaign, we haven’t seen the Harronir again and that leaves a lot of questions and expectations for what might happen later in the expansion. For example… we still don’t know where the Harronir live, and that might mean a new zone could be accessible at a later time.
Considering the Harronir were front-and-center alongside the Arathi and the Earthen in The War Within trailer, it is just a matter of when Blizzard chooses to show their cards. At the moment, those cards are tightly held against their chest.
Conclusion
Overall, I recommend everyone to jump back into World of Warcraft: The War Within. For transparency, I was given a review code for Early Access, but my opinion is my own. I roast the developers where I see something wrong or that needs to be changed.
I already had great things to say about the game from my Beta experience, but now with the game live and all I have progressed through (that I had no access to in test servers), I am impressed. It’s a new age for World of Warcraft, and that heightens everyone’s expectations for the Midnight and The Last Titan expansions remaining in the Worldsould Saga.
Now that we have reached the end of the campaign, what can we expect in Patch 11.1? Patch 11.5? Patch 11.7? Patch 11.2? That’s a mystery to a degree. Datamining during Beta revealed Goblin and Ethereal content.
These Goblins are likely the ones causing chaos in The Ringing Deeps, and the Ethereals are the same we saw in the outdoor entrance of Ulduar — in the Alleria and Xal’atath quests before The War Within launch.
The War Within Roadmap only provided a preview up to 11.0.5 … and that’s hitting PTR soon as per an email I got yesterday. We have no view into 11.1 or beyond. It’s a good time to jump in into The War Within before Patch 11.1 comes up. Start the grind now, because the Worldsoul story has just begun.
