The War Within set bonuses have been revealed, and much like in Dragonflight our first set bonus
The Waves of the Forgotten Reservoir has some pretty strong implications for how we'll be playing, with a passive 2-piece and a
linked 4-piece.
These bonuses look deceptively simple on the surface, but due to the amount of synergy there's a lot of depth here considering it's a Season 1 set bonus. Overall, it looks incredibly powerful but is entirely weighted toward the 4-piece bonus currently, keying into our major cooldown by adding something we can leverage with bonus duration. Given the unique nature of our cooldown being something that gets stronger with multiple instances, this means this set has incredible potential going forward.
This bonus is a fairly harmless increase to our generic strikes in
,
and
, thankfully covering all aspects for both builds and our AoE conversion tool in
. This likely hits the estimate goal of around 2%~ regardless of what you're playing, and is the type of non-invasive effect I'd expect to see in a first tier with heavy overhauls happening like Hero talents.
The 4-piece on the other hand is a lot more mechanically involved. I want to be careful talking about the strength considering we've had no changes but, right now this is a bit stronger than I was expecting season 1 bonuses to be. Currently, this impacts
any spawn (so the base cast and effects such as
), making it very easy to get overlapping sets of wolves out without much of an issue thanks to
. Bonuses related to
are often pretty cool, and getting an army of wolves like the
Sepulcher set is always visually striking so revisiting that is always welcome.
There's just a couple of concerns that need to be brought up so the design space of this bonus doesn't get out of hand:
- It heavily leans into one specific hero tree - Stormbringer - due to which can lead to a lot of wolves quite quickly thanks to the frequency of .
- This bonus has extreme potential scaling, meaning that in its current state it would need increasingly powerful bonuses to supercede it.
- Considering there's an entirely new Hero Talent system, a set bonus this involved may end up getting in the way of learning new mechanics for players.
Make no mistake, this is an awesome bonus and is deeply linked to the way we play for any talent build, and
will have a major impact for both Hero trees going forward as well, just to varying degrees. Its power level on the other hand makes me a little worried about future tuning (likely in the form of a reduced duration increase, or additional wolves from the initial cast rather than duration increase), but without knowing if anything further is planned for Enhancement and its hero trees this may end up being an extra thing to have to design around. At the very least, I hope the strength of this bonus doesn't cause any stray nerfs to hit things enabled by it (such as
) before the bonus itself gets adjusted downward.
