World of Warcraft: The War Within | Review In-Progress

As World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th anniversary, The War Within expansion marks the beginning of an epic new journey with the Worldsoul Saga. This ambitious storyline will unfold across three expansions, each delving deeper into the mysteries of Azeroth and its cosmic connection to the Worldsoul. This review in-progress will focus on the beginning storylines and new lands to explore, delves and warbands, and as I complete the expansion story soon, I will talk more of the overall story as well as the new playable race, the Earthen. If you have been on the fence about returning to WoW, I would recommend jumping back in as this has been a lot of fun so far.

The War Within serves as a pivotal chapter in the Worldsould Saga’s grand narrative, introducing a host of new features and challenges. Your characters need to be level 70 to gain the starting quests for the expansion. After a dramatic introductory gameplay sequence, we land on our feet in Khaz Algar and the Isle of Dorn. The quests and new location discoveries have flowed very well, and it has been exiting again to clear an area of quests before following the main storyline to the next area.

It has been a long time since I have enjoyed the levelling and questing in a new zone, and in my mind, I was thinking back to playing Mists of Pandaria the first time. I was enjoying the lush green fields and deep caverns, finding new ores to mine and new gems to craft on my Hunter. As it turns out, Khaz Algar is off the western shores of Pandaria, so it all clicked into place for me. The capital city Dornogal was teeming with players on their flashy flying mounts, and this is helped by the expansion granting us skyriding. This makes zone traversal a breeze and the rare times I had to backtrack to hand a quest in were swiftly done by skyriding for 10 seconds or so, if that.

There are two main flying methods aside from the standard zone flight paths – skyriding and steady flight. We were introduced to skyriding in the Dragonflight expansion, back then known as dragonriding, and steady flight was the first form of flying that we were introduced to way back in The Burning Crusade. As such, there is a mind boggling 464 mounts available for skyriding in this expansion! We start the expansion with skyriding and once we reach max level, we then unlock steady flight. The beauty of skriding in The War Within is that all your previously unlocked flying mounts now have skyriding available to them which is awesome.

There is a whole talent tree for skyriding and you level up using skyriding glyphs which can be found within the four explorable zones of Khaz Algar – Isle of Dorn, The Ringing Deeps, Hallowfall and Azj-Kahet. You can collect 38 total skyriding glyphs which are spread throughout these zones and for the completionists, there are glyph hunter achievements in each. The skyriding talent tree has been simplified compared to the dragonriding one, and I am all for simplification of some of these systems which brings me to hero talents.

Hero talents are what I have been looking forward to the most from The War Within, and of the classes I tested out, I was super excited to get back into the levelling mindset. Hero talents expand on the existing talent system that we have been accustomed to and bring a greater fantasy feeling to your class specialisations. Many hero talents are inspired from characters within the Warcraft universe and access to these unlock at level 71. There are three Hero Talent trees for each class except for Druid that has four and Demon Hunter has two).

Each specialisation has two hero talent trees they can choose between, and each of these trees is available as an option for two specialisations. For my beast master hunter I could choose between Dark Ranger and Pack Leader (my choice). My retribution paladin could choose between Herald of the Sun and Templar (templar all the way!), and my shadow priest could choose between Arcane (my choice) or Voidweaver. Some talents have choices to make along the way but having these more simplified talent trees allowed me to spec my characters my way and I didn’t feel the need to go searching Wowhead or other sites for a cookie cutter build.

The final aspect I can talk about in my time so far with The War Within is delves, and I love this feature! When delves were first announced, I had flashbacks to my time in Guild Wars 1 with the Eye of the North expansion where you could run dungeons with just your companions. Delves aren’t there yet, but it’s a great starting point. Delves are small dungeons for 1-5 players together with an NPC companion. You can solo these with a companion, and if you are grouped, the group leader chooses the companion, though everyone in the group earns companion experience which is great.

The first companion we come across is the legendary Brann Bronzebeard, and every season there will be a new follower. Using the explorer’s league supplies, you can choose Brann’s role between healer or damage. Earthcrawl Mines is the first delve we come across and we start at tier 1 but can unlock 11 tiers of difficulty. You must complete tier 1 to unlock tier 2, and so on. The first three tiers of each delve are available until you reach level 80, and with the launch of The War Within season 1, tier 4 and above have been unlocked.

Completing a tier in one delve opens that tier level to all delves, and at the end of a you will earn experience, companion experience and expeditionary spoils from chests in the treasure room that contain class gear, companion upgrades, resonance crystals, cosmetics and more. Each tier gets progressively more difficult with debuffs that will challenge you and your team. Once you get to tier 4, you will also need to deal with Zekvir’s Influence, which empowers a random group of enemies inside the delve. Defeating them will provide additional undercoins and Delver’s Journey progress. At level 80, we unlock bountiful delves for even better rewards and these are on a rotation basis, signified by a golden door icon on the game’s map.

From my time in The War Within so far, I have been really enjoying the main story, the levelling process and completing delves as I come across them. Not having to rely on other players to complete the delves is a plus, though you’ll get better rewards in a group taking on tougher content. The zone feels fresh, and questing doesn’t feel like a grind, helped by the ability to zoom around the map with skyriding mounts. It’s always a joy to play a new expansion in the early weeks as there are tons of players around and so far, they have been very helpful when I’ve had questions. I will continue my journey to 80, unlock the Earthen race and check out some end-game dungeons in a full review soon.

This review utilised a key provided by Bizzard ANZ and World of Warcraft: The War Within is out now.

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