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Is WoW: The War Within worth it for a mostly solo player?
I thought I should ask this question here, as I value the input of users here more than strictly WoW-focused places. A brief summary of my relevant likes and dislike.
- Love solo-friendly MMOs, e.g. ESO and GW2
- Haven't played WoW much but love Warcraft's lore, and been a fan of it for over 2 decades
- Dislike competitive group content and mandatory structured raiding
Basically, I am mainly interested in solo content, and story and lore.
The price of the expac is a bit pricey in my country, so it's a significant monetary expenditure if I choose to buy it. However, nowadays I have exhausted my enthusiasm for the other MMOs mentioned (and a lot more others I haven't mentioned). I've also heard a lot of good things about the solo-friendly nature of this expac. But I still have my reservations, as WoW players tend to hop on a bandwagon rather easily, especially at the start of an expac.
So, the question stands: do you think it's worth it?
I've been playing WoW since Vanilla and TWW is the most solo friendly expansion yet. I've played Shadowlands and Dragonflight mostly solo and I have plans to do the same for TWW. I am in a guild of almost 15 years, but I intentionally get no help from them in the way of boosting because I don't want to sink my time into hardcore raiding again. Despite all that, I was able to do get great gear, make gold, do all the content, see all the bosses and quests via mechanics available to solo players.
I can't say whether you will enjoy the content. I do enjoy it and I think WoW is a great product, but since you're coming from a place of no knowledge of the game, I'm not sure how friendly it'd be. That being said, TWW more than meets your criteria for being a solo-friendly expansion. I could even go as far as saying that TWW puts priority on solo players within the constraints of an MMO with inclusion of Delves and Warbands, which is basically a link that ties all your characters together where you can easily share gold, items, reputation etc.
This might go against the nature of your post, but if you do decide to join in on the fun, feel free to DM me and I'll share my Battle ID. That way you can ask me any questions you might have about the game. (I'm in the EU region.)
Delves may actually convince me to bite the bullet and get this expansion. One of my biggest frustrations with WoW (and a big reason why I quit during DF Season 2) has been with the rampant gatekeeping from its elitist and incredibly toxic community. Solo Shuffle fixed these issues from a PvP perspective last expansion, but I absolutely fucking blow at Arena and lack the skills/knowledge necessary to actually climb. There is unfortunately no solo queue for Mythic/M+ Dungeons or Normal/Heroic/Mythic raids.
Do Delves compare in difficulty to current endgame content and is there any kind of competitive progression leaderboards to them á la Diablo III's Greater Rifts?
I don't know if lack of solo queue for M+ dungeons and raids are a bad thing, but I understand that that has its own disadvantages as well. I mained a Ret Paladin in Dragonflight and had no problem finding groups until I hit levels where people cared more about which classes to invite ("meta classes" as players call it). I had no intention of going above 3K rating though, so that wasn't an issue for me. All my gear, including my legendary weapon, was attained through groups I got in using the in-game LFG tool.
If I recall correctly, Greater Rifts in D3 were dungeons you could solo with increasing difficulty. Assuming I'm right, then Delves are exactly that. The only difference is Delves can be done with other people, but you can do them as a solo player perfectly fine with no disadvantages whatsoever. The more you do it, the higher it scales and with higher scales come increasing difficulty and better rewards. I believe you can't get the absolute top Mythic raid gear from them but you can get very close to it. That's what I mostly plan on doing this expansion.
As for the leaderboards, no, Delves don't have that. It's sort of against the nature of Delves, as Delves have no time limit. All that matters is you finish them. That being said, if Blizzard have APIs available, I'm sure a website like raider.io will have a leaderboard like as they do with Mythic+ dungeons (you won't see anything as yet since Season 1 started today).
Absolutely. The leveling experience and the story in questing is better than ever. You can run dungeons with a party of NPCs. There is even a story mode for solo players to experience the last boss of the new raid and the associated story bits. Just today the season started and there is now a way for solo players to get near highest end (heroic raid) gear from delves, which can be completed solo or with up to a party of 5.
I am in a guild and we do go for heroic raids but outside of that I mostly play solo, and I’m having a blast so far!
Sounds really cool!
For some quick background, I picked up WoW back around mid-late 2005, some time around patch 1.6 of the original game. Was most “serious” about raiding in Vanilla and WotLK, but dabbled during TBC (mostly just Karazhan runs). Have always been more of an open world person (that’s what pulled me into WoW; I had no idea dungeons or raids even existed initially) but enjoy small group instances for contrast.
Since Cataclysm, my interest in raiding has basically fallen off of a cliff. LFR is too often an awful experience and when it comes to the “real” raid difficulties, the raids themselves have become overly technical and I find that too many players have come to take it all too seriously for my taste — that spirit that used to be found outside of cutting edge raiding where it’s just a bunch of people goofing around in ventrilo has been supplanted entirely by sweaty minmax culture.
Similarly, M+ has brought that attitude to dungeons, which has had a similar effect on my interest in those. In vanilla dungeons felt almost like fun tabletop sessions with hodgepodge parties making things work however they can, but now they feel like a chore that’s either too easy (round everything up and AoE it down) or too technical and tedious. The experience of running a dungeon is of little or no value, it's all about pushing key levels as high as possible as quickly as possible for a bigger loot box next week.
And then there's the whole mess of normalization of paid carries for group content, which is essentially pay for power with a level of indirection via players injected for plausible deniability.
All of this along with life just being more busy in general has led to spotty play over the past decade and change. I sat out most of MoP, dipped in and out of WoD, played Legion a lot, played a decent amount of BfA, sat out most of Shadowlands, and sat out even more of Dragonflight. Without group content as a pull, my interest in the game depends largely on two things: its solo content and appeal of the subject matter. It's no coincidence that Legion is among my most played in recent xpacs, because it was pretty great in both regards, giving solo players a ton of stuff to do and dealing with a lot of "core Warcraft" lore and story bits. BfA was weaker on soloability but at least had Kul Tiras which was amazing as an Alliance player, and while Shadowlands and Dragonflight might've been a bit better for solo players too much of the story and setting felt too disconnected and newly invented to care much about.
So far, TWW is scoring higher than either of the prior xpacs on both metrics. Soloability is great and we're dealing for the most part with characters and factions that are well-grounded in lore (even if TWW embellishes on some of them), so it feels sufficiently "Warcraft". The art and music are excellent and there's SO many quests it's really just insane — I've been taking a semi-completionist approach and hit cap just off of the first two zones' quests! Right now I'm about halfway through Hallowfall (third zone) and there's still a whole fourth zone to work through. Dungeon quests are getting completed much more quickly thanks to the bot-assisted dungeons, which let me go through them at my own pace without party members breathing down my neck to move more quickly. Overall, it's good.
I'm still bummed about the state of group content, though. I enjoyed the socialization, but having to work the game like a job to live up to community standards for it is for the birds. Maybe in following patches or the next xpac Blizzard will implement changes that inject some of that old tabletop sort of spirit into dungeons and raids again and make things less focused on technical correctness, speed, and loot.
It's a very different game, but I've been playing WoW 1.12 solo through running my own server with playerbots. The playerbots work surprisingly well, I'm still working my way through the leveling dungeons but the bots are honestly better than 90% of PUGs I've played with.
Basically, you can make alts on your account and log them in as bots to group with, choose their spec and behavior, etc. I usually pick one or two of them to level for a bit, get to a dungeon, and then set the others' levels to mine to run the dungeon so I don't have to level a whole group's worth of characters. I usually tank the dungeons but the bots are pretty good at all all roles so you can let them tank if you want although you'll still need to lead them around and give them the command to pull.
I'll probably check out TWW later in the life cycle when the expansion is cheaper. It does seem like it has some good features but you mentioned price is a factor so I thought I'd suggest the most affordable way to play WoW solo. Plus, nothing beats being able to log out in the middle of a dungeon because you're tired and it's already midnight. ;)
mmmm, the comments here are making me want to pick it back up! It's heartening that the new expansion is good for solo play, and I usually most enjoyed those aspects of the game anyway (or at least the lower pressure multiplayer things). I've tried it again at various points in the past few years but it has felt impossible to get into again without people to play with (friends I used to play with no longer do). Even outside of needing a group for certain things, I think there's something about needing people to kind of share the overall experience with, even if it's just chatting as you're each doing stuff alone/occasionally meeting up to do things. That's something I really miss. Maybe we could start a little Tildes cluster?