World of Warcraft: The War Within Review

It’s been a little bit over a month since early access for World of Warcraft's latest expansion, The War Within, launched. In that time, I’ve leveled characters, geared up, done a ton of dungeons, raided, and a plethora of delves. Now that the first season has started — although M+ and Mythic raiding don’t begin until September 17th — it’s finally time to take stock of where we are and put a score to this expansion. If you missed the first half of this review, take a quick detour to my Review in Progress to catch up on my leveling experience and some of the issues I ran into the first few weeks. This part will focus on the max-level story experience, dungeons & raiding, and delves. There will be story spoilers, so if you aren’t fully caught up, you may want to skip to the dungeons & raiding section.

Max Level Story Campaign

I knew there would be more story unlocking after the full expansion launch, but before the raid released. However, I didn’t expect the new story to kick off with Jaina and Thrall returning with help from the Alliance and Horde. It may be because of how slowly things like that have happened in past expansions, but I wasn’t expecting them to turn up until the second season of content or maybe, at the earliest, in the bridge content between the first and second seasons. Their return was pitch perfect, though, and I loved Jaina — as the only other person who had been through almost the exact same experience as Alleria in Dalaran — comforting and offering Alleria understanding for the rash actions she had taken.

The campaign's first half followed a ‘readying the troops’ flow as everyone prepared to strike back against the nerubians. There was one section where I had to help train the ground troops, but it didn’t quite land for me. It wasn’t helped that when I arrived, Turalyon made a snide comment about another horde arriving to yell at the troops. It felt really out of place, especially since it happened shortly after a very sweet “stay awhile and