Although World of Warcraft: The War Within doesn’t launch until August 26, some of its standout features, including skyriding and warbands, will be available sooner, according to an announcement post from Blizzard on the game’s official website.
With the pre-patch “The War Within,” which is coming on July 23, players can answer the “Call of the Radiant Echoes.” In this event, players will fight in three zones in 90-minute cycles (which get faster as the event progresses, as a catch-up mechanism).
During these events, you’ll need to discard echoes of past bosses—including Ragnaros, the Lich King, and Onyxia—to gain Remnant Memories, which will net you fun transmogs, an heirloom ring, item level 480 gear, mounts, and the rest. It looks like it’s going to be a fun jaunt through Azeroth before we all hop on Metzen’s three-expansion wild ride, but I’m personally more excited about two juicy quality-of-life features: skyriding and warbands.
Skyriding is pretty easy to explain, so I’ll start here: tons of flying mounts, including druid flight forms, are being converted to the new dragonriding system. This is huge, as dragonriding – a more fluid, momentum-based form of travel – has been one of the best additions to WoW in years. Skyriding marks its rise from an expansion-specific feature to a perpetual travel buff.
Warbands are a bit more complex, however. Thankfully, there is a detailed explainer post that goes into the details, which I will summarize below.
What is a warband?
Warbands mark the beginning of Blizzard’s new alt-friendly approach to WoW. Your character selection screen is now split into “scenes,” which are small camps where your characters stand. The presentation is a bit sparse at the moment, but Blizzard plans to add more backgrounds in the future.
While you can only add four characters at a time in these scenes, this is mostly for flavor—all of your alts will be part of the same warband, including characters from different realms, though those realms must be part of the same region (you can’t share a warband between European and American realms, for example).
As a member of a warband, you gain access to a number of quality-of-life features, such as a warband bank into which you can drop reagents (which “behaves like the reagent bank, allowing you to craft with reagents from it without having to remove them”) and a new equipment type, Warbound Until Equipped (WuE).
I’m particularly excited about the WuE gear, as it represents a middle ground between soulbound and equip-bound gear:
“WuE gear will be available in raids, dungeons, and delves. Whenever you loot, you will have a small bonus chance to receive an additional piece of WuE gear as personal loot. This gear will be at least one level lower than other loot from that source (currently a whole upgrade level lower (e.g. Hero->Champion) and it could be gear that can be used by any class.”
Basically, you upgrade your alts just by playing the game. It goes without saying that this is pretty damn cool. You can also complete a questline called “Warbanding Together” which gives you access to a summon spell called “Warband Bank Distance Inhibitor” which allows you to access this bank remotely every 4 hours.
Transmog is also getting a major facelift – whereas previously you could only collect appearances that your character could equip, that will no longer be the case. Reputation and achievements will also be account-wide, with a few exceptions. As for reputations, Blizzard will gradually convert most of them to Warband reputations, meaning that “any progress made on one character will be shared across all of your characters.”
There are a few notes here, such as smaller, atmosphere-building grinds like the Winterfur Furbolg and Glimmerrog Racer reputations: “Winterfur Furbolg has a language learning component that can’t be meaningfully split between multiple characters, and the Glimmerrog Racer reputation is more of a personal position in the snail races.”
Achievements will follow a similar progression, with a few outliers like “Insane in the Membrane, as the hard part of this achievement is maxing out diametrically opposed reputations.” Progress will also be applied retroactively, meaning if you’ve made small progress on an achievement with multiple characters, they’ll all be combined the next time you log in.
There will also be mechanisms for sharing things like map exploration, quest progress, and currencies within your warband. All of which is confirmation that Blizzard is really shedding its old sacred cows for the better – make no mistake, warbands will completely change World of Warcraft. Mandatory repetitive grinding is dead and buried, may it never be missed.
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