A lot of what was showed off at Blizzcon for War Within comes straight out of my wishlist for WoW over the last few years. As the target demographic that, I believe, a lot of these changes are aimed towards, I wanted to give some in detail hopes for War Within. (This is a wall of text)
TLDR: Warbands and Delves look great, but I hope it’s a proper game mode and not just Island Expeditions 2.0.
My hopes are focused in two areas, ‘account by default’ and solo/small group play.
Account by Default
To start with ‘Account by Default’, shifting as much as possible to be account focused, rather than character focused is an absolute win. Like Blizzard stated, having to grind out renown a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc, time is not fun, regardless of whether it’s 100%/200% faster or not.
For this, the main goal is a mindset shift. With everything in the game, the question should be asked “what would this be like to do it 13 times” and give the player the option to work around it.
Levelling as an example. First time, interesting, exciting, new, novel. Second time probably still has some appeal, you’re now experiencing a whole new way of playing from a different class. Third time the appeal starts to wear off a bit. Fourth, fifth, sixth etc etc it becomes a chore. A chore that taints what should be an exciting experience. You’ve getting to try an entirely new class and way of playing. ‘Account by default’ is looking at the fun, and removing the chore and the pain where possible.
An example of how this could be solved with an ‘account by default’ mindset, every max level char you have gives you a stacking 50% increase in xp gains for future characters. Ultimately, you don’t want every player to be able to instantly character boost to current expansion content, as the best thing about actually levelling a character is the learning of the class mechanics along the way. That’s definitely something you don’t want to lose, however with every character levelled, the ability to pick up class mechanics speeds up so you can pretty comfortably level your 7th character with a 300% exp boost and not feel overwhelmed or lost in how to play the class. Then, make that xp buff optional. Blizzard have talked about player agency forever. So if a player wants to just level a new character in no time at all, let them. If they want to take their time and “take it all in”, let them. My immediate suspicion is we’ll never see a system like this implemented because it completely de-values the Character Boost in the shop, but one can hope.
Then there’s the max level side of ‘account by default’. What they’ve announced with renown and banks, a great first step. Sure that will be helpful. But another facet that I hope is going to be considered is, let’s call it the ‘World State’. Jumping back in to 10.2 after taking a break for most of 10.1. I hoped on my main, knocked out all the campaign quests that came along during 10.1, 10.1.5 and 10.1.7 in preparation for 10.2. Quest log is empty, world state is all good to go. Then I jump on an alt who I haven’t touched in a long time because they’ve got some changes coming up in 10.2 that look like they’ll be fun to play, and I’m immediately presented with about 47 different threads of quest chains, some campaign some side stuff, some related to systems and I have no idea which of them I need to do and which ones I can safely ignore. This again is detracting from the fun of just playing another class, and swamping it with chore and pain of either having to re-do a whole bunch of content or the cognitive load of having to figure out what I do need to do and then living with exclamation marks floating all across the world. Giving the player the option to sync their world state across their account so whatever character I jump on to I know exactly where I am in the flow of story and systems would be a blessing.
Solo/Small Group Play
What’s been announced with Delves and replacing the PvP track of the Great Vault with Open World track, is amazing, music to my ears. However, similarly with Warbands, my hope is that Blizzard doesn’t go to light with this. Come out of the gates swinging and introduce an entirely new, 4th pillar of end game.
If we break it down to what we have currently.
- Raiding, for the folks who want to play hard content with 19 other people on a regular schedule. When it comes to this, WoW is hands down the best game in the world for offering this experience. So that’s great.
- M+, for the folks who want to play hard content but with a smaller group of 4 other people on a much more flexible schedule. This works pretty well right now, sure the affixes debate could come up, but at a high level the system works pretty good.
- Then you’ve got your PvP lovers. Some of these folks are solo players, but mostly it’s small groups of 2, 3 or 5 die hard PvP lovers. They’ve got some great changes over the course of Dragonflight and more coming in War Within with no longer having to compete their PvP rewards from the Great Vault with other content.
What’s missing? The solo/small group PvE lovers. This is a demographic, which I’m fairly certain is growing in number as the vast majority of the player base slowly age up, build careers, families and just generally have less time to dedicate and on a far more haphazard schedule. Or even, it’s not a time constraint, they just don’t want to do group content. For these folks, Delves and outdoor content (combined with the ‘account by default’ mindset) could revolutionise their experience of the game. Providing a pillar which gives these folks access to challenging content that can reward them with end-game rewards so they don’t feel like they’re paying their subscription and not getting full value out of it because they just can’t commit to raiding or M+. A focus on challenging solo content, combined with ‘account by default’ giving a solo player the opportunity to experience all that content on all 13 classes if they wished, accentuated by the improvements to crafting over the course of Dragonflight could offer an entirely new way to play that has never been available before, serving an ever growing demographic.
To paint a picture, my absolute wish for Warbands and Delves would be this. I can take on Delves and Outdoor world content on my Evoker, challenging myself to clear the hardest level available (Mage Tower was awesome). Doing so rewarding Mythic raiding (or just under, similar to crafting) gear at a pace equal to that of raiding (so 1 - 3 pieces per reset). Then, when I’ve done all I want to do on my Evoker I can jump on to my Monk and have a go at Tanking or Healing or Melee, experience the same challenging content but in a whole new way. Gaining similar rewards for that 2nd character. Combine that with being able to utilise my Warband of characters to farm all the resources I need to craft whatever gear I want (because everything needed to craft end-game gear is obtainable solo from Delves/Outdoor content) so the net result is a fully self-sufficient Warband that can enable (if I wanted to put the time and effort in) to achieve end-game gear on any and all my characters over the course of a patch. This pillar also works great for 2 or 3 people who enjoy playing together but don’t like PvP and don’t particularly want to engage with random folks for M+ or Raiding.
No doubt, there are some people that will absolutely hate everything I’ve listed above, and that’s fine and expected. But to those folks I ask, if you already have what you want from the game (I’m assuming it’s Mythic raiders who would hate this), then what harm is there in providing other paying players the opportunity to get as much out of the game as you do?
