Prepare to mark your calendars because Blizzard Entertainment has announced the release date for World of Warcraft: The War Within's next major content update, 'Ghosts of K'aresh'.

Starting on August 5, 2025, players can start exploring the ruined world of K’aresh to take on various new challenges, Delves, and a dungeon, among other exciting new ventures.

Then on August 13, 2025, Season 3 will begin and have players take on the Manaforge Omega raid, which will feature the return of an old Warcraft enemy called Dimensious as a city-sized raid boss.

Here are all the details you need to know about World of Warcraft's next big update.

The Ghosts of K'aresh is the third major content patch for World of Warcraft: The War Within, following the Undermine(d) patch. It will go live on August 5, 2025, for the public server realms and will include a ton of new content such as:

• New main campaign quests that will conclude the storyline for The War Within and help set up the events for the upcoming World of Warcraft: Midnight expansion.
• A new zone to explore called K'aresh, a world destroyed by the Void Lord Dimensious.
• Tazavesh the Veiled Market returns from World of Warcraft: Shadowlands as a hub city.
• A new raid dungeon called Manaforge Omega.
• Reshii Wraps, an artifact that can be upgraded through various gameplay activities and acts as a key to access a new outdoor activity called Phase Diving.
• A series of Delve dungeons called The Archival Assault.
• A new creature-collector activity called Ecological Succession.
• A new dungeon Eco-Dome Al’dani.
• The Tazavesh mega-dungeon returns with a new hard mode.
• Several class balance updates for Shadow Priest, Brewmaster Monk, Frost Death Knight, Unholy Death Knight, and more.
• Several PvP talent updates.
• A new PVP World Quest that can be accessed on Vanquisher's Wake Island.
• A new Warband Campsite screen called 'The Fate of the Devoured' which can be obtained by completing the 'A Shadowy Invitation' quest.
• Tons of new Ethereal-themed armor sets, mounts, and cosmetics will be made available in this update.

The Manaforge Omega raid dungeon will be open for players on August 13, 2025.

The raid schedule for Manaforge Omega's difficulty levels will be the following:

• Week of 13 August: Normal, Heroic, Mythic, Raid Finder Wing 1- Might of the Shadowguard (Plexus Sentinel; Loomíthar; Soulbinder Naazindhri)
• Week of 20 August: Story Mode, Raid Finder Wing 2- Monsters of the Sands (Forgeweaver Araz, The Soul Hunters, Fractillus)
• Week of 26 August: Raid Finder Wing 3- Heart of Darkness (Nexus-King Salhadaar, Dimensius, the All Devouring)

World of Warcraft: The War Within is going out with a big bang

If this is the climax of The War Within then it's one insanely spectacular way to conclude this fun expansion to one of Blizzard's best PC games. The new Ethereal-themed armor sets and mounts you can obtain from the raids and dungeons look so cool, and the new raid bosses look so badass.

Dimensius, in particular, has got me excited as this monster is being hyped as the biggest raid boss Blizzard has ever created for World of Warcraft. It's reportedly bigger than the entirety of Stormwind and ten times the size of Deathwing, who currently holds the record as the biggest raid boss in World of Warcraft.

Then, once that titanic foe has been slain, we can look forward to the much-anticipated Legion Remix event, where we get to relive one of World of Warcraft's best expansions in crazy new ways.

Considering how much I enjoyed Pandaria Remix, I can't imagine how bonkers Legion Remix is going to get when it eventually drops (possibly at the end of The War Within's lifecycle). One thing's for sure, we'll have plenty of fun to keep us busy in the lead up to World of Warcraft: Midnight and the long-awaited addition of player housing.

We're halfway into the life cycle of World of Warcraft: The War Within, and Blizzard Entertainment has dropped a massive bombshell for the game's next update.

This content update, titled "Ghosts of K'aresh", promises to bring the greatest challenge for players yet, as one of World of Warcraft's oldest enemies, Dimensius the All-Devouring, will be making his grand return since 2007's World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, as the biggest raid boss ever seen in WoW history.

Here's everything you need to know about the Ghost of K'aresh update.

First and foremost, this update will have players explore a new zone called the Shattered World of K’aresh to stop evil forces from summoning forth Dimensius the Void Lord, an enormous monster capable of devouring entire worlds.

Operating out of the hub world of Tazavesh, the Veiled Market (returning from World of Warcraft: Shadowlands), players will gather allies, forge an upgradeable artifact called the Reshii Wraps, and fight through a new Raid dungeon called "Manaforge Omega" to confront Dimensious.

But that's not all, as the Ghosts of K'aresh update will also have players tackle a new Delve dungeon called "The Archival Assault" and a new dungeon called the "Eco-Dome Al'dani".

Additionally, players can participate in a game activity called "Phase Diving" to take on unique quests and enemies, and help cultivate a healthy ecosystem on K'aresh through the Ecological Succession sidequest.

Each of these quests offers materials that can be used to upgrade the stats of the Reshii Wraps to help you survive the challenges ahead.

On top of the Reshii Wraps, players will be getting new Class armor sets offering unique passive bonuses based on Hero Talents, and they will be getting PvP and PvE class balance changes for Shadow Priest, Brewmaster Monk, Frost Death Knight, and Unholy Death Knight among many others.

Brace yourself for World of Warcraft's biggest raid boss yet

According to Blizzard Entertainment's latest WoWcast, Dimensius is going to be World of Warcraft's biggest raid boss ever made, as its size is bigger than that of the entire city of Stormwind.

That means that Dimensius will be bigger than even Deathwing, who is currently World of Warcraft's biggest raid boss, and he was the size of a mountain!

I have no idea how on Azeroth the developers are going to pull off creating a raid boss that huge, but I can't wait to find out when this update eventually launches. It will certainly be a good time to kill as we wait for the next expansion, World of Warcraft: Midnight, and the long-awaited player housing feature.

Blizzard Entertainment has just released the launch date for World of Warcraft's 11.1.5 content update, which is confirmed to be April 22, 2025.

This content update will introduce various gameplay activities like the Nightfall Scenario, The Winds of Mysterious Fortune Event, The Dastardly Duos boss rush gauntlet, the return of Horrific Visions, and a new Cooldown Manager added to the UI to help players see their abilities' cooldown much easier.

Here's all the juicy gameplay details you can expect to see in this upcoming update.

According to the roadmap above ^, the first pieces of content players can expect to experience are the Nightfall Scenario, the Cooldown Manger, and The Winds of Mysterious Fortune on April 22, 2025.

Nightfall Scenario

The Nightfall Scenario is a new questline/gameplay activity where players will ally with the Flame's Radiance faction to help defend the Arathi from the Sureki forces who seek to avenge their queen Ansurek.

As you aid the Flame's Radiance and to get know their leaders Thaed Pyremaker and Mylton Wyldbraun, you will earn ten levels of Renown with them and unlock special rewards.

Gameplay-wise, the Nightfall Scenario will have players fight the Sureki forces across Hallow and Azj-Kahet while being assigned to various task forces of the Flame's Radiance. You will also be able to take in various activities and quests to earn additional Renown and rewards in between scenarios.

The rewards you get for taking part in the Nightfall Scenario will include new armor sets, new weapons, a tabard that visually changes as you gain Renown levels with the Flame's Radiance, a new color variation for your Delver's Dirigible mount, and more.

As your Flame's Radiance rank increases, you will gain buffs that will grant you extra strength while exploring Hallowfall and Azj-Kahet.

The Winds of Mysterious Fortune

The Winds of Mysterious Fortune is a special passive event that will last from April 22, 2025, until May 20, 2025. While this event is active, players will gain a 20% experience buff to speed up levelling their new or alternate characters so long as their level is between 10 and 79.

The Winds of Mysterious Fortune will also grant a +200% buff for renown level gains for major factions in Dragonflight zones and a +100% buff for renown level gains for major factions in The War Within zones.

The affected factions include:

Dragonflight Factions

• Dragonscale Expedition
• Maruuk Centaur
• Iskaara Tuskarr
• Valdrakken Accord
• Loamm Niffen
• Dream Wardens
• Sabellian
• Wrathion
• Cobalt Assembly

The War Within Factions

• Council of Dornogal
• Hallowfall Arathi
• The Assembly of the Deeps
• The General
• The Vizier
• The Weaver

Undermine factions are excluded from benefitting from the Winds of Mysterious Fortune renown gain buff.

While the Winds of Mysterious Fortune event is active, players below Lv.80 will have a random chance to obtain Mysterious Satchels found while looting monsters or from quest rewards while exploring Dragonflight and The War Within Zones.

These satchels contain various items that grant temporary stat boosts or change your appearance. The satchels also have a rare chance of dropping bonus gear appropriate to your current level and class' specialization, and potions that grant two hours of 10% experience bonus gains that stack on top of the passive 20% exp boost buff from the Winds of Mysterious Fortune event.

The Experience potions are Warbound-bound items so they can transferred between your Warband account's characters that are between Lv.10 to Lv. 79. The best part is that these potions can be saved and used after the event is over, so you can stockpile them for future characters.

Do note that the Winds of Mysterious Fortune-related potions will not work in Mythic+ dungeons, Raids, or rated PvP content.

Cooldown Manager

Perhaps one of the biggest yet most subtle additions of this patch is the new Cooldown Manager. This is a new UI element that will show the cooldown timers of a player's cooldown abilities in the middle of the screen so they can more easily know when to use them again.

Players can activate the Cooldown Manager by opening up the Game Menu via hitting Escape, selecting Options, then opening up Advanced Options to see the 'Enable Cooldown Manager' option.

By toggling on this option, you can see important timers on your abilities' cooldowns and buffs in separate customizable HUD elements for your selected specialization.

You can also customize the Cooldown Manager by opening the Game Manue via hitting Escape, selecting Edit Mode to access the HUD Edit Mode, then selecting Advanced Options.

From there, you can select 'Cooldown Manager from the options and then select the Utility Cooldown Options bar, Essential Cooldowns bar, Tracked Buffs bar, and Tracked Bars by clicking on them and adjusting their visual appearances to suit your preferred UI set-up.

Horrific Visions Revisited

On May 20, the Horrific Visions event will be making its return in 'Horrific Visions Revisited'. In this event, players will be forced to fight for their lives and sanity in distorted, nightmarish versions of Stormwind and Orgrimmar, as dreamt up by the Old God N'Zoth.

This event can tackled solo or with a party of players. Solo players can also recruit a follower NPC called the Construct of Soridormi to help them out. This follower can take up Tank, DPS, or Healer roles and will not be affected by sanity.

The Horrific Visions Revisited event will also feature higher difficulty levels that will reward players with Heroic-tier items and gear should they overcome the odds.

The Horrific Vision Marks will also return for this event and they include Mask of Pain, Mask of Dark Imagination, Mask of the Long Night, Mask of the Burned Bridge, and Mask of the Daredevil.

There will also be three new masks to collect and conquer with called the Mask of Vengeance, Mask of Multitudes, and the Mask of the Nemesis.

Horrific Visions Revisited will feature a new currency to collect called Displaced Corrupted Mememtos. These Mementoes can be spent at vendors to purchase rewards from the previous Horrific Visions event and new rewards which include mounts, toys, transmogs, weapon enchantments, and more.

Dastardly Duos

Lastly, this content update will introduce a six-week event that will begin on June 3, 2025, called Dastardly Duos. This event will last from June 3, 2025 until July 15, 2025

Dastardly Duos is a combat show hosted by Vinnie Sweets and it will task players to fight 'animatronic' versions of bosses from World of Warcraft's past.

This event will involve full-player parties going up against two (or more) bosses at once to rack up points on a leaderboard. Claming victory in these battles will net players bonus power-ups they can use to help the even odds, and a variety of rewards including cosmetics, toys and dungeon items based on the bosses you slay.

Dastardly Duos can be accessed by visiting special hubs for it located in Stormwind, Orgrimmar, and Dornogal and speaking with Xyggie Marou to queue for fights. The hubs will also have a Troll-Servant vendor called Wodin where you can buy the aforementioned power-ups to help you in the upcoming fights.

The first week of Dastardly Duos will only have four bosses to fight, and each week afterward will add new ones up to a total of ten bosses to fight. New power-ups will also become available to purchase as the weeks go by.

Additionally, specific achievements can grant additional game effects from them while competing in the Dastardly Duo.

I can't wait to face the new challenges and snag new loot when World of Warcraft's 11.1.5 update drops this April.

World of Warcraft has been experiencing a renaissance lately thanks to the The War Within expansion's improved gameplay elements, story direction, and art design.

Not to mention every patch introduced since The War Within's launch has been nothing short of excellent like the chaotic, Goblin-themed Undermine patch. While this 11.1.5 content update is much smaller in scale, it nonetheless features tons of fun activities that will keep us busy long after we finish liberating Undermine.

Not to mention the Cooldown Manager, a feature that was only possible through third-party add-ons like WeakAuras is a huge deal. This feature will help new/rookie players manage their abilities more easily without having to scour the internet for mods that are difficult to set up without guides.

With player-housing on the horizon for World of Warcraft's upcoming 'Midnight' expansion later this year, the future of one of Blizzard's best PC games is looking bright.

World of Warcraft has entered its 21st year in operation, which makes it a true rarity within its genre, and potentially within the industry in general. It remains the world's most popular subscription-based MMORPG, with millions of players funding large ongoing story and PvE content drops every few months, with large world-growing expansions every 1.5 years or so.

WoW has enjoyed something of a renaissance recently. The "current" retail version of the game has received what may end up being remembered as one of its best expansions ever, with The War Within.

The latest content patch delivered an entire new city, new raid, new quest hub, ambitious new story beats, and more. Beyond that, Blizzard has thrown the rulebook out of the window, aggressively pursuing what players say they want, rather than what Blizzard thinks they want — WoW: Classic delivers the nostalgic experience people of a certain age yearn for.

WoW: Hardcore's new perma-death mode has become social media fodder, creating emergent and shareable hijinks ideal for the streaming era. Blizzard has also been experimenting with "remixed" events, retelling previous storylines with new gameplay elements. Despite it all, World of Warcraft has remained relevant, 20 years after the fact.

As a long-time player, I feel like World of Warcraft is enjoying something of a quiet renaissance right now. Emphasis on quiet, because part of me wonders how ready World of Warcraft is to go truly loud right now.

World of Warcraft 'The War Within' Season 2 patch is absolutely phenomenal

I need to preface this with an admission of bias. I am a goblin, and have been since Cataclysm 15 years ago. But let's put that to one side for a moment, and speak purely analytically: WoW's Undermine update is absolutely peak.

Undermine was fairly long in development, but the results speak for themselves. Undermine has been long established in lore as the goblin home city, and it's pretty clear that Blizzard wanted to deliver on those expectations.

For those who don't know, World of Warcraft goblins are a bit steampunky thematically, wielding their engineering prowess (or lack thereof) in the construction of various mechs, tanks, robots — many of which are prone to spontaneously explode.

The goblin's iconic penchant for chaos and their hyper-capitalistic society makes for a uniquely poignant setting given the current state of, well, everything, but Blizzard adeptly satirizes its themes with grace and good humor, but it's not all light-hearted neon-washed fun.

Undermine is run by a heartless kingpin known as Gallywix, who has a long history of general villainy. Players join other goblin mainstays like Gazlowe to lead something of a revolution in the city, uniting the disparate cartels against Gallywix — who seems to have aligned himself with saga antagonist Xal'atath.

While Undermine is full of crazy inventions and wacky hijinks, Blizzard also confidently injects genuinely heartfelt moments into proceedings, while also pushing forward the overarching saga

I won't spoil for those who haven't experienced the story yet, but it was, for me, the best mid-expansion storyline in years, and beefy, with plenty of high-quality cutscenes, voice acting, and juicy lore. I also have to give a big shout out to the music and soundtrack here — absolutely sublime filthy jazz and blues is a breath of fresh air.

On top of it all, Blizzard baked Undermine with new dynamic driving mechanics, a mountain of reward tracks to grind out, a new raid, a new dungeon, new delves — so much stuff, I find myself discovering new things almost daily. But, is it too good?

Hear me out.

But WoW continues to be difficult to recommend to new or long-lapsed players

Can a patch be too good? As Blizzard seems to want to raise the bar in every way for World of Warcraft, I find myself worrying about how poor the "new player" experience continues to be for the game.

I've written about it before, but years later, nothing major has really been done to improve things.

New players in WoW get dumped into a very dull, generic zone called Exile's Reach, which tutorializes the basics of the game in a patronizingly easy and poorly paced island of banal linearity. The original WoW starting experience put players into a huge world, immersing them in a racial starting zone steeped in player fantasy-building lore.

The non-linear levelling experience of the original World of Warcraft is simply unmatched, and not really available to experience in the modern game in an intuitive way.

Players can opt in to it, but the content is painfully outdated, creating story continuity issues, replete with pacing problems born of WoW's updated levelling speed.

The reason I worry that Undermine might be too good and the upcoming Midnight expansion with its player housing might be too good is that the quality bar Blizzard has reached lately seems like it must be very expensive.

And it's all content geared almost entirely to veteran, end-game players. There's been little to no investment in actually improving the experience for completely new players, besides the bare minimum.

I feel like without a solid starting zone experience, players won't as easily get invested in their characters, or in the over-arching story of the game. I also feel like they won't learn the ins and outs of the game in a well-paced way, instead being sped through the bare basics and then thrown into the deep end with a rapid delivery of new systems and mechanics.

Selfishly, if WoW is to maintain the quality bar that I am thoroughly enjoying right now, I'm concerned that not enough investment is being made to find those shiny new players.

Although my concerns might be totally unfounded. WoW Classic Hardcore has been popping off on socials after all, and maybe players don't mind the starting experience as much as I presume.

My current conspiracy theory is that, with zones like Undermine for goblins, the revamp to the Eastern Kingdoms in World of Warcraft: Midnight, and previous recent new zones like Bel'ameth for night elves, might be part of a gradual effort by Blizzard to create new starting zone experiences for different races. But there's no real evidence that'll happen.

I sincerely hope the new World of Warcraft development cycle is sustainable, either way, because it's absolutely fantastic. Is there a universe where World of Warcraft can return to the numbers seen during the Wrath of the Lich King days? I want to believe the answer is yes, but perhaps the landscape has simply changed too much.

The highly anticipated update for World of Warcraft: The War Within's next chapter, titled Undermine(d), finally has a release date. WoW fans need to wait no longer than February 25 to get their fill of goblin cartels, a sweet new customizable hot rod, and a chaotic 8-boss raid just for starters.

In the next chapter of WoW The War Within, players will need to unite the goblin cartels to put a stop to Gallywix and uncover his connection to Xal'atath. We have a helpful overview on the story for The War Within if you need a refresher before the big update. The city suffers as a result of ongoing conflict between the goblin cartels. The four cartels, Steamwheedle, Blackwater, Bilgewater, or Venture Company, will provide players new insight into goblin culture and their society. While there's sure to be plenty of humorous explosions and mayhem, there's much more to uncover with the goblins. Players can choose to align themselves with one of the four groups to participate in their cartel's unique weekly events.

There will be two new Delves to explore, including Excavation Site 9 and Sidestreet Sluice, with updated variants of existing delves alongside Brann Bronzebeard who will now feature a new tank specialization. Players can look forward to new rewards, curios, a new nemesis, and improve rewards at the highest difficulty during Season 2. For those of you that fussed the delves were too easy, look for increased difficulty of all delves from tier 4 and above with this update.

Of course, you'll need a new way to explore all this sweet new content. The G-99 Breakneck is a customizable hot rod designed for high-speed street domination so you can experience dynamic travel with D.R.I.V.E. The Breakneck will be exclusive to Undermine(d), and it offers a faster speed than any ground mount.

Additional features are also coming to The War Within with the 11.1 content update, including Operation: Floodgate, a 4-boss dungeon where players will race against time to prevent a catastrophic dam collapse within the Ringing Deeps. The Liberation of Undermine is an 8-boss raid that leads players through the streets of Undermine for a royal rumble at Gallywix's headquarters.

If you're still looking for more to get you excited for WoW The War Within's 11.1 update, then you might be tickled to find out a new PvP Arena is also on the menu. The Cage of Carnage is a close-quarter gladiatorial arena found within the Demolition Dome. Players are dropped in through trap doors, with only haphazard metal platforms equipped with ramps to keep things separated. That sounds safe!

To go along with a new PvP Arena, WoW The War Within will also follow up shortly after the launch of the update with a brand-new season. Season 2 will kick off on March 4 with a new raid, new Delves, and an update rotation of challenging mythic+ dungeons in addition to the new PvP season. Players can also look forward to exclusive rewards and achievements for their efforts.

A new raid unlock schedule has also been released ahead of the new season:

• Week of March 4: Raid Finder Wing 1: Shock and Awesome (Cauldron of Carnage; Rik Reverb), Normal, Heroic, Mythic Difficulty
• Week of March 11: Raid Finder Wing 2: Maniacal Machinist (Sprocketmonger Lockenstock; Stix Bunkjunker), Story Mode
• Week of March 18: Raid Finder Wing 3: Two Heads Are Better (Vexie and the Geargrinders; One-Armed Bandit; Mug’Zee)
• Week of March 25: Raid Finder Wing 4: The Chrome King (Chrome King Gallywix)

Players will work their way through eight new bosses during this raid schedule, concluding with the big fight against Chrome King Gallywix himself. It all starts with content update 11.1, Undermine(d), on February 25.

World of Warcraft is a massive multiplayer online and role-playing game developed and published by Blizzard. The title is considered to be the most popular MMORPG of all time, with server counts putting the base at more than 130 million players, despite only being available on PC.

During today's big Warcraft 30th anniversary celebration, Blizzard outlined the immediate future of World of Warcraft, and a variety of other projects. The major announcements revolved around Warcraft 1, 2, and 3: Reforged getting remastered versions, on top of major updates for Warcraft Rumble and Hearthstone.

For World of Warcraft: The War Within players, Blizzard offered a glimpse into the future of the game. We're getting a huge new patch dubbed Undermine(d), set in the goblin city of the same name. Undermine is a vast new subterranean city, complete with a new 8-boss raid experience with Gallywix as its ultimate villain. The patch will continue the story of Xal'atath and her efforts to subvert Azeroth itself, while also giving players new gear to hunt down and accolades to achieve.

For long time players, perhaps the biggest reveal / tease for World of Warcraft is the addition of Player Housing. In the next expansion, dubbed Midnight, players will finally be able to decorate their very own homes, complete with trophies acquired for various in-game feats. The tease has been a long time coming, since the feature was originally planned for the game over two decades ago, but has never materialized until now.

During the festivities, we spoke to game director Ion Hazzikostas as well as Assistant Lead Quest Designer Mark Kelada to learn a bit more about the future of World of Warcraft.

On Mythic+ progression, Hero Talents, and Delve rewards

Jez Corden, Exec Editor, Windows Central: At a high level, are you guys happy with how World of Warcraft: The War Within has been going so far? Particularly with regards to endgame progression, Mythic+ difficulty curve, and so on.

Ion Hazzikostas, World of Warcraft Game Director, Blizzard: I think high level, I'm very happy and satisfied with how The War Within has been going. The narrative journey, the world building, the beginning of the epic Worldsoul saga — I think it's been great seeing people just embrace that, while beginning to speculate about what's going to come next.

Delves and Warbands so far has played out the way we've hoped. On Mythic+, I think that this was a season of experiments. We changed the way affixes work, the way progression is structured, and we have been iterating based on feedback. A big focus for the team right now is to smooth out some particular pain points in specific dungeons, while also looking at class balance. We also don't feel like we have a proper on-ramp into the system.

For a lot of players hitting level 8 Delves, you're getting very powerful rewards at that point. When you look across from there to Mythic+, it can feel like there's no point doing anything below a Mythic+7, and 7 and up is actually quite hard. If you're someone without experience of dungeons to begin with, +7 is not the best point of entry, and it certainly wasn't designed to be a point of entry, so we think some players are hitting a cliff wall. So we see a lot of people bouncing off that would have previously had a home in early Mythic+ tiers. So, for Season 2, that's one of the big things we're going to address there. It just wasn't something we could change in the middle of Season 1.

Jez: On that point, do you think the Mythic+ Crest system is working out how you'd like? Sometimes I feel like it's a bit opaque and confusing, even for me as a vet. For new players, I've found it hard to explain at times, haha.

Ion: The Mythic+ Crest gearing system meets almost all of our design goals, save for that clarity and intuitiveness. That is one area we want to focus on in terms of naming them, tutorialization, and so on. We want to make it more logical about what you shuold be doing with Crests. The idea is to give players of all play styles goals to work towards, with ongoing power advancements, beyond specific item drops. Crests are an important part of the tiered structure of World of Warcraft, helping sure that the best way to get stronger is to push into harder content, rather than just grind basic content massively, as we saw previously with Artifact Power and things like that. You should want to complete higher tier dungeons, but making it clearer on how to get there is something we want to address.

Jez: I noticed you have been addressing some things mid-season such as racial bonuses, which were recently updated. I wondered how you guys are feeling about the overall balance of the game right now, not only for racial bonuses, but also Hero Talents. Are there more passes to come in the near term? Should we expect that Hero Talent trees end up simply being a case of "one tree for AoE, one for single target" and so on, as is the case for some of them?

Ion: On racials, I think we are taking more passes at increasing the power of particularly underpowered races, such as the Draenei Light of the Naaru, for example. Things that just don't feel worth even clicking in the current meta. At the same time, we want to keep racial power levels to be low. Just above "pure flavor" is the goal. The race you play should be an expression of your identity and preference in that regard, then I think it's meaningful to have some mechanical flavor associated with different races based on their heritage or physical quirks. We don't want to be at a place where players feel forced to play a specific race. There are a couple of race/class combinations where, at least when it comes to min-maxing, are higher than we'd prefer them to be. Those aren't changes we'd make mid-season, though.

On Hero Talents, overall we're happy with how they're playing out. Of course there are many trees, many specs, many ability interactions. There are some where there isn't enough diversity in terms of choices, and others have some finicky aspects that we're going to iterate. It overall accomplished our goals, though.

The situation you describe is a big challenge for our combat team, regarding picking specific trees for specific situations like AoE and single target. On the one hand, some players enjoy changing their load outs to solve specific problems. Others may dislike it, though, because they feel a certain tree is an expression of their preference or aesthetic identity. "This is what I think is the coolest, and I want this to work everywhere." That's true for hero talents, and maybe even specs as a whole. We try to strike a balance between strengths and weaknesses. That's why we made Hero Talents and talents in general heavily flexible, moving from single target, to something more AoE-oriented for dungeons, and then more utility-focused for PvP. I think that's the direction class design will likely continue in.

🎃The best early Black Friday deals🦃

• 💽Seagate Xbox Series X|S Card (2TB) | $199.99 at Best Buy (Save $160!)
• 💻Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge (X Elite) | $849.99 at Best Buy (Save $500!)
• 📱iPad 9th Generation (64GB) | $199.99 at Best Buy (Save $130!)
• 🖥️ABS Cyclone Desktop (RTX 4060) | $1,099.99 at Newegg (Save $400!)
• 💻HP Victus 15.6-inch (Radeon 6550M) | $429.99 at Best Buy (Save $370!)
• 📺LG OLED Curved Ultrawide (32-inches) | $892.74 at Amazon (Save $607!)
• 💻Alienware x16 R2 (RTX 4070) | $1,999.99 at Best Buy (Save $700!)
• 📺HP Curved Ultrawide (34-inches) | $299.99 at Best Buy (Save $180!)
• 💻Dell G16 Laptop (RTX 4060) | $1,199.99 at Best Buy (Save $400!)
• 📺LG C4 OLED 4K TV (42-inches) | $899.99 at Best Buy (Save $250!)

On story delivery, Undermine, and player housing

Jez: I feel like World of Warcraft's story delivery took a huge leap forward in terms of quality and delivery with The War Within, but my concern would be that it was probably also very expensive to deliver too ... should players continue to have increased expectations for World of Warcraft's story as we move into 11.1 Undermine(d) patch and more?

Mark Kelada, Assistant Lead Quest Designer, World of Warcraft: The goal is never to see a degradation in our story quality, certainly. In making 11.0, we wanted to make sure that our villains are on par with our heroes. Heroes are only as good as the villains, right? That's why we want to give Xal'atath a strong path through the story. What are the conflicts and successes that we can have? She grew from being trapped in a knife, and is now a focal point of the main story.

On Undermine, it's perhaps not what you might expect from a typical Goblin story, but it does connect to the main arc. We're not giving anything away today, but you will see how big characters from 11.0 feature into 11.1 in Undermine, and how the war between Gallywix and Gazlowe has begun playing out. I will say that we do want to take time to tell lighter stories too, in that vein, because you can create fatigue if we bludgeon you with heavy stories constantly.

Jez: It's music to my ears about the emphasis on villains, and I do feel like Xal'atath is one of the strongest World of Warcraft has had in years. You mentioned about the balance between heroes and villains, but many felt 11.0 with The War Within's launch was quite heavily Alliance-centric. How important is the Horde vs. Alliance narrative to the future of WoW?

Ion: I think narratively, there's no question that the Alliance vs. Horde conflict is not the primary theme of WoW at this stage. We dived very deeply into that for Battle for Azeroth, and there is a history of conflict and tensions. But the story has always been about the factions ultimately working together to battle a shared enemy to save Azeroth itself. We found increasingly that trying to shoehorn conflict into those stories, it felt dissonant for players. It's almost not realistic, and almost frustrating to watch the Horde and Alliance snipe at each other while Azeroth is potentially facing apocalyptic destruction. I think that matches how players think. We're making the game more cross-faction so that players can play with their friends regardless of server of faction. We still want the faction anchors, the thematic identity of playing Horde or Alliance, which is why we often hear feedback like "this story is too Alliance focused" or "too Horde focused." We don't swing the pendulum based on the need to tell faction-specific stories, and we think it's important to note that an elvish story doesn't necessarily need to be Alliance-associated, and Undermine in 11.1 doesn't necessarily need to be Horde-associated too. Goblins were a neutral faction long before the Bilgewater Cartel joined the Horde. Obviously Alliance characters like Anduin have been front and center right now, but other characters with other affiliations will come to the fore over the course of the story.

Mark: We are cognizant of the feedback of course, but the discussion often revolves around what cultures or characters are best conduits to tell aspects of the story as it develops. Gazlowe is a character players might recognize from Battle for Azeroth with a bit of Heroes of the Storm too, and now we have an opportunity to build him up beyond that legacy experience.

Ion: We can say pretty confidently that we didn't just do Undermine because we felt like "it was time to give goblins their spotlight," but rather really because we're already underground. What are some known locations from beneath the surface of Azeroth? Obviously, one of the big ones was the Nerubian Empire, which we'd barely seen. The second big one was, of course, Undermine. Figuring out how to lead the story arc to Undermine was an early challenge, but it would've been a horrible injustice to make an expansion underground and miss out on Undermine. It was a labor of love for everyone to pull together and figure it out. The humor, the intrigue, the "fun" that comes with goblin culture, and it's a really deep exploration. We're going well beyond the surface.

Mark: Undermine was a weird sort of turn, but the team was hyped to make it work. We wanted to follow the "rule of cool" while also making sure the story develops in a way that doesn't make people go "huh?" It's a cultural story, but we're pulling different Azerothian races in too, we want to serve players and the characters they're playing too. We're excited to go deeper on a culture when the story allows us to make sure we're doing it justice, and not just try to shoe-horn things into a position.

Jez: Just a quick one before we run out of time... I'm not going crazy right, you guys did just confirm World of Warcraft Player Housing, right?

Ion: Yes, it is a tease. I hope we weren't too subtle there. Player housing is coming in World of Warcraft: Midnight. We'll have a lot more to say on Midnight and housing in the year to come. We wanted to end our Warcraft Direct on player housing to start conversations and discussions, and listen to what people want to see most from it. We don't want to say much more about it for now, since our focus is on The War Within, but we can't wait to share more in 2025.

World of Warcraft's roadmap is looking bright

A mountain of fresh content is heading to World of Warcraft in the coming months. WoW: Classic has a new Season of Discovery to look forward to, in addition to totally fresh realms based on the vanilla experience. World of Warcraft retail is getting the big Undermine patch at the start of next year, with an expansion on the horizon with Player Housing as a headlining feature in 2025. Warcraft 1, 2, and 3 have been refreshed and updated on Battle.net, celebrating Blizzard's heritage. Warcraft Rumble is also coming to PC, and Hearthstone is getting new StarCraft-themed content as well.

As someone who has been playing for 20 years, it has been a long time since World of Warcraft truly felt like it was firing on all cylinders. Microsoft's acquisition of Activision-Blizzard has removed much of the old guard from the organizational equation, which has been felt as a change of direction for one of the world's most celebrated franchises. Long may it live! Thanks a ton for reading, and thanks to Blizzard for taking the time to answer some of our questions.

World of Warcraft: The War Within is here, and so far, it has been incredibly promising. 

Microsoft's Xbox division acquired World of Warcraft along with its purchase of Activision-Blizzard last year, and it coincided with a bit of a boom time for the game. Thanks to back-to-back solid expansion launches, I haven't been this hopelessly addicted to World of Warcraft in quite a long time. The volume of pro-player design choices Blizzard has baked into its maturing MMORPG has also seen legions of lapsed players return. 

In my World of Warcraft: The War Within review, I praised the game's focus on improved story telling and reduced grind, allowing players to band their alternate characters together to share reputation, currencies, and even equipment. The game also now has soloable mini dungeons for those of us who don't have the time nor inclination to get into organized group World of Warcraft content. Blizzard has also extended the class fantasy, allowing players to further specialize their characters with "Hero Talents" inspired by classic Warcraft archetypes. However, some aspects of these features still need a bit of polish. 

RELATED: Is it worth playing World of Warcraft in 2024?

World of Warcraft enters its 20th year in November, and Blizzard is celebrating WoW's 20th with a range of new content, including revamped equipment sets and a remastered old school dungeon. But between now and then, Blizzard is working hard to improve some of the new features it added to The War Within, and we caught up with Associate Game Director Morgan Day to learn a little bit more about what the immediate future may hold.

🎃The best early Black Friday deals🦃

• 🎮Lenovo Legion Go (Z1 Extreme) | $649.99 at Best Buy (Save $100!)
• 💻HP Victus 15.6 (Radeon RX 6550M) | $449.99 at Best Buy (Save $350!)
• 📺Amazon Fire TV Stick | $24.99 at Amazon (Save $25!)
• 💻Lenovo IdeaPad 1 (Ryzen 5) | $329.99 at Best Buy (Save $250!)
• 🕹️Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (3-months) | $29.49 at CDKeys (Save $21!)
• 💻Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge (X Elite) | $849.99 at Best Buy (Save $500!)
• 🕹️Starfield Premium Upgrade (Xbox & PC) | $28.29 at CDKeys (Save $7!)
• 💻ASUS Vivobook S 15 (X Elite) | $970 at Amazon (Save $330!)
• 🕹️Final Fantasy XVI (PC, Steam) | $43.49 at CDKeys (Save $7!)
• 💻Dell XPS 14 (Core Ultra 7) | $1,449.99 at Dell (Save $550!)
• 💻Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1 (Ryzen 5) | $499.99 at Best Buy (Save $230!)
• 🕹️Hi-Fi RUSH (PC, Steam) | $8.59 at CDKeys (Save $21!)
• 💻Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 (Core Ultra 7) | $1,099.99 at Best Buy (Save $350!)
• 🕹️Days Gone (PC, Steam) | $12.09 at CDKeys (Save $38!)

On Delves, Hero Talents, and more upcoming changes

Jez Corden, Managing Editor at Windows Central: With Delves having been out for a few weeks now, what are the biggest takeaways and changes you're exploring for the near or long term? One big discrepancy I've seen in my own experiences is that my warlock has a very easy time solo'ing tier 8, but my disc priest has a very miserable time solo'ing tier 8, for example. 

Morgan Day, Associate Game Director at Blizzard: It’s been amazing seeing everyone’s excitement for Delves, and the positivity around how flexible they are. We really want to continue to prioritize achieving our goal of making Delves a bite-sized piece of content that you can do in a quick 10 or 15 minutes, and a lot of our biggest takeaways have been focused on achieving those goals. We’ve learned a lot about tuning of the Delves at higher difficulty and the impact of solo vs. group play, as well as Brann’s impact on your experience depending on your role. 

As you mentioned, the team is really focused right now on dialling in the tuning of delves across different roles and we’re actively discussing ways that we can help get the experience more aligned for your Disc Priest.

With Hero Talents, you've previewed a big rework of Dark Ranger, which has been well received by the community. Are there any other talent trees you're looking into for perhaps another pass? I feel both thematically and mechanically some trees are a lot stronger than others even now. 

Dark Ranger is the big one for 11.0.5 and the 20th Anniversary update; we’re super excited for the update and the new visuals there! Keep an eye out in future updates for additional Hero Talent changes as well as visual updates, but for the immediate future outside of Dark Ranger we’re looking at making some adjustments to Rogue, Resto and Balance Druids as well as Enhance and Elemental Shaman. Additionally based on player feedback we’re also looking to make some further adjustments to the Shaman Ascendancy form that we had previously announced and updated that will be in the Anniversary update. Some of those updates to the Shaman forms are now visible in the latest PTR build.

On Warbands, story delivery, and updating old school assets

I've personally adored the Warband system, and it has made me feel like playing my alts is also beneficial for my main. How are you guys feeling about the way Warbands have landed? Could we see more features added there?

Great to hear you’ve been enjoying the Warband System! We view Warbands as an evergreen feature that will make WoW better forever. We feel it has transformed the way we build all of our features moving forward to ensure we’re considering whether we should “Warbandify” (I just made that word up) where it’s appropriate. While we’re excited with what we had to offer at the launch of The War Within, we want to continue to improve upon and add to the already strong foundations of Warbands.

We’ve been listening to player feedback to help drive the short-term additions and improvements we make to the system and are looking at things like adding filters to the character select screen so people with a bunch of alts can more quickly find their characters. We’ve also heard feedback about not being able to easily transfer currency if you have zero of that currency on the character you’re currently logged into, so we’re working to get a solution for that into the near future.

Longer term we still love the idea of adding more options for your camp screen and being able to change where your Warband is located on that screen. I’ve really loved seeing the community reaction as well as the fan art and community created camp screens that feel so thematic!

The Warcraft 20th anniversary coming up, as someone who has played since the beginning, I love what you're doing with the Tier 2 sets and I think most others do as well. Updating classic assets seems like an ongoing process. How do you approach updating classic assets, and how do you pick which ones to look at next? Since transmog, people seem more invested in their character's visuals than ever, I would say.

We spend a lot of time discussing this topic, and in terms of what we update it’s a delicate balance. We often are guided by the content we’re building, and the story we’re currently telling to make sure that it keeps the original intent. For the Tier two sets we felt like that was a great way to update something that is beloved by the community, but also retained the original design of those iconic sets.

Regarding future updates, it’s hard to say but we are always looking for opportunities, reading community feedback, and looking for ways to make WoW always feel fresh and revisiting exciting content from the past that still holds up today.

I want to really give you guys a shoutout for the delivery of The War Within's story. The cinematic treatment, abundance of voice acting, and "stay a while and listen" moments really added a ton of intrigue and depth this time around. How are you guys feeling about how that aspect of TWW landed? I think it has been a long time since I've been so intrigued by the mysteries Blizzard is weaving.

For the specific “stay a while and listen” moments, that really was inspired by wanting to tell these deep stories but also wanting to make sure people were able to play they wanted to. We have such a broad audience in WoW; some people are really geeked out by the narrative, where others just want to get to max level so they can do the super challenging content as quickly as possible. 

In the past we might have built those quests to make you “Hear the story of X, Y, and Z thing” and we have gotten feedback that it could break the pacing of gameplay for some of our audiences. So, with The War Within we looked at this as an opportunity to continue that world building and developing the rich stories of the cultures and characters, but in a way that felt more like an opt-in experience.

We’re excited that it paid off, those were very much an intentional choice, and we were quite worried that people would miss out on that story, but that hasn’t turned out to be the case, which is awesome!

World of Warcraft is on a big upward trajectory

A big thanks to Morgan Day for fielding our questions here! 

World of Warcraft is experiencing a soft renaissance in my view, and while there are still plenty of issues to address, the game feels like it has been in a better place than it has been in years. Blizzard has begun focusing on permanent, evergreen additions to the game, rather than expansion-only features that get thrown away at the end. We've seen a greater alignment with how different cohorts of players play, offering potent challenges for high-end Mythic raiders, and accessible challenges for mid-core players in Heroic raids and Mythic+. For solo players, we've seen a bigger emphasis on story development and character delivery, as well as the first tier of solo-able Delve dungeons that offer truly powerful rewards. 

RELATED: Best PCs for World of Warcraft

Of course, there's still some polish passes to address. I think healers have had it particularly rough this season for example, and some specs and hero talent trees have fallen quite far behind the pack, limiting player choice. There's still the on-going issue of the new player experience being a bit muddled and lacking compared to previous iterations of World of Warcraft. Also, the lack of playable ogres remains a big issue. Right? No? Just me? Anyway ...

In any case, World of Warcraft continues to be an example to be followed for the service video game industry, as it enters its next two decades. Long may it live, and may we get playable ogres sooner rather than later, ahem. 

What you need to know

• World of Warcraft is among the game industry's most successful titles, entering its 20th year of profitable operation. 
• Microsoft acquired the game when it purchased Activision-Blizzard, which was finalized last year. 
• Over the summer, World of Warcraft gained its latest expansion, The War Within, and it has been largely well-received. 
• However, an influx of new players have noticed that World of Warcraft's aging levelling experience has become easier and more simplistic than ever — because you can no longer actually die. 

World of Warcraft is one of the game industry's biggest success stories. Launched almost 20 years ago, the game has gone from strength to strength, still delivering a premier MMORPG experience even during some of its worst expansion cycles. Microsoft acquired World of Warcraft when it purchased Activision-Blizzard, and it remains one of Windows' best PC games. 

The most recent one, World of Warcraft: The War Within, has vastly improved the experience for casual players and soloists, adding a new type of dungeon that solo players can enjoy, while also maintaining the usual endgame difficulty curve for those who want a real challenge. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft interview (Oct 2024) on Warbands, Delves, Hero Talents, and more

In my WoW: The War Within review, as well as my "Should you play World of Warcraft in 2024?" article, both times I've criticized the game's levelling experience. World of Warcraft's new-player experience is sub-par generally speaking, owing to overlapping timelines, outdated story content, and a insistence on speeding players to the endgame without care or consideration for storytelling or immersion. I would argue that this abandonment of WoW's levelling experience is partially responsible for the interest in WoW: Classic, which had a much, much better delivery. 

As part of The War Within, Blizzard has been updating, hotfixing, and patching the game at a breakneck pace. I wrote this past week about how the World of Warcraft's new Delve dungeon system has missed potential owing to balance issues, with some classes far better at soloing the content than others. 

World of Warcraft's difficulty curve has undergone various permutations over the years. 25-player Mythic raids offer a blisteringly tough challenge for the most skilled min-maxxers, while Mythic+ 5-man dungeons scale in difficulty based on your choices. Delves too have a tier system, going all the way up to Tier 13 complete with a special solo boss. Many of the game's endgame systems reward player skill and dedication, and gently ease players into the experience from Story mode dungeons with AI followers, to mid-core Heroic raids, all the way to Mythic difficulties that even have esports events revolving around them. 

That curated difficulty curve is exactly why I'm slightly baffled by this latest change to the game's new-player experience. It was noticed by players in my guild and, as far as I can tell, hasn't been clearly documented by Blizzard. 

In the above clip, you can see my level 47 dwarf Paladin getting whaled on by elite monsters, only to find himself fully invincible. It seems that new players cannot die in World of Warcraft anymore, which completely eliminates any and all risk from actually playing the game. 

I'm unsure what this "Obsidian Blessing" buff, which protects you from death essentially from levels 1 through to 70 aims to achieve. For new players, it creates a completely inconsistent experience between 1 to 70 and levels 71 to 80, since as far as I can tell, it isn't really explained anywhere why exactly you're unable to die in the Dragon Isles. The levelling experience for new customers directs players straight to the previous Dragonflight expansion, which offers at least some basic context for the wider World of Warcraft universe. I've argued previously that Blizzard should remake the old WoW levelling experience with a focus on small-stakes evergreen content that builds immersion and flavor, much like the old experience that made the game a huge hit in the first place. 

WoW's levelling experience was far less forgiving than today's modern experience, making you feel as though danger lurked in every corner, adding intrigue and mystique. I've tried many times to get friends and family into the game, only for them to bow out owing to the simplistic, and un-immersive gameplay that is at total odds with the current expansion experience. Now, Blizzard has taken that ease to a whole new level. Removing all the danger from World of Warcraft is akin to making it feel completely arbitrary. Why not just remove levelling all together, if Blizzard has started to think that all types of friction are the problem?

🎃The best early Black Friday deals🦃

• 🕹️Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (3-months) | $31.59 at CDKeys (Save $17!)
• 💻Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge (X Elite) | $899.99 at Best Buy (Save $450!)
• 🎮Razer Wolverine V2 Chroma (Xbox & PC) | $99.99 at Amazon (Save $50!)
• 🕹️Starfield Premium Upgrade (Xbox & PC) | $27.69 at CDKeys (Save $7!)
• 💻ASUS Vivobook S 15 (X Elite) | $955 at Amazon (Save $345!)
• 🕹️Final Fantasy XVI (PC, Steam) | $43.79 at CDKeys (Save $6!)
• 💻Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon | $1,481.48 at Lenovo (Save $1,368!)
• 🎮 Seagate Xbox Series X|S Card (2TB) | $249.99 at Best Buy (Save $110!)
• 🕹️Hi-Fi RUSH (PC, Steam) | $8.49 at CDKeys (Save $22!)
• 💻HP Victus 15.6 (RTX 4050) | $599 at Walmart (Save $380!)
• 🫙Seagate HDD Starfield Edition (2TB) | $79.99 at Best Buy (Save $30!)
• 🖱️Razer Basilisk V3 Wired Mouse | $44.99 at Best Buy (Save $25!)
• 🕹️Days Gone (PC, Steam) | $10.19 at CDKeys (Save $39!)
• 🖥️Lenovo ThinkStation P3 (Core i5 vPro) | $879.00 at Lenovo (Save $880!)

Not all players are the same, but no player wants to be bored

I don't begrudge Blizzard's intent to make the game more accessible to players. I used to raid 5 days a week during my early 20s to chase server-first boss kills, and now I simply can't imagine ever having that kind of time. I love that Delves have made gear progression more accessible for players with less free time or less inclination to group with others. I love that World of Warcraft: The War Within also has a story mode raid experience for solo players to experience story beats typically exclusive to guilds and group players. In fact, I would argue that the story mode feature should be expanded to the entire raid, rather than just the final boss. 

What I find it hard to advocate for is making World of Warcraft boring. My level 47 protection Paladin, which is supposed to be a low-damage defensive class, already can one-hit-kill monsters with critical hits. And now, you're telling me I don't even need to actually play the game to level up? I would argue that this isn't going to have the intended impact Blizzard might want it to have — death teachers players the risks of standing in area-effect spells, or over-pulling monsters. If you teach players that there are no consequences for hitting 0% health, then you're going to teach them endgame is like that too. MMORPGs need to have depth, challenge, and risks to justify those juicy rewards. 

I'm all for improving access to the game, but Blizzard has gone way too far with this one, and should seriously reconsider, in my view. Perhaps there's a perfectly valid reason for this that I'm overlooking. Maybe it's a bug, and the Obsidian Blessing is not actually supposed to make you unkillable. Maybe they have access to data that I don't and immortality is exactly what the game needs to attract new players. I would argue that a dedicated levelling experience that comes with localized evergreen stories, complete with engaging gameplay and risk and reward paradigms is what it needs to find new players. But hey, I'm certainly no game dev, just a passionate fan. 

Microsoft purchased Activision-Blizzard last year, and with it, the legendary Blizzard franchises like World of Warcraft. The first expansion launched as part of that partnership is World of Warcraft: The War Within, and despite having a very typical Azerothian theme, it's actually probably the most pivotal, important expansion the game has had in over a decade. 

In my World of Warcraft: The War Within on-going review, one of the aspects I've been working to dive deeper into is Delves, its much-lauded small group / solo player content. Delves are small 15-20 minute experiences (according to Blizzard in my recent interview), that are akin to mini dungeons complete with a boss at the end. Delves have 12 tiers, with the 8th and higher rewarding powerful end-game loot on par with Heroic difficulty raids. There's also a 13th tier that is a challenging boss battle, culminating a mini story quest chain that rewards players with added bragging rights and cosmetic rewards. 

RELATED: Is World of Warcraft worth playing in 2024?

So far, I've been having an absolute blast with Delves in World of Warcraft. But there's a huge caveat here. I'm a demonology warlock, armed with a personal demonic body guard and a variety of tools designed for solo play. Other players have been having an incredibly bad experience with Delves, owing to their on-going balance issues. 

I feel like Blizzard is well and truly on the edge of making solo / small-group endgame play truly magical in World of Warcraft, but getting there may require a big change in design philosophy — a change that could negatively impact other parts of the game. Nailing balance for Delves is going to be incredibly tough.  

Balancing challenge with access

World of Warcraft has been designed with group-play in mind for 20 years. Blizzard famously declared that 1v1 PvP would never be balanced in yesteryear, owing to the need for classes to have divergent flavor and tools. If every class has every ability, then you're homogenizing the class fantasy to a degree, and reducing the need to actually socialize in the game. 

With Delves, Blizzard has acknowledged that no matter what they do, some players simply don't want to deal with other players. World of Warcraft can be a very "elitist" environment in some regards, with gatekeeping at every turn. Players will defer to tier lists online and make a blanket decision that "this class is bad" and deny access to group content, even if the differences between them are as little as 3% on paper. Delves are a potential reprieve from that universe, where finding likeminded players can be an uphill battle at times. 

I'm blessed with an incredibly fun and kind guild of semi-casual players who like to go hard at seasonal content without getting too stressed about it. But finding this guild took me literally decades. Many players won't necessarily have that kind of determination, particularly new ones who never got bitten by the WoW bug. For them, Delves are on the edge of being the perfect content. 

• DEAL: Xbox Game Pass Ultimate 3-month pre-paid cards are just $31.59 at CDKeys, giving you three months for the price of two even after the recent price increase to $19.99/month

In Delves, players are dropped into a mini dungeon designed to be finished in around 15-20 minutes, according to my previous interview with Blizzard. Each Delve has three different scenarios, which changes their stories, bosses, and in some cases, the dungeon's layout. In the picture below, you can see one particular scenario which had me attempting to defend a Leviathan giant squid from being taken over by necromantic Kobyss.

Over the weekend, I played through some Delves in 2-player co-op with my brother, and we had a blast. The tier-8 difficulty dungeons reward champion gear, which typically come from 20~ player raids or mythic+ difficulty 5-man dungeons, requiring very tight co-ordination and organization. The tier 8 Delves are similarly challenging, requiring careful planning, and class skill utilization. I found myself casting Fear for the first time in years outside of PvP to crowd control monsters, while my bro beat monsters down with his plate-wearing tauren warrior. We had a solid set up for Delves here, with his high-armor making him very tanky, and my demon pets keeping aggro on other monsters while I burned them with fel magic from afar. 

But herein lies one of the issues with Delves, it's far, far easier for some classes and set ups over others. 

Delves are great for strong solo classes, and awful for others

By the time this article goes out, it may already be irrelevant. Blizzard has been patching and hotfixing Delves at a breakneck pace since they launched them with the World of Warcraft: The War Within expansion, with some tweaks hitting players mid-dungeon run in some cases. 

Blizzard says that fixing Delves is their "top priority," with a variety of buffs and nerfs hitting the system in various ways. For example, the latest one as of writing pertains to a "bug" that gives your NPC companion, Brann, extra damage in some cases. Players who encountered this bug had an easier time in Delves, while others didn't. I have no idea personally if I hit up this bug or not, but I can tell that my experience vastly differs based on what class I've played. 

Playing through the tier-8 difficulty Delves with my plate-wearing brother, with item-level recommendation appropriate gear was incredibly fun. They certainly weren't the "15-20 minute" experiences Blizzard described, though, as monsters have incredibly high levels of hit points and can take a very long time to burn through. I found the extreme end of this example when I tried to put my discipline healing priest through the same Delve on tier-6, again, using the item levels that Blizzard recommended.

This "15-20 minute" experience actually took me roughly 45-60 minutes to get through. And that wasn't because I died. I only died once on the final boss during this run. The issue was that the monsters simply took that long to kill as a healing specced player. 

If Delves are truly designed around the solo player, then in essence, I should be able to complete them efficiently with any class. I have Brann Bronzebeard, the NPC companion players get to partner up with for these "solo" dungeons at level 20. I had him in his damage dealer mode, and still it took an exorbitant amount of time to slowly burn monsters down with the tools I had available to me. This wasn't the "casual" experience I feel Blizzard sold to me during the initial press run. I'm using the item level recommended to me here, with Brann Bronzebeard in his damage dealing role to compensate my lack of damage. Other players are hitting the same frustrating walls, depending on their class choices. 

Many classes don't have access to short cooldown interrupts, for example. These interrupts have been typically the realm of melee-based classes, and it seems that some bosses (particularly the tier-13 challenge boss) are designed around having access to interrupts. In some cases, players have found that it's optimal to play these dungeons in a more traditional way, in 5-man groups with a tank, healer, and three damage dealer roles assigned. In other cases, players have found that certain classes have a brutally difficult uphill struggle while other have a total breeze, based on the tools their classes have.

Indeed, my discipline priest does not have access to an interrupt at all, which meant the final boss of this particular dungeon was able to deal massive amounts of damage to me unimpeded using a curse spell, that I also lacked the tools to remove. I was able to heal through the damage just about, but I couldn't help but feel like as the tiers climb higher, it's going to just become ever-increasingly choring to get through them on this particular class. 

My warlock by comparison has a far easier time. A personal tank, several fears and interrupt options, self-heals, high sustained direct and area damage, teleports, stuns, and much more, designed to help me in solo play. Warlocks and other classes have long held the mantle of being great for solo play, but with Delves, Blizzard may have to reconsider how it approaches class balance and design if it wants this to be its flagship solo content. 

Can World of Warcraft get solo Delves right?

I want to emphasize that I do love a challenge in WoW. Getting the fel fire cosmetic challenge unlocked on my warlock back in Mists of Pandaria is one of the most fun and rewarding things I've been able to achieve as a solo player in WoW. Things like the Mage Tower and Brawler's Guild have fleetingly offered solo players ways to enjoy and challenge themselves beyond the typical group-based content. I've also been concerned that Delves could be too rewarding, to the point where highly organized group-based content could become obsolete. Indeed, the highest item level in my weekly reward vault is as a result of the Delves I did this week, rather than any of the raiding or mythic+ 5-man dungeons I did. 

Brann Bronzebeard and other seasonal NPC party members for these Delve dungeons should be the complimenting factor to any of an individual class's shortcomings. Brann has interrupts, but they're painfully random, and often interrupt the "wrong" thing. His damage often feels middling and difficult to quantify, and the fact he can't really tank or taunt directly seems like a total mis-fire for players trying to play solo as healers or even more vulnerable cloth characters. As a shadow priest for example, I still found myself far too squishy to actually run the Delve, with Brann unable to take attention away from monsters who wanted to murder me. 

I want every run to feel as fun and rewarding as it did when I played through with my brother. It was a solid challenge, still required to navigate the dungeon's various hazards and be sharp with interrupts and stuns. We completed it in a reasonable timeframe too, about 20-30 minutes as previously advertised. We got insane rewards for it as well (for me, a ring, whose enchants and sockets nearly bankrupted me to upgrade). But by comparison, playing through the same Delves on my healer priest solo was an utterly miserable, slog of an experience.

If Blizzard can make Delves a fun experience for any spec, that would be the true holy grail solo players of WoW have been waiting decades for. But it goes beyond simply giving Brann more damage, some classes simply don't have the tools needed to overcome certain challenges. I think it's important that classes remain powerful in their respective niches, but Blizzard needs to rethink Brann and how much control we have over his abilities, like his interrupts, if Delves are really going to land more keenly. 

You don't want Delves to be too easy, because it'll trivialize group content and social play. You don't want them to be too rewarding either, because again, players will find it's more efficient to eschew guilds. You also don't want them to be too hard, because they're designed around a shorter gameplay loop many casual players absolutely need in order to justify the subscription. You also don't want to exclude any class or spec from it, because that defines what "solo" play is all about. But you also don't want them to punish players who do want to play with friends in small groups. 

Delves have the opportunity to be "everything" content, without the same types of restrictions of other World of Warcraft endgame activities. If Blizzard can nail the balance, they could be truly huge for the game in a variety of ways. Whether it's attracting new players, opportunities to experiment with new mechanics, inject world building lore into small spaces, or even just showcase a cool moment that didn't fit into other types of content.

I don't envy the challenge Blizzard has given themselves here, but the rewards for what Delves could bring World of Warcraft from a game health perspective could be immense. Delves are tantalizing glimpse into what could be one of World of Warcraft's most important, pivotal features, as it enters its 20th year. 

World of Warcraft turns 20 in November. That means I've been playing World of Warcraft (often known as WoW) for 20 years. I am old, and so is its player base. Blizzard seems to have acknowledged some of that in a big way in World of Warcraft: The War Within. 

Indeed, as mentioned, the latest expansion is called The War Within, and takes place within Azeroth itself, the planet over which all sorts of interdimensional horrors and outer gods seem obsessed with fighting for. The previous expansion Dragonflight was well received overall, with a big overhaul in playstyle-defining talent trees, heaps of added depth to profession systems, wrapped in a lower-stakes conflict that set the stage for the latest bout of nightmares eager to devour World of Warcraft players from beyond the great dark. 

Since the game's launch, I've been playing almost non-stop. I've completed every single main and side quest. I've kitted out two characters, obtained rare mounts I thought would take me months to acquire, and beaten every boss the game has to offer in its pre-season state. Ahead of the Season 1 launch, I thought it was appropriate to put my initial thoughts to paper, and then update this review over the coming months with each content update to see how The War Within evolves over time. 

RELATED: Should you play World of Warcraft in 2024?

This review is both for veteran players as well as interested potential newcomers, but also Blizzard itself. This review is as much for you as it is framed for (hopefully) constructive feedback for one of the most successful and intriguing video game projects in history, and what is undoubtedly one of the best PC games of all time. It's also the first World of Warcraft launch expansion since Microsoft purchased Activision-Blizzard last year, which is of particular interest, given that Activision meddling was often blamed for World of Warcraft's more recent declines. 

Either way and make no mistake, The War Within proves that Blizzard has absolutely no intention of slowing down. My issues with WoW: The War Within do little to dent the overall experience right now. Honestly, I haven't been this invested in a World of Warcraft experience since vanilla itself, and for me, that's a huge achievement in of itself. 

The War Within represents a big leap in immersive story telling, a vast expansion of solo and alternate-character play accessibility, and an exciting overarching saga set up that could define the next decade of Warcraft. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within Review — Story delivery

The headline act here, for me, is the story delivery. World of Warcraft's central gameplay loop hasn't changed in an enormous way for the most part (save for solo play, and we'll get to that in a minute), but I would argue that The War Within represents a huge evolution for how Blizzard thinks about story telling in its flagship product. Arguably, The War Within has the best story delivery the game has seen since Legion, and potentially, maybe ever. 

It's hard not to draw some comparisons here, as there are only really two major subscription based MMORPGs that remain popular in any capacity. One is Final Fantasy 14, and the other is World of Warcraft. A couple of years ago, I wrote an editorial about how Final Fantasy 14 was on the cusp of eating World of Warcraft's lunch, owing in part to a more thoughtful delivery on story beats and character development. I certainly wasn't alone in thinking that, either. After the middling reception of the Shadowlands expansion and the way the poor writing unravelled some of Warcraft's most iconic characters, I feel like Blizzard really had to begin rethinking how it treats its story beats. The War Within builds on the improvements Blizzard made in World of Warcraft: Dragonflight in a big way, with a far more thoughtful approach on character building, coupled with boosted cinematic tech investment. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within story overview (for new players)

The War Within kickstarts a new saga that Blizzard has dubbed "The Worldsoul Saga," presumptively named after the planet Azeroth itself. In the Warcraft universe, we've discovered that planetary bodies can carry powerful souls, in essence, which the godly Titan pantheon have used to nurture new Titans into existence. Titans certainly aren't infallible, though, with the leader of the apocalyptic Burning Legion, Sargeras, being a Titan that fell to demonic influence. Thus sets the stage for The War Within. A shadowy agent of the void, Xal'atath, is seemingly seeking to usurp Azeroth's Worldsoul for her nefarious own ends. Although much of her plans remain utterly shrouded in mystery. 

Players and major story characters like Alleria Windrunner, Anduin Wrynn, and Magni Bronzebeard answer the call of the planet itself to seek out the lands of Khaz Algar, built atop a large Titan facility. It's the home land of the Earthen, a faction of proto-dwarves that are made of rock and stone, animated by the Titans themselves. Here, we learn about their diverse culture, inter-civilization conflicts, and ultimately help them overcome internal political conflicts to face the bigger threat — Xal'atath, and her various proxies. 

The journey into the deep caverns of Khaz Algar represents some of World of Warcraft's greatest character building to date, with all characters wrestling with their past in different ways. I won't spoil it, but the resolution of a 20-year sub-plot between Magni Bronzebeard and his family had me tearing up for the first time across almost 20,000 hours spent in this game world. This felt like Blizzard's writing team at its absolute best, paying careful attention not to make the same mistakes of previous expansions while also balancing the need to acknowledge those previous, potentially unpopular writing decisions. 

Blizzard made certain to add a lot of additional optional dialogue beats beyond the main cutscenes too for those that are interested, further developing its characters and shaping our understanding of their motivations. Blizzard's under-investment in story development seriously harmed the game across the Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands expansions, with character decisions and motivations lacking explanation or appearing contradictory in practice.  However, some of those "rushed" writing beats do still appear at times in The War Within, which I hope Blizzard continues to work through. 

Some of the game's zones have a great arching sub plot that usually culminates in a dungeon story event, complete with a mini antagonist being taken down. The Ringing Deeps has its dysfunctional Titan machines and a seemingly tyrannical, corrupt steward to deal with. Dornogal on the surface sees two factions of Titan-loyal and Titan-disloyal Earthen fight through frosty relations. Hallowfall represents a lost human faction of Arathi in constant war with void-empowered Nerubian spiders, and in Azj-Kahet, we help rebel spiders fight against Xal'atath's usurping of the throne. 

Some of the beats here are quite familiar territory. Azj-Kahet is unmistakably similar to Legion's Suramar, where players help rebel Nightborne reclaim their city from The Burning Legion complete with espionage and subterfuge. It even has a similar dungeon, complete with a "find the spy" event. Hallowfall, while absolutely stunning, deals with human void cultists (Twilight's Hammer from Temu), and overzealous Holy Light users (Scarlet Crusade from Temu, although they have much better uniforms).

RELATED: Blizzard talks building World of Warcraft: The War Within, and its future 

Some of the pacing of these areas clearly fell on the wrong side of development timing, too. In Hallowfall, the dungeon "The Dawnbreaker" has a lot of flying mechanics inside it which is quite fun (depending on who you ask at least), but it also has some inexplicable story beats. In the dungeon, the entire city has been overthrown by Nerubians, carrying very little story explanation as far as I could tell. I feel as though seeing the entire city overrun by Nerubians should've had a bit more tie-in to the story outside of the dungeon, unless I somehow missed some of the beats there. 

Additionally, the fighting Earthen factions put aside their millennia's worth of differences almost immediately after the player shows up. I feel as though some of these story beats are an example of "gameplay over story design," which Blizzard has long admitted to prioritizing, for better or worse. But it's all the more jarring when other aspects of the story delivery have been so good overall.

What remains true is that this is the first time I've gone through and completed every quest in the game right from the first week of play. Besides a couple of minor gripes with certain aspects of pacing, the overall delivery has been fantastic. There's tons of additional story beats, lore items, and optional dialogue scenes that add believability and weight to proceedings. The cinematic treatment has been top tier, with incredible music and big moments that are among some of Warcraft's biggest beats. I'm intrigued by the villain, immersed in the mysteries, and once again feel like I'm playing an MMORPG and not just an cosy MMO from my nostalgic past purely out of habit. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within Review — Art and Performance

One aspect of World of Warcraft that once again, firmly fires on all cylinders, is the art department. Blizzard's art and design team are world-class, and the fact they're still able to squeeze so much juice out of World of Warcraft's decades-old engine speaks to the team's talent, tenacity, and technical wizardry. 

I already mentioned the recent tech that improves World of Warcraft's facial expressions and dialogue delivery, but even beyond that, Khaz Algar and its environs deliver in a way that I wouldn't have expected from an expansion set almost entirely underground. Somehow Blizzard managed to perfectly balance the uniquely harrowing setting that is Tolkien-esque caverns and great deeps, while also delivering a subterranean world that feels vast in its expanse. Hallowfall is on the edge of a massive underground ocean, complete with its own "sun" crystal protruding through the ceiling. The flora all angles towards the crystal, known as Beledar, which shows great attention to detail and a willingness to build consistency rather than develop a fantastical backdrop for the sake of it. Indeed, everything in Khaz Algar feels like it has lived-in depth. When the Hallowfall crystal cycles between light and shadow, the citizenry all rush to get in doors before the shadowy void creatures emerge. Every three hours for half an hour, the entire zone cycles into a dark mode, offering unique gameplay opportunities but it also just looks incredible to witness. I'm really excited to see what else Blizzard does to marry its gameplay elements even deeper with its environmental treatment. 

The Ringing Deeps delivers a bit more of that dwarven cavern fantasy, complete with large steampunk Titan facilities, gigantic fungal colonies, and wax-laden Kobold settlements. It culminates in one of my favorite dungeons in the expansion, where players find out the true meaning behind the famed Kobold phrase "you no take candle," with eldritch gameplay elements designed around staying well within the light. 

I feel as though World of Warcraft's music delivery has taken a leap forward too in this expansion. Some scenario events and zones look spectacular visually, but I found it was the music that added that thumping sense of urgency. The huge war between the Xal'atath Nerubians and Hallowfall Arathi is a particular high point of the expansion for me, with a large amount of detailing and inspired design feeding into it. The Nerubian species may look like 8-legged monsters, but they're among Azeroth's most advanced civilizations, and the ingenuity of Blizzard's art direction really emphasizes that here. The vast array of spider silken technology is incredibly well realized, from floating silk mines to gigantic airship-destroying web traps, the Nerubians are a true force to be reckoned with. 

Indeed, that sense of "RPG" has really returned to World of Warcraft in recent years. Blizzard has shown an proficiency in delivering on this premise throughout the game's history, but I really felt as though The War Within represented more investment in this area than the game has seen in years, perhaps since Legion almost ten years ago. There's a meticulousness in the art direction that adds layers of immersion and believability throughout Khaz Algar, and even after dozens of hours spent at level 80, I keep finding new delightful details that make me feel ever more connected to the Worldsoul Saga and its future. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within Review — Gameplay

World of Warcraft's core gameplay loop has been viciously addictive and rewarding even during some of the game's worst expansion cycles, but The War Within continues Blizzard's recent change in philosophy of improving the entire game at a systemic level. To that end, The War Within has some of the best changes we've seen from the franchise to date, and represents something that could make the game more popular than ever — at least potentially. 

Before I dive deeper into the core endgame loop, it's important to note that this review is based on pre-season content. The pre-season is effectively up to "heroic" 5-man dungeon difficulty, and isn't really representative of the full slate of progression players will have access to after this review ships. I plan to update this review over time as the expansion progresses, to record how the game ebbs and flows and provide feedback therein. I have to say, though, this pre-season cycle has been a breath of fresh air for various reasons. 

For World of Warcraft: The War Within, Blizzard has massively, massively improved the experience for solo players, which has been a long-time weakness of the game for decades. It remains to be seen how well some of these gameplay systems land over time, but early signs are very positive. 

The first big change here is what Blizzard is calling your "Warband," which essentially refers to all of the characters on your account, regardless of server or faction. Now, many of the game's more "grindier" systems like Renown / Reputation gains are now per account, rather than per character. This makes playing alt characters far more friendly, as that sense of "progression" you experience is now across your entire account, rather than any single character. You also have access to an account-wide Warband bank, and can even share account-bound gear between characters to speed up the gearing and progression process. This makes dipping into other specs, characters, and experiences far more easy than it has ever been. I've already managed to gear up my main and a secondary alt healer to raid-ready levels, without feeling like I had to invest choring amounts of time to do so. 

I mentioned in the intro that Blizzard seems intent on delivering shorter gameplay loops where possible. There's a consensus in the industry in general that players have less time to invest in any single game these days, owing to work constraints, evolving user behavior, and competition from other forms of entertainment. To that end, Blizzard has created a new soloable dungeon tier called Delves, which are miniature experiences taking place across 10-20 minute runs, for anywhere between 1 and 5 players. These Delves seem quite fun so far, and in Season 1, they will also reward high-end gear for tackling higher difficulty versions. They will also culminate in a special 13th Delve boss battle, which Blizzard hopes will allow solo players to showcase a mastery of their chosen class, similar to things like the Brawler's Guild or Mage Tower of expansions past. 

It remains to be seen if Delves can stand up to the test of time. Blizzard has dabbled with this kind of content before, but if seasonal Delves land, it could open World of Warcraft up to solo players for the first time in a big way. 

Another new system added to World of Warcraft are "Hero Talents," and it's here where I have the most criticism for Blizzard right now. This entire system just feels rushed out the gate, with some talent trees firing on all cylinders with great class fantasy, animations, and functionality — while others languish bereft of animations or, in some cases, basic logic. 

As a Demonology Warlock, I've been blessed with two Hero Talent trees that are not only cool as hell, but are also fun to play through and experience. I can summon a Pit Lord demon, something I've dreamt of doing since vanilla, who appears out of a radioactive firey haze to blast my enemies with a powerful nuclear laser beam. Conversely, my Dark Ranger hunter gets an ability they already used to get as part of their talent trees, with the most basic shadowy sliver of special effects as compensation. 

There are tons of examples where Hero Talents for some classes just fall way below the standards set by others, missing out on thoughtful designs or special effects that are crucial for adding flavor. In some cases, they even detract from the flavor. Many of the Druid Hero Talents, for example, are all elven themed. What if I'm a troll druid? or a Kul Tiran druid? Furthermore, I'm incredibly nervous about how these abilities will be balanced over time. 

It reminds me of Shadowlands' hated Covenant system, where players had to pick between optimal power over aesthetic choices. Blizzard acknowledged the mistakes with the Covenant system in that capacity, yet here they are, apparently making the same error again with Hero Talents. What if I don't want to choose between an Elven-themed or a Shadow-themed Marksmanship Hunter? What if I'm a goblin hunter who doesn't feel like either Hero Talent tree fits my class fantasy?

It's clear Blizzard hasn't thought some of this stuff through with Hero Talents, and we even have evidence as such. The Dark Ranger Hero Talent tree I mentioned has a full-bore complete revamp in the works right now, changing literally every aspect of it. I suspect other trees will see similar reworks as well down the line... but what if they don't? What if you're stuck with lameness forever? That's a big question mark many people have over the system right now — even if I'm quite happy with the ones offered to my warlock main. Blizzard could solve some of this by expanding the Glyph system to give players more control over the aesthetics of some of these abilities. Sadly, Blizzard seems to hate the cosmetic Glyph system it previously designed, despite players' desperation for it to return.

As I mentioned, parts of this section will need to be updated once the true endgame begins, which is Season 1. Delves will open up into deeper difficulty modes, Mythic+ dungeoneering content, freshly streamlined, will also open up. The first raid tier will also become available, set inside the traitor Nerubian Queen's palace. We'll have a better idea of how Delves will factor in to the game's new focus on solo player options, and also how Khaz Algar will feel for veteran players hoping to call Azeroth home for the next several weeks. Over all though, I've had a ton of fun already with the base expansion experience. 

Across World of Warcraft's elevated story experience, decreased restrictions on alt-character play, potential in Delves, and intriguing overarching saga, I haven't been this immersed or optimistic about WoW's future in a very long time. Blizzard is already on hand to fix some of the Hero Talent system's shortcomings (hopefully), and has already revealed plans for a WoW 20th anniversary celebration in November 2024 (just don't look at the new shaman ascendant form...). 

There's a vast amount of potential to be explored in the depths of Khaz Algar still. Perhaps we'll see new zones open up in deeper cavern systems. We have no idea who the second raid tier antagonist will be. Will we get additional allied races, such as the heavily-teased Harronir? Will Blizzard finally add player housing (sorry)?! Only time will tell. 

Either way, The War Within has made me incredibly excited about WoW again, building on the foundation from Dragonflight, while learning from the mistakes of Shadowlands. Long may Warcraft live. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within Review — Conclusion

I mentioned in the intro that this review was feedback oriented for Blizzard, but also to inform both veteran and returning players. It's hard to cover every corner of such a huge game without writing a 10,000+ word thesis on the topic, but hopefully there's some good overview in here about whether or not it's worth giving a try. 

The biggest downside of WoW remains its new player experience. World of Warcraft now puts new players into the Dragonflight expansion, which is still a far cry from the immersive experience of vanilla, where players can experience their full faction fantasy and grow in power and experience in a gradual, low-stakes way. Instead, Blizzard will throw you into an endgame experience essentially, with random characters acting like they knew you all along, while calling you "Champion" and referring to your past deeds that new players had no hand in. WoW is desperately crying out for another base game revamp, but The War Within ain't it, at least this time around. 

For veteran players, The War Within represents a great moment to return to the fold. It's the start of a fresh new story complete with returning characters, deep story beats, and elevated technical delivery. The new zones are compact and dense with lore and interesting biomes, and the variety of endgame activities seems solid, even without the seasonal complement. 

If you're not overly concerned about the story, there are still tons of reasons to play. And frankly, if you're a new player, not caring about the story might be a help rather than a hindrance, since it doesn't do a great job of introducing and immersing new players into proceedings. The new Earthen race is a fun fresh face for creating alts, especially on Horde, who previously had no dwarves of their own. The profession systems are heavily involved and rewarding for those who enjoy that type of gameplay. Delves have massive long-term potential, and the tried-and-tested dungeon, Mythic+, and raid content will continue to be as infectious as ever.

Hero Talents could've used more time to bake in the oven, and there were a range of irritating bugs and glitches in the early days, but the overall experience is among the best I've had at the start of a World of Warcraft expansion. I'm curious to see if Blizzard can keep up the momentum.  

World of Warcraft: The War Within is available now at Battle.net for $49.99 with a required monthly subscription of $12.99 per month. 

What you need to know

• In a recent episode of WoWcast, Blizzard Entertainment revealed the gameplay details for World of Warcraft's upcoming Patch 11.0.5 update that will feature the game's 20th Anniversary Celebration Event.
• The World of Warcraft 20th Anniversary Celebration event will include the return of Blackrock Depths remade as a 10-15 player Raid dungeon, and several side activities and World Events where players can earn special currency to purchase cosmetic items, mounts, pets, and the Tier 2 armor sets now reimagined with new HD modeling and textures.
• In addition, Patch 11.0.5 will enable the Dracthyr race access to more classes beyond Evoker and grant the Shaman Class reimagined Ascension Forms.
• World of Warcraft's Patch 11.0.5 will drop in November 2024. The 20th Anniversary Celebration event will begin sometime during the middle of November 2024 and will run for a couple of months.

On September 4, 2024, Blizzard Entertainment unveiled during its latest episode of WoWcast (a YouTube show where the developers reveal the latest news updates for World of Warcraft) what it has planned for World of Warcraft's 20th Anniversary Celebration Event. 

Starting mid-November during World of Warcraft: The War Within's Patch 11.0.5 update, the World of Warcraft 20th Anniversary Celebration Event will begin and have players embark on a nostalgic rollercoaster where they can take on World Events, Dungeons, and Raids to obtain updated versions of the iconic Tier 2 armor sets among other awesome rewards.

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within review

Here is everything you need to know about this event.

World of Warcraft 20th Anniversary Celebration Event - Activities

World of Warcraft's 20th Anniversary Celebration Event will feature all kinds of fun activities that will reward players with special in-game currency called Bronze Celebration Tokens, which they can use to purchase all kinds of cosmetic items, pets,  mounts, and more. You can also earn these tokens by engaging in World of Warcraft: The War Within's Season 1 content.

RELATED: How to farm Valorstones using the fastest method in World of Warcraft: The War Within

The activities you can participate in World of Warcraft's 20th Anniversary Celebration Event include:

• The classic Blackrock Depths dungeon reimagined as a 10-15 Player Raid dungeon, complete LFR, Normal and Heroic difficulty levels.
• A Timewalking event where players Lv. 10 and up can challenge the Deadmines, Zul’Farrak, Dire Maul (east and west wings), and Stratholme’s living and undead dungeons.
• A Cavern of Time event where players can engage in all kinds of fun activities such as showing off their elaborate armor set collections in Fashion Frenzy, displaying their majestic mounts in Mount Mania, transforming into battle pets in the Pet Corner, and helping Alyx attend guests for the event in Guest Relations.
• Korrak's Revenge, a classic Battleground PVP event will be returning with new mounts for both Horde and Alliance players up for grabs.
• Help Chromie fix her codex by traveling back in time to revisit the Opening Gates of Ahn'Qiraj World event where you will fight back the invading forces of the Scourge, Burning Legion, and Qiraji, and have epic rematches with classic World Bosses like  Tichondrius, Ossirian, and Kel'thuzad.
• Hunting down classic World bosses that have spotted across Tanaris including Doomwalker, Azuregos, Lord Kazzak, the Dragons of Nightmare, the Sha of Anger, and Archavon the Stonewatcher.

World of Warcraft 20th Anniversary Celebration Event - Rewards

The items you will be able to purchase from the Bronze Celebration Tokens range from brand new pets and mounts, cosmetic items never released before to the public, and reimagined versions of classic armor sets from World of Warcraft's early days that you can apply to any armor set thanks to the game's gear Transmogrification system.

RELATED: "We want to make sure that every group of players can seek adventure," World of Warcraft devs discuss boosting solo play in The War Within

These rewards include:

• The Tier 2 armor sets from the Blackwing Lair Raid reimagined with updated HD textures and remodeled armor pieces for all Classes. In addition, there will be new 'Tier 2' style armor sets for Classes that didn't exist back when the Blackwing Lair Raid was first released in 2005 such as Demon Hunter, Monk, Evoker, and Death Knight.
• A plethora of returning items you can purchase from Timewalking Vendors who will appear during the 20th Anniversary Celebration Event. Some items include but are not limited to the Enchanted Spellweave Carpet from Wrath of the Lich King, the Amani Hunting Bear from The Burning Crusade, and the Frayfeather Hippogryph from the vanilla version of World of Warcraft before any expansions were released.
• Participating in the returning Korrak's Revenge Battleground will reward players with exclusive mounts depending on whether playing as Horde or Alliance characters. Alliance characters will receive the Stormpike Battle Ram and Horde characters will receive the Frostwolf Snarler.
• A new mount called the Coldflame Tempest, a chilling variant of the Ashes of Al’ar mount.
• Two new Doomlord battle pets called Lil’Kaz and Lil’Doomy.
• Some items from past anniversary events will return including the Core Hound mount,  Lil’ Nefarian pet, Molten Corgi pet, Onyxian Whelpling pet, Hatespark the Tiny pet, and the Baby Blizzard Bear pet.
• A cosmetic crown, sword, and shield that was previously awarded only to Blizzard employees will be made available for the public to grab during the 20th Anniversary Celebration Event.

World of Warcraft 20th Anniversary Celebration Event - Bonus Patch 11.0.5 content

World of Warcraft's 20th Anniversary Celebration Event isn't the only thing to look forward to in November as World of Warcraft: The War Within's Patch 11.0.5 will also include some cool bonus content for the Dratchyr Race, Shaman class, and fans who grew up playing Warcraft 3.

The bonus content you will see in Patch 11.0.5 includes the following:

Dratchyr Race and Evoker changes

• The Dratchyr Race will gain access to the Hunter, Rogue, Priest, Mage, Warrior, or Warlock Class during character creation. Dratchyr players who take up these Classes will have the option of staying in their human-like 'Visage' form or their true Dracthyr form during combat.
• The Dracthyr's Racial abilities will receive the following reworks:
  • Tail Swipe's cooldown has been increased to 3 minutes (it was originally 1.5 minutes).
  • Wing Buffet's cooldown has been increased to 3 minutes (it was originally 1.5 minutes). It now displays wing effects around your character if you use it while in Visage form.
  • Tail Swipe and Wing Buffet will no longer automatically shift you into Dracthyr form for all classes except Evoker.
• The Evoker Class will receive the following reworks:
  • Clobbering Sweep will reduce Tail Swipe’s cooldown by 2 minutes (it was originally 45 seconds).
  • Heavy Wingbeats will reduce Wing's cooldown by 2 minutes (it was originally 45 seconds).
  • Permeating Chill will now be a baseline ability for Evoker.
  • Heavy Wingbeats and Clobbering Sweep will no longer be a choice node, and their position has changed in the Class skill tree.

• Dracthyr players will gain a new Skyriding talent called Squadron which will allow two additional Dratchy players to join you mid-flight and soar through the sky in a flight formation.

Shaman changes

The Shaman Class will receive three brand new forms when they activate their Ascension ability in battle. These new Ascension forms will change depending on what Talent tree 'Spec' your Shaman is currently equipped with i.e. Restoration Shamans will have a new Water Ascension Form, Elemental Shamans will get a new Fire Ascension form, and Enhancement Shamans will get a new Wind Ascension form.

These forms haven't been particularly well-received so far, with various memes emerging about them. Don't be surprised if we see Blizzard tweak them a bit further. 

November Trading Post

Last but not least, Blizzard Entertainment has a preview of some items you will be able to obtain during November's Trading Post offerings. For those unaware, the Trading Post is a system whereby completing a certain number of activities every month, you will earn unique in-game currency called Trader Tender which you can use to buy cosmetic items, pets, and mounts that are only available for a limited time.

November's Trading Post offerings will include back armor pieces inspired by the faction symbols of the four main playable armies from Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos – Orcs, Humans, Scourge, and Night Elves.

🎒The best Back to School deals📝

• 🕹️Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (3-months) | $29.99 at CDKeys (Save $20!)
• 🎮Lenovo Legion Go (Z1 Extreme) | $599.99 at Best Buy (Save $100!)
• 🎧Sony WH1000XM5 ANC Headphones | $329.99 at Best Buy (Save $70!)
• 🕹️Starfield Premium Upgrade (Xbox & PC) | $27.69 at CDKeys (Save $7!)
• 💻HP Victus 15.6 Laptop (RTX 4050) | $599 at Walmart (Save $380!)
• 🕹️God of War: Ragnarök (PC, Steam) | $50.19 at CDKeys (Save $10!)
• 💻Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon | $1,481.48 at Lenovo (Save $1,368!)
• 🎮 Seagate Xbox Series X|S Card (2TB) | $229.99 at Best Buy (Save $130!)
• 🕹️Hi-Fi RUSH (PC, Steam) | $8.99 at CDKeys (Save $21!)
• 🖱️Razer Basilisk V3 Wired Mouse | $44.99 at Best Buy (Save $25!)
• 🖥️Lenovo ThinkStation P3 (Core i5 vPro) | $879.00 at Lenovo (Save $880!)

So much to look forward to for World of Warcraft's 20th Anniversary

The amount of effort and nostalgic fanservice Blizzard Entertainment is putting into World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary is astronomical. Dratchyr players will be able to spread their wings beyond the Evoker Class and players will get to challenge old school bosses and dungeons revamped with new difficulty challenges with lucrative rewards. 

Not to mention, old-school World of Warcraft fans who have playing the MMORPG since its early days will be able to relive their childhood memories donning modernized versions of Tier 2 armor sets, which many fans consider to be some of the most iconic gear in Warcraft history.

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within Story Overview

While I don't feel the same levels of nostalgia as veteran World of Warcraft fans as I have only started playing the game recently thanks to The War Within's gameplay features and the awesome Pandaria Remix event, I can't wait for World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary Celebration event and grabbing all updated Tier 2 armor sets for my collection because they look so cool.

Needless to say, I picked the perfect time to finally subscribe to one of Blizzard's long-running, best PC games.

World of Warcraft: The War Within is out now on PC. It is an incredible expansion packed with some of the best story-telling the MMORPG has had in years, powerful and fun new Hero Talents to master, a playable race in the form of the Earthen, gorgeous new locales to explore, a plethora of diverse multiplayer and single-player gameplay content, and much more.

After many moons of anticipation, World of Warcraft: The War Within is finally here. 

So far, the expansion has been incredibly well-received, continuing the game's winning streak following on from the similarly well-received Dragonflight expansion. 

World of Warcraft (WoW) is entering its 20th year in 2024, marking one of the most successful video game runs in history. While not quite the zeitgeist-buster it used to be, WoW has changed it up a lot in recent years, baking in a wide variety of different modes and features to accommodate a broad array of different playstyles. Blizzard revived a classic version of the game, as well as a remixed version of the classic experience with new features. They also did a seasonal Mists of Pandaria: Remix event based on a previous expansion, allowing players to be overpowered and earn rewards in the process. They even tried out the battle royale PvP craze with Plunderstorm. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within review

"Retail" as its known continues unabated, serving the bulk of the playerbase, while also pushing the game's story forward. The War Within sees the start of a new saga that Blizzard has named The Worldsoul Saga, featuring the mysterious entity known as Xal'atath as its central antagonist. The game has taken a decidedly dark slant for this expansion, owing to Xal'atath's cosmic horror origins. With the story showing up increasingly well with new cinematic tech and more investment in writing and storytelling, Blizzard has also been keen to boost the MMO's gameplay for its evolving player base, particularly when it comes to gameplay styles. 

RELATED: How to farm Valorstones fast in World of Warcraft: The War Within

Recently, we were treated to interviews with Blizzard's Michael Nuthals (Senior Games Designer), Tina Wang (Associate Art Director), Maria Hamilton (Associate Design Director), and Mateusz Albrewczynski (Assistant Lead Quest Designer). We talked Blizzard's goals for The War Within, how the team is exploring boosting solo play and time constraints for those of us with a lot of work and family commitments, and the overall direction for the legendary MMORPG. 

Note: Some responses were edited for brevity.

On boosting solo play, and respecting players' time in World of Warcraft: The War Within

I suppose these days, I'm what you might describe as a casual-hardcore player. I don't raid up to Mythic difficulty chasing server-first boss kills anymore, but I do try to max out my Mythic+ dungeon rating each season with my guild, and raid on Heroic difficulty. Back in my late teens, I would raid almost every day of the week, back when I didn't have regular work or a family to consider. For many players like myself, times have changed, and it has been Blizzard's ability to adapt to evolving habits that has kept World of Warcraft relevant for over two decades. 

To that end, Blizzard has expanded The War Within to incorporate a feature it is calling Warbands. Warbands extends the amount of content that is tied to your account, rather than simply your character. For example, once you've completed the campaign story once, you can effectively skip it on alternative characters if you want to. Reputation with in-game factions now increases for your entire account, rather than on a per character basis. You can also easily share gear, currencies, and other items between other characters in your "Warband" too, allowing players to explore the game's vast array of classes and races without feeling like there's another big grind to do. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within Story Overview

I asked the team what drove some of these thought processes, and if there was any concerns that easier access to content would increase churn — meaning players burn through the content more quickly than previously, leading to increased demands for fresh content. 

"We have a really incredible Global Insights Team that look at all player activities, and the types of content these players engage in —  segmenting them into categories based on the types of activities," Tina Wang explained. "This has been so helpful to help us develop features targeting the variety of ways that players play, even if they're not always the most vocal. It reinforced our technological investment into Warbands." 

Michael Nuthals emphasized that The War Within is all about delivering content for everybody, regardless of their free time and preferences. "We wanted The War Within to really feel like everybody who logs in is going to have the opportunity to find and have an adventure. We want each group of players to be able to seek that type of adventure. If your main interest is the story, we now for the first time have added the ability to defeat the major raid season end boss solo, as part of a new difficulty called Story Mode. Previously, these types of solo players would have had to step over to YouTube to see how the climax of the story plays out." 

I asked for more information on how Story Mode works here. Essentially solo players will be able to enter the raid as part of a quest, complete with NPC followers to give it that "raid" feel. The Story Mode, however, only features the final boss, skipping the rest of the raid. Players will also be able to, of course, experience the climactic story beats of the season in a more traditional raid too, comprised of anywhere between 10 and 30 players. 

"We put so much love and care and storytelling and art into these dungeons, building out these custom spaces. This allows more players to actually get to experience that, and also allows us to invest more into storytelling within dungeons. In the past, we maybe might have kept things out of dungeons because we were like 'oh, many of our players aren't going to be able to see this' and so on." 

Delivering a new story saga in The War Within

On the topic of story telling in the new Khaz Algar world, Blizzard has changed course a fair bit when it comes to storytelling in the game in recent years. In the older game, much of the story was delivered via quest text, with the occasional pre-rendered cinematic if you were lucky. These days, Blizzard has far more robust in-engine story telling tech, bringing characters to life in a much more immersive way. The Worldsoul Saga starts with The War Within, but, no spoilers now, I have experienced War Within plot points pulled from threads several decades old to weave the tapestry of its plot. And to great effect, I might add. 

Mateusz Albrewczynski and Maria Hamilton noted how much ambition has gone into The War Within's story delivery in general. "We figured that now is the time to tell a story that is so epic, and so big, that it simply cannot be contained within our usual expansion cycle." Albrewczynski remarked. "This is not just the culmination of 20 years of WoW storytelling, but also setting the stage for whatever comes after ... right? We have no intentions of slowing down. We have lots of ideas, the team is very happy to try this new format."

I managed to complete World of Warcraft: The War Within's entire campaign and all of its side quests in roughly 40 hours of play, coupled with a lot of exploration and dungeoneering. While the vastness of Khaz Algar and the quality and variety baked into its zones is impressive, I did notice that it seemed physically smaller than Dragonflight previously. I wondered if it was intentional, or if I was just imagining it. Maria Hamilton explained the intent there. 

"No, that is absolutely the case, you're right. Dragonflight had some of the largest zones we've ever made, because we weren't sure how much space we'd need for Dragonriding at the time. For The War Within, we figured we'd focus on building zones that were 'the right size' rather than simply enormous. As we look ahead to the next expansion, Midnight, which will take place in the Eastern Kingdoms, we're reminded that many of those old classic zones were actually much smaller than the zones we've been building more recently." Maria noted, "we want the spaces to tell stories, and have them feel closer and intimate when it's important to do so, and then deliver vast expanses too. Hollowfall for example, has an endless sea at its edge. There's intent and purpose, hinting at things you might want to think about." 

The Worldsoul Saga is undoubtedly ambitious in scope, setting up events that will play out over the next ten years. Maria Hamilton explained that the structure of the story is essentially set, although the team has left room to evolve and pivot if necessary, especially going into the next expansion "World of Warcraft: Midnight," and then the subsequent expansion "The Last Titan."  

"So, we have our big story beats, we know what those are throughout the entire saga. We know the themes we want to explore. The War Within is out there now, but we've already started taking feedback that will inform when we put, you know, Midnight into beta testing. We'll be considering what players have said over the course of The War Within and its content updates as well, so we're trying to leave room to adjust and pivot. If we find that people are not understanding motivations or connecting well with a character, we have opportunities to add quest content to help explain that, or cinematics. It's unlikely we'd make changes to the broad strokes, however."

One of the things WoW has been criticized for in recent years is how some major story characters have developed (or undeveloped, as it were) over some previous expansions. In The War Within, the game has an abundance of "Stay a while and listen" optional dialogue, where players can essentially eavesdrop on conversations between major characters to learn bits of additional character development. This feature has been a personal favorite of mine, and has made The War Within's story one of the most "immersive" for me personally, as a multi-decade Warcraft fan. 

Mateusz Albrewczynski elaborated, "We keep working on what comes next, what comes after The War Within. There's lots of ideas. In 20 years, that is a lot of storytelling. There's lots of plots, lots of characters we want to bring in, and which of them will go on the ride with us. It's not an easy choice, as people have their many favorite characters. Worldsoul is a big journey for all of them, though." 

Maria Hamilton teased that even now, Blizzard is setting the seeds for events for The Last Titan, which we probably won't see until 2027 at the absolute earliest. "I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago, where an amazing idea for The Last Titan came up. We realized, for that to land well and feel good, we needed to seed hints and clues much earlier on in the story. In addition to the expansions themselves, with Dragonflight, we started to introduce quests that would continue the story, both in larger updates but also smaller ones. We have opportunities to pace those out and touch more points, and help guide the story, rather than expand plot points out of nowhere." 

Mateusz Albrewczynski hinted that The War Within has strong themes of family, as we follow the Bronzebeard clan, but also Alleria Windrunner, as she wrestles with battling the villainous Xal'atath and effectively abandoning her family to do so. "There's a lot of stories we'll be looking at. There's a lot of cool faces coming back." 

How Delves are making WoW's endgame more solo-friendly than ever

World of Warcraft's story is more accessible than ever owing to the changes, and while The War Within has been a big step up in terms of overall quality (more on that in our coming pre-season review), the meat of the game has always been its dungeoneering. 

WoW has some of the best MMORPG gameplay in the history of the genre, with hundreds of unique boss encounters, meticulously designed dungeons, and epic-feeling 30-player raids that reward tight co-ordination and co-operation. But what if you don't have the time, or even the inclination to go super deep on WoW's raid scene? Blizzard is hoping that its new Delve system might be for you instead. 

"Delves are designed around smaller groups, folks who prefer to solo, or hang out with a few people," Michael Nuthals explains. "In a Delve you'll experience a cool little adventure and get a cool reward for doing it. Of course, we want to make sure that folks who engage with more organized activities are rewarded appropriately. REwards for timed Mythic+ dungeons or Heroic, Mythic raids are going to be better than the rewards from a Delve." 

Delves are essentially mini dungeons that take place anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes, baked into the fabric of the game's various zones. Here, players accompany a hero character from the story and fight through various scenarios, culminating in an end boss and a reward trove. Blizzard has experimented with similar things before, but Delves are far more interesting than previous attempts — owing in part to the varied activities and environments. 

I asked the team if there was any concerns that Delves might undercut more traditional raid structures. Guilds often have a hard time recruiting, especially on smaller servers. If the rewards can come from going solo, why bother jumping through hoops? Tina Wang emphasized that the team is taking a lot of care in their approach to solo content to that end. "Balancing Mythic+ and Heroic raid rewards against Delves is definitely something we'll be watching. However, they can also potentially help players who are raiding in Heroic. One thing we sometimes hear is that they struggle to keep up with their raid team because they don't have time to run Mythic+ dungeons during the week. This potentially gives them an outlet to find more gear between raids." 

What about on the high-end, though? Delves might seem as though they're fully geared for casual play, but they have difficulty settings of their own. Delves scale all the way up to a "Tier 13" difficulty, which heaps on additional hazards (and more powerful rewards on top). However, they also have a max-level challenge mode boss battle. "The 13th Delve is really an for folks to really show off their mastery over their classes. This is something we haven't tested on beta at all, something we've intentionally played close to the chest. We don't want to let folks see the boss before it goes live." 

What does the future of Delves hold? Well, that's up to you, dear player. Maria Hamilton remarked that there has been some early comparisons to Torghast, Blizzard's previous attempt at solo dungeons. "We haven't gotten a lot of feedback on Delves yet, and we haven't seen how much people enjoy them. We're aware of early comparisons to Torghast, where players felt forced to play it even if it wasn't something they enjoyed. So, we didn't want to force people to go and play Delves, in case it isn't someone's cup of tea. We're waiting to see what kind of reception they have before we invest in putting things like more quests into them. It's a tool in our tool box, but we want to be respectful of people's time and previous feedback. We'll reassess as feedback comes in." 

On building Xal'atath, Blizzard's unlikely central antagonist

It wasn't supposed to be this way. 

Over the past twenty years, World of Warcraft and its universe has established itself in new and unexpected ways. The franchise has always had a cosmic slant to it, with the franchise kicking off with orcs invading from another planet via an interdimensional gateway, but we're reaching even further into the depths of space now. With various other main villains defeated, the central destructive force in the universe, known as The Void, has taken center stage. 

The Void and its Void Lords are cosmic horrors who feed on chaos and entropy, essentially. They seek, seemingly by their very nature alone, to devour and infect everything in the universe. If the Void is analogous to the Lovecraftian pantheon of cosmic horrors, their firm opposition, the Titans are more akin to the Greek gods of yore. However, increasingly it seems like the Titans may not be the benevolent world-shapers we once thought them to be. 

"In Dragonflight, we certainly had some hints that the Titan's version of events, you know, might not be the true way everything went down. In Xal'atath, we obviously have a connection to the Black Empire, and the struggle that happened between them and the Titans from long ago. We will be dipping back into some of that. Perhaps it's a bit more nuanced, we will look at different perspectives and points of view on these events. Xal'atath is the perfect character vehicle for this, because she has nuance. Her goals are pretty difficult to understand right now. I'm also aware of those N'Zoth fanatics out there. Here's hoping everyone has a good time and enjoys the ride." 

Xal'atath, indeed, seems to be something in between. She was originally a side character, trapped inside a dagger used by priest players in the Legion expansion. The fanbase took a shine to her though, as she'd whisper to players while in use. Since then, Blizzard has vastly expanded Xal'atath into a central antagonistic force in the game. 

Everything about Xal'atath is a complete mystery. She seems to be aligned with the Void Lords, but there are hints that it was they who imprisoned her in the first place. So far, she has been using an artifact known as the Dark Heart to absorb various types of magical essence, including the soul of the all-devouring necrotic dragon of yore Galakrond, and the arcane power contained within the city of Dalaran. It seems as though Blizzard is having a lot of fun keeping us guessing, here. 

"I think one of the most interesting things about Xal'atath is that we don't know the full extent of what she's planning, right? She has a very different way of doing things. She pulls strings from behind the scenes. She will knock somebody over just at the right time so they will fall into her plan just at the right moment." 

"Plus, she can look like whatever she wants. Right now, she chooses to look like an elf... There's probably a reason for that, she's very purposeful in what she does." 

While discussing Xal'atath, I also brought up the fact that she was initially tied to the Class Hall quests from Legion. I wondered why Blizzard had never revisted the Class Hall feature, which essentially gave every character class its own unique storyline to explore, which ultimately led to the creation of Xal'atath and compelling lore around that as a result. 

Maria Hamilton says, "Never say never. We all really, really like Class Halls. We have some classes now that don't have Class Halls, so we would need to rebuild some of that out. It's an opportunity. It would have been an opportunity with the Hero Talents, but the decision was made to make them more systemic, and less content-based. 

"I don't think there's a single person on the quest or narrative team that wouldn't love to do more with Class Halls. We are hopeful that it's something we could bring back. We're always looking for opportunities to sneak in previous stuff that we're excited about. There's a lot of great story telling in Class Halls." 

Thanks a ton to Blizzard for talking with us

I've already put dozens of hours into The War Within, and it has been years since an expansion has sucked me in like this, playing for fun rather than habit. The Warbands mechanic makes playing different classes incredibly easy and rewarding, the story has been spectacular, and the volume of content to hunt down has been remarkable. And this is all pre-season. 

There's a lot of question marks I still have. I'm worried that Hero Talents will end up being a choice between aesthetics and power, like Shadowlands' ill-received Covenants system. I'm not a fan of the erosion of the Horde vs. Alliance narrative thread either, as the franchise's iconic factions increasingly cozy up. But the broad strokes have been fantastic so far. The characters are compelling, the gameplay is as good as ever, and the new zones have some of the best music and visuals in franchise history. 

And then there's Xal'atath. I firmly believe that a story like this is only as good as its villain, and so far, Xal'atath is doing a bang up job. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within is out now on PC. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within, the 10th expansion for Blizzard Entertainment’s legendary MMORPG, World of Warcraft, has recently launched to the public. It has been met with high praise from fans and critics for its artistically rich beautiful locales, action-packed storyline, awesome new abilities for every Class, mountains of engaging solo and multiplayer endgame gameplay activities, and more.

What’s more is that this is only the beginning because, on September 10, Blizzard will be launching The War Within’s first Season which will introduce tons of challenging endgame content for players to tackle. These include higher tiers of the new single-player Delve dungeons, Mythic+ difficulty levels for the regular dungeons, and the new Nerub-ar Palace Raid dungeon where players will challenge an army of spider-like monsters called the Nerubians led by their vile queen, Ansurek.

With such daunting challenges ahead of them, players are scrambling to upgrade their armor and weapons in preparation for Season 1 by finding the quickest ways to collect Valorstones, a special in-game currency needed for upgrading gear. 

Normally, farming for Valorstones is a very time-consuming process as most of the in-game activities tend to reward small amounts of them. However, my guild members have been sharing their preferred and most effective Valorstone farming methods that will allow you to gather stockpiles of Valorstones in no time and earn some gold, crafting materials, and more goodies along the way.

It's all about wax. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within Valorstone Guide — What are Valorstones?

First off, let’s go over what Valorstones exactly are. Valorstones (originally introduced as Flightstones in World of Warcraft: Dragonflight) is an in-game currency that players earn from various gameplay activities once their character reaches Lv.80 and completes the World: of Warcraft: The War Within’s main story campaign. These activities range from completing quests, defeating rare boss monsters, completing dungeons, Delves, and Raids, and more.

Valorstones are used to upgrade the item level of endgame gear so that they grant higher stats for the players equipping them. There are other materials required for upgrading gear like the Crests but Valorstones are the most common and the most needed as upgrading Heroic and Mythic tier gear usually involves hundreds upon hundreds of them.

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within Story Overview

However, earning Valorstones is not an easy process as most of the regular methods of obtaining them like completing dungeons and killing Rare World monsters etc. yield little amounts of Valorstones ranging from one to ten stones depending on the content. This means it’s going to take you a long time to farm for them.

In addition, World: of Warcraft: The War Within has a cap limit on how many Valorstones a player’s character can hold at a time (2,000 to be exact). This can be somewhat inconvenient as it prevents players from infinitely stockpiling them for future Seasons and potentially causes players to run out of Valorstones too quickly at the worst time once they start spending it on the high-end gear obtained from the Raid Dungeons and Mythic+ dungeons.

Thankfully, there is a unique gameplay activity in World: of Warcraft: The War Within that will not allow you to farm Valorstones faster than the normal methods, it will let you circumvent the Valorstone cap limit and earn you a bit of extra rewards as well. And that method involves, strangely enough, gathering wax for Kobolds.

World of Warcraft: The War Within Valorstone Guide — Quick Farming Guide

Here's the quick overview of how to achieve this method, with more detail in the next section if you're unfamiliar with some of the concepts. 

1. Progress the main campaign until you unlock Assembly of the Deeps, the major faction within The Ringing Deeps zone. 
2. Hit Renown level 2 with Assembly of the Deeps. You can check your renown using the button on the mini map. 
3. At renown level 2 you will unlock a new quest called "Every Day I'm Snuffling," accessed via a Kobold NPC called Gnawbles in the main area city Gundargaz. 
4. Upon doing his quest chain, you will unlock the ability to uncover patches of Disturbed Earth which drop various items including Valorstones. 
5. However, what we really want here is wax. Odd Globs of Wax can be found via Disturbed Earth patches but also wax spills found randomly throughout Khaz Algar. 
6. Turn in the wax to a Middles in Gundargaz will yield 10 Valorstones a piece. 
7. At higher renown levels, you can end up with piles of wax due to the various mini-games you can perform while gathering wax from wax patches and patches of Disturbed Earth. 
8. On top of the additional rewards you get from farming wax in the open world, it can also yield various other items, gold, and crafting materials if you stack it with herbalism and mining professions while searching. 
9. Patches of Disturbed Earth are easier to find in the underground zones in Khaz Algar, and can be even easier to find if you enable highlight mode "high" in the graphics settings, giving them a purple outline. 
10. Do Weekly Quests on top of gathering Odd Globs of Wax as they yield just as much and sometimes more Valorstones.

World of Warcraft: The War Within Valorstone Guide — What is the farming method?

To unlock this method, you will need to progress through the main campaign until you unlock Assembly of the Deeps Faction (a faction consisting of the new Earthen Allied Race and rat-like monsters called Kobolds). Once you unlock the Assembly of the Deeps, you will need to level up your Renown levels with them by completing quests, killing Rare World monsters, finding hidden treasure, and other activities while exploring The Ringing Deeps Zone until you hit Renown Lv. 2.

What happens at Renown Lv. 2 with the Assembly of the Deeps is that you will unlock a unique gameplay system called ‘Every Day I’m Snuffling 1’. By completing a small series of Unlock Quests for an NPC Kobold called Gnawbles in Gundargaz, you will gain the ability to detect hidden patches of dirt labeled ‘Disturbed Earth’ throughout all the zones of Khaz Algar and dig them up to uncover various items. However, sometimes enemies will spawn that yield the items instead.

At higher Renown levels with Assembly of the Deeps faction, digging up ‘Disturbed Earth’ can sometimes initiate a mini-game that will offer more rewards (via Renown Lv.5’s ‘Close Encounters of the Snuffling Kind’) and obtain rarer rewards (via Renown Lv. 16’s ‘Every Day I’m Snuffling 2’).

Interacting with ‘Disturbed Earth’ will yield small Valorstones but this is only a bonus for the true reason why we’re here. The item you will be needing the most from this activity is Odd Globs of Wax, which will you need to hand over to an NPC Kobold called Middles in Gundargaz. For every stack of five Odd Globs of Wax you turn over, you will receive 10 Valorstones per stack. With this method, you will be able to farm Valorstones in less time and effort than it will take to farm them through other endgame activities.

Additionally, there’s no cap limit to how many Odd Globs of Wax you can carry other than space in your inventory bags. This means you can potentially stockpile immense heaps of wax and trade them in to refill your Valorstone supply once it runs, essentially giving you the ability to accumulate infinite amounts of Valorstones for not only Season 1, but for future Seasons as well.

World of Warcraft: The War Within Valorstone Guide — Bonus benefits of farming wax

Farming for Odd Globs of Wax isn’t only useful for gathering Valorstones, this activity can also yield valuable items for other gameplay content. For starters, unearthing ‘Disturbed Earth’ will sometimes yield Resonance Crystals, an in-game currency that is used to purchase unique cosmetic items, mounts and gear from Renown Quartermaster Vendors that become available once you reach certain Renown levels of each Renown Quartermaster’s respective faction.

However, if you dig up ‘Disturbed Earth’ in the Azj-Kahet zone, you will receive Kej instead of Resonance Crystals. Kej is a special currency used to buy unique items only available to vendors in the City of Threads and vendors for The Severed Threads faction located in The Weaver’s Lair.

Another benefit of wax farming is that you potentially make tons of gold out of this activity. Digging through piles of ‘Disturbed Earth’ will sometimes yield crafting reagents you can sell at the auction, including the rare ‘Profaned Tinderbox’ crafting material which is currently selling for at least 8,000 Gold at the auction house.

Additionally, if you hand in enough Odd Globs of Wax to fill the Wax Contributation Progress gauge (which can also be filled by every player on the server you're currently playing in), Middles will reward you with one Firelight Ruby Chip. This is another special in-game currency that you can trade in for unique items by handing them over to Gnawbles. These items include unique pet companions and cache items which yield bundles of crafting materials, Resonance Crystals, and even stacks of nearly 2,000 Gold pieces.

World of Warcraft: The War Within Valorstone Guide — Where and how do we find wax?

While patches of ‘Disturbed Earth’ can be found in every zone of Khaz Algar, they appear to spawn mostly on in the underground zones like The Ringing Deeps, Hallowfalls, and Azj-Kahet. Out of the three zones, Hallowfalls has the highest number of spawn points for patches of ‘Disturbed Earth’, especially in the farmlands located Mereldar and Light’s Blooming.

It can be tricky at first to find patches of ‘Disturbed Earth’ as they tend to blend into the environment. However, if you go into the graphics setting within options menu, set Outline Mode to ‘High’, the ‘Disturbed Earth’ will then be highlighted by a glowing purple outline, making them easier to spot.

World of Warcraft: The War Within Valorstone Guide — Other methods of obtaining Valorstones

While hunting for Odd Globs of Wax, we highly recommend completing any Weekly Quests that pop up during your travels because they give out tons of rewards including dozens upon dozens of Valorstones. 

These Weekly Quests you will need to look for are:

• The 'Spreading the Light' Event in Hallowfalls where you will need to activate Keyflames with Radiant Remnants and defeat Rare monsters that spawn there.
• The 'Awakening the Machine' event in The Ringing Deeps where you will need to battle 20 waves of enemies solo.
• The 'Theatre Troupe' event in the Isle of Dorn where you will need to participate in a play and earn the approval of the audience with your performance.
• Complete the Weekly Pact Quest for the Severed Threads Faction which involves completing Daily Quests in Azj-Kahet.
• Complete weekly Delves quests for Brann Bronzebeard located at the Delver's Headquarters in Dornagal, Isle of Dorn.
• Complete a Weekly Activity Quest offered by Faerin located at a table near the Inn in Dornagal.
• Complete the weekly Worldsoul World Event. By offering up Radiant Echoes, you will be tasked with defeating waves of increasingly challenging enemies depending on what difficulty level you have selected.
• Complete the Weekly Dungeon Quest offered by Biergoth located outside the Inn in Dornagal and earn extra Renown points while doing it.
• Complete the weekly Special Assignment quests that spawn in one of the four major zones of Khaz Algar. However, they require to be unlocked first by completing Daily Quests in the same zone the Special Assignment quest is currently located in.

Are you ready to take on the Nerub-ar Palace Raid when Season 1 launches?

Now you know the fasted way to farm Valorstones in World of Warcraft: The War Within so you can upgrade your gear for the upcoming challenges that await you in Season 1. 

I’ve been using this method myself and it’s worked wonders for me. In five minutes, I was able to gather hundreds of Valorstones in half the time it took for me to farm them from dungeons on Heroic difficulty.

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within is the best starting place for new players

We hope this method yields great results for you too and helps you prepare for the exciting endgame coming for one of Blizzard’s best PC games on the market. Look forward to hearing from our review of World of Warcraft: The Within's pre-season content in the coming days.

World of Warcraft: The War Within is now available after launching on August 26, 2024, for Windows PC.

What you need to know

• To celebrate the imminent release of World of Warcraft's next expansion, World of Warcraft: The War Within, Blizzard Entertainment has released a special web browser tool called Warcraft Story
• Warcraft Story allows players to type in the names of their characters and have The War Within's main villain, Xal'atath, list off their accomplishments while making fun of them at the same time.
• World of Warcraft: The War Within launches on August 26, 2024, on PC, while players who pre-ordered the Epic Edition will gain early access later tonight.

World of Warcraft: The War Within, the tenth expansion of Blizzard Entertainment's legendary MMORPG, World of Warcraft, is only a few days away from being released to the public on August 26, 2024. It will also be released later tonight (3:00 PM PDT/6:00 PM EDT) via early access for players who have purchased the game's Epic Edition.

To celebrate The War Within's impending release, Blizzard Entertainment has decided to launch a special event called Warcraft Story to get fans extra excited for this upcoming PC title.

Warcraft Story is a special web browser that celebrates the personal history of a player's World of Warcraft character. How it works is that a player types in the name of their character (and the server realm they were created in) and the web browser will begin scanning the game's data to catalog their accomplishments and compile them into a video you can download and share online.

Once the scan is complete, players will be in for a shocking surprise as their character's history will be narrated by none other than Xal'atath, the main villain of The War Within expansion. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within Story Overview

She begins by addressing your character's class and then compliments their greatest achievements which can include killing enemies in Raids and Dungeons, killing fellow players in PvP content, collecting pets, and more. 

However, Xal'atath will then humiliate you by bringing up your character's most embarrassing acts of foolishness and crushing defeats. Xal'atath will mock you for how many times you have been killed in battle (or gravity), how many times you made silly emote gestures, how many times you have been summoned to Dungeons and Raids, and much more.

🎒The best Back to School deals📝

• 🕹️Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (3-months) | $32.39 at CDKeys (Save $18!)
• 💻Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 (Core Ultra 7) | $679.99 at Best Buy (Save $370!)
• 🎧Sony WH1000XM5 ANC Headphones | $299.99 at Best Buy (Save $100!)
• 💻HP Victus 15.6 Laptop (RTX 4050) | $599 at Walmart (Save $380!)
• 📺Amazon Fire TV Xbox Game Pass bundle | $82.85 at Amazon (Save $37!)
• 💻Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon | $1,481.48 at Lenovo (Save $1,368!)
• 🎧Bose QuietComfort ANC Headphones| $249.00 at Best Buy (Save $100!)
• 💻HP OmniBook X 14 (X Elite) | $899.99 at Best Buy (Save $300!)
• 📺TCL Class Q6 4K QLED TV (55-inches) | $319.99 at Target (Save $130!)
• 🎮 Seagate Xbox Series X|S Card (2TB) | $249.99 at Best Buy (Save $110!)
• 💻Dell Inspiron 14 Plus (Core Ultra 7) | $799.99 at Dell (Save $200!)
• 🕹️Hi-Fi RUSH (PC, Steam) | $9.39 at CDKeys (Save $21!)
• 📺Dell UltraSharp 4K 32 Monitor | $899.99 at Dell (Save $300!)
• 🖱️Razer Basilisk V3 Wired Mouse | $48.99 at Best Buy (Save $21!)
• 🖥️Lenovo ThinkStation P3 (Core i5 vPro) | $879.00 at Lenovo (Save $880!)

Get revenge against Xal'atath for mocking your characters when World of Warcraft: The War Within launches

When I signed up my recently created Tauren Warrior, Diäblos, for the Warcraft Story, Xal'atath praised them for all the enemies he conquered during the Mists of Pandaria WoW Remix event. However, she lambasted my character as a constant disappointment because he only died 35 times so far in Raids and Dungeons.

I really enjoyed Warcraft Story as it not only provides a nice nostalgic reminder of how far you have come as a player, but it also made Xal'atath endearing as a villain.

I love that Xal'atath insults players for even the pettiest of mistakes and judging from the way she gleefully manipulated the Nerubians in the 'Threads of Fate' trailer, she undoubtedly enjoys doing it. Also, it's very rare for a World of Warcraft villain to personally address the player and mock them for the actions they've made within the game.

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within is the best starting place for new players

I thoroughly enjoy cartoonishly evil villains in video games because while they may lack in-depth character development, they can make up for it with sheer charisma and witty dialogue. Not to mention, they provide great catharsis for the player once you put these egotistical maniacs in their place during boss fights without a shred of guilt to worry about.

I have a feeling that this is going to ring true with Xal'atath as she's already proving to be an entertaining villain thanks to this event and from what we've seen of her in the previous cinematic trailers. I'm going to enjoy destroying her for mocking my Tauren Warrior, once the latest expansion for one of Blizzard Entertainment's best PC games launches later this week.

World of Warcraft: The War Within launches on August 26, 2024 for Windows PC.

What you need to know

• World of Warcraft is a legendary 20-year-old MMORPG from Blizzard Entertainment, now owned by Microsoft. 
• The game is gearing up for its latest expansion, The War Within, with a range of new trailers detailing the game's characters and story setting.
• This latest trailer showcases Alleria Windrunner, who wields dangerous void magic to combat the various threats facing the game's world of Azeroth. 
• The trailer has led to calls for Warcraft to explore an animated feature show in the vein of Netflix's League of Legends "Arcane." 

On August 26, 2024, World of Warcraft drops its latest expansion: The War Within. 

World of Warcraft remains the world's most successful subscription-based MMORPG, serving millions of players across a variety of game modes, including WoW: Classic and Season of Discovery. World of Warcraft's headline act is its "retail" portion, which continues the game's storyline which has been ongoing for literally 20 years. World of Warcraft: The War Within kickstarts a brand new saga, which Blizzard has formally named "Worldsoul" for the first time. The saga will take place across three expansions over the next several years, but the first will focus on an underground region called Khaz'Algar. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within Review

We recently were treated to a trailer showcasing Xal'atath, the new "villain" who has taken center stage in the overarching World of Warcraft storyline. The self-proclaimed "Harbinger" has begun wreaking havoc across Azeroth, and major political figures have started hearing a piercing cry coming from within the very planet. One of those figures is Alleria Windrunner, who has become increasingly prominent in the overarching plot. 

Late yesterday, Blizzard dropped a new animated trailer focusing on Alleria's back story, and the complicated relationship she has with the corrupting forces of the Void.

The Void is source of shadow magic generally associated with evil, but some characters (including Warlocks, Rogues, and Shadow Priest players) have managed to harness the energy and wield it as a weapon. Other practitioners are shown to lose their sanity. Famously, the former dragon Aspect of Earth Neltharion was driven mad by the Void, transforming into the apocalyptic mutant dragon Deathwing. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within Story Overview

Indeed, shadow users of all stripes are still generally met with suspicion and even derision in the World of Warcraft universe. The Horde expelled a sect of Void researchers, who eventually settled in with the Alliance, adding playable "Void Elves" to the character roster. Their leader is the afforementioned Alleria Windrunner, who unleashed the powers of the Void. Those who infuse their abilities with shadow magic run the risk of losing their very sanity. Alleria's own husband Turalyon, a Paladin of the Holy Light, is shown to be devastated in the trailer by her usage of the power. Alleria is convinced that using the Void is the only way to actually combat the forces of the Void itself. 

🎒The best Back to School deals📝

• 🎮 Seagate Xbox Series X|S Card (2TB) | $249.99 at Best Buy (Save $110!)
• 🕹️Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (3-months) | $30.79 at CDKeys (Save $19!)
• 🎮Lenovo Legion Go (Z1 Extreme, 512GB) | $599.99 at Best Buy (Save $100!)
• 📺Amazon Fire TV Xbox Game Pass bundle | $82.85 at Amazon (Save $37!)
• 🖱️Razer Basilisk V3 Wired Mouse | $49.99 at Best Buy (Save $20!)

A darker tone we've not seen from Warcraft in years

Coupled with the recent Xal'atath trailer, it feels like Blizzard is trying to ramp up the idea that the Void isn't this fluffy blue sparkle magic that it could be misconstrued as if you've played through recent expansions. Xal'atath's expressions and movements have a definitive horror tone to them here, reminiscent of the ghost in The Ring. 

I feel like World of Warcraft pulled away from the darker notes after backlash to the infamous burning of Teldrassil. Blizzard has also de-emphasized the war between the Horde and the Alliance player factions, partially for gameplay reasons so players can play more together. I would personally argue that World of Warcraft has lost some of its identity, perhaps unintentionally so. 

RELATED: How to farm Valorstones fast in World of Warcraft: The War Within

The new trailers could be a hint that Blizzard is willing to ramp up the darkness again. The Void Lords are supposedly the central threat to the entire World of Warcraft universe right now, and they've not had a tremendous amount of build up as to why exactly we should be so horrified by them. The Void Lords hurl bioweapons that are more commonly known as Old Gods through the universe, which slam into planets like asteroids and spread like a gigantic terrestrial, sentient, tentacled cancer. Players have already defeated the Old Gods present on Azeroth, setting the stage for confrontation with the Void Lords themselves, but we've yet to really see them beyond simple glimpses. Players wield shadow magic without consequence, and the Void's presumed Harbinger, Xal'atath, hasn't really played her hand yet either. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within is the best starting place for new players

With the Old Gods seemingly felled, the Burning Legion scattered to the winds, and classic villainous factions like The Scourge utterly destroyed — World of Warcraft needs to develop new, high-stakes threats to prepare for the next 20 years of the storied franchise. Disney-style villains won't cut the Wild Mustard. It's time to ramp up the horror. I wouldn't say no to a Warcraft Netflix show either, based on that animated Alleria trailer. Fantastic.

World of Warcraft: The War Within launches on August 26, 2024 for Windows PC.

What you need to know

• World of Warcraft is a 20-year-old MMO from Blizzard entertainment, and is about to get a brand new expansion called The War Within. 
• To celebrate, another Blizzard title, Diablo 4, has grabbed some Warcraft-style skins as part of its Season 5 Infernal Hordes patch. 
• The skins offer a glimpse at what WoW might look like with a more modern engine, showcasing Xavius, Varian Wrynn, Xal'atath, Sylvanas, Kael'thas, and even Warcraft's infamous sparkly Celestial horse. 

Last year, Microsoft finalized its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, giving it control of mega franchises like Candy Crush, Call of Duty, and World of Warcraft. Indeed, the Blizzard acquisition is among the most exciting, as we could see classic franchises like StarCraft return from dormancy. 

Blizzard has been on a roll in recent years. Overwatch 2 is ticking over well and is exploring bringing back 6v6 gameplay, Diablo 4 just got a new season, Infernal Hordes, and so far it seems really awesome. World of Warcraft is also set to get a new expansion called The War Within, kicking off a new story saga led by returning franchise architect Chris Metzen. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within review

World of Warcraft has entered its 20th year in operation, and still sports the same engine. The engine has had a ton of new graphics improvements, but still is heavily "stylized" in essence. Many areas in World of Warcraft haven't received visual improvements, however, including old cities like Ironforge and the Undercity. It has led many people to request enhancements to the old world, and some of WoW's upcoming expansions such as Midnight and The Last Titan might offer graphics passes on some of these older zones. Some have dared to wonder even further. There's plenty of Unreal Engine Warcraft fan art on YouTube, for example, such as this amazing Ironforge render. But what if Blizzard itself reimagined WoW in a modern engine?

The latest Diablo 4 season "Infernal Hordes" has added a range of new skins to the shop, and some of them have a distinctly Warcrafty theme. 

There's a Kael'thas skin for sorcerers. Kael'thas was the heir to the Blood elven throne, until he threw his lot in with Illidan and later the Burning Legion, becoming a notorious villain. There's also a Druid skin based on Xavius, the evil elven traitor who also sold his soul for demonic power (sensing a pattern here...). There's also a necromancer skin based on Xal'atath, the new central antagonist of the upcoming Warcraft Worldsoul saga. There's a skin for famed Banshee Queen Sylvanas, for rogue archers. Departing from elves a bit, we also have a Barbarian skin based on Varian Wrynn, who was turned into a pile of ash by Gul'dan during the Legion expansion (RIP). Finally, there's a mount skin based on Blizzard's notorious Celestial Steed. This horse mount was the first in-app skin Blizzard offered on Warcraft's microtransaction store. A former StarCraft developer noted that the skin, while derided by core fans, actually outsold an entire StarCraft II expansion, perhaps further encouraging Blizzard to go down the microtransaction. 

The skins each cost 2800 platinum, which costs around $25 depending on your region and the current sales events going on. Right now, Blizzard is offering 300 platinum on top of a 2500 purchase, which matches how much the skins generally cost. They come with weapon visuals and so on, too. 

🔥The hottest trending deals🔥

• 🎮 Seagate Xbox Series X|S Card (2TB) | $249.99 at Best Buy (Save $110!)
• 🕹️Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (3-months) | $29.19 at CDKeys (Save $21!)
• 📺Amazon Fire TV Xbox Game Pass bundle | $82.85 at Amazon (Save $37!)
• 🕹️Xbox Game Pass Core (12-months) | $41.89 at CDKeys (Save $18!)
• 🖱️Razer DeathAdder V3 Wired Mouse | $50.99 at Best Buy (Save $19!)
• 🖱️Razer Basilisk V3 Wired Mouse | $49.99 at Best Buy (Save $20!)

Use Microsoft Rewards to get Diablo 4 skins for free

Sure, they are pretty steep to buy. But, did you know you can convert Microsoft Rewards points for using Bing into Diablo IV Platinum? Now you do. You can also buy the Diablo 4 battle passes too. Head over to Microsoft Rewards' redemption page to spend them, and you can switch your search engine on mobile and Chrome to Bing to start earning.

It would be awesome to see World of Warcraft get a true next-gen visual makeover, but it would also make the game astronomically more expensive to build. The game's more "simplistic" stylized visuals are at least potentially cheaper to build at scale, over something more photorealistic. World of Warcraft patches and expansions come with veritable mountains of content, in part owing to the size of the team making the game, but also the maturity of the tools and its engine. Moving WoW to a more complex engine probably wouldn't do the game's content release schedule any favors, but it's fun to dream. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within's story overview

Either way, WoW has some of the best pre-rendered cinematics in the entire industry, with both The War Within's intro movie and the recent Nerubian faction profile cinematic building hype for the expansion's launch on August 22, 2024. 

You can also grab Diablo IV right now as part of Xbox Game Pass. 

What you need to know

• Blizzard has released a new motion comic cinematic trailer for World of Warcraft: The War Within.
• The cinematic, titled "Threads of Destiny", shows off a spider-like race called Nerubians and gives insight into their politics while providing context for the expansion's story.
• World of Warcraft: The War Within is expected to release on August 26 for PC.

World of Warcraft is getting its tenth expansion later this month, pitting players against the villainous Xal’atath the Harbinger and an army of spider-like Nerubians in an epic journey to save Azeroth. To prepare for the upcoming adventure, Blizzard has released a brand-new motion comic cinematic trailer to provide a little context on the current events of the game world and introduce the new foes. 

Taking place in the Nerubian city of Azj-Kahet, the “Threads of Destiny” trailer lays the groundwork for the events of the expansion. The world of Azeroth has seen plenty of threats during World of Warcraft's two decades of storytelling, but the return of Xal’atath and her army of Nerubian spiderlings is shrouded in mysterious motivations for destruction. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within Review

The cinematic trailer sets the stage for the expansion’s events with exposition surrounding Nerubian politics, setting into motion events that will lead to the upcoming raid, set in Nerub’ar Palace in the Azj-Kahet region. The lore and story of World of Warcraft is lengthy, and getting caught up on all the events ahead of the August 26 release date for The War Within can be daunting. You can check out our World of Warcraft: The War Within FAQ and World of Warcraft: The War Within story overview for a refresher on what has gone down in Azeroth up to this point. 

The community reaction to the latest trailer has been primarily positive, with commenters celebrating Threads of Destiny’s painterly art style and cinematic aesthetic. However, others found the plot for the cinematic to be too similar to the previously told story of Arthas. The War Within is the penultimate update for the 2024 World of Warcraft roadmap, as it was detailed in December 2023. In addition to a new campaign story, the update will include delves, hero talents, four new zones, eight new dungeons, a new raid, and a new season for PVP. Additional story and quests, new content and system updates, and a 20th-anniversary event are slated to follow up The War Within in update 11.0.5, coming mid-late Autumn of this year.

RELATED: How to farm Valorstones fast in World of Warcraft: The War Within

World of Warcraft: The War Within launches on PC on August 26. World of Warcraft is published by Blizzard Entertainment, which was acquired by Xbox at the end of 2023. Despite now being considered a first-party Xbox title, World of Warcraft has yet to be made available to subscribers of Game Pass. The injunction granted to the FTC by U.S. courts during the acquisition process prevented Activision Blizzard King and Xbox from working together to include ABK properties in the subscription service before the deal was officially closed. There has yet to be any clear announcements by Xbox or Blizzard on when (or even if) subscribers of PC Game Pass can expect to play World of Warcraft, widely considered one of Blizzard’s best PC games, as part of their subscription plan.

Soon, players will embark on another journey to save the world of Azeroth from evil forces in World of Warcraft's tenth expansion, World of Warcraft: The War Within. In what was one of 2024's most anticipated upcoming PC games, a newly powerful and mysterious villain called Xal'atath the Harbinger, is planning to lay waste to Azeroth. An otherworldly ‘Radiant Song’ is calling its greatest champions to venture forth in the depths of the world, and we're unsure exactly why. 

RELATED: World of Warcraft: The War Within review

If you’re a new player jumping into World of Warcraft for the first time or a veteran that’s returning after a long break, you’re probably wondering how we got to this point. Well, have no fear, for we have prepared a recap of the major relevant events leading up to World of Warcraft: The War Within to help you learn what you’re fighting for and understand what’s going on so you can get invested in the story.

World of Warcraft The War Within: General premise

The World of Warcraft takes on Azeroth, a fantasy world that’s been ravaged by decades of war between two major factions, the Horde and the Alliance. Although there have been times when Horde and Alliance have put aside their hatreds to battle common enemies like undead armies of the Lich King, the world-ruining dragon Deathwing, and the infernal Burning Legion led by the dark Titan Sargeras to name a few.

Sargeras is particularly noteworthy as he sought to destroy Azeroth as he believed that its Worldsoul (essentially the soul of a planet that has the potential to be reborn into a god-like entity called a Titan) would spell doom for the entire universe if the Old Gods and their Void Lord masters corrupted it. The Old Gods are a group of disgusting eldritch horrors created by Sargeras’ afforementioned arch-enemies, the Void Lords, a race of evil shadow gods bent on consuming all energy in the universe. 

Sargeras nearly destroyed Azeroth when he impaled the planet itself with his namesake sword at the end of World of Warcraft: Legion but was ultimately foiled by the players with help from the fan-favorite Warcraft character, Illidan Stormrage.

Many years later came the tumultuous events of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, which saw the Horde and Alliance team up yet again to save the world and the afterlife from the villainous Jailor. Once that crisis was averted, the Horde and Alliance realized their war had gone on for too long and agreed on a proper truce so they could focus on healing their lands.

During this peacetime, an otherworldly phenomenon called the ‘Radiant Song’ is occurring throughout Azeroth, subjecting certain individuals to cryptic visions and an unfamiliar voice compelling them to travel to the heart of the world. Famous Warcraft heroes like Thrall, Anduin, and more have heard the Radiant Song and are organizing an expedition comprised of Azeroth’s greatest champions (that's you) to venture into the depths of Azeroth to find the cause of this Radiant Song.

However, our heroes’ investigation of the Radiant Song has been complicated by the re-appearance of a recent threat named Xal'atath, who has now taken up the monicker "The Harbinger." This enigmatic villainess plans to bring ruin to Azeroth by gathering an army of cavern-dwelling, spider-like monsters called Nerubians to invade the surface while she works on her own schemes in the shadows. So, not only will our heroes be tasked with uncovering the origins of the Radiant Song, but they will also need to unravel Xal'atath's plans and put a stop to the swelling Nerubian invasion.

World of Warcraft The War Within: Who is Xal'atath the Harbinger?

Much of Xal'atath’s motivations and what she even is, is shrouded in mystery. What we do know is that she is an ancient creature related to the Void, a primordial extra-terrestrial force ruled by the Void Lords, associated with the depths of space. 

Long ago, Xal'atath’s essence was sealed away by unknown beings inside a cursed blade called Xal'atath: Blade of the Black Empire, which players could acquire during the Shadow Priest Legion Artifact questline in World of Warcraft: Legion. Xal'atath could talk to the player wielding the knife, and rapidly became a fan-favorite artifact, which potentially lead to an expanded role in the wider story. 

Then during World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, Xal'atath managed to free herself from the blade by making a deal with the Old God N’Zoth, who players vanquish at the end of the Battle for Azeroth expansion. Although, many are wondering if N'Zoth is truly dead ... given its penchant for manipulating Azeroth's powers across history. 

Once the deal was complete and she was no longer bound to her namesake blade, Xal’atath possessed the dead body of a high elf girl named Inasis and abandoned the player to their fate. Fortunately, the player managed to break out of the trap and ultimately destroy N’Zoth.

Xal'atath's ultimate goals are unclear as of writing. Aside from gathering an army of bloodthirsty Nerubians, we know that Xal'atath’s schemes rely on an ancient artifact in her possession called the Dark Heart. She acquired this relic from the powerful elemental proto-dragon Iridikron, one of the central antagonists of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight.

The Dark Heart is just as mysterious as Xal'atath, but we do know that it has the power to convert magic into shadow energy and that it possesses the essence of Galakrond. Galakrond was a humongous proto-dragon that threatened to consume all life on Azeroth, but was destroyed by the dragon Aspects eons ago. Galakrond is something of a legend in Warcraft lore, whose gigantic skeleton can be found by players half-excavated in Northrend. The Scourge was attempting to resurrect Galakrond as an unimaginably powerful undead frostwyrm, but this proved too much even for the powers of the Scourge to pull off. 

Thoroughly dead in Azeroth, Iridikron teamed up with the time-traveling Infinite Dragonflight to travel to the corpse of Galakrond, and siphon his soul as it was leaving this mortal coil. Galakrond's insatiable, all-devouring essence has been implanted into the Dark Heart by Iridikron as part of a deal he made with Xal'atath. Iridikron despises the ancient gods called the Titans, who he views as alien invaders that corrupted Azeroth and its denizens. The Titans are responsible for shaping and "ordering" Azeroth in its primordial era, and stand in direct philosophical opposition to the entropic and chaotic forces of the Void. 

RELATED: How to farm Valorstones fast in World of Warcraft: The War Within

Much of the cosmic battles at a macroscopic level are over Azeroth's Worldsoul. Azeroth is a uniquely powerful planet, owing to its size and abundant spirit energy. Azeroth consumed this energy and became the most powerful known Worldsoul in the universe, which is why cosmic forces like the Titans, Void Lords, and the former Burning Legion were all intent on acquiring it for their own ends. The Burning Legion (largely destroyed during the Legion expansion) were largely successful in creating a corrupted Worldsoul Titan in the form of Argus, which players destroyed. As of writing, there's no known successful instance of the Void corrupting and enlisting a Worldsoul. But that is exactly what we may be trying to prevent in this expansion. 

Chapter 3: What is the Radiant Song?

Like Xal'atath and the Dark Heart, the Radiant Song is an enigma that is yet to be solved, however, we do have some clues as to what its nature could be. According to several Warcraft characters like Thrall, Jaina Proudmore, Anduin, and Magni Bronzebeard, the visions from the Radiant Song feel like a dire warning, as if Azeroth’s Worldsoul itself is crying out for help.

This interpretation of the Radiant Song being a cry for help is further hinted at by the Locus Walker, a Void-Ethereal who first appeared in World of Warcraft: Legion. 

During the Dark Heart Patch questline, where the player accompanied high elf huntress Alleria Windrunner into investigating the Dark Heart and Xal'atath, the Locus Walker explains that his homeworld experienced a phenomenon similar to the Radiant Song. Sadly, his people were too late to decipher its meaning as the Locus Walker’s world was shortly destroyed by a Void Lord named Dimensius, who originally appeared almost two decades ago in The Burning Legion expansion. Dimensius was something of a smaller character back then, but has been given a much bigger role as a result of this questline. 

The Locus Walker believes a similar catastrophe is about to happen again in Azeroth and that Xal'atath will most likely be the cause of it.

Will you answer the call of the Radiant Song and stop Xal'atath from destroying Azeroth?

As you can see, World of Warcraft: The War Within's story will have a lot of mysteries for players to uncover as they fight through Xal'atath’s army of Nerubians. Personally speaking, I predict that a new or returning Old God is trapped somewhere inside the caverns of Khaz Algar, and that Xal'atath is planning to use the Dark Heart as part of a ritual to free it from imprisonment and unleash the essence of Galakrond's hunger upon the world.

I believe that Azeroth’s Worldsoul may have sensed Xal'atath’s intentions to free the Old God, and is now calling out to Azeroth’s champions through the Radiant Song to stop Xal'atath before it's too late. In addition, this would explain why Sargeras attempted to destroy Azeroth with his sword as he may have sensed the dark presence of an Old God dangerously close to Azeroth's Worldsoul within. 

However, it is very likely that Xal'atath could be an entirely different being of the Void altogether and is merely using the Void Lords’ power to achieve her own ambitions. She didn’t seem keen on helping N’Zoth (a monster created by the Void Lords) finish off the players back in Battle for Azeroth. There are also a variety of villainous, Voidy characters out there that could make a return. Where is Queen Azshara? What is Iridikron up to? Could we even see a return of Sire Denathrius and his Dreadlords?

There are many other questions that need answering too: Will Galakrond’s essence within the Dark Heart play a role in Xal'atath’s plans or perhaps be revived in a new body? Is the Radiant Song indeed a sign of Azeroth calling for help? What exactly is Xal'atath and what sealed her away in that blade eons ago? What is Xal'atath’s ultimate end goal? And what exactly was Sargeras aiming for when he impaled Azeroth?

Join the great expedition to Azeroth’s depths and find the answers to these burning questions when World of Warcraft: The War Within, the tenth expansion for one of Blizzard Entertainment’s best PC games, launches on August 26, 2024 for PC. 

Confession time: I’ve been rather reluctant to give Blizzard Entertainment’s juggernaut MMORPG, World of Warcraft, a chance over the years. Despite having fond memories of playing Warcraft 3 as a kid, I just couldn’t get invested in World of Warcraft when I was younger. My reasons varied from being scared off by the extreme dedication needed to play the game, how unfriendly it was for solo players back in its early days, how multifaceted its storyline and lore are, and the fear that I would be unable to make friends or join guilds required to play the game optimally. 

However, after over twenty years since the game launched in 2024 and gaining MMORPG experience during my time playing Final Fantasy XIV, I have finally converted into a full-time subscriber to World of Warcraft. This is thanks to Blizzard refreshing classic content, mountains of quality-of-life improvements that made power-leveling your characters faster than ever, finally landing an amazingly welcoming and friendly guild, and so much more.

With this in mind, you can bet I’m excited for World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion, World of Warcraft: The War Within. WoW’s tenth milestone expansion is set to take the MMORPG to greater heights by kicking off an epic storyline, pitting players against new Raids and endgame Delves content, and adding all kinds of new gameplay features like Warbands, Hero Talents, and more.

Here are my top favorite new features I’m looking forward to seeing in World of Warcraft: The War Within.

World of Warcraft: The War Within — Warbands

First off, one of my favorite new features is one you can experience right now as it was added in the recently released World of Warcraft: The War Within pre-expansion patch, the Warbands. Warbands is a new system that allows players to carry over achievement progression, collection items, Renown rankings, gear, currency, flight points, map discoveries, and more across all their characters on a single Battle.net account.

With this system, you will no longer have to redo Faction quests to gain Renown levels or redo achievements on each of your player characters; you just have to do them once, and most achievements and Renown levels will carry over to all of them on your account. Additionally, you will no longer need to transfer equipment to backup characters (or alt characters as they’re commonly known in-game) to gain their appearance for Transmogrification (a system that allows players to change the cosmetic appearance of their gear) if they’re incompatible with certain character classes, they just have to collect them, and their appearance gets stored in the account-wide Collections storage.

RELATED: How to farm Valorstones fast in World of Warcraft: The War Within

Warbands will get access to an account-wide storage unit for items called the Warbands Bank, which can be accessed in any bank in the game. The Warbands Bank will have five tabs with 98 slots per tab of storage (the first tab is free, but the rest will need to be fought with Gold), giving you tons of space to store items and gear you find and transfer them freely between all your created characters.

I love the concept of Warbands as it incentivizes players to create alt characters in addition to your main character. It will make gathering gear, achievements, and cosmetics much easier for your alts and help them catch up for endgame content much faster than in previous expansions.

Not to mention, you get a new cool character log-in screen where you can position four of your favorite player characters together for an awesome group shot.

Blizzard has confirmed that it plans to add more features to Warbands in the future too, making it an incredibly exciting new addition to the overall game. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within — Skyriding

Another new feature brought in by World of Warcraft: The War Within’s pre-expansion patch is the Skyriding feature. Formally known as Dragonriding, this system allows players to control their flying mounts at higher speeds to traverse the map more quickly than the traditional flying system (now named Steady Flight), that’s been a part of World of Warcraft since The Burning Crusade expansion.

However, unlike Dragonriding, which was only limited to certain mounts from World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, Skyriding is applied to 464 flying mounts, a number that will grow as time goes on. In addition, the Druid class’ flying Travel Form will be able to use the Skyriding feature as well. 

I loved the new Dragonriding feature in Dragonflight as it made travel between zones go by so much faster and it personally made me nostalgic for the flying segment in the classic Spyro the Dragon games as they had similar, weighty, physics-based controls. But Skyriding has made it even better because now you can use it with your personal favorite mounts instead of being able only to use it with the custom Drake mounts in Dragonflight.

However, if you prefer the old-school method of flying, you can adjust it in the Mounts section of the Collections menu to switch between Skyriding or Steady Flight.

World of Warcraft: The War Within — Hero Talents

Hero Talents are new talent trees that every class will get as they level up throughout World of Warcraft: The War Within, which will be added on top of their default talent trees. These range from granting passive abilities that can augment a character’s powers or new active abilities entirely. Each will have multiple Hero Talent trees to choose from (Druits get four Hero Talent trees, Demon Hunters get two Hero Talent trees, while all the other classes get three Hero Talent trees), and they can switch between them to decide which fits their playstyle the most.

I’m excited to try out Hero Talents as they have the potential to completely change classes into something new or have them function like classic Warcraft heroes or units from the old Real-time strategy games. For example, the Dark Ranger Hero Talent tree will have a Hunter class character gain abilities reminiscent of the fan-favorite character Sylvanas Windrunner, and the Mountain Thane Hero Talent tree will grant Warriors the thunderous abilities of the Mountain King hero units from Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. 

This system seems more scalable into the future too, giving Blizzard opportunities to add more hero talent trees for new playstyles in future expansions without necessarily giving into power creep. An issue Blizzard has struggled with in the past is how to give players something new without adding reams of new complexity. Switching between hero talent trees seems to be exactly what the alchemist ordered. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within — Delves

One new upcoming feature I’m particularly interested in and one that my colleague and seasoned WoW veteran Jez Corden enjoyed during his preview World of Warcraft: The War Within is the Delves. The Delves is a new form of endgame content where players will explore dungeons with an NPC companion to fight hordes of difficult monsters, solve puzzles, and traverse treacherous platforming segments. The Delves can be tackled solo or with a party of five players.

What makes the Delves intriguing is that the rewards you get for completing them will include high-level gear that’s on par with endgame raid gear. This means that if you don’t have a guild or need to wait for a raid schedule, you can challenge yourself and collect endgame loot. You can instead opt to take on the Delves alone or with your closest friends and farm for gear that’s on a similar power level so you don’t get left behind on content and still feel like you're making meaningful progress.

In addition, the Delves will have exclusive mounts, toys, cosmetic, and more rewards you won’t find anywhere else in World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft: The War Within — The new Earthen Race

World of Warcraft: The War Within will introduce a new playable Allied Race called the Earthen, an ancient race of Titan-forged golems created to help shape the subterranean caverns of Azeroth during its infancy. Many of the Earthen were cursed by the Old God Yogg-Saron to become the race we know today as the Dwarves, but some of the original Earthen survived this fate and rose to stop The Harbinger from destroying Azeroth.

The Earthen Race will be able to play for both Alliance and Horde factions, and they will be able to choose the Hunter, Monk, Paladin, Mage, Priest, Warlock, Rogue, Warrior, or Shaman class upon character creation.

I like the look of the Earthen as they’re essentially a race of superpowered golems covered in crystals, which you don’t often get to play in RPGs (Shale from Dragon Age: Origins is the most prominent example), so I will be looking to trying them out and adding to my Warband.

There are strong hints that Earthen won't be the only new race joining players in The War Within either, since dataminers uncovered the cave troll-like Harronir, which also feature heavily in The War Within's CGI intro cinematic. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within — A new saga spanning multiple expansions

When World of Warcraft: The War Within was announced at Blizzcon 2023, it was stated this game would be the first chapter of an epic ongoing storyline called the Worldsoul Saga.

This saga will span the next three expansions (World of Warcraft: The War Within, World of Warcraft: Midnight, and World of Warcraft: The Last Titan) and tell a grand tale that where the champions of Azeroth fight to save the Worldsoul of Azeroth from the mysterious villain, Xal'atath the Harbinger while dealing with the Titans, and the forces of Light and the Void.

What’s more is that Chris Metzen, a legendary developer who helped direct the story, create artwork, and voice act for Blizzard’s most iconic games such as Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo, to name a few, would return from retirement as the Executive Creative Director of the Warcraft universe. Long-time Warcraft fans are excited to see Chris Metzen effectively return in a large directorial role for Warcraft’s story, as his direction in the past led to some of the most memorable, cinematic, and beloved moments in the franchise’s history.

Fans are hoping that under Chris Metzen’s creative lead, the storyline for World of Warcraft will get back on track to tell amazing stories and well-written characters again. This feeling is due to that after Chris Metzen retired, the storylines for previous expansions that didn't involve any of his input like Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands left fans with a bad taste. Shadowlands was notoriously unpopular for a variety of reasons, and it contribued to long time fans leaving World of Warcraft and migrating to Final Fantasy XIV.

While I can’t say for certain if Chris Metzen’s direction will help restore fans' faith in the MMORPG's ongoing narrative, I can say that I am intrigued by the premise for World of Warcraft: The War Within. I’m curious to know what Xal'atath’s ultimate goal is, and I’m excited to see the spider-like Nerubians, one of my favorite Warcraft races from Warcraft 3, promoted to major antagonists for players to deal with to the point where they’re getting their own Raid dungeon.

World of Warcraft: The War Within — Possibility of more WoW Remix events

My last favorite feature isn’t necessarily in World of Warcraft: The War Within, but one I hope we’ll see more of in the future is the addition of more WoW Remix events. WoW Remix is a limited-time event where players get to relive a past World of Warcraft expansion but with remixed content that allowed players to experience in new fun ways.

The first WoW Remix event, World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria, was an absolute blast to play, and I’d argue, is the perfect jumping on for new players to World of Warcraft and a good method for veteran players to prepare Alt Characters for World of Warcraft: The War Within. It allowed players to level alt characters at the speed of light, obtain intentionally overpowered Remix gear that let players humiliate Raid bosses in fun cathartic fashion, and grab exclusive cosmetics rewards and other items that are almost impossible to collect in the normal, retail version of World of Warcraft.

At the time of this writing, World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria is still active and will end on August 19, 2024, upon which all Remix player characters will be transferred into the retail version of World of Warcraft for The War Within. I hope we get to see more Remix events in the future during World of Warcraft: The War Within’s post-launch patch life cycle, as I would love to see Remixed versions of Legion, Burning Crusade, or Wrath of the Lich King.

Are you ready to journey to the depths of Azeroth and battle the Harbinger?

And there you have my top reasons why I’m looking forward to playing World of Warcraft: The War Within. From game-changing Hero Talents, the new Earthen race, an extravagant storyline that will span multiple expansions, Delves, Warbands, and Skyriding, there’s just so much promising content to indulge in.

World of Warcraft: The War Within will launch on August 26, 2024, for PC, and players who pre-ordered the Epic Edition will get Early Access to it on August 22, 2024. I can’t wait to play this upcoming PC game with my guild buddies and embark on a new adventure in one of Blizzard Entertainment’s best PC games.

What you need to know

• World of Warcraft's pre-expansion patch for its upcoming World of Warcraft: The War Within expansion has gone live.
• This patch includes the new Warbands and Skyriding features, along with new quests and class balance changes. However, it also contains a myriad of bugs.
• World of Warcraft: The War Within is set to launch on August 26, 2024 on exclusively on PC.

The long wait for World of Warcraft's tenth expansion, World of Warcraft: The War Within, is nearly over as it will be launching next month on August 26, 2024. However, players will be able to get a taste of its new content early, as World of Warcraft: The War Within's pre-expansion patch has recently gone live today.

This patch brings with it a slew of new gameplay features including the much-anticipated Warbands feature that will make achivement progression and cosmetic item collection between all characters on a player's account much easier, the Skyriding feature that will enable players to use the Dragonriding system from World of Warcraft: Dragonflight with a majority of the game's flying mounts, and a ton of balance adjustments for every class.

In addition, this patch includes a new questline called Visions of Azeroth for those who have reach Lv.70 and completed Dragonflight's final storyline, and a limited time called Radiant Echoes that will run from July 30, 2024 to August 26, 2024. This event will have players fight classic WoW bosses to obtain lucrative gear and cosmetic rewards to prepare them for the expansion.

Unfortunately, this momentous occasion is somewhat soured due to a huge, unexpected pile of bugs that have snuck into the MMORPG within this patch. These bugs range from preventing class abilities working properly, displaying the UI incorrectly, messing up the Warbands feature, and more.

The full list of known bugs discovered by Blizzard Entertainment on their official website are as follows:

Classes

Some specializations may encounter issues when loading a previously saved Talent loadout. This can be resolved with a character relog.

• Death Knight
  • Unholy
    • Death Knights can sometimes only receive one stack of Festermight for the first proc of Sudden Doom after casting Death Coil.
    • Sudden Doom does not cause all Epidemics to critically strike.
    • Festering Scythe does not gain benefit from Mastery: Dreadblade and does not grant stacks from Festering Wounds that burst on creature death.
    • Raise Abomination’s Virulent Plague is only applied once.
• Priest
  • Halo can pull creatures that are not in combat with the Priest.
  • Discipline
    • Rapture does not allow for spell-queuing casts immediately after Rapture.
  • Shadow
    • Idol of C’Thun is not functioning properly.
• Hunter
  • Kindling Flare can sometimes fail to reveal stealthed targets when players leave its area of effect.
  • Tendon Rip (Pet Ability) is not removed by movement-freeing abilities (like Blessing of Freedom).
  • Marksmanship
    • Serpent Sting & Wind Arrows from Legacy of the Windrunners are not affected by Marksmanship Mastery.
    • Wailing Arrow is granted after 19 Wind Arrows, instead of 20.
    • Killer Accuracy does not increase the critical strike damage of Kill Shot.
    • Rapid Fire can be canceled by Kill Zone when it is procced from the Season 4 2-piece set.
  • Beast Mastery
    • Bloodshed can sometimes fail to apply Basilisk Collar.
  • Survival
    • Flanking Strike’s pet damage does not scale with primary or secondary stats.
    • Exposed Flank can sometimes fail to duplicate the pet’s damage.
    • Spearhead does not increase the critical strike chance of Kill Command.
• Mage
  • Fire
    • Fire’s Ire buff tooltip description indicates a 2.5% gain even if players have 2 points in the talent.
• Shaman
  • Stone Bulwark Totem’s audio & animations are slightly too loud.
  • Elemental
    • Flash of Lightning can sometimes fail to reduce the cooldown of Stone Bulwark Totem and Primordial Wave.
    • Elemental Blasts from Fusion of Elements can incorrectly consume Magma Chamber.
    • Elemental Blasts from Fusion of Elements can trigger Storm Frenzy.
    • Lava Beam does not benefit from Storm Frenzy.
    • Thunderstrike Ward cannot trigger from Lava Beam.
  • Restoration
    • Spouting Spirits does not properly reduce healing beyond 5 targets.
    • Spell queuing Lava Burst after a Healing Surge was incorrectly consuming Master of the Elements when Lava Burst is instant cast.
• Rogue
  • Death From Above (PvP Talent) does not scale up to 7 combo points.
  • Assassination
    • Envenom’s buff persists for 2 seconds longer than the tooltip indicates.
    • Ruptures applied via Indiscriminate Carnage will always apply 3 Serrated Bone Spikes, even with less than 3 spikes prepared.
  • Subtlety
    • Premeditation does not benefit Shiv, Shuriken Toss, or Shuriken Storm.
    • Premeditation is consumed if players do not open with a combo point generating spell from stealth.
• Warrior
  • Arms
    • Bloodletting can cause Mortal Strike to apply Rend to targets above 35% health.
  • Protection
    • Spell Reflection has a small chance to not properly reflect spells.

Dungeons

• Abilities may be missing form the Dungeon Journal while on Mythic+ difficulty.

Quests

• Quest objectives for the Legion quest “To Be Prepared” may not be visible.
• Quest objectives for “Archives: The First Disk” may not be visible.

User Interface

• Group Manager
  • Pressing the reset button in Group Manager UI will cause a lua error.
  • Holding down a used marker button makes the highlight disappear.
  • The remove all button does not work for unit markers.
• Spellbook
  • After the Spellbook goes from minimized to maximized, the Click Cast Settings frame will not function. Typing /reload in chat will resolve the issue.
• Professions
  • The Concentrate button disappears when selecting and unselecting finishing reagents.
  • The Patron tab does not honor a filter when switching to other tabs and back.
  • The Recraft button is shown after completing an order.
  • Finishing reagents can show increased recipe difficulty.
  • The tracker is missing the green checkmark if the player hides all Dungeon and Bonus Objective Trackers beforehand.
  • The Rewards Frame may disappear when accepting an order.
  • The quality preview when using Concentration may be inaccurate.
• Quest and Map
  • Right-clicking on a tracked World Objective may cause a Lua error.
  • Gossip windows may display the incorrect icon for an in progress wrapper quest.
  • Accepted Daily Quests may show the wrong icon.
  • The Lore Book help tip may appear outside of the log frame.
  • The Quest objective icon may still be present after disabling the quest objectives map filter.
  • Clicking on the Great Vault world map icon may not open the UI.

Warbands

• Entering the world on a character on a different realm may result in a blank character select screen.
• Some account-wide reputations may not show correctly across all characters.

In addition, Blizzard has stated that it has temporarily disabled the Warbands Warbank to fix a critical issue they have discovered with it and will bring it back up as as soon as possible.

🔥The hottest trending deals🔥

• Seagate Xbox Series X|S Expansion Card (2TB) | was $359.99 now $249.99 at Best Buy
• Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (3-months) | was $49.99 now $31.99 at CDKeys
• Alienware 34 Curved QD-OLED Gaming Monitor | was $899.99 now $699.99 at Dell
• HP Victus 15.6 Gaming Laptop (Ryzen 5, RTX 4050) | was $979 now $599 at Walmart
• Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max + Xbox Wireless Controller + Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (1-month) | was $119.98 now $82.85 at Amazon
• Logitech G502 LIGHTSPEED Wireless Gaming Mouse | was $149.99 now $89.65 at Amazon
• Samsung Class QE1C QLED TV (85-inch) | was $2,799.99 now $1,229.99 at Samsung
• Razer DeathAdder V3 Wired Gaming Mouse | was $69.99 now $50.99 at Best Buy
• Surface Laptop Go 3 (Core i5) | was $799.99 now $599.99 at Best Buy
• Razer Basilisk V3 Wired Gaming Mouse | was $69.99 now $49.99 at Best Buy

The first chapter of the 'World Soul' saga draws ever closer

Its sad to see so many technical hiccups creep their way into this patch in an attempt  to ruin everyone's excitement for World of Warcraft: The War Within's new gameplay features. Thankfully, Blizzard is aware of these issues and its tech team is working around the clock to get them fixed as soon as possible, so everyone can get back to enjoying one of its best PC games without technical difficulties.

World of Warcraft: The War Within is set to launch on August 26, 2024, on PC. If you pre-order the Epic Edition, you will be able to experience this upcoming PC title much sooner via Early Access on August 22, 2024. 

In the meantime, check out our World of Warcraft: The War Within preview to see why we're excited about this expansion and our World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandara Remix feature to see why it's the perfect jumping on point for new players to join Blizzard's iconic MMORPG.

What you need to know

• Blizzard Entertainment has announced that a pre-expansion patch for World of Warcraft's upcoming The War Within expansion will go live on July 24, 2024.
• This pre-expansion patch will include the Warbands feature, the Skyriding feature, a new prologue questline for The War Within, and a limited-time event called Radiant Echos in which players will get to fight classic raid bosses for lucrative rewards.
• World of Warcraft: The War Within will launch on August 26, 2024, on PC for the public, while players who pre-order the Epic Edition will get Early Access to it on August 22, 2024.

The long wait is almost over as we are a month and a half away until World of Warcraft's tenth expansion, The War Within releases on August 26, 2024, for PC. However, we won't have to wait to get a taste of its vaunted gameplay features as Blizzard Entertainment has announced that a pre-expansion patch for World of Warcraft: The War Within will go live on July 24, 2024.

This update will implement all kinds of new content for World of Warcraft, including the highly anticipated Warbands and Skyriding features, a new questline, a limited-time event called Radiant Echoes, and more.

WoW: The War Within pre-expansion patch — Warbands

In this update, players can look forward to getting their hands on one of The War Within's biggest gameplay features - the Warbands. This feature will allow players to share achievements and renown progression, cosmetic Transmog items, money, crafting materials, gear, and more across all their created characters on their Battle.net account in a single region (such as America or Europe).

WoW: The War Within pre-expansion patch - New quests

If a player has reached level 70 on a character and completed the final chapter of World of Warcraft: Dragonlight's questline, they will be able to take part in the first chapter of the "Visions of Azeroth," which will act as a set the stage for World of Warcraft: The War Within's main storyline.

WoW: The War Within pre-expansion patch — Skyriding

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight's Dragonriding feature proved to be so popular that Blizzard Entertainment has enabled it for many zones outside of the Dragonflight-exclusive zones and renamed it to Skyriding.

In addition, a vast majority of mounts will be able to use the Skyriding method of flight instead of only the customizable Dragonriding mounts from World of Warcraft: Dragonflight. If players prefer the old method of mount flight (renamed to Steady Flight), they will have the option to switch between Steady Flight and Skyriding at will from the mount collections menu.

WoW: The War Within pre-expansion patch — Radiant Echoes

The biggest surprise of this patch is a new limited-time event called Radiant Echoes, which will run from July 30, 2024, to August 26, 2024. In this event, ghostly spirits that resemble characters, monsters, and bosses from previous World of Warcraft expansions (which have been dubbed 'Radiant Echoes') have suddenly appeared out of nowhere and are causing havoc across Azeroth.

After accepting the quest to participate in this event at Dalaran, players will be dispatched to various zones via teleportation to destroy these 'echoes' of Azeroth's past before they can harm the living. Defeating Radiant Echoes will not be easy as some of these specters can even take the form of classic World of Warcraft Raid bosses like Ragnaros, Onyxia, and even Arthas the Lich King.

As you defeat Radiant Echoes, you will obtain a new, unique form of currency called Residual Memories, which players can use to purchase all kinds of rewards, including weapons, armor, heirloom rings, mounts, and pet companions.

Are you ready to begin the first chapter of World of Wacraft's epic 'World Soul' saga?

After having a blast with World of Warcraft's Pandaria 'Remix' event and seeing all the exciting gameplay changes coming in World of Warcraft: The War Within, I can't wait to get my hands on this upcoming expansion for one of Blizzard Entertainment's best PC Games. 

The Warbands feature will make creating and powering up backup characters easier than ever. I will be able to fly at high speeds with my favorite mounts instead of only Dragonflight's Dragonriding-exclusive mounts thanks to Skyriding, and the upcoming Hero Talents will make classes more diverse and fun to play than ever.

And that's without mentioning the new playable Earthen Allied Race, dungeons, Raids, the Delves endgame content, and other gameplay changes that had my colleague and World of Warcraft veteran, Jez Corden thrilled during his hands-on preview for The War Within.

World of Warcraft: The War Within launches on August 26, 2024, on PC for the general public, while players who pre-order the Epic Edition will get to play this upcoming PC title sooner via Early Access on August 22, 2024. 

What you need to know

• During the Xbox Games Showcase 2024, Blizzard Entertainment has announced the final release date for World of Warcraft: The War Within.
• The War Within is the tenth expansion for the long-running MMORPG and will feature new raids, dungeons, a new playable race, Hero Talents, and more.
• World of Warcraft: The War Within is scheduled to launch on August 26, 2024 on PC.

On Sunday 9, 2024, Blizzard Entertainment showcased a new cinematic trailer for The War Within, the next big expansion for the genre-defining MMORPG, World of Warcraft at the Xbox Games Showcase 2024 event.

The trailer consists of a montage of the previous expansions' cinematic openings followed by a new one that gives players a glimpse of The War Within's setting and central characters, all narrated by Xal'atath, the expansion's main antagonist. 

At the end of the trailer, we finally get confirmation of when the expansion will launch – World of Warcraft: The War Within will launch on August 26, 2024 exclusively on PC.

• Check out our LIVE Xbox Games Showcase 2024 coverage

The Worldsoul Saga begins this summer

World of Warcraft has come a long way since 2004 and judging from our positive preview of The War Within, this two-decade-old MMORPG still has plenty of life in it yet. The War Within expansion will feature a mountain of new content for players to sink their teeth into including new raids and dungeons, a playable Allied Race called the Earthen to play as, special new Hero Talents that will be available for every class, and much more.

If you wish to learn more about this upcoming PC title, check out our FAQ for World of Warcraft: The War Within.

World of Warcraft was one of the properties Microsoft acquired when it picked up Activision-Blizzard, and the game is due for a big expansion in the form of The War Within, which is expected to launch later this summer on PC via Battle.net. 

The War Within takes place in a new area of Azeroth, dubbed Khaz Algar. The region is largely underground, winding down into the earth from the Isle of Dorn. The Earthen dwarves are the dominant race here, although their peaceful existence has been threatened by a newly resurgent Nerubian empire, which has aligned itself with saga antagonist X'alatath. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within will bring a ton of new content for existing players, including new playable races, new zones, a big new story campaign, as well as new raids and dungeons. However, Blizzard is also putting a large focus on a historically under-served player base for this endgame: solo players, and players without mountains of free time. We caught up with Associate Director Maria Hamilton and Executive Producer Holly Longdale to learn more about what that looks like. 

Delves: Endgame for the solo player

Delves are mini-dungeons that take place throughout various areas in Khaz Algar. They are instanced areas of the game world, depicted by a fog door not dissimilar to Dark Souls, but don't trigger a loading screen like a typical dungeon might do. The area is unique to your group and can't be invaded by other players. 

The Delve I experienced in The War Within's alpha build took place in a mine shaft, overrun by Nerubian spider-like enemies. It was also part of the main story campaign quest chain, which is another impressive feature about Delves — Blizzard could use these areas to add setpiece combat moments to typical every day quests, in areas free of interference from other players. However, these areas are repeatable, with scaling difficulty modes, with increasingly potent rewards. 

Holly Longdale explained that, the idea behind Delves emerged from research that Blizzard was under-serving one of its largest player segments — solo and casual players. Delves is an attempt to try and fix that. 

"We are on this journey to serve all kinds of players. We know from our research and surveys that we have a whole segment that are like 'I don't want to think too hard, I just want to feel like I progressed in 15-20 minutes," Holly explains. World of Warcraft does have a reputation as a time-hog. Content tends to skew towards Mythic+ 5-man dungeons and up to 30-man raids, which take a fair bit of preparation and organizational work to pull off. If you're not into that kind of thing, up until now, World of Warcraft hasn't had a great deal of meaningful content to engage and challenge solo players. 

"We wanted to make these snackable experiences that are easy to consume, that also keeps you relevant in the content, you can continue to play — but not outsize the rewards for the effort. As you get into doing more complex or more challenging versions of Delve, it will get more difficult and the rewards will increase." 

Indeed, Delves will have multiple difficulty levels, which Blizzard has confirmed, starting off as an easy "story mode" difficulty and scaling all the way up to +11. However, the rewards taper off after the 7th level, and the subsequent ones are more about bragging rights and things like titles. Blizzard is also adding an extra-difficult single-boss Delve for those who want some added challenge. So even though these mini-dungeons are "snackable" pieces of content for 10-15 minute experiences, they should offer some decent ways to challenge yourself. The Delves also appear in various places all across Khaz Algar, all with different themes, events, and mechanics, which should help stave off the sense of repetition that Torghast had in Shadowlands — Blizzard's previous solo dungeon experiment. 

"We saw after an expansion releases, the solo players would go through the level up campaign and then they're like 'cool, I'm good,' you know, and they'd stop playing until we had new larger quest lines. So we recognize that, we're really underserving the casual community, because they're not getting content as frequently, or with as much replayability as the more hardcore player. We looked at what kind of features would be great for them. A lot of people with families and partners that just want to do something solo or duo with their child — but also significant enough that it feels worthwhile. There's also a challenge component that could help it appeal to a broader audience, mid-core or so. Part of the new ethos for our team is that we should be serving all of our player segments equally. We want everyone to participate in Azeroth."

I asked Maria Hamilton about other potential things that could be added to improve the solo-player experience. Back in the day, I'd grind the Archaeology profession to the maximum level, hunting down various toys and treasures alongside the cool Professor title for my character. The lore items were also super interesting to me, but sadly, it seems the old format for Archaeology will be committed to a museum. However, fans of the old Brawler's Guild mini-boss rush area may have more reason to celebrate in the near term.

"With respect to archeology, we don't foresee this coming back in its previous format or as a profession. I do personally love archeology and the fantasy there and do intend to look at new opportunities. We experimented a little bit with that feel in the Azerothian Archives content we included in 'Seeds of Renewal' recently.

For Brawler's Guild, this is something we do want to bring back in an evergreen format, but not right away at The War Within launch."

The War Within looks incredibly promising so far

Having dabbled with The War Within Alpha, I'm really enjoying the experience so far. The flavor injection from Hero Talents adds a refreshing dimension to many of my favorite classes, and it's going to be interesting to face off against the Nerubians in their home turf, especially since I've been battling them since the Warcraft 3 days. 

Dragonflight is wrapping up, and it has been a solid expansion overall for Blizzard after the arguable low point of Shadowlands. Long-time World of Warcraft co-creator Chris Metzen is back out of retirement to spearhead the story direction now, and Blizzard seems to have built a steady pipeline for fresh content throughout this expansion cycle. The pieces are well and truly in place for The War Within to be another solid expansion for the MMORPG, which enters its 20th year in 2024. 

I still think a lot of work needs to be done on the new player experience, and it's a shame how the classic Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms areas have become an afterthought. World of Warcraft also lives in the shadow of the incredibly ambitious Legion expansion, which came with a new class, story campaigns for every class, new races, and tons of large endgame areas. Perhaps with solo players being served better than previously, the game will see some much-needed growth and, thus, more investment from Microsoft on top of it. 

Either way, it's clear that WoW still has some juice in the tank, though, and many more stories to tell as we enter its next decade. Long may it live. 

What you need to know

• World of Warcraft is one of the industry's biggest success stories, with non-stop operation for very almost 20 years. 
• Now owned by Microsoft, World of Warcraft has recently had a successful run with its Dragonflight expansion, alongside World of Warcraft: Classic modes.  
• The next expansion, The War Within, just hit alpha testing ahead of an expected Q3 2024 launch.
• Recently, we attended an event in London to discuss The War Within with Executive Producer Holly Longdale and Associate Game Director Maria Hamilton. 
• Holly acknowledged that the new-player experience is less than ideal, and said that improving it will be a big focus in the future. 
• Maria Hamilton noted that the Horde vs. Alliance faction tension still has potential to flare up again, despite the current truce — but allowing individual players to play together cross-faction will remain in place, even if there was a wider faction conflict some day again. 

World of Warcraft enters its 20th year in 2024, marking an incredible run for one of the industry's biggest success stories. Yet, Blizzard is still not done. 

Launching later this year, expected around Q3 2024, Blizzard is launching The War Within. The latest expansion for World of Warcraft also kickstarts a new Worldsoul Saga, with expansions Midnight and The Last Titan also already revealed. 

Recently, we had an opportunity to play The War Within's early alpha version, and go hands-on with the games new Delve mini-dungeons, flavor-rich Hero Talents, and new Warbands feature. We also enjoyed the privilege to speak to Vice President and Executive Producer Holly Longdale, and Associate Game Director Maria Hamilton about World of Warcraft's past, present, and future. 

For this first piece of content we have coming on World of Warcraft: The War Within, we asked about World of Warcraft's new player experience, which has arguably been lacking in recent years. What are the big problems with WoW's onboarding process, and is Blizzard planning to address it? Here's what Blizzard had to say on the topic. 

The state of World of Warcraft's new player experience, and general immersion 

I've recently been trying to figure out what the fourth character in my 4-man Warband would be. Warbands let you pool all achievements, progression, transmog unlocks, and other systems into a single "Warband," made up of your four main characters. Right now I have Blood Death Knight, Discipline Priest, and Demonology Warlock in my stable, and I need something else suitably emo to complete my band. While deciding between Subtlety Rogue or Havoc Demon Hunter, I embarked upon WoW's current "new player" experience, which leads players through a tutorial island called Exile's Reach, and then punts them into the Battle for Azeroth expansion, which is several years old at this point. 

Exile's Reach is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it gives you little to no context of your place within the "World" of Warcraft. There's no real introduction to your race, class, or lands that make up Azeroth. Previously, each race had its own unique starting area, complete with an introductory cutscene, and several quest zones dedicated to your race's flavor and backstory. If you were Forsaken, you resurrected in a crypt and traversed several plague-ridden desolate forests before emerging into the wider world. If you were an orc, you braved the Valley of Trials before embarking into sun-blasted savannahs surrounding the infamous Crossroads. Elves discovered their own enchanted forests, and humans defended their lands from encroaching threats from the southern jungles, and treacherous volcanic mountains to the north. Exile's Reach delivers none of that fantasy, and none of that flavor, and Blizzard tends to agree.  

Holly Longdale acknowledged that over the years, Blizzard's focus has revolved around retaining existing players, and catering to the endgame. "Content gaps are not great," Holly admitted, discussing previous expansions like Shadowlands. "We were also getting data showing how different player segments were being served. We looked at new players coming into [World of Warcraft], right? And then, how were they bouncing out. We know that we have a lot of work to do on new player acquisition, but we hadn't been focusing there, we were focused on retention."

Holly elaborated that "casual" players come in to enjoy the story campaign, but typically don't stick around after the fact, which is where features like Delves come in. Delves are mini-dungeons that players can complete solo, and earn powerful rewards on a weekly basis via the gear vault, previously exclusively tied to Mythic+, PvP, and raid group content. Blizzard also worked hard on building new events across WoW Classic, and experiments like the recent battle royale "Plunderstorm," which Holly says helped them boost overall player retention. 

"We set goals for ourselves, actual metrics on what "retention" would mean. And we beat those. So thanks, players, that's great! But user acquisition is a weakness." Holly conceded, "We do get players that come in. And then there's a part of the onboarding experience where we lose them. And so — very important to us — that's one of the pillars that we're going to be chasing the future."

"There's a bunch of challenges. How do we tell 20 years of story? So players get a really good healthy intro. I do think this idea of the player fantasy with the race you choose ... I loved logging in, and still do, as a night elf, going through Teldrassil, and doing all this stuff. Without that, for me, personally — I'm not as bonded to my race, and I don't feel that purpose as much. So, I think we're going to explore that more. There is work to do there. And that's something that we want to aim for in the future."

I made the point to Associate Director Maria Hamilton that, with World of Warcraft's iconic Horde and Alliance factions now in a "truce" period to allow players from either side to play together, the game feels like it has lost some of its identity as a result. It stems a bit into the general World of Warcraft new player experience and feeling bonded, rather than disoriented when entering the world for the first time. Maria teased that things might not always stay peachy between the Horde and Alliance, even if the philosophy is allowing players to play together primarily.

"I don't think we want to get rid of that faction identity at all," Maria emphasized, "I think that that's important. And I know that things that happen later in The War Within — we'll delve into some of that. But at the heart of it, the philosophy is more about friends being able to play with each other."

"We want to make sure the stories do still show that tension [between Horde and Alliance], and there is certainly more potential for that tension, right? We've seen some some with the Forsaken andnd with the Gilneans recently. They don't love each other. The the factions have cooperated in times where they needed to, by necessity — not because they loved each other. They unite, and then they always fall out. I think that's a safe bet that you're not going to stay friendly. You know, individuals may stay friendly, but maybe not factionally."

So, how could Blizzard fix it?

Maria Hamilton noted that in The War Within, new players will be pointed to the Exile's Reach tutorial island, and then emerge in Dragonflight, rather than Battle for Azeroth. Dragonflight's self-contained story and more modern content should provide a better experience for players than Battle for Azeroth did in yesteryear, given the fact Battle for Azeroth takes place right in the middle of a major storyline saga. Dragonflight essentially kicks off a new one after a short time skip, and should serve as a better onboarding point. 

However, I personally still don't think it's good enough. 

The classic World of Warcraft experience of cultural areas like Mulgore, Teldrassil, Gilneas, or even Kezan provide a much better and far more immersive introduction to the game. The Cataclysm revamped levelling experience through the old Azeroth zones also provides a far bigger, more epic "adventure" than what is offered even in Dragonflight. That RPG feeling of essentially as a trainee soldier in the Horde or Alliance army, and gradually growing into your power, eventually working alongside major characters — is totally absent for new players in modern WoW. It's this lack of RPG feel that makes it so hard to get new players into the game these days, and also I think why WoW Classic has been so popular for players wanting a deeper RPG experience. 

It's easy in my view how Blizzard could prepare World of Warcraft for the new generation. Another Cataclysm-style revamp of the old Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms lands, including a revamp for the new player starting areas, with new low-stakes characters and enemies that could serve as evergreen context, would be absolutely ideal. Right now it makes no sense to see Sylvanas or Garrosh in the Cataclysm levelling experience from a timeline perspective, and the "Chromie Time" time-travelling explanation feels like a band-aid over a much bigger, much more confusing problem. 

I would make a set of characters whose sole job is to basically stay within those old lands. Smaller low-stakes enemies that exist only in those areas, and are essentially defeated when players beat them in the game's various, forgotten classic dungeons. Those zones don't need major characters or high-stakes cutscenes and things of this nature. And if you did want to sprinkle in a cameo from a faction leader here and there, make it so that they'd be easily replaceable to keep those areas feeling "evergreen." There will always be new quillboar threats in the Barrens. There will always be the odd demon making their way down from Felwood. Duskwood will always have its cursed creatures, and so on. The old world still has vast potential, even without a major graphics pass — although that would be nice too, time permitting.

Exile's Reach and Dragonflight cannot, and will not, be able to replace that feeling of traversing Silverpine or Duskwood the first time. Hopefully, Blizzard will re-tread these lands in the future, with a more "future-proofed" mentality than Cataclysm's previous revamp had.

The War Within is shaping up nicely, regardless

World of Warcraft: The War Within has no fixed launch date, but most expect it to launch somewhere in the Autumn if the usual alpha development timelines line up. The major features include mini dungeons in the form of Delves, a new major raid, a ton of new dungeons, four large new areas, Earthen playable race on both Horde and Alliance, and much more. 

It's looking like another win for the World of Warcraft team, after the generally well-received Dragonflight expansion, which re-focused the game's philosophy on evergreen upgrades to the experience rather than transitory, expansion-only features. 

Where the aging MMO goes from here is anyone's guess, but there's clearly still tons of potential left to find here. An Xbox version? A hit Warcraft TV show like Fallout on Prime? Will I finally get playable ogres?! Only time will tell. 

One thing is for certain: I'll be playing until the servers are eventually turned off. 

Recently, I had the privilege of experiencing World of Warcraft: The War Within first-hand. 

Blizzard recently invited me to a press event in London, to be among the first players in the world to try out the latest expansion to the world's most successful MMO of all time. World of Warcraft is entering its 20th year, and is emerging out of the tail end of one of its more popular expansions of modern times, dubbed Dragonflight. 

Dragonflight sought to somewhat reset Blizzard's approach to World of Warcraft after the ill-received Shadowlands and mixed-response Battle for Azeroth expansions. The popularity and sheer ambition of Legion has cast a fairly long shadow over World of Warcraft in recent years, with some of the games' expansion feature sets failing to live up to the standards set previously. With Dragonflight, Blizzard focused more on evergreen permanent additions to the game rather than transitory expansion-only features.

Blizzard also introduced a small time-skip for the story, giving them some breathing space from the apocalyptic (and half-baked) delivery of Shadowlands to try something a little on the lower-stakes end.

Huge revamps to crafting systems, solid villains and characters, lifted restrictions on alt-characters and cross-factional play, and revamped talent systems all enjoyed a generally positive reception. Blizzard has also been experimenting with additional game modes, including WoW: Classic Season of Discovery, WoW: Classic Hardcore, and the Plunderstorm battle royale PvP event — all as part of the current subscription. That has kept subscriber counts uncharacteristically resilient as the Dragonflight expansion winds down and heads into Season 4. 

Many players might skip Season 4 owing to its lack of new dungeons and new rewards and instead set their sights on World of Warcraft: The War Within. The next big content expansion is expected to drop towards the end of the summer or early autumn, depending on development timelines. Once again, The War Within focuses on more local threats rather than cosmic apocalyptic entities, although it also kickstarts a new story saga, dubbed the Worldsoul Saga, with Warcraft architect Chris Metzen back in the creative driver's seat.

RELATED: World of Warcraft — The War Within FAQ and Overview

At the event, I caught my first glimpse at The War Within's story direction, went hands-on with various Hero Talent trees, and tried out the expansion's headline Delve feature. The Alpha test was in its very early days, so bugs and missing graphics, etc, were to be expected. Still, from a broad overview perspective, The War Within is definitely shaping up nicely — but many questions remain.

A new, but familiar setting

Blizzard is keeping The War Within's full intro under wraps so everyone can experience it together on launch day, but the first zone in the Alpha build does give you an impression of what's going down. 

I won't spoil it for those who want to avoid them, but I suspect some of the biggest happenings will be unavoidable once this embargo lifts. But I'll just say this — if you thought Blizzard might be shying away from massive, world-shattering changes after Battle for Azeroth's controversial Teldrassil BBQ event, you'd be wrong. 

In any case, various major lore figures were recently treated to a nasty global psychic headache from everyone's favorite evil knife, Xal'atath, who has escaped her kitchen utensil prison and is doubtless putting plans in place to further the cause of The Void. Or at least, that's what we think. The Void is World of Warcraft's central antagonistic force, representing everything that is dark, devouring, and entropic. Xal'atath has a pact with similarly voidian horror N'Zoth, who players vanquished at the end of Battle for Azeroth. Or at least, that's what we think. 

Indeed, a lot of the current World of Warcraft story arc is shrouded in heady mysteries. What was Xal'atath's pact with N'Zoth? Why was Xal'atath imprisoned in a blade in the first place? What exactly is she? Is she working for The Void and the Old Gods, or against them? Well, at the very least, one thing's for certain — she doesn't like us very much. 

Major WoW characters like Thrall, Jaina, Alleria, and Anduin are called to face off against Xal'atath in a new location known as Khaz Algar, where The War Within expansion will take place. The region is a subterranean cluster of caverns and hollows, whose entrance is manned by the ancient Earthen race, who preceded the dwarves. It's here on the Isle of Dorn that players crash land, only to find a once peaceful land besieged by an old threat. 

The arachnoid Nerubians seem to have thrown in their lot with Xal'atath and have attacked the surface of the Isle of Dorn. The last time we saw the Nerubians in any major context was in Wrath of the Lich King, where many of them fell into undeath as part of Arthas' unholy army. We did, however, help some living Nerubians to reclaim parts of their Northrend civilization. But perhaps that alliance was short-lived. 

The Nerubians may look monstrous, but Blizzard was keen to emphasize to attendees that this is actually one of Azeroth's great superpowers and merely exists out of view deep underground. Indeed, the Nerubians are incredibly advanced technologically and magically, crafting huge cities with ancient Egypt and Aztec-inspired architecture, the designs of which actually found their way into the Scourge architecture from Warcraft 3. The Nerubians form the first supporting antagonistic faction for the expansion, and we'll waste no time getting acquainted with them. 

The Isle of Dorn is a relatively familiar-looking landscape, with lush greenery and forests that don't look far removed from Dragonflight itself. It's strangely nostalgic seeing dwarven-style architecture rebuilt using World of Warcraft's more modern tech, complete with finer detailing and plenty of flavor. Even in the Alpha, the locations felt charming and well-populated, with Earthen bars, forges, and Titan machinery that betrayed their heritage. Indeed, the Earthen were among the first races crafted by the Titans, and they had their own inter-factional conflict happening between those Earthen who decided to abandon reverence of the absent Titans and those who did not. 

The Earthen will eventually join players as an allied playable race towards the end of the campaign, and they have some really great designs. Dare I say, they might even put the actual current dwarf races to shame, with 3D hair and beard textures encrusted with diamonds and metallic skins. Therein lies some of World of Warcraft's central issues across its 20-year history, with some graphics and models looking far more advanced than older ones despite being in the same gameplay environment.

Battling this is an ongoing endeavor for Blizzard, but the raw quality of the new Earthen environments and buildings put the existing dwarven capital city Ironforge to shame, making me wistful for a broader World of Warcraft graphics pass. That's for the future, though. 

As for right now, we have Nerubians to slaughter, new talents and spells to wield, and new Delves to, erm, delve into. So, what exactly are Delves?

Delves could be fun, but might not be for everyone (and that's okay)

So, there wasn't actually too much to test in this current version of The War Within alpha, but we did get access to the first "Delve," which is set to be a major ongoing new content feature for World of Warcraft moving forward. 

You can think of Delves as mini-dungeons, playable either solo or with your current party. These are instanced portions of content that can also seamlessly tie into the overworld and can be used for quest objectives in the campaign, as well as more dynamic content once you hit the maximum level. Delves are marked by their grey fog doors (Dark Souls anyone?), and once you click on it, you can even set a difficulty level for the challenges therein. 

Delves use World of Warcraft's new NPC follower system to give you a personal party member if you fancy going in solo. The first one you'll get is Brann Bronzebeard, a long-time Warcraft hero and renowned archaeologist. You can spec him out as either a healer, throwing potions for you to drink, or a damage dealer, wielding random dangerous archaeological artifacts to devastating effect. 

Delves are designed to be "snackable" content, with 5-10 minute completion times. I was sent there to help some Earthen dwarves escape encroaching Nerubians and was tasked to escort a mine cart through the caverns. The mine was filled with simple web traps, mob spawning events, and also random treasure chests here and there. I was also granted temporary buffs, which reminded me of Shadowlands' solo-able dungeon Torghast, with a similar interface there. Indeed, the Delve also finished with a mini-boss encounter, which I dispatched in seconds. 

This "story" version of the Delve was incredibly easy, as story campaign quests tend to be. I found myself wondering how Delves might evolve once we get further into the endgame. Since they're part of the world and not simply in a separate tower like Torghast, there's a lot of potential for variety there, with different kinds of events, environments, and encounters. Torghast was quite heavily restricted based on its location and theme by comparison. Perhaps Delves could eventually evolve to house exclusive items and transmogs similar to the popular Mage Tower challenge from Legion as you ascend up its difficulty rankings. Indeed, I found a vendor that would exchange Delve currency for cool transmogs, one which was a Murloc skull helmet, another which was a Kobold candle helmet, and another which was a Nerubian carapace back plate as a cape option. 

The fact they're instanced also gives Blizzard some opportunities to use them as more seamless storytelling devices, similar to how scenarios have functioned in the past. The mini-bosses could get more complex, too, with raid-like mechanics or even environmental features that Torghast similarly didn't have access to, given it was just a tower in the Maw.

Delves also open up slots on the weekly vault reward track, giving solo players opportunities to progress without having to ever step into raids and group up. Indeed, I'm not sure if Delves will scratch the itch for hardcore players, but that certainly isn't their point — and that's okay. I just hope that the full breadth of Delves has a bit more depth than the one I experienced in Alpha, which, to be fair, probably isn't fully finished, either — but the potential is quite clear. 

I was able to get to level 72 during my time with the Alpha, which gave me access to some of The War Within's other headline features: Hero Talents. 

Hero talents will hopefully bring a ton of flavor 

The other headline act for The War Within is a new hero talent tree, which is essentially an extension of your current class and spec with additional flavor. 

Once you hit the cap, you'll get access to every point in the tree. I was surprised by this since, in a sense, it defeats the point of choosing points in a tree if you can just end up with everything. But considering how many extra abilities are being added, it would probably be a nightmare to balance otherwise. Blizzard already has a tough time making talent tree choices in the existing trees competitive in general, with players eager to simply seek out the mathematically "best" option as described by websites like WoWhead and Icy-Veins. To that end, there's every chance the Hero Talents could end up going the same way, with players forced to sacrifice their chosen flavor and themes for power differences. Alas, we can only hope that won't be the case. 

Obviously, I couldn't really test the endgame performance of the trees; no dungeons or raids were open, and there was limited time in general, but I did get a sense for how some of them play, and I was in love — at least with some of them. 

Here's a quick video detailing some of the spell effects from the Diabolist and Voidweaver Hero Trees. 

I'm a demonologist main, and I have been since World of Warcraft vanilla. Yes, even during the dark times when they were thoroughly underpowered/overlooked. Thankfully, demonology has been eating good in recent times, which is why I was ecstatic to see that it will be maintaining its well-fed buff into The War Within as well. The Diabolist tree doesn't add any extra cognitive load to the damage rotation for Warlocks here but instead simply augments your existing primary attacks with additional flavor. Every few casts of Hand of Gul'dan summons a greater demon in a sequence, and they look absolutely badass. The final one is a Pitlord, who zaps your target with fel flame before transforming your next Hand of Gul'dan into a nuclear meteor. 

The other demonology hero tree, Soul Harvester, is what I will henceforth call the "Death Note" anime spec since it gives you a suspiciously Rem-looking Shinigami demon who occasionally pops out on some of your attacks to mirror and match your spells. My Discipline Priest, as a "Voidweaver," gets to replace the dull Smite spell with shadowy laser beams, too, which is all kinds of awesome. My Blood Death Knight gets the ability to transform his weapon into coagulated blood for massive heaving two-handed strikes (which, unless I'm going crazy, seem to be part of a new 2H weapon animation), on top of the ability to summon the final boss from The Underrot dungeon. 

However, some of the Hero Talent trees definitely need more work. 

Blizzard seems to have already implemented some feedback from the initial reactions to the Hero Talents. For example, the Lightsmith Paladin spec no longer places weapons on the ground and instead has a Power Infusion-like buff that they can cast on themselves or a party member that cycles between granting a shield or granting on-hit extra holy damage between each cast. Oracle specs for Priests also seem to be undergoing some changes. The spell "Premonition" no longer replaces Power Infusion, which many players didn't like. However, it still cycles through different buffs on-cast, which I found to be a bit irritating given how many things Discipline Priest healers already have to track and juggle in dungeons.

Many spells also had missing effects or simply didn't have very good effects. I tried out Dark Ranger Hunter's Black Arrow, for example, and it was incredibly difficult to even see. Compared to the gigantic Pitlord graphic my Diabolist Warlock gets, it felt a little unfair. 

And sure, not everybody wants to have huge and flashy spells like that. I'm not a Hunter main, and the lack of showy spell effects is part of the reason why. But at the same time, I can't help but feel some of the Hero Talents don't lean far enough into the fantasy they're trying to portray. Maybe Black Arrow should just replace Arcane Shot instead with additional effects on top. Why would a shadowy Dark Ranger be using Arcane-tipped spells over Shadow-tipped arrows in the first place? I just hope that every Hero Talent tree ends up feeling as flavorful as others do when they're all said and done.

But hey, this is the kind of stuff that Alpha is for. It's for gathering feedback, listening to reactions, and then putting those tweaks into practice. World of Warcraft now has beta sign ups live for The War Within, so you can (and should) sign up to test if you're so inclined — but honestly, it might be even more fun to wait, and go in blind when it's all polished up later this year. 

The War Within kickstarts a new World of Warcraft saga, in more ways than one

The Worldsoul Saga represents a new phase for World of Warcraft's story, but also a new phase for World of Warcraft in general. The game turns a truly insane 20 years old this year, and as someone who played since day one, that's difficult to contemplate. Over ten thousand hours of my time has been spent in Azeroth's climbs, and I've seen the game experience the highest of high points down to the lowest lows. Incredible story beats, raids, and events have buttressed long content droughts and failed features as the MMO continues to evolve in a rapidly evolving gaming landscape. 

Dragonflight had its flaws, but it has made its mark in the modern era of World of Warcraft. It turned a page on the strange plot void that was Shadowlands and built out new evergreen features with long-needed changes to talent trees and professions. Hero Talents will extend the player fantasy more and hopefully lean into some of those side-classes like Dark Ranger that are iconic in the Warcraft universe but perhaps not fleshed out enough to warrant a whole new class. Delves could bring the variation that was lacking in Torghast. And, perhaps The Worldsoul Saga will eventually justify revamping some of the old world, too, to make the game more appealing to new players, especially given that Midnight and The Last Titan are supposed to take place in the Eastern Kingdoms and Northrend, respectively. 

Either way, come rain or shine, I'll be in Azeroth along for the ride. I just hope that WoW can continue to balance delivering quality consistently on a high cadence, given how appetites for fresh content simply never abate. 

What you need to know

• World of Warcraft's Patch 10.2.6 update has gone live today and Blizzard has announced that a new limited-timed event will be included.
• This event is Plunderstorm, a standalone 60-player battle royale game mode where players fight as pirates to steal loot and treasure from their rivals.
• Patch 10.2.6 also includes several balance changes for classes, dungeons, items, PVP, raids and more.

Back in December 2023, when Blizzard Entertainment announced World of Warcraft's roadmap leading to The War Within expansion, there was a mysterious pirate flag for the game's Patch 10.2.6 update, following the Seeds of Renewal update. Nobody knew what to make of it or what it might hint at for months. 

Fortunately, we know now the answer as Blizzard Entertainment has announced that World of Warcraft's Patch 10.2.6 update has gone live, bringing with it a new event called Plunderstorm.

The Plunderstorm

Plunderstorm is a standalone pirate-themed game mode where 60 players assume the role of pirates and duke it out in gigantic battle royales where they must survive and plunder as much treasure as they can. 

What's interesting about Plunderstorm is that does not require players to buy any expansion, you simply need the base game of Retail World of Warcraft. Then once you have launched it, you will be able to play Plunderstorm by accessing it through World of Warcraft's game menu.

Plunderstorm will not use a player's default player characters World of Warcraft, instead, this game mode will have players create new ones exclusively for it. 

Once you have made a character, you will be queued to join 60-player battle royale matches in the Arathi Highlands that will last 10 to 15 minutes where the last man standing will be the winner.

You will need to scour the land for treasure chests that will grant you powerful abilities and skills to fend off hostile wildlife and destroy rival players looking to steal your loot.

Participating in the Plunderstorm event will reward players will kinds of pirate-themed cosmetics, pets, titles, and mounts. These rewards include the Plunderlord parrot mount, Bubbles the crab pet, swashbuckling cosmetics, and much more. Do note that you don't necessarily have to win every match to claim the rewards.

Patch 10.2.6 Balance changes

In addition to the Plunderstorm event, Patch 10.2.6 includes a huge list of balance changes for World of Warcraft. The patch notes from the official World of Warcraft website are as follows.

Classes

• Macros that use the non-healer versions of dispels will now override the ability with the healer dispel variant if the player is in a healer specialization. This applies to Discipline, Holy Priest, Holy Paladin, Restoration Druid, and Restoration Shaman. Mistweaver Monk and Preservation Evoker already had this functionality.
• Developer's note: We've updated the power of many of the set bonuses that are returning for Season 4 to match the increased power of the rest of the new gear in Season 4. 

Death Knight

• Blood
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (2) Set Bonus: Heart Strike and Blood Boil damage increased by 20% (was 10%).
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (2) Set Bonus: Chance to gain Vampiric Blood increased to 10% (was 5%).Empty list

• Frost
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (2) Set Bonus: The damage of your next Frostwyrm's Fury is increased by 5% (was 4%). Stacks unchanged.
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (2) Set Bonus: The effectiveness of Frostywrm's Fury increased to 30% (was 25%).
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (2) Set Bonus: Howling Blast damage increased to 20% (was 10%).

Druid

• Balance
  • Vault of the Incarnates (2) Set Bonus: Starsurge and Starfall increase the damage of your next Wrath or Starfire by 30%, stacking up to 3 times (was 20%).
  • Vault of the Incarnates (4) Set Bonus: When you enter Eclipse, your next Starsurge or Starfall costs 15 less Astral Power (was 5 less Astral Power) and deals 40% (was 20%) increased damage.

Evoker

• Landslide costs 1.4% base mana (was 2.8%).
• Sleep Walk costs 1% base mana (was 2.4%).

• Devastation
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (2) Set Bonus: Causes Disintegrate and Pyre to pierce enemies for 18% of damage done (was 12%).
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (4) Set Bonus: Increases Empower spell damage by 12% (was 8%).

• Preservation
  • Vault of the Incarnates (2) Set Bonus: Increases the healing of Reversion by 50% (was 35%) for 8 seconds (was 6 seconds).
  • Vault of the Incarnates (4) Set Bonus: Increases healing and damage of Living Flame by 50% (was 20%).
  • Reversion critical heals now extend Reversion by 2 seconds regardless of Haste.
  • Emerald Communion will now give an error message and fail to cast if used while in Diamond Ice.

Hunter

• Survival
  • Vault of the Incarnates (2) Set Bonus: Mongoose Bite/Raptor Strike, Carve, and Butchery damage increased by 18% (was 12%).
  • Vault of the Incarnates (4) Set Bonus: Bonus damage to Mongoose Bite/Raptor Strike, Carve, and Butchery increased to 50% (was 40%).

Mage

• Fire
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (2) Set Bonus: Charring Embers now increases damage taken by 6% (was 5%) and lasts 2 additional seconds.
  • Added an activation overlay for Fury of the Sun King.

Monk

• Mistweaver
  • New Talent: Dance of Chi-Ji – Your spells and abilities have a chance to make your next Spinning Crane Kick deal an additional 300% damage.
  • New Talent: Peer into Peace – 5% of your overhealing done onto targets with Soothing Mist is spread to 3 nearby injured allies. Soothing Mist now follows the target of your Enveloping Mist or Vivify and its channel time is increased by 4 seconds.
  • Resplendent Mist now causes Gust of Mists to have a 30% chance to do 75%/150% more healing (was 50%/100%).
  • Peaceful Mending is now a 1-point talent and increases the healing allies receive from Enveloping Mist and Renewing Mist by 40% while Soothing Mist is active (was 25% per point).

• Windwalker
  • Vault of the Incarnates (2) Set Bonus: Fists of Fury now increases the damage dealt by your Rising Sun Kicks or Spinning Crane Kicks by 40% (was 30%).
  • Vault of the Incarnates (4) Set Bonus: Fists of Fury now instead enhances your next 3 Rising Sun Kicks or Spinning Crane Kicks and enhanced kicks increase the damage of your next Fists of Fury by 7% (was 5%) stacking up to 3 times.

Paladin

• Holy
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (2) Set Bonus: Increases Holy Shock’s critical healing by 80% (was 60%).
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (4) Set Bonus: Increases Holy Prism’s healing by 40% (was 80%).
    • Developer’s note: Holy Prism’s healing was increased baseline in Guardians of the Dream, so this bonus is being decreased with that in mind. This will still be an overall gain in power compared to Embers of Neltharion.
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (4) Set Bonus: Light’s Hammer healing increased by 20%.

• Protection
  • Vault of the Incarnates (2) Set Bonus: Ally of the Light's Versatility increased to 8% (was 6%).
  • Vault of the Incarnates (4) Set Bonus: Hammer of the Righteous, Blessed Hammer/Crusader Strike increases your Parry by 7% (was 5%).Empty list

Priest

• Leap of Faith no longer interrupts spell casts from the ally it was used on.

• Holy
  • Empyreal Blaze has been redesigned – Holy Word: Chastise causes your next 2 casts of Holy Fire to be instant, cost no mana, and incur no cooldown. Refreshing Holy Fire on a target now extends its duration by 7 seconds.
  • Pontifex has been redesigned – Flash Heal, Heal, Prayer of Healing, and Circle of Healing increase the healing done by your next Holy Word spell by 6% stacking up to 5 times. Lasts 30 seconds.
  • Lightwell has been redesigned – Creates a Holy Lightwell. Every second the Lightwell will attempt to heal a nearby party or raid member within 40 yards that is lower than 50% health and apply a Renew to them for 6 seconds. Lightwell lasts for 2 minutes or until it heals 15 times. Cooldown reduced by 3 seconds when you cast Holy Word: Serenity or Holy Word: Sanctify.
  • All healing done reduced by 7%.
  • Holy Fire mana cost reduced to 0.4% of base mana (was 1%).
  • Holy Word: Chastise mana cost reduced to 0.6% of base mana (was 2%).
  • Resonant Words now causes Holy Words to increase the healing done by your next Flash Heal, Heal, Prayer of Healing, or Circle of Healing by 20%/40%. Lasts 30 seconds.
  • Divine Word now increases the effectiveness of your next Holy Word spell by 30% (was 50%).
  • Casting Holy Word: Chastise with Divine Word active now increases damage dealt by 20% and refunds 15 seconds from the cooldown of Holy Word: Chastise instead of its previous effect.
  • Casting Holy Word: Sanctify with Divine Word active now blesses the target area and heals 5 targets (was 6). Healing done increased by 25%.
  • Casting Holy Word: Serenity with Divine Word active no longer increases the critical strike chance of Flash Heal, Heal, and Renew.
  • Healing Chorus now increases the healing of Circle of Healing by 5% stacking up to 20 times (was 2% stacking up to 50 times).
  • Prayerful Litany now heals for 100% more to the most injured ally it affects (was 30%).
  • Harmonious Apparatus has been renamed to Voice of Harmony and its icon has changed.
  • Voice of Harmony now causes Holy Nova to reduce the cooldown of Chastise in addition to Holy Fire.
  • Gales of Song is now a 1-point talent with the values of the previous 2-point version.
  • Orison now has a connection to Pontifex.
  • Divine Service now has a connection to Say Your Prayers.
  • Empowered Renew and Rapid Recovery have been removed.
  • The final 3 rows of the tree have been reorganized.

• Shadow
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (2) Set Bonus: Increases the damage of Mind Blast by 40% when Shadowy Insight triggers (was 30%).
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (4) Set Bonus: Increases Devouring Plague damage by 18% (was 15%).
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (4) Set Bonus: Causes every 4 casts of Devouring Plague to increase Shadowy Apparition damage by 100% for 10 seconds (was 80%).Empty list

Shaman

• Restoration
  • Vault of the Incarnates (2) Set Bonus: Healing Stream Totem now increases critical strike by 15% (was 10%).
  • Vault of the Incarnates (4) Set Bonus: Increases the effectiveness of critical heals to 220% (was 215%) instead of the usual 200%.

Shaman

• Restoration
  • Vault of the Incarnates (2) Set Bonus: Healing Stream Totem now increases critical strike by 15% (was 10%).
  • Vault of the Incarnates (4) Set Bonus: Increases the effectiveness of critical heals to 220% (was 215%) instead of the usual 200%.

Warlock

• Destruction
  • Vault of the Incarnates (2) Set Bonus: Consuming Soul Shards has a chance to grant you Chaos Maelstrom, increasing your critical strike chance by 15% for 10 seconds (was 10%).
  • Vault of the Incarnates (4) Set Bonus: Your critical strikes deal 212% (was 208%) damage instead of the usual 200%.Empty list

Warrior

• Arms
  • Vault of the Incarnates (2) Set Bonus: Bonus damage to Mortal Strike and Cleave increased to 15% (was 10%). Critical Strike chance bonus unchanged.
  • Vault of the Incarnates (4) Set Bonus: Bonus damage and Critical Strike chance increased to 8% (was 5%).

• Fury
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (2) Set Bonus: Bonus damage and Critical Strike chance to Rampage increased to 12% (was 10%).
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (4) Set Bonus: Bonus damage increased to 30% (was 25%) and Critical Strike chance increased to 12% (was 10%) to Bloodthirst.

Dungeons and Raids

• ULDUAR TIMEWALKING
  • Fixed an issue where Liquid Pyrite was not properly restoring ammunition.
  • Fixed an issue where Burning Tar was incorrectly damaging players and vehicles that were far away.
  • Fixed an issue preventing Tar from properly slowing and damaging enemies.
  • Fixed an issue where Mimiron would jump the gun too quickly and attack players while remaining untargetable.
  • Fixed an issue where General Vezax's Mark of the Faceless was doing too much damage.
  • Fixed an issue where various boss enemies were moving great distances when tanks were too close.
  • Fixed an issue where Yogg-Saron's tentacles could spawn within the boss model.
• If a player in a Follower Dungeon can cast Bloodlust/Heroism/Time Warp/Fury of the Aspects, the followers will no longer try to cast their version when they think it's appropriate and instead leave the decision of when to cast up to the player.Empty list

Items

• Raid loot from Vault of the Incarnates and Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible have received several adjustments to align with changes made in Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope:
  • Class set tokens will drop at a ratio of 1:3 relative to non-token items.
  • All Very Rare items have a separate chance to drop in addition to a boss's standard quantity of loot.
• Developer's note:  As we look ahead to Dragonflight Season 4, we are aiming to level the playing field for certain over- and underperforming raid trinkets. Further tuning can be expected before or shortly after the start of the season.
  • The following raid trinkets have been adjusted:
    • Conjured Chillglobe mana restore effect reduced by 70%.
    • Whispering Incarnate Icon's infusion effects granted to allies reduced by 45%.
    • Ward of Faceless Ire cooldown reduced to 1 minute (was 2 minutes), absorb reduced by 35%, and damage reduced by 50%.
    • All remaining stacks of Enduring Dreadplate's Hellsteel Plating that are not consumed by taking damage now rupture to release Rays of Anguish upon expiration.
    • Ominous Chromatic Essence shared alignment secondary stat reduced by 5%.
    • Blossom of Amirdrassil effects increased by 10%.
    • Fyrakk's Tainted Rageheart absorb increased by 5%, lash damage reduced by 5%, and passive area-of-effect damage reduced by 20%.
  • The following dungeon trinkets have been significantly reworked:
    • Tome of Unstable Power
    • Umbrelskul's Fractured Heart
    • Globe of Jagged Ice
    • Water's Beating Heart
    • Granyth's Enduring Scale
    • Inexorable Resonator
  • The following dungeon trinkets have been adjusted:
    • Kyrakka's Searing Embers chance to trigger increased by 100%, damage reduced by 50%, and healing reduced by 40%. Additionally fixed an issue that could cause inconsistent proc behavior.
    • Miniature Singing Stones shield effect increased by 3%.
    • Mutated Magmammoth Scale chance to trigger now scales with Haste and damage reduced by 13%.
• New glyphs have been added to transform the appearance of the recently updated Covenant abilities back to their old Covenant visuals. They can be purchased from the Covenant quartermasters.
• In the Appearances collection, wrist appearances are now shown on the right wrist (was left wrist). This allows more one-sided appearances such as the Gothic Corsage to be visible in the collection pane.

Pet Battles

• Briarhorn Hatchling has been struck by the Curse of Flesh and is now properly Beast-type (was Mechanical-type).

Player vs Player

• BATTLEGROUND BLITZ BRAWL
• Developer’s note: We’ve been happy to see the excitement around Battleground Blitz after its launch in Guardians of the Dream and after monitoring feedback and internal data, we are making some changes. We believe these changes will be healthy for the game mode and we want to ensure adequate time to observe feedback on them while Battleground Blitz is a brawl.
  In particular, we have not been happy with the low frequency of capture the flag maps due to the restriction of having the maps be only available with tanks. In 10.2.6, we are lifting that restriction and are introducing a new buff, Empowered Carrier, that will be applied to non-tank specializations if they pick up the flag in Warsong Gulch and Twin Peaks. Tanks will still only be matched up against other tanks, and this buff will only be applied if there are not any tanks in the match.
  Additionally, we’ve been overall happy with and have heard positive feedback around having an increased mount speed in Battleground Blitz. However, the 150% mount speed increase is slightly too fast for both the gameplay and character control experiences. We are adjusting the amount of increase on all maps, although having it slightly higher on the larger maps: Arathi Basin and Deepwind Gorge.
• Eye of the Storm
  • Added a hidden effect that prevents fall damage to both teams for 10 seconds at the start of a match.
• Warsong Gulch and Twin Peaks
  • New Buff: Empowered Carrier – Increases maximum health by 10% and movement speed by 30%. Additionally, Empowered Carrier provides 25% damage reduction for 4 seconds when stunned. Empowered Carrier is applied to non-tank specializations who pick up the flag on Warsong Gulch or Twin Peaks and won’t be applied if the match started with tanks in the match.
• Swift Pursuit has had the following adjustments:
  • Increased mount speed is now 100% Arathi Basin and Deepwind Gorge (was 150%).
  • Increased mount speed is now 75% on all other maps (was 150%).
• EVOKER
  • Preservation
    • Rewind heals for 50% of damage taken in the last 5 seconds in PvP combat (was 33%).

Shiver-me timbers!

Blizzard Entertainment has stated the Plunderstorm event will last for "several weeks", with no concrete end date as of yet. So, if you're a fan of pirates or a long-time Warcraft fan who wants cool cosmetics to create Warcraft 2-themed pirate Transmog sets in time for The War Within expansion, don't wanna miss out on this fun limited-timed event for one of the best PC games.

What you need to know

• Blizzard Entertainment has announced on social media that World of Warcraft: Dragonflight's next major update patch, Seeds of Renewal, will go live for the general public on January 16, 2024.
• The Seeds of Renewal update will contain a myriad of new features, including new quests, customization options, Dungeon Followers, and enabling Dragonriding across all of Azeroth.
• This update is the first stop on World of Warcraft's 2024 leading up to the game's tenth expansion, The War Within, launching in the Summer of 2024.

On January 2, 2024, Blizzard Entertainment announced the launch date for World of Warcraft: Dragonflight's next major update patch titled 'Seeds of Renewal' (a.k.a. Patch 10.2.5). The update will leave World of Warcraft's Public Test Realm servers and go live for the general public on January 16, 2024.

The Seeds of Renewal update will contain the following gameplay features:

• New Story quests that will conclude the main storyline of the Dragon Isles region.
• The Dragonriding mechanic will be made compatible with every zone in Azeroth outside of the Dragon Isles.
• World of Warcraft: Dragonflight's dungeons will begin implementing NPC followers to aid players if they wish to complete them solo.
• The Reclamation of Gilneas event where players will help King Greymane and his people retake the kingdom. 
• The Azerothian Archives event, which will have players embark on quests for the Azerothian Archives faction in the Dragon Isles.
• New customization options.

In addition, according to the World of Warcraft's 2024 Roadmap, the Seeds of Renewal update will feature the Outland Cup event, where players get to participate in special Dragonriding races for unique prizes. Plus, there will be an event celebrating Hearthstone's 10th Anniversary.

Worgen players, its time to finally reclaim Gilneas

Blizzard Entertainment is certainly starting 2024 with a bang for World of Warcraft. We're getting new quests that will send off the storyline of Dragonflight, NPC allies to help players tackle dungeons solo, Dragonriding will be made available worldwide so we can travel in style, and most importantly, players will finally be able to help King Greymane retake Gilneas. 

For those unaware, Gilneas was the home kingdom of the Worgen playable race. The Worgen are humans who were cursed into becoming werewolves when Scourge invaded Gilneas during the events of Warcraft 3. Then, later on, the Worgen joined the Alliance out of desperation because they were driven out of their kingdom by the Forsaken faction during the events of 2010's World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion. 

Fourteen years later, Worgen players will at long last be able to reclaim their home in Seeds of Renewal update and gain closure for the long years they had to wait for this pivotal moment. 

This major update is but the first of many that will lead us to World of Warcraft: The War Within expansion in the Summer of 2024. This upcoming PC title will introduce a slew of new features to one of the best PC games in Blizzard's library, including an epic storyline exploring the depths of Azeroth, a new race to play called Earthen, Hero Talents that will offer new playstyles and abilities to classes, new raids and dungeons to conquer, and more.

What you need to know

• Blizzard has recently uploaded a preview of the new Hero Talents system that will be implemented in World of Warcraft's upcoming expansion, World of Warcraft: The War Within.
• Hero Talents are talent trees that will be added on top of each Class' Specialization Talent tree to give them new abilities and playstyles. 
• Four Hero Talent trees have been revealed in this preview: Mountain Thane (Warrior), San'Layn (Death Knight), Chronowarden (Evoker), and Lightsmith (Paladin).
• World of Warcraft: The War Within is scheduled to release sometime in 2024 on PC.

Blizzard Entertainment has recently shown off a preview (which can be found on the official World of Warcraft website) of the new Hero Talents system that will be added to World of Warcraft's tenth upcoming expansion, World of Warcraft: The War Within. Hero Talents are self-contained talent trees that will be added to every class's specialization talent tree and grant them new abilities and passive traits to strengthen them in combat.

Each Class will receive three different Hero Talent trees, each of which can accessed by two of a Class' Specialization. The only exceptions are Druids, which gets access to four Hero Talent trees, and Demon Hunters, which gets only two.

Hero Talent trees are unlocked when a player reaches Lv.71 in The War Within. When a player chooses which Hero Talent tree to go for their Class' Specialization, they will activate a tree's starting talent node to obtain a new ability and gain one talent point to activate another.

A player gains a new talent point to spend on Hero Talents per level from Lv.71 to Lv.80, allowing them to activate every talent node by the time they reach Lv.80. However, some nodes have two separate abilities that players will need to decide which one to take depending on their preferred playstyle and Class Specialization.

Hero Talent trees can be swapped anytime, much like Class Specialization talent trees. In addition, you can save your Hero Talent builds alongside all your other talents in the Class Specialization menu.

Do you have the talent to be a hero in The War Within?

Death Knights that can suck the blood of enemies to heal allies? Paladins forging weapons mid-combat? Evokers that use time magic to reverse foes' damage to save the party? These new Hero Talents sound insane and fun to use on paper, and we can imagine how powerful they will be when put into practice when World of Warcraft: The War Within launches in 2024 for PC.

Stay tuned for more info on this upcoming PC title, as Blizzard promises to share more gameplay details on The War Within and showcase more Hero Talent trees in the coming months.

What you need to know

• Yesterday, Blizzard announced not one, but three upcoming World of Warcraft expansions, as it revealed that future games will revolve around "sagas" planned out over the next several years. 
• Despite a positive reception, presented by legendary Warcraft co-creator Chris Metzen, Blizzard has still caught some backlash today.
• The War Within has several pre-order bonuses, one of which grants players 3-day early access for $90. 
• The early access period will grant more affluent players an advantage in the race to The War Within's endgame, and create a financial burden on players who may not have the means to join their friends in early access. 

Blizzard almost hit a home run with this year's Blizzcon, but managed to fumble at the last minute. 

Yesterday at Blizzcon 2023, the firm revealed the future of its major franchises. Big updates for Overwatch 2, Diablo 4, and World of Warcraft should ensure Blizzard has a great 2024, its first full year as part of Microsoft. Microsoft and Xbox now own Blizzard Entertainment, as part of Microsoft's huge $70 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King. Xbox lead Phil Spencer was up on stage at Blizzcon 2023 to reassure fans that Xbox seeks to empower Blizzard to help it go to the next level. 

For World of Warcraft, Blizzard announced not one, but three upcoming expansions. Legendary Warcraft co-creator Chris Metzen has returned from retirement to take the reins once again of one of the industry's most prolific franchises, revealing that the story is now designed years in advance around "sagas," the first of which will be known as the Worldsoul Saga. 

As of often the case with good news, sometimes the small print can catch you off guard. Blizzard has pulled one of the most irritating pre-order bonuses out of its bag of tricks, as part of a wider industry trend that revolves around paid early access. 

Whether it's Starfield or Forza Motorsport, the industry at large is seeking to capitalize on player FOMO (fear of missing out) by offering early access for a premium edition. In the case of an offline single-player game like Starfield, it at least won't necessarily impact your own personal gameplay if you opt to save a bit of extra cash. In the case of a competitive multiplayer game like World of Warcraft, though, 3 days of early access offers richer players an unequivocal advantage. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within preorder bonuses are as follows:

• Standard Edition ($50): Access to The War Within, level 70 boost, 500 trader's tender (cosmetic currency). 
• Heroic Edition ($70): Access to The War Within, level 70 boost, 750 trader's tender (cosmetic currency), Algarian Stormwider mount and access to special race courses, Stormrider's cosmetic attire. 
• Epic Edition ($90): Access to The War Within, level 70 boost, 1000 trader's tender (cosmetic currency), guaranteed beta access, 30 days of gametime, a storm hatchling battle pet, a Storm Gryphon toy, a hearthstone effect, and 3 days early access to The War Within. 

Fans and content creators alike have already reacted negatively to the paid early access period. Although there were some rumblings about Starfield having a paid early access tier (even from us), the fact it's not a competitive game at least means early access won't impact other players who opt out. World of Warcraft: The War Within is different, though. 

Guilds that opt-in to early access for $90 will have a gearing advantage against guilds that don't. With three days, it's conceivable that you'll already have a bunch of guilds fully raid and PvP ready for the mythic+ and raiding endgame while other players opt in more slowly. This will put unfair financial pressure on friends and guildmates if their pals opt-in, but they cannot afford to do so responsibly. Paid early access in a game like World of Warcraft will divide guilds, groups of friends, and players by their financial means, and that is wrong in my view. 

For solitary single-player experiences, paid early access is irritating but at least avoidable. For World of Warcraft and similar competitive games, it amounts to competitive advantages to at least some degree, but it's the social and financial pressure that is far more egregious. The FOMO factor will be amplified tenfold owing to World of Warcraft's social gameplay — and I suspect this is by design. 

This bundle is unequivocally an out-of-touch move by Blizzard, and will hopefully be reverted. 

World of Warcraft: The War Within launches in 2024 for Windows PC. 

Blizzard Entertainment dropped several major bombshell announcements for World of Warcraft at Blizzcon 2023. Not only will World of Warcraft: Classic be receiving the Cataclysm expansion in the form of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Classic, but World of Warcraft will be receiving THREE major expansions in the future — World of Warcraft: The War Within, World of Warcraft: The Last Titan, and World of Warcraft: Midnight

These expansions will tell the tale of World of Warcraft’s next ongoing storyline, The Worldsoul Saga. The expansion that will be the opening act of this saga will be World of Warcraft: The War Within. This expansion is slated to be released in 2024 and will introduce new zones to explore, new dungeons and raids to conquer, new game systems to master, and more.

Here is everything you need to know about World of Warcraft: The War Within.

World of Warcraft: The War Within: What is it about?

The premise of World of Warcraft: The War Within is that Anduin Wrynn and Thrall have been experiencing visions where a mysterious voice singing a Radiant Song, is calling out to them from the depths of Azeroth. 

To uncover the source of this voice, Thrall and Anduin gather a band of heroes and lead an expedition into the unexplored depths of their world. Our heroes will also find allies on their journey such as an ancient race of Dwarves known as the Earthen. Also, Magni Bronzebeard and Alleria Windrunner are set to return for this expansion to accompany Anduin and Thrall on their trip.

As the expeditionary force makes its way through the underground caverns, players will have to fight new threats threatening to cut their journey and their lives short.

RELATED: Full story overview for World of Warcraft: The War Within. 

The villain leading this threat is Xal'atath, an ancient being who serves a chaotic, otherworldly force known as the Void. After being freed from being sealed in a cursed black blade for untold millennia, she seeks to create a new dark legacy to replace The Black Empire which fell at the hands of the titan-forged.

Our heroes pose a danger to Xal'atath's vision so she decides to pit them against her newly acquired army - the Nerubians of Azj-Kahet. Nerubians are a race of deadly humanoid arachnids that have existed in Azeroth since ancient times. 

Xal'atath conscripted the Nerubians and their queen, Ansurek, to serve her. In return for their service, Xal'atath promises to help release the Nerubians from their isolation, restore their empire to its former glory, and grant them the power to transform into terrifying soldiers through a horrifying evolution.

Long-time Warcraft fans should beware Nerubians of Azj-Kahet as these creatures are far more dangerous and cunning than the Nerubians that served the Lich King. These monsters are survivors of countless wars that ravaged the world for thousands of years and will do whatever it takes to achieve victory.

World of Warcraft: The War Within: What will the gameplay be like?

The gameplay of World of Warcraft: The War Within will be the same tab-target-based combat system, team-based dungeon crawling, and exploration World of Warcraft is famous for. In addition, it will feature a smorgasbord of new gameplay systems, zones, dungeons, raids, and an allied race.

New zones

Players will come across new, never-before-seen locales as they make their way into the depths of Azeroth to find the Radiant Song. Four new zones have been announced thus far:

• Isle of Dorn: A lush, forest-filled zone that resides on the island of Khaz Algar and is the home of the Earthen and other indigenous species. Here you will find Eathern preparing Cinderbrew Mead made of molten honey and a city where the Oathsworn live, carrying out their duties as Edicts of the Titans.
• Ringing Deeps: Located beneath the Isle of Dorn lies the Ringing Deeps, a large network of underground boundaries, forges, and factories where the Earthen conduct their work. 
• Hallowfall: Hallowfall is a gigantic hollow area bordered by an underground sea that appears to be endless. A tribe of humans known as the Arathi live here and fight a never-ending battle to protect their homes from the Nerubians.
• Azj-Kahet: Within the deepest, darkest depths of the earth lies the ruined Nerubian kingdom of Azj-Kahet. Players will need to exercise extreme caution and utilize pheromones to throw off the Nerubian's senses when exploring this zone lest they wish to meet a tragic end.

As a side-note for those worrying about exploring miles of underground caves, Dragonriding will be allowed in these zones to make travel easier. In fact, prior to the release of The War Within, there will be an update that will make World of Warcraft: Dragonflight's Dragonriding mechanic available in flyable areas for many flying mounts.

Players will also have the option to toggle between dynamic flight and the original flying style introduced World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

New dungeons and raids

World of Warcraft: The War Within will include four new level-up Dungeons, four new max-level Dungeons, and a new Raid Dungeon.

The Raid Dungeon will be called The Nerub’ar Palace and will be available to participate once Season 1 of The War Within begins. It will be the culmination of the expansion's opening story and see players unite to defeat Xal'atath and the Nerubians of Azj-Kahet.

New Allied Race: Earthen

There will be a new Allied Race to unlock and play as for both Horde and Alliance players called the Earthen. The Earthen are a pre-historic race of Dwarves made of stone and gems. 

They were created by the Titans to help shape the subterranean caverns of Azeroth during its infancy and were given a series of duties and edicts to carry out. However, when the Titans left Azeroth and left the Earthen to their own devices, the gem-entrusted Dwarves lost their unity and divided into three factions.

• The Oathsworn: This a faction of Earthen who strictly upholds the edicts given to them by the Titans. They are tasked with protecting the Coreway, a gate that leads into Azeroth's core.
• Unbound: These Earthen were charged with providing materials needed to keep TItan installations running but have abandoned their edicts to live in quarries and mines.
• Machine Speakers: Machine Speakers are Earthen who have also strayed from their edicts but continue working on repairing Titan machinery out of obligation. 

To unlock the Earthen, players will need to progress through the expansion's main campaign and endgame questline. Once unlocked, players will be able to create Earthen characters as the following classes:

• Death Knight
• Hunter
• Mage
• Monk
• Paladin
• Priest
• Rogue
• Shaman
• Warlock
• Warrior

Levelling up an Earthen character will reward players with the Earthen Heritage Armor set.

The Delves

World of Warcraft: The War Within will introduce an evergreen system called the Delves. The Delves will be an endgame activity where players complete quests for the Dragonscale Expedition and earn rewards such as mounts, titles, achievements, and gear. 

This activity will launch with twelve unique Delves dungeons to explore with scalable difficulty and they can be completed solo or with a party of up to five players. Season 1 of the Delves will feature Brann Bronzehead as a seasonal NPC compassion and he will offer players aid by gifting them a customizable talent and ability system.

The gear rewards in particular are significant as they will be on par with Mythic+10/Mythic+15 gear or Heroic Raid gear. This means that players who don't have time to commit to Raid schedules or prefer playing alone with a small group of friends can catch up to the current gear meta.

In addition, the rewards you can obtain from The Delves will be integrated into the Great Vault.

Warbands

World of Warcraft: The War Within will implement a new system for the player accounts called Warbands. This is a platform that will allow transmog cosmetic options, Reputation, Renown and more resources to be shared amongst all of a player's created characters on their Battle.net account.

The Warband's functions will include:

• Warband Bank:  This will allow you to store your items in a bank and share them across all your created characters on a single Battle.net account. 
• Warbound Items: These are bonus personal loot items that drop at lower levels and can be shared with a player's alternate characters.
• Transmogrification Collection: The transmog system will be enhanced to allow players on one character to add extra class-specific gear that they can't equip to their transmog collection. For example,  if a player playing as a Mage finds a piece of Warrior-only gear, they can add it to the transmog collection and use it for their Warrior character instead.
• Warband Reputations: Earning Reputation in The War Within will become accessible for all characters on a single Battle.net account through Warbands. For example, if you unlocked a recipe on a character, you won't need to earn the Reputation of a faction ever again when playing as an alternate character.
• Flight Paths: Unlocking flight paths on one character, will unlock them for all characters in your Warband.
• Delves: Levelling up NPC companions will be available to all characters in your Warband.
• Achievements: All achievements will be made account-wide.
• Login Screen: When logging into the game, you will see a selection of your created characters on the login screen, waiting to see who you will choose to play with.

Hero Talents

World of Warcraft: The War Within will introduce new Hero Talents to the current talent trees. There will be three new trees per class (except Druids which will have four and Demon Hunters which will have two) and can be switched at any time. The Hero Talents will unlock at Lv. 71 and players will begin earning a talent at level, up to ten points at Lv. 80.

The new Hero Specialization trees for each class are:

• Death Knight: Rider of the Apocalypse, San'layn, Deathbringer.
• Demon Hunter: Aldrachi Reaver, Fel-Scarred.
• Druid: Keeper of the Grove, Elune's Chosen, Wildstalker, Druid of the Claw.
• Evoker: Chronowarden, Ruby Adept, Scalecommander.
• Hunter: Sentinel, Pack Leader, Dark Ranger.
• Mage: Sunfury, Frostfire, Spellslinger.
• Monk: Master of Harmony, Shado-Pan, Conduit of the Celestials.
• Paladin: Lightsmith, Herald of the Sun, Templar.
• Priest: Voidweaver, Orale, Archon.
• Rogue: Deathstalker, Trickster, Fatebound.
• Shaman: Stormbringer, Farseer, Totemic.
• Warlock: Soul Harvester, Hellcaller, Diabolist
• Warrior: Colossus, Slayer, Mountain.

Longtime Warcraft fans may notice that some of these specs are likely inspired by units from the RTS game, Warcraft. Mountain Thane spec seems to be an homage to the Mountain King unit and the Dark Ranger spec sounds like it is inspired by Sylvanas Windrunner and Dark Ranger units.

World of Warcraft: The War Within: When is it coming out and on what platform?

World of Warcraft: The War Within is currently scheduled to be released sometime in 2024 on PC.

World of Warcraft: The War Within: Will there be a Special Edition?

World of Warcraft: The War Within is now available to pre-order on Battle.Net with three versions to purchase — the Base Edition, Heroic Edition, and Epic Edition. The Basic Edition will cost $49.99, the Heroic Edition will cost $69.99, and the Epic Edition will cost $89.99.

The content for each Edition is as follows:

Are you ready to begin The Worldsoul Saga?

World of Warcraft: The War Within is aiming to kickstart World of Warcraft's Worldsoul Saga with a bang through its mountain's worth of new gameplay content and systems. 

Will Anduin and Thrall be able to discover what this Radiant Song? Will the Champions of Azeroth be able to stop Xal'atath from achieving her nefarious goals? Dive into the depths of Azeroth when this upcoming PC title releases in 2024 to find out.