After a fairly long break (missing Plunderstorm entirely despite it looking like a fun alternate mode) I jumped back into Warcraft for the War Within. Mainly to raid Nerub-ar Palace of course.

I swapped to Protection Warrior, suiting up one of my original BC characters. He had been sulking for some time having been beaten down by Halls of Reflection back in WotLK. Warrior is very fun, Charging and Heroic Leaping all over the place, and the class fantasy is spot on: a lot of armour, a shield, and a one handed weapon. Even the brown class colour is good (though Paladin pink is still the winner).

A crew of Warcraft characters stand in front of the huge body of the dead spider Queen

We cleared Normal mode without any trouble, one-shotting all the bosses until Silken Court, which took 23—a sudden escalation in difficulty. It was a surprise to one-shot Broodtwister Ovi’nax and Nexus-Princess Ky’veza, having watched how hard they were on Mythic during the RWF, but Normal obviously doesn’t compare. Even Queen Ansurek only took 5 attempts.

I had fun levelling up my boss kill videos this tier, finally graduating from the built-in Windows video editor to DaVinci Resolve. It’s vastly better, and surprisingly not as complicated as I feared. Lots of fun effects and a strong editing timeline, plus finally exporting in HD.

Normal being so easy led to the decision to really push for Heroic this time. It was a shock to find that the first four bosses were also a pushover in Heroic, allowing us to farm two vault slots each week for a month or so to prepare for the last four. Only Bloodbound Horror caused occasional wipes due to random bad mob placement, but the rest were easy-mode.

Luckily the challenge comes with Ky’veza onward. That’s a fun fight, requiring careful gravity management and plenty of precision movement. Still it was only 15 battles over a few weeks before we had her.

Broodtwister was our first real wall, ending up needing 48 attempts. Chaos fights are our weakness, and that one is the definition of chaos—things can get very rapidly out of hand if you miss a single egg-break assignment, or let the small spiders overwhelm you as they multiply. So it was a nice pre-Xmas present to finally kill her on our last raid night of the year.

That leaves Silken Court and Queen Ansurek to finish (before 11.1 in ~March) to claim a guild-fire Ahead of the Curve.

It’s been fun following along with Nogamara’s Heroic progression which is almost exactly mirroring ours. They’re on Silken Court too, and also struggled most with Ovi’nax. Hopefully both guilds will make it to the end before Season 2!

A Tauren mounted on a dragon flys up into a pink-cloud-sworled sky

The War Within has been a good expansion so far. As everyone has said, the Warband feature is the standout, making a huge difference to managing multiple characters. Gearing an alt is so much more straight-forward, and the 20th anniversary event has meant levelling a character is lightning-fast.

The zones are fun and different, though I wonder about too much underground after a while. Being out on the Isle and seeing the sky is refreshing after tootling around in the caves for a while.

I love the kobold culture they’ve created, and really wish the Undermine(d) 11.1 patch had been kobolds instead of Goblins. I’m not a fan of the Goblin culture as depicted—environmental vandals with their noisy smoke-belching mounts, money-grubbing, selfish. The kobolds on the other hand are brilliant and fun, with their candles and joy at discovering a piece of junk out in the world.

The expansion does feel a little bit stalled at the moment, despite the launch of Siren Isle (with its lacklustre ring), but Plunderstorm returns in January to distract everyone before Season 2. I’m a little worried by the proposed Prot Warrior rage nerfs, but that’s Warcraft for you—won’t take long to find out. Hm. Maybe I should gear my Paladin and Monk and Druid in the meantime just in case…