WoW: Ending The War Within

Blizzard’s 11th World of Warcraft expansion is coming to a close. This is also the first of the Worldsoul Trilogy. As usual, I like to go over the highlights and the lowlights at the end of an expansion.

This was a pretty good expansion. The leveling experience was interesting, and the story was engaging for most of the expansion. This probably ranks about the middle of the pack of all the expansions. I’d probably choose it for leveling a future alt.

The Highlights

Most of the story was interesting. The parts that weren’t, I’ll cover later. I did enjoy the leveling experience. The destruction of Dalaran was a great way to galvanize us to seek retribution. Perhaps, the next time they destroy a city, it can be something specific to the Horde. For Teldrassil.

The raids were fun. We did get Ahead of the Curve on all three, and I did feel like Dimensius was as epic as advertised. It was cool to incorporate the skyriding feature, which made sense given his immense size. It was fun to liberate Undermine. If you’ve ever leveled a goblin through their starting zone, it adds to the fun of overthrowing Gallywix in his casino.

Undermine was fun. I did enjoy driving the Breakneck around, once I got used to the steering. Honestly, if you unlocked the upgrades and made the adjustments, steering and gliding were much easier. I wonder if a lot of players who didn’t like the Breakneck didn’t use the D.R.I.V.E. system.

The best features

The warbands are great! I loved that we can organize our characters into campfires on the selection screen. The fact that we could centralize our crafting materials made crafting a little easier, though professions still aren’t great (more on that later).

Delves are, by far, the best feature of this expansion. I was doing delves on every alt, and sometimes when I didn’t need to. In fact, I was doing delves last week. It’s a great way to gear up for raids without having to do Mythic+ dungeons. In fact, I may go so far as to say that I have no reason to do Mythic+ dungeons again outside of getting the mount.

The other feature that I loved wasn’t added until the very end. Yes, I’m referring to Player Housing. Players have been asking about it for years, and I’m glad Blizzard took their time. The player housing in SWTOR is great, and I wondered how Blizzard was going to compete with that. Not only did they rise to the challenge, but they made it a lot better than SWTOR. Housing is the ideal evergreen system in WoW. It’s very well done, and there is so much more they can do with it. I’m excited to see how it evolves.

The Lowlights

Professions are still painful and arduous. The centralized access to materials, via the warbanks, was very helpful for all the professions. The biggest pain points with professions are still the number of knowledge points required and the amount of materials needed to craft an item. While I did manage to max all 11 professions, I probably would not have been successful without the warbank. Patron crafting orders were also a big help. I hope we continue to see those in Midnight.

While the raid was fun, I felt K’aresh was fairly underwhelming. Phase diving wasn’t that great and sometimes kind of a pain. However, it was a great method of quick travel since you could get around K’aresh without ever taking a taxi.

We had a few people completely skip the K’aresh story. In a way, I don’t really blame them. It just wasn’t a story we were interested in. Professions aside, this was the weakest part of the expansion, and it wasn’t really that weak. Just felt a little unnecessary.

Final Thoughts

As I said earlier, it’s not a bad expansion, but it wasn’t a great expansion. It’s definitely middle of the pack. Housing probably saved it at the end because it gave us all something to focus on while we waited for the Midnight launch. Although even that felt like it couldn’t come soon enough. The pre-patch was pretty boring and only kept my interest for about a week. Maybe two.

Now it’s time to go into the void and after Xal’atath.