World of Warcraft®: Deep Dive Panel Recap

During the World of Warcraft®: Deep Dive panel at BlizzCon 2023, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas took viewers deeper into the features coming in the next chapter of World of Warcraft: The War Within™.

During the World of Warcraft: What’s Next panel, the philosophy to continue to utilize evergreen content to make World of Warcraft better with every new feature addition was discussed. With The War Within expansion, the intention is to continue to build on the foundations of Dragonflight and carrying those philosophies forward with replayability, depth, and player agency while considering all the varying playstyles found in the game.

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Introducing Delves

Delves are quick adventures for one to five players as a solo experience, with friends, or even as a dungeon group. These adventures are integrated into the outdoor realm as a new endgame pillar alongside dungeons, raids, and PvP. Designed to provide variety, flexibility, and replayability,  there are 12 Delves available at launch that take place throughout Khaz Algar in a variety of environments.

Shaped by lessons learned from Torghast, Islands, and Scenarios, Delves intends to allow more player choice and variety.

Just the Facts:

• 10–15-minute adventures
• Players will unravel mysteries and seek out treasure throughout Khaz Algar
• New Seasonal Rewards with a narrative tie-in and NPC companions

Season One will include the NPC companion, Brann Bronzebeard.  These companions will level up as they journey with you and can be customized to be a compliment to your character, whether you need them to do more damage or heal a bit for you.

Entering one of these adventures won’t involve any loading screens to transition into a Delve portal. As you solve the mysteries and puzzles within and defeat the boss at the end, you’ll make your way to a room overflowing with treasure offering currency, gold, chances at cosmetics, and more. If you have the right key, you may even be able to open any large Resplendent Chests that will show up from time to time. These keys can be earned in other Delves, outdoor gameplay, or in a weekly quest. These items will be balanced against dungeon and raid loot.

Delve Locations

Delves will be integrated into the various zones with a variety of environments, settings, and inhabitants.

Delves have several difficulty tiers, resulting in a variety of potential rewards.

The Great Vault

The Great Vault will add the new “World” category, removing PvP. For the first time, players who take part in outdoor world activities will be able to earn rewards from the Great Vault. Whether it’s from completing outdoor objectives or by doing Delves, players will be able to unlock rewards based on the level of difficulty completed. Rewards can potentially reach the level of Heroic raiding or close to Mythic 15 dungeon range.

Players who take part in PvP will no longer need to access the Guild Vault for rewards—which were often more random than players wanted. Instead, players will receive additional Conquest to be able to purchase the items they want most.

There will be a variety of cosmetics available in Delves such as fun new helms like a fungarian hat, kobold helm with candles, or even the terrifying new undersea creature, kobyss, helm.

Players who take part in Delves will also be able to unlock a new customizable flying mount.

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Warbands

In summary, Warbands mean account-wide everything. As the years have progressed, World of Warcraft players have changed the way they play, leveling up multiple alternative characters has become the norm instead of focusing only on one character.  This is the result of the leveling experience becoming faster over time and playing alternate characters a regular expectation. Players who want to play additional characters currently run into additional challenges, however.

Warbands is an attempt to change the system and create a more alt-friendly experience and reset the foundation of World of Warcraft allowing for the accomplishments of individual players to be reflected across all of their characters on their Battle.net account. This new system will focus on adding convenience and flexibility but will not provide additional power to alts.

• Warband Bank: Share Items between all of your characters on a single Battle.net account in one convenient bank.

• Warbound Items: These are bonus personal loot items that drop at a slightly lower level that can be shared with alternate characters.  

Additional Integrations

• Transmogrification Collection: This system will expand to allow players on one character to add additional class specific items that they can’t equip to their transmog collection. This allows a player on a mage character to collect a warrior item and be able to add it to the transmog collection for use on your warrior character instead.
• Warband Reputations: Many Reputations in The War Within will become available for all characters to access through integration with Warbands. As an example: unlocking a recipe on one character won’t be reliant on gaining the trust of a faction again on an alternate character.
• Flight Paths: Once unlocked on one character, all characters in your Warband can access them.
• Delves: Leveling up a companion NPC will be accessible to characters in your Warband.
• Achievements: Instead of only specific achievements being account-wide, they are being updated so that they are all account-wide rewarding the individual player instead of the character for the accomplishment.
• Login Screen: When you log in to the game, you’ll be able to see a selection of your characters on the login screen waiting for you to choose who you will go on your next adventure with.

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Hero Talents

With Hero talents, you’ll be receiving 10 new talent points for each of the 10 levels you’ll earn while playing through The War Within. These new talent points will focus on offering the ability to explore a deeper class fantasy, provide additional flexibility to suit your play style, and offer progression and agency while not adding excessive complexities.

With four available specializations, development began with the druids. As an example, a Balance druid might choose between Keeper of the Grove or Elune’s Chosen. You’ll be able to swap between the same way as you change talents any other time during gameplay.

Adding Hero talents to the mix provides three talent trees to choose from: Class, Hero, and Specialization. With ten points available to apply to Hero talents, you’ll be able to access all of the available nodes on a given Hero tree. The choices will lie in which of the talents you want to take first as you level up.

Within the Hero tree there are additional choice nodes you’ll be able to select depending on the type of content you are undertaking.

The Keeper of the Grove tree is available to both Balance and Restoration druids. This selection focuses on summons and offers additional choice nodes.

Elune’s Chosen tree is available to Balance and Guardian druids.

This tree is all about Elune and calling down her power to smite foes and protect allies.

Hero Talent Trees

There are 39 Hero talent specializations available.

Names of all Hero Talent trees subject to change.

Each class specialization will have access to two of the three Hero trees to choose from.

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Other Features

Earthen Allied Race

Players will be able to play through The War Within campaign and the endgame questline to unlock access to  the Earthen Allied Race.  This new race is able to join either the Horde or the Alliance and will be available to play as the following classes: Death Knight, Hunter, Mage, Monk, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, and Warrior. Leveling this new Allied Race will also unlock the new Earthen Heritage Armor.

Dynamic Flight

Dragonriding is here to stay and will also be available for many flying mounts in all flyable areas even prior to the launch of The War Within. Players will also be able to toggle between dynamic flight or the flying style introduced originally in The Burning Crusade (TBC).

Dynamic Flight will be available from the start in Khaz Algar and players will be able to unlock the TBC style of flight at maximum level by exploring the zones of The War Within and completing the campaign.  Players will also be able to collect glyphs throughout Khaz Algar as they explore.  These glyphs will be shifting to an evergreen state in which players shouldn’t feel as if they need to go back to Dragonflight to gain any they missed before. Some abilities that players have collected from their adventures in the Dragon Isles may be restricted to the Dragon Isles, but base abilities like increased Vigor will become a part of how Dynamic Flight works and available to everyone as they level up.

New Battleground!

This new 10v10 capture-point map is set in the Ringing Deeps. This battleground is similar to Silvershard Mines, but with some additional twists. Players will fight for control of minecarts along with a central node, teams will want to control.

Interface Updates

As a part of the continuing refinement of the Interface, the Spellbook is getting some additional cleanup. It will provide a larger and cleaner layout, take advantage of modern display resolutions, and allow more pages to fit on one screen. It will serve as a one-stop-shop for your spells and talents within the same tab along with specialization information.

Aspects of the quest interface are also evolving allowing more filtering along with hide or show objectives in your quest log. Icons are also getting cleaned up.

While not large changes, development continues to work to streamline the User Interface to improve the default capabilities.

Cross-Realm Guilds

Players will be able to apply for a guild or recruit new players to their guild freely, regardless of the realm they are on. Mythic raiding will be available from the first day of the launch of The War Within. The Hall of Fame will still exist to commemorate the top guilds in each season and in each tier and save their accomplishments, but there’s no longer a need to tie it to unlocking the ability to do the content within the game.

This is another means toward removing social barriers that currently exist so that players can join with their friends wherever they are.

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We look forward to sharing more about the future of The War Within as development continues.

Don’t forget to submit your questions for the Q&A next week!