World Of Warcraft's latest expansion The War Within is live, adding a new continent, hero talents and Delves
And a bunch more things
It's been a while since I last played World Of Warcraft, but that doesn't stop me from listening to the Elwynn Forest theme whenever I need to decompress. And as I understand it, WoW's latest expansion The War Within adds to a game that's largely unrecognisable from those vanilla days. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and with TWW out this very second it does make me think, "Hmmm, what if I do make a return". This happens every time. I'd quite like to see the new continent, the new class features, and the expanded Skyriding.
First on the agenda is the new continent: Khaz Algar, which lies off the western shores of Pandaria (a good time, that DLC) and fits with the theme of a subsurface, well, war within. Here you've got the surface level city of Dornogal that acts as the city centre, so to speak, with three other zones all under the surface: The Ringing Deeps, Hallowfall, and Azj-Kahet. The max level has been ramped up to 80, so each of those zones, starting with the Isle Of Dorn, will feature a gradual level climb with the aid of new dungeons.
New instances called Delves can be tackled with up to four pals, along with an NPC companion Brann Bronzebeard (who's customisable through a skill tree). These act a bit like bitesize dungeons, taking around "10-15 minutes on average" and offer puzzles, platforming challenges, boss fights, and rewards that'll help you in future Delves. Tick these off and you'll earn "endgame rewards", similar to those offered by dungeons, raids, PVP, and the like.
Elsewhere, Hero Talents are unlocked for players at level 71 and let you specialise classes even further. Essentially, there are talent trees to pick from depending on classes and specialisations, you select a single talent tree to activate, then each time you level up you bang a point into it. They grant you buffs up the wazoo - the technical term. Here's Blizzard's article on it, which breaks it down into more detail.
More mounts are available for skyriding and now you can switch between dynamic flight (the zippy flippy type introduced in the last expansion) or steady flight (kinda normal flying introduced all the way back in The Burning Crusade).
There is, of course, a whole lot more that would take aeons to cover here. Blizzard's War Within page has you covered on that front.
And hey, if you want to know what it was like starting WoW as a newbie a little while back, why not give our Inventory Space vid a watch? A relic from a bygone era of Edders and Liam (RPS in peace) doing fun vids together. I miss it dearly.