When I delivered my first impressions of The War Within, I was full of praise for World of Warcraft‘s latest expansion, but I did offer the caveat that I hadn’t yet explored its endgame in depth and that my opinion could change once I did.
After a few months at level cap in TWW, I can now happily report that its endgame has only cemented my favourable view of the expansion. It may have taken 20 years, but it feels like Blizzard has finally hit the perfect formula for how to handle max level play.
Some big improvements had already been made in Dragonflight, as I covered when I first returned to the game, and TWW doubles down on what it did well. World events are prevalent from the start, and there’s a lot more variety in their design this time. Options run the gamut from helping the Arathi defend their farmlands to a solo wave defence scenario to participating in a community theatre troupe.
You will outgrow the gear rewards from these things fairly quickly, but they’re great for getting geared when you first hit level cap, and even after that they remain a great source of reputation and currencies, so they’re never irrelevant.
Speaking of currencies, another system that returns from Dragonflight is the gear upgrade system. Virtually any activity you could possibly do at endgame awards Valorstones and Harbinger Crests in varying quantities, and these can be used to increase the item level of any endgame gear in incremental steps. It’s not a full replacement for drops, but it allows you to feel as if you’re always making progress even when better items aren’t dropping.
A related system I totally ignored in Dragonflight but am now taking full advantage of is the Catalyst, a tool that allows you to periodically convert most endgame items into a tier piece of the same slot and item level. This allows anyone to get the full tier set bonus, even if you never set foot in a raid.
Something I didn’t initially realize about these systems is that they are also a great path to cosmetic as well as practical rewards. Converting an item with the Catalyst also gives it the appearance of a tier piece, and if you upgrade a tier or raid item far enough with stones and crests, it also unlocks the colour tint from the next highest raid difficulty.
The Great Vault can also help with getting your tier sets finished. The Vault allows you to choose one item from up to three tracks weekly. There’s a track for raids, one for dungeons, and one for delves and open world content, so no matter your playstyle the Vault can be a path to tier items and their associated appearances, alongside many other desirable endgame items.
I quite like visuals of the monk tier set this time, but my preferred colour tint is from normal mode, and I’ve long since lost the patience for difficulties without matchmaking, so at first I despaired of getting this outfit. But then I realized that I could get it all through the Great Vault and the various upgrade systems, and now I’ve got every piece I want from the normal set, without much effort even.
Since delves can award up to heroic raid equivalent gear, you can even potentially get the full heroic colour tint of your tier set from purely solo content. It’s just a bit more work.
My opinion on delves hasn’t changed much from my first impression. For a first draft of the feature, they’re solid. I do feel that there’s some room for improvement, but I will also admit I’m not sure what exactly needs to be improved. In theory I’d like some more mechanical variety, but a lot of the environmental hazards that provide such currently are more of a mild irritant than an interesting challenge. If there’s one thing still holding WoW back, it’s the limitations of its archaic combat mechanics.
But don’t get me wrong, I’ve still had a lot of fun in delves, to the point they’ve become my primary form of endgame content. It’s great to have the option for solo content with meaningful challenge and rewards, and other MMOs should take notes.
The improvements to reputation introduced in Dragonflight also continue to pay dividends. The rewards for the new factions feel good enough to be desirable but not so good that you feel pressured to get them as soon as possible. Most of the noteworthy rewards are cosmetic anyway.
I also appreciate that most reputation is earned from a single large bonus (usually from a world event) that you can earn once per week across your Warband, so there’s no need to be grinding reputation every day.
Warbands also do a lot to make reputation grinding less tedious. Since reputation is shared across your account, there’s no need to do all your grinding for a faction on a single character, or worse yet complete an important faction on every character.
In many circles WoW remains dogged by its reputation as a game that puts raiding above all else, and there was a time when that reputation was well-earned, but I don’t think it fits anymore.
It’s not just that there are so many other ways to get raid-equivalent item levels and appearances. For perhaps the first time in the game’s history, the main raid of this tier, Nerub’ar Palace, is more of a side story, and the most important plot moments of the expansion all happen in soloable quests instead.
I’ve even noticed that Nerub’ar Palace feels… a little half-assed? It’s “only” eight bosses, and most of its art assets are reused from the open world. It’s still a very sumptuous raid by the standards of most games, but by WoW‘s standards it doesn’t seem to have gotten the usual level of effort. That feels like a weird thing to praise, but it is a sign of how much WoW has shifted away from being a purely raiding game, and it creates a more fair endgame when resources are more evenly distributed to different forms of content instead of everything going into raids.
Heroic dungeons are still in a bit of an odd place without a clear role, as the gear they reward is easily outstripped by that from many other forms of content, but there are some very lucrative weekly quests you can complete in heroics, so they’re not completely irrelevant.
What’s really making The War Within‘s endgame sing, though, is not any of these individual changes but rather the way they work together to bring something WoW has sorely lacked throughout its history: Choice.
As I’ve said in the past, the underlying issue with WoW was not so much a hyper-focus on raiding; that was the symptom, not the disease. The problem was a philosophical opposition to player agency. The developers had a clear vision of how the game was meant to be played, and they designed all its systems to force players down that narrow path.
Said path usually led to raiding, but it would have been equally toxic no matter what content they chose to favour, and we’ve gotten small tastes of that throughout the game’s history. Mists of Pandaria didn’t let you sneeze without doing a dozen different daily quests. Warlords of Draenor made garrisons inescapable.
Those days are finally behind us now. The War Within doesn’t have any one single be all and end all form of content. World quests, delves, world events, dungeons, raids, and PvP are all useful, but not essential. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want, on any character you want and know that you’ll be making meaningful progress.
That’s all I’ve ever wanted from any MMORPG’s endgame.
Everyone has opinions, and The Soapbox is how we indulge ours. Join the Massively OP writers as we take turns atop our very own soapbox to deliver unfettered editorials a bit outside our normal purviews (and not necessarily shared across the staff). Think we’re spot on — or out of our minds? Let us know in the comments!
