The War Within is already one of WoW's better expansions

[jeezusisacasual]

I think the expansion is fantastic for someone like me who can come back later and not be at all really behind someone who played every week due to the gear reset and tier set nerfing when that new season launches. That being said some real pain points are there, medium end m+ dungeons seemed overly punishing and not as rewarding as in previous seasons.

Also not addressing outliers or letting them fester and rot around is causing people to throw up hands and walk away. They also said more changes coming to m+ but that was 2 weeks ago and they all have twitter, wowhead and other avenues to announce changes and if they have not means they clearly do not give a shit. WoW is a live service game and allowing hugely popular specs to be so fucking terrible for so long is insane to me, BM, Arms, Sub and Dev evoker, Prot Pal, Rdruid, Hpriest have been a fucking train wreck, the inconsistency between the tanks and healers is another huge fucking problem they are absolutely silent on they should beheld to account and explain themselves for this.

I hope a team with 20 years of experience of producing a live service game can pull themselves together because this has not been good, they need every patch to be as good as end of legion not just fine or okay.

[klaps_05]

Since the last few years, the game just feels like a seasonal ARPG. Id rather play stuff like poe than wow atm. The worst offender being valorstones - i spend time and effort to get myth gear and then you have to farm like thousand dungeons for valorstones...stupidest system they have ever made.

[nvaelz]

Whoever decided that the combat animation should be on by default in the Trading Post, is a complete imbecile.
What's worse is when we turn it off it's automatically back on the next item. Super annoying but what to expect from Blizzard.

[Joshuaj]

This expansion has taken a lot of lessons learned from previous failures and successes to form this expansion. It is the most casual friendly expansion we've ever had, even more than Dragonflight. I wasn't 100% behind Delves at first -- not as solo content, but once I started doing them in groups AND on alts? I realize they were at most the most unique thing about this expansion as gameplay goes. Let's also not ignore how better the gearing and progression system is? While the story isn't anything to brag about, there's also not much to criticize on. It definitely has improved with Metzen's return and Danuser's departure. While I do not believe this expansion will dethrone Legion as the best expansion, at least for me, this expansion can definitely become a top 3 contender if they continue on this path and continue to listen to feedback.

Personally? For the story I want some slight adult themes to return: Language, more blood and gore, and morally questionable quests.

Eh, it's okay.

[Rennadrel]

It's fine. I returned after a 13 year hiatus and so much of the game has changed that it feels new to me despite playing on characters that were created in the middle half of Burning Crusade. The story is kinda meh. I don't get it with writers as a whole making female protagonists like Aleria into some overly aggressive and angry character. That side quest with Faerin was also cringe and what a dumb idea for a character in general.

But Delves are a lot of fun and challenging. Kinda wish there was more raid content because literally releasing an expansion with 1 raid tier that has 8 bosses and half your gear comes from 5-mans seems kinda counter intuitive when raid gear is supposed to provide the top tier loot. On the flipside, not having to commit multiple nights a week to do raids is nice and the gear upgrading system is nifty. There's a lot I am really enjoying and having the cross faction guilds and raids is great. Now if only they could fix the issues of loot trading between factions.

[Raidoser]

This expansion has taken a lot of lessons learned from previous failures and successes to form this expansion. It is the most casual friendly expansion we've ever had, even more than Dragonflight. I wasn't 100% behind Delves at first -- not as solo content, but once I started doing them in groups AND on alts? I realize they were at most the most unique thing about this expansion as gameplay goes. Let's also not ignore how better the gearing and progression system is? While the story isn't anything to brag about, there's also not much to criticize on. It definitely has improved with Metzen's return and Danuser's departure. While I do not believe this expansion will dethrone Legion as the best expansion, at least for me, this expansion can definitely become a top 3 contender if they continue on this path and continue to listen to feedback.

Personally? For the story I want some slight adult themes to return: Language, more blood and gore, and morally questionable quests.

Did they truly learn their lessons ?

Classes Balance is shit as ever with spec mechanically horrible + having low dps while certain spec have it all, nothing has changed since Burning crusade and Rogue-Mage-Priest arena team (who was OP because those 3 classes had it all : DPS, CC, Burst, survivability etc).

Content burnout is still real with blizzard asking you to do the same few boring timegated chores ad nauseam on 4 characters (why 4 ? that's the number of favorite character you can have and people would be naive to think it's random)

Delves are nothing new... do people remember island in BFA ? thorghast in SL ? or simply dungeons who exist since vanilla because Delves are a bland watered down version of all that, Delves could have been so much more fun if we had access to BFA island AS DELVES, we should also had a delves talent tree with thorghast power in it so we can create fun build and with the possibility of playing in group it would be even more fun but ion like any mathematician loser couldn't see fun if it was in front of him (that man should have gone at the same time as the rest of activision worm).

M+ toxic mentality because blizzard can't bother to police their own game (which is their responsability) has now taken over every form of group instanced content : Timewalking dungeons/raid ? check, leveling dungeons ? check, LFR ? check, Chromie Codex ? check because clearly you need MDI mentality and gameplay in those content...

Timegating still exist in way that make you feel blizzard is treating you like a child and telling you : "Sorry you spend your fun credits for this day/week come back next week for more fun !" except certain people can only play sporadically and when these people get enough time to play the game limit them the same as people playing every day 2h, meanwhile modern korean MMO game have all mechanics to allow people to only connect every 4-5 day (so every week end) and still get the same amount of content done as everyone else because it allow the stacking of daily.

Story is still bad it isn't metzen who wrote this TWW shit is still Danus you can clearly see it because you got exactly the same problem and tropes (because Danus can only write the same shit) as SL and Dragonflight and every time an idiot say "but the story was not better before" YES IT WAS FOR FUCK SAKE, just compare TWW danus nerubian to the MOP klaxxi it's night and day in writing or Mogu vs Danus titan it's the same, it's crazy to think the story was worse before when the story had at least constancy, maturity and logic.

Gearing has been made worse now because you need to enchant/embellish/gem your stuff meaning they didn't solve the problem which was that people can't equip a item that drop before you need to enchant/gem it, still fun to look at his bag with an item allowing to get your 4 bonus set but you can't equip it right away because you need to wait for the end of the raid of your Dungeons session to have the time to prepare the item.

While Dragonflight Follower dungeon gave a lot of XP, in TWW you get nothing, truly an improvement ! Onward to the future walking backward ! Should be blizzard motto...

20th anniversary event is a joke that prove blizzard doesn't learn or isn't even constant :
https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com...-heros-journey
The 20th new activity are 100% group content (TWW dungeons/raid, chromie codex, world boss) so if you're back to wow as a solo player blizzard is giving you the middle finger and telling you to just do the same boring shit you've been doing since TWW came out so for solo players it's like there is no event going on and they will be up to 3 weeks late in bronze acquisition compared to the rest,
100% sure people won't stop their subscription when they see every one running around with the new T2 set while they still can't get one /s

After saying all that i still voted "need another patch to be sure" because the devs are still showing sign that they want to do good but the problem is leadership (Ion) if they changed him for a true professional meaning someone who understand game design and not a lawyer whose only skill is to lie (badly).
I've read people praising Ion which i don't understand because even when looking at his "field of expertise" (dungeons/Raid design) there is nothing to support him as some kind of genius, instead when looking at his work you understand more the depth of his stupidity and arrogance than anything.

[Melius]

game play is good, i have fun on my frosty mage, the story is weak but light years better than the slop we got in dragonflight. im still playing so its ok-ish for now, not even close to legion though

[Zodiark]

game play is good, i have fun on my frosty mage, the story is weak but light years better than the slop we got in dragonflight. im still playing so its ok-ish for now, not even close to legion though

I feel like initially it had a good start. The story is okay. Nothing amazing because realistically the notes we are hitting on are sort of ho-hum. I mean what do we have? Xal'Atath ? Okay she was a minor bit in legion from the priest campaign. Having her turned into a main antagonist isn't the worst thing in the world but who else do we really have from the time of vanilla who hasn't already been dealt with? I feel like we've never really had a proper dust-up with Sargaras. We've fought his Avatar and Lieutenants but never directly the big demon boss himself. The events that lead up to this were kind of foreshadowed in Dragonflight. But not a huge buildup. I feel like the fate of this storyline really depends on how the rest of the expansion plays out. Gameplay wise I feel like it's fine so far. I like the concept of Delves but feel like they need more of a defined purpose.

Going back to the Antagonists tho. I feel like Blizz has squandered their cast a bit. Now they are trying to scramble and fix the damage of the past a bit. I don't mind if we get some of the old bosses back IF they are handled well. I feel like some of them have just become meme's at this point like Kel'Thuzad. The problem is though how do you give players a sense of accomplishment and NOT have them kill the Boss? I feel like that's what they tried at the end of Legion.

[jeezusisacasual]

Actually i am now wondering why they waited so long to do anything in regards to dungeon balance, class balance and the like. They had months and one has to assume the 20 year anniversary patch was being made by a team a year ago. They seem behind and the inability for them to do any kind of Q and A session despite some people being rude is baffling to me kind of unacceptable lets hope when i return next season they act like they have been making the game for 20 years.

[Zodiark]

Too early to tell for me. Need another patch.

I wasn't really taken with the initial story, I found Xal kinda Jailer 2.0 lite (kinda feels they REALLY don't know what this character is and where to take her - tbh I find the cosmology stuff in WoW limit the kind of stories they can tell. I'm hopeful after the WS Saga is finished we shelf them and reconsider their approach).

I love Delves for the reasons you've stated, so fun to do them on alts but once you outgear them then there's no point to them. Honestly, once your Delver's Journey is over you should earn the 'S1 Mastery' FoS and a Curio with - yeah, I've just upset some people with that sentence, but I want Delves to be a REAL pillar to WoW gameplay. Some Hero Talents are win/loss/underwhelming but that's been discussed to death.

I slightly agree with you on the themes, but not on the adult side; WoW is NOT Game of Thrones, however it did lose its grimdark/dark fantasy identity long ago.

I very much agree with you on the whole cosmology thing. I was very much on board with WC3 and Vanilla WoW and the direction they were going. I feel like that excitement became a bit derailed though as soon as TBC came out. I wanted/imagined we were going to go through the dark portal into a hellscape. We kinda did but not really. Hellfire Peninsula was just a ruined husk of a once vibrant world. Therein lies the problem for me. I imagined the dark portal to take us to another dimension. NOT another planet. Demons lost the mystery of being supernatural and just became some kind of aliens. The Titans are just some different form of advanced space-faring race. Theoretically the Titans could be US. Think about it. IF in some future of Azeroth the technology improves to a point where magic and science are fully merged and we are able to travel to new worlds in far corners of the cosmos and find a planet where the inhabitants are miniscule versions of ourselves, then WE could be hailed as Titans or some other term coined by that world. It's all a matter of perspective. But for me this is just science fiction / Twilight Zone stuff. Not that I hate that kind of thing at all. Twilight Zone if one of my favorite franchise. But that's not what I was looking for in WoW.

[RobertMugabe]

TBF I have played TWW a lot and it was mostly thanks to Warbands. The zones are great, the story is alright and the class design has greatly improved. Though it's honestly time for them to announce the next patch and release it soon. The anniversary patch aside from BRD has in total like a days worth of content and it does not connect to TWW at all.

That being said though, I also really liked Dragonflight. I still don't get it why some people "meme" over it as if its an established fact and agreed by most people that this expansion sucked or was close to a low point. I thought it was an amazing expansion and I always had the impression that most people who tried it thought it was one of the best expansions ever.

[Zodiark]

Actually i am now wondering why they waited so long to do anything in regards to dungeon balance, class balance and the like. They had months and one has to assume the 20 year anniversary patch was being made by a team a year ago. They seem behind and the inability for them to do any kind of Q and A session despite some people being rude is baffling to me kind of unacceptable lets hope when i return next season they act like they have been making the game for 20 years.

Class Balance is never good when it swings against you. Although I don't feel like it's that big of a deal right now. I have played all the classes and feel like there isn't any ONE spec that is majorly undertuned. Even off-beat specs like Surv Hunter are really much better than people realize. It's just that there is such a small pool of logs for those classes that it makes them look much worse when you look at Tier lists, leaderboards, etc.

[Goat7]

Its average at best so far. Long way to go before giving it a "real" grade. 20th celebration patch is complete dogshit so far. Hot buggy mess

[For_The_Horde]

The bugs are killing it for me. Especially the bug that deleted a good chunk of my private guild bank with millions in losses. Made worse because they downplayed the issue, told everyone nothing of value was lost, and refused to restore anything for anyone. Thousands of players, millions of items, billions of gold, just swept under the rug. I can't even make tickets anyone because they threatened to ban me if I brought it up again.

[Zodiark]

TBF I have played TWW a lot and it was mostly thanks to Warbands. The zones are great, the story is alright and the class design has greatly improved. Though it's honestly time for them to announce the next patch and release it soon. The anniversary patch aside from BRD has in total like a days worth of content and it does not connect to TWW at all.

That being said though, I also really liked Dragonflight. I still don't get it why some people "meme" over it as if its an established fact and agreed by most people that this expansion sucked or was close to a low point. I thought it was an amazing expansion and I always had the impression that most people who tried it thought it was one of the best expansions ever.

I think the problem with DF was that it had a lackluster storyline. With no real clear direction that people cared about. The whole Aspect thing was kinda ho-hum. You had potentially cool villains like Razageth or however you spell her name, just kind of peter out in one patch. Even Iridikron was cool but not utilized fully. The gameplay was good. Lots of little things to do. I feel like if you played DF from start to finish then you were well prepared for TWW. But it was just kind of a hollow experience for many. The cutsey dragons everywhere who often times did little, to the mostly useless Alexstrasza. Part of that problem can be seen in some interviews where even Metzen mentions that one of the issues has always been that they have these awesome central characters who COULD handle everything by themselves but we have to find creative ways to kind of get them out of the picture so the players can shine. However we are kind of a meme ourselves because the NPC dialog always acts like we each are the main HERO of Azeroth. I feel like there is a bit of an identity crisis going on there. Where we either need to BE more in the background as PART of the resistance that helped to save the world and they let the NPC's actually do things. OR we need to have more of an actual dialog ourselves as actual characters. Not some silent protagonist.

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Its average at best so far. Long way to go before giving it a "real" grade. 20th celebration patch is complete dogshit so far. Hot buggy mess

I'm sorry I think these kinds of responses are disingenuous. I found a lot of fun little things in the event so far. It's not the end all-be-all of events but it's had some fun moments and there is still more to come apparently. I feel like they should have added a few more classic dungeons to the timewalking roster. Whatever bugs are there haven't stopped me from playing or even really slowed me down much. To just disregard everything else and chock it all up to "dogshit", is a bad take. Sorry.

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The bugs are killing it for me. Especially the bug that deleted a good chunk of my private guild bank with millions in losses. Made worse because they downplayed the issue, told everyone nothing of value was lost, and refused to restore anything for anyone. Thousands of players, millions of items, billions of gold, just swept under the rug. I can't even make tickets anyone because they threatened to ban me if I brought it up again.

Listen, I'm sorry if you and others lost millions of gold worth of items. I would have to assume it's something ongoing in the repair process. I don't know what type of tickets you opened and what kind of tone you had while writing them out. I would have to assume that if your being threatened with a ban they were not politely worded requests. I know players enjoy the game how they like. But in 20 years I haven't been a big fan of keeping private guild banks. I always felt like it was an accident waiting to happen. To each their own though. To me it's like messing with the bull but crying when you get the horns.

[Biglog]

Too early to say really. If we compare/review TWW now to past expansions, it's not really a good comparison since it's comparing full expansions with 3-4 major patches of content to just 11.0. Timeless Isle for example gave a huge boost to MoP, and it wasn't there on release. We really need to wait and see what the big 2-3 patches of content bring in TWW and then look back on it as a whole compared to other expansions. Otherwise we're kind of comparing a 4k Director's Cut movie with the extras to a VHS release edition.

[WeAreNotSmilesTimes]

The bugs are killing it for me. Especially the bug that deleted a good chunk of my private guild bank with millions in losses. Made worse because they downplayed the issue, told everyone nothing of value was lost, and refused to restore anything for anyone. Thousands of players, millions of items, billions of gold, just swept under the rug. I can't even make tickets anyone because they threatened to ban me if I brought it up again.

Just out of curiosity what is it you lost that would have earned you millions of gold?

[For_The_Horde]

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Listen, I'm sorry if you and others lost millions of gold worth of items. I would have to assume it's something ongoing in the repair process. I don't know what type of tickets you opened and what kind of tone you had while writing them out. I would have to assume that if your being threatened with a ban they were not politely worded requests. I know players enjoy the game how they like. But in 20 years I haven't been a big fan of keeping private guild banks. I always felt like it was an accident waiting to happen. To each their own though. To me it's like messing with the bull but crying when you get the horns.

I was polite, never swore or demanded anything, I just kept reopening the tickets requesting help because the only response I got were the prewritten copy/paste responses that didn't answer anything. I mean half of them suggested it was a UI issue even though there were dozens of threads and thousands of posts in the forums at that point. Eventually they boilerplate response was to make bug reports in the bug report forum, where the threads got locked almost immediately. Now they're saying the issue is resolved and restorations are completed, though "some people may not have gotten everything back".

This is an absolute lie of course since not a single person across multiple forums have suggested they got anything more in the mail than a pittance of a couple stacks of cloth/meat and maybe some holiday items. And the mass majority of guilds have gotten nothing but awkward silence and redirects to the stickied post in the general forums promising restorations over a month ago.

And I got threatened because I finally requested a supervisor, who very bluntly stated GMs don't restore items, they don't help players with bugs, they don't answer questions, and any issue players have with items in guild banks isn't their problem so deal with it or get banned. They he force resolved/closed the ticket.

Just out of curiosity what is it you lost that would have earned you millions of gold?

Mostly transmog weapons/armor. Like plundered gear from island expeditions, teebu's swords, rare drops from outdoor rares, world BoE items. Also a fair amount of pets and toys and patterns and mounts, including a TCG mount worth more than everything else I lost put together.

[CasualFilth]

I very much agree with you on the whole cosmology thing. I was very much on board with WC3 and Vanilla WoW and the direction they were going. I feel like that excitement became a bit derailed though as soon as TBC came out. I wanted/imagined we were going to go through the dark portal into a hellscape. We kinda did but not really. Hellfire Peninsula was just a ruined husk of a once vibrant world. Therein lies the problem for me. I imagined the dark portal to take us to another dimension. NOT another planet. Demons lost the mystery of being supernatural and just became some kind of aliens. The Titans are just some different form of advanced space-faring race. Theoretically the Titans could be US. Think about it. IF in some future of Azeroth the technology improves to a point where magic and science are fully merged and we are able to travel to new worlds in far corners of the cosmos and find a planet where the inhabitants are miniscule versions of ourselves, then WE could be hailed as Titans or some other term coined by that world. It's all a matter of perspective. But for me this is just science fiction / Twilight Zone stuff. Not that I hate that kind of thing at all. Twilight Zone if one of my favorite franchise. But that's not what I was looking for in WoW.

It feels at this point that Blizzard are WAY, WAY, WAAAYYY too conservative with their story for something like that. Personally I haven't been surprised since Sylvanas burned the tree, but I realised early on that Blizzard did not know why that happened either.

Part of it is the current Blizzard culture (I'm almost done with 'Play Nice' by Jason Schreier). They do NOT plan ahead with their stories, not because they do not want to, but just how Blizzard is structured now makes it difficult for developers to reach one another and come to an understanding of where the story should head for. Plus the way story is presented in WoW feels too open ended, which itself is potentially cause by a patch or expansion being cancelled down the line.

[Hellfury]

Downgrading it to a 3 after anniversary patch, too much fomo, too much bugs, too much untesting too much filler or unfinished stuff.

TWW has no inovations, content is ok but all of it could had been a massive patch doesnt feel a new expansion but what makes it worst its the quality, lots of bugs classes been balanced based on twitch clips due to bugs.

Warlock been underpowered since the beginning of the expansion and taking a weeks to get sorted,specs with too much AOE but no ST or vice-versa(Fury warriros/Hunter) Blizzard giving buffs to already at the top specs just to hotfix 1 day later saying ooops, specs launching with massive bugs and untested damage like Elemental that create a uproar obviously to then be nerfed.

20th anniversary patch with so much gate and fomo and useless content like Chrommie scenario and a Raid where they forgot to add a few items with mastery so that some specs just dont feel like running at all.