I had the opportunity to explore the early alpha of the next World of Warcraft expansion, The War Within. Based on this early look of what’s to come and what was available for testing, I have put together some highlights that I thought would be good to share!
Pre-patch event: Radiant Echo’s
Upon entering the Alpha, I noticed that there were some familiar Horn icons on the world map. These signified the location and timer for a World Event called Radiant Echo’s.
From what I could assume, these world events could be the pre-patch event that prepares us for the transition into the next expansion. The event that I tested consisted of defeating a mob marked with a large skull on the map (Congealed Memory) and then completing some small objectives around the zone. From what I could see, these events spawned about 30 mins after one had expired, and there was a maximum of 2 up at once.
The events offer pretty solid 493 Item level loot, starting at 1 out of 8 upgrade levels, so they can be upgraded a fair bit as well. Likely matching Season 4 normal to Heroic Item level items after fully upgrading them. Great for getting your characters ready for the next expansion.
Hero Talents
Overall, these are quite cool additions! You get to choose between 2 additional talent trees, located in the center of your current talents UI, that will reward either passive or active abilities. You get an extra point every level above 70. Giving you 10 points in total and a full tree at level 80. You can swap between these seemingly freely. Allowing even more adaptability when it comes to your talents.
My personal feedback would be that I'd have preferred there to be more utility rather than DPS/HPS gains. There are already quite a lot of small changes you can do to your tree, meaning this might just become “another” thing you have to do in between bosses and Mythic+ dungeons. But I am optimistic that they can give us a good feeling of power going into the expansion.
4 New Renown Factions
Just like Dragonflight there will be 4 factions (as far as I could tell) that will allow us to farm renown for rewards. These rewards will be great for everyone, they include Delve Epic keys, Pets, Mounts, Transmogs and even some good gear. There was an item available to purchase at level 16 renown from the faction’s vendor, the item level of the gear piece was the equivalent to normal Raid item level. Which is quite powerful at the start of the expansion.
There was no real intel on how you can “Farm/Grind” the rep as of now, but it's something that you will likely want to do early into the expansion for all the rewards available.
8 New Dungeons
There are 8 new Dungeons in The War Within:
- Ara-Kara, City of Echoes
- Cinderbrew Meadery
- Darkflame Cleft
- Priory of the Sacred Flame
- The Dawnbreaker
- The Rookery
- The Stonevault
- City of Threads
The only Dungeon I tested first-hand was the Cinderbrew Meadery. And honestly, it was great, even on normal difficulty. The bosses have interesting, engaging mechanics and the entire dungeon was themed around a Bee Company, of which there were a lot throughout the dungeon. The bosses and trash mobs had funny names like the “ceo” or “Investors”. Overall a very cool theme and I loved it.
I also found some profession based interaction items within the dungeon, notably a Cooking Pot that required at least level 25 skill in Kaz Algar Cooking or Alchemy to interact with it, for what I can assume to be a buff or benefit (similar to Court of Stars or some Shadowlands dungeons).
The bosses in Cinderbrew Meadery are Brew Master Aldryr, I’pa, Benk Buzzbee and Goldie Baronbottom.
Brewmaster Aldryr: He will jump behind a bar, and you have to serve drinks to his guests while taking AoE damage. I don’t believe we have seen this mechanic before, and already got me thinking of specs that could make this fight easier with all the movement.
I’pa: He spawned some adds that had to be controlled. The add touching him gave him A LOT of HP as a shield. Definitely a more “standard” boss that you have to deal with.
Benk Buzzbee: This boss spawns a lot of Bees and some barrels that attract adds (I think?). We should be able to blow them up somehow, but that seemed mostly to be a tank mechanic. The boss fight was a little confusing when first experiencing it, but feels like it will have some strategy brewed up to make it easier, likely once you’ve seen it a few times.
Goldie Baronbottom: Many barrels spawn that when destroyed spawn fire waves you have to dodge. All mechanics can break these, and the boss at some point will destroy all of them at once, meaning that you really want to control the fight. Possibly my favorite fight in the dungeons, so far!
Raid Nerub-ar Palace
The first raid of The War Within Expansion, Nerub-ar Palace had some information available about it in the Dungeon Journal.
The raid has a very Narubian aesthetic to it, as you can imagine, with the following boss encounters for us to look forward to:
- Ulgrax the Devourer
- The Bloodbound Horror
- Sikran, Captain of the Sureki
- Rasha’nan
- Eggtender Ovi’nax
- Nexus-princess Ky’veza
- The Silken Court
- Queen Ansurek
This means that we have 8 bosses to start off the tier and the Expansion! Which in my eyes is a good number of bosses, and I am excited to see them in Raid Testing and ultimately in the Race to World First.
Spellbook UI
Your spells have now been moved to the talent tree!
Honestly it's incredibly pretty to look at, and just from setting up my character for the testing I did, I already found it easier to find all the spells to set up my action bars. I’m really loving the UI change here, and hope to see if there are more to come in future releases!
Delves:
With not too much information out there yet on this new The War Within feature from Blizzard, this is some of what I noticed whilst doing my own testing on them.
They do seem to become an important piece of content. From the get go, I saw one of the purchasable items on the vendor being a way to add sockets to Jewelry (rings and Necks), which can be insanely important to your characters overall power.
Delves can be done while leveling, although it did not seem to grant too much XP when I tested it out.
It's basically an adventure you are being sent on (a scenario), accompanied by Bran Bronzebeard. You can make Bran either be a healer or a DPS.
Whilst doing a delve, you get to kill rares, pick up treasures and complete quests. During this time you can obtain powers (similar to in Torghast), but there were not as many.
Higher level Delves are locked behind certain requirements,such as 525 Item level, and even higher level Delves seem to come from specific keys. An Epic Key is purchasable at renown 10 with one of the factions.
Again, it’s hard to gauge the actual importance of these, as they are a highlighted feature of the new expansion. But at least on the Alpha it was quite a reset from the generic quests and dungeons.
Thanks for reading some of my highlights from testing the Alpha version of The War Within, it has sparked that excitement again for what’s to come in future releases of the testing and the new expansion itself!
