"Respecting The Player Behind The Keyboard": New World Of Warcraft Cast Talks Warbands, Raids, And All Of The War Within's Endgame

Thirteen days and counting until the launch of World of Warcraft's The War Within expansion, well, not counting head start, of course. As we get closer, I'm actually really happy with everything I am seeing so far, particularly on the PvE front. We all know by now that I am a huge dungeon/raid hound. That's my MMORPG content of choice.

When it comes to WoW's endgame post-expansion, the team hosted a WoWCast video talking about exactly that today. Delves obviously took up a significant portion of the discussion seeing as they are the newest addition to endgame PvE content that is receiving some love. If you don't know by now, delves are kind of bite-sized adventures that you don't need a group to take on.

Gear in the delves may only go to tier 8, but the difficulty of delves are being unlocked up to tier 11. Yeah, the gear level may cap, but if you're looking for challenge, you'll still have it. Twelve of these delves will be part of your path through the world, but that doesn't mean the delves will be the same all the time. Maybe the path will be different, maybe the challenge will change, or other modifiers will be added. It's bite-sized, but it'll be rewarding still through your Great Vault if the delves are content you enjoy doing.

For more "traditional" dungeons, Mythic+ and the core progression of dungeons is getting a bit of a revamp, too. Mythic 0 is being added to give you challenges without the timer. Affixes have been refreshed and they actually saw a huge pivot after early testing. Rather than applying affixes to specific Mythic+ dungeons, now affixes will target different level ranges of Mythics rather than all of them.

The Follower Dungeon feature from Dragonflight will continue in The War Within allowing you to learn dungeons with some NPCs while you try out that new spec.

Warbands continue to be my favorite new Warcraft feature. I love alts but I hate doing the same things over and over again. Not only allowing you to pick and choose what you do on your alt, the Warband system also opens up all of your characters to work together as a team. Sharing items, currency, and reputation across characters is fantastic. There's even a new "Warband Bound Until Equipped" equipment classification. Sure, it may be a little lower in level than the normal rewards from your raid, but you can pass it to any character in your roster and it'll only bind when you equip it on your alt.

Warbands is the system the team describes as respecting "the player behind the keyboard" and that player's time. I love it.

Raids will finally provide a way for solo players to experience the "end story" that comes with raids with a new "solo" story version. About a month into The War Within, raids will pass out a buff to help you finish things off if you're just falling shy of a raid clear. For you FFXIV players, it's kind of like the Echo.

Check out the full video below as it got me pretty pumped for endgame and it has other new tidbits regarding some visibility options for your own character and a brief chat about PvP.