Yep. This is a wall of text, so:
TLDR - It’s not perfect, and it will never be my all-time favorite, but The War Within has accomplished some very important changes that I believe will be huge net positives for the game’s future.
Post will discuss: Solo Content & Gearing, Dragon Riding/Steady Flight Toggle, Talent Tree Formats, and Profession Improvements
Listen, my favorite iterations of this game are OG Vanilla, OG Wrath, and BfA.
Side Tangent You Can Skip:
Yeah, BfA’s Azerite RNG gearing was absolute garbage and made a lot of people rage quit, and the Island Expeditions/warfronts disappointed pretty much everyone, but the expansion itself was perfection. The world, the storylines, the zones, the secondary characters, the raids (omg, the raids were amazing), and the dungeons were some of the best this game has ever seen. Seriously…ever.
The streamers learned how to make a living off of rage bait during BfA, so the online narrative at the time was “worst expansion ever” and “virtually unplayable,” but to those of us who were playing it and had no skin in the peddling of outrage, BfA was entertaining and engaging with excellent player retention right up through pre-patch.
Having said that, TWW is the expansion this game needed. It’s really done some revolutionary things and set us up for revival of the game.
- Yes, it’s still unforgivably horrendous for new players, and they need to fix that.
- Yes, the dungeons of season 1 have not received broad approval and a lot of us really hate the changes to affixes.
- Yes, it’s been plagued with balance issues throughout this first season.
- Yes, it has been the buggiest expansion we’ve ever seen from this game.
But. Some big positive things have happened, too.
FIRST, They have finally cracked the code on a gearing system for solo content that can be challenging and done in short bursts.
That is huge! They’ve never managed that before, and for all the issues delves have had in their debut season, I still think that solo instances are an ingenious way to fold in solo players, giving them access to endgame gear progression and content they actually need that gear progression for that doesn’t involve forced PvP or pugging. For players that only have a few hours per week but still want to experience the game’s story and get meaningful loot drops, it’s fantastic.
Sure, not everyone is pleased with delves, but pleasing everyone is not a realistic bar to set. A lot of people seem to play this game with the primary goal of finding it wanting, and that will always be the case. In the main, however, delves are a revolutionary positive for the player base we actually have. The Delves + Catalyst system is a literal game-changer for the slump between raid tiers, for alt gearing, and for the huge number of players who rarely, if ever, consume group content.
SECOND, Dragon Riding is now universal, and the toggle for OG Flight works well.
Again, this was an often-repeated request during Dragonflight, and it’s here. They did it and it’s in the game, and it works pretty well.
This has provided a whole new perspective on traversing the massive regions of previous expansions, and I don’t think we’ve seen the full range of ways it will change how people interact with old content. It is a positive with no downsides, and it has been seamlessly done.
Sure, some people are mad about the achievement gate on OG flight, but some people get mad about the sky being the wrong shade of blue of a Tuesday. The main thing is that dragon riding and OG flight both exist and function smoothly in every part of Azeroth now on every flying mount model we have…and that’s a big deal.
THIRD, The Talent Trees that were introduced in Dragonflight have been further refined and they’re absolutely the best ones we’ve had since MoP.
Talent/Spec dissatisfaction and/or lack of choice has always, Always, ALWAYS been a primary complaint in WoW. The devs have struggled to find a system that makes sense, stays balanced, and gives players some meaningful freedom of choice.
We’ve also historically been handed a huge expansion-specific system (like AP1, AP2, or conduits, etc.), that they forced the talents to awkwardly bend around. It rarely worked well, and it set a precedent that talents and class design are subordinate to whatever expansion-specific schtick we’re working with in a given tier.
The DF talent changes FINALLY addressed that issue, albeit imperfectly. It might surprise people that I mention the talent trees as a game-changing positive for TWW because several of the trees are still messy. I am NOT saying the talent trees are fine. The Druid class tree is a source of tremendous irritation to me at the moment, so I am definitely not saying that.
What I am saying is that we haven’t had talent trees that are designed to both give choice AND address the issue of expansion system dominance over base class kits before. We haven’t had talent trees this functional since MoP.
They’re moving in the right direction. It will mean that the talent trees don’t have to be re-built from the ground up next expansion, with the gutted classes and crippling imbalance issues that happen every time an old expansion’s systems go away.
I play a lot of video games, and despite my irritation with the current state of the Druid class tree, I can see that the format they’ve landed on here is elastic, fixable, and viable…and we’ve never had this much freedom of choice for viable builds.
FOURTH AND FINALLY, Professions, however imperfect, are the best they’ve been since Vanilla, and they are the most functional, relevant, and rewarding they’ve ever been.
I think the new profession system needs a little bit of trimming.
- We don’t need quality tiers on reagents. That needs to go away. It’s too much, and it doesn’t add entertainment value or actual value to the crafting system.
- Cooking in TWW gives buff foods that are so insignificant/poorly scaled compared to previous expansion food buffs. It’s disheartening, and they need to roll that back.
- Public crafting orders need to have a minimum quality requirement. I know they want retail to operate as Classic does, where the crafter and the customer speak to one another, but retail doesn’t have closed servers and this is not Classic. That feature needs to be added…like yesterday,
That said, I was thrilled to see professions brought back into the forefront for Dragonflight, and The War Within has refined the DF profession system into something much more manageable and satisfying. I only hope that future expansions continue to refine it and keep the gathering/crafting part of WoW viable and fun to play.
Crafted gear, crafted consumables, and skill trees that feel meaningful and remain viable well into endgame are an integral part of the WoW experience for a lot of players.
…
Okay. That’s it. I’ve played this game since 2005, and there have been times when I took long breaks from the game. I haven’t played every tier of an expansion since BfA, but TWW feels like an expansion that will keep me engaged. It takes time and effort to course correct a ship the size of WoW. DF felt like a positive course correction, but TWW feels like a much bigger one to me.
Here’s to hoping. Have fun out there.