The War Within: Last Zone, Delves, Endgame

The last zone of the War Within is Azj-Kahet, the spider/Nerubian zone. This zone suffers a little bit from being unfinished story-wise, as the zone's story continues on over the expansion. I don't think it really grabbed me, either. It's good, maybe I was just a little tired at that point.

Otherwise, I've done most of the other content. I've ran the dungeons on Heroic. They're all pretty good. The Dawnbreaker one is interesting as Blizzard tried to incorporate flying mounts and an aboveground layout as the dungeon. Not sure it was entirely successful, but it was interesting. Personally, I disliked not being able to tell where the tank was going to decide to land in the second part. Also, I didn't really know what was going on and died chasing the last boss.

The follower dungeons are also quite good. I did a couple of The War Within to finish some quests, and also tried a levelling one from Dragonflight. The interesting thing is that the NPC tank moves at a pretty good clip, but also stops if you stop. Ironically if you don't know that, you chase the tank, the tank keeps going, which really feels like you're stuck in the modern "go, go, go" environment. But once I realized the tank would only run X meters ahead, and then would wait, it got a lot smoother.

The other major new content is Delves, which have been on a roller-coaster of bug-fixing and difficulty adjustments. I think Blizzard will sort everything out. I do feel like the community seems to take it for granted that they should be able to do Tier 8 even while under-geared. It's not the end of the world if people gear up in lower tiers.

The other thing which would be nice is if Brann had a tank spec. I wish they had used the Chromie tank mechanic from Legion. For reference, the tank loses 2% health every second until 50%, but damage scales significantly with health above 50%. I really enjoyed healing in those Chromie scenarios, and I think Delves would have been the perfect place to bring it back.

I also did the first wing on Raid Finder and even won a healer sword, which was nice. I might look into seeing if I can raid this expansion, though the main guild raid seems full for now.

The War With has quite a nice variety of endgame activities. Having all the activities give caches, but limiting rewards to the first 2 or first 4, is an excellent way to allow the player to pick and choose what they want to do.

Hero Talents in Future Expansions

Kaylriene has some thoughts on the future of Hero Talents:

The pros are that Hero Talents add fun customization that is a decent flavor without requiring relearning a spec and that they are powerful – the stated design intent is that they can and should be near 33% of your overall throughput, which is a very-potent 10 points to spend. The cons are that they just aren’t flavorful enough, they’re largely passive bonuses that take agency out of your hands, and oh yeah – it’s WoW and mathematically you have a top pick for every spec and every mode of play that’s already mathed out and written up on Wowhead guides, Icy Veins, and the class Discords. My longer-term wait-and-see con for them is that they also feel like a trap that is going to be designed around in just one expansion – by using this solution, Blizzard has functionally trapped themselves to either expanding the Hero Talent trees for a couple of expansions until they’re as big as the class and spec trees or pruning them down and making the big marquee rollout of them a bit of a waste, and neither of these is a particularly good outcome. I hope there’s a secret third option and that Blizzard has already identified this as a priority.

I was thinking about the future of Hero Talents in new expansions, and I do think there's a third path. Blizzard could completely replace the 3 current Hero archetypes with 3 new ones. So in The War Within, you're a Templar Retribution paladin. In the next expansion, you can be a Crusader Retribution paladin that focuses on an entirely new mechanic.

Then in a couple of expansions, maybe they can bring back popular and successful archetypes, mixed in with new ones.

That way it becomes an evergreen system, but bounded at the same time. Each spec only has access to two Hero archetypes, but the archetypes change from expansion to expansion. Each archetype focuses on a specific ability, the way they do now, but remains at 10 points, and you get 1 point per level in the new expansion. 

The core class and specialization remain consistent with the standard tweaks and tuning, while the changing Hero archetypes would provide the radical changes which people like to see.

The War Within: Hallowfall

This post may contain spoilers for The War Within.

Hallowfall may very well be the best zone ever created in World of Warcraft.

Now, I'm probably a little biased as a paladin player, but everything about the zone is just perfect. The Arathi are excellent. It's so nice to have a zone of basically Lawful Good people and have it be played straight, with none of "the good guys are really the bad guys" twists that have infected modern media. (Well, there is the Priory, but even that is more a case of the good guys getting desperate.)

The motif of fires and flames holding back the darkness, and Lamplighters who go into the darkness, works perfectly in this expansion. It also has surprising parallels with the kobolds and their use of candles to hold back the darkness. I'm waiting for the inevitable meeting of the kobolds and the Arathi, where the kobolds decide that the Sacred Flame is the biggest candle of them all, and become Lamplighters.

The questing plate armour is superb, perhaps the first armor that has surpassed Judgment in the eyes of the community. At least until the Judgement remaster was announced.

There are two very memorable side-quests. First, Alyza Bowblaze, who is quite likely to lead a crusade when she grows up. The second is The Last Mage, which is worth avoiding spoilers even in a spoiler-marked post.

Hallowfall is a superb zone, one of Warcraft's best. It manages to be a standout even in a very strong expansion.

The War Within: Second Zone

This post contains spoilers for The War Within.

I hit 80 while working on the second zone in The War Within, the Ringing Deeps. I guess the expansion is really balanced around only doing the main quests. And maybe doing the remainder on your "Warband"? Shades of FFXIV and doing side quests on other jobs.

In any case, the second zone was pretty decent. It continued the story of the Earthen from the first zone. One thing though, there's a plot line about how the Earthen can transform into some type of ghoul. This seemed to come out of nowhere for me. I was rather confused for much of this, as the quests seemed to take it for granted that we knew all about this and how it was a problem.

Actually, to be fair, it was really unclear whether: A) we knew that ghouls existed and didn't know where they came from; or B) we knew the ghouls came from Earthen. Maybe there was an introductory quest line in the first zone that got cut.

Otherwise, it was a good zone. Again, very Alliance-heavy with the focus on the Bronzebeards. I do wonder how primary-Horde players are finding this.

This is also the first zone in the expansion that is underground, and I do think Blizzard has done a good job here. It's clearly underground, but at the same time there's enough room to move about easily. The ecology also reinforces the feeling of being underground, with really interesting choices in flora and fauna.