World of Warcraft: The War Within won't be kicking off until August 26—but some of its marquee features, including Skyriding and Warbands, are going to be arriving early as per an announcement post by Blizzard on the game's official website.
Landing July 23, The War Within pre-patch will see players answering "the Call of the Radiant Echoes". This event has players battling across three zones in 90-minute cycles (which will get faster as the event goes on, as a catch-up mechanic).
During these events, you'll need to put down echoes of past bosses—including Ragnaros, the Lich King, and Onyxia—to grab Residual Memories. These'll get you fun transmogs, an heirloom ring, item level 480 gear, mounts, the whole shebang. It looks like it's gonna be a fun romp around Azeroth before we all get strapped into Metzen's three-expansion long wild ride, but I'm personally more excited about two juicy quality-of-life features: Skyriding, and Warbands.
Skyriding is pretty straightforward to explain, so I'll start there: A ton of flying mounts, including druid flight forms, are going to be converted over to the new Dragonriding system. This is massive, since Dragonriding—a more fluid, momentum-based way to get around—has been one of the best additions to WoW in years. Skyriding marks its graduation from expansion-specific feature to evergreen travel buff.
Warbands, however, are a little more complex. Thankfully there's a full explainer post that gets into the nitty-gritty, which I'll summarise below.
Warbands mark the start of Blizzard's new alt-friendly approach to WoW. Your character select screen will now be split up into "scenes", which are little camps with your characters standing in them. They're a little bare-bones presentation wise at the moment, but Blizzard's planning to add more backdrops going forward.
While these scenes only let you add four characters to each, that's mostly just for flavour—all of your alts are going to be a part of the same Warband, including characters across realms, though said realms need to be a part of the same region (you can't share a Warband between European and American realms, for example).
Being in a Warband gets you access to a bunch of quality-of-life features, such as a Warband bank that lets you plonk reagents (which will "behave like the reagent bank, allowing you to craft using reagents from it without having to withdraw them") and a new type of gear, Warbound until Equipped (WuE), inside.
I'm particularly excited about WuE gear, since it acts as a midway point between soulbound and bind-on-equipped armaments:
"WuE gear will be available within Raids, Dungeons, and Delves. Whenever you earn loot, you will have a slight bonus chance to gain an additional piece of WuE gear as personal loot. This gear will be at least one lower tier than other loot from that source (currently a whole upgrade track lower (e.g., Hero-> Champion), and it could be gear usable by any class."
Basically, just by playing the game, you're gearing up your alts. It goes without saying that this is super freaking neat. You can also complete a quest line called "Warbanding Together" which gives you access to a summoning spell called the Warband Bank Distance Inhibitor, which lets you access this bank every 4 hours remotely.
Transmog's also getting a huge facelift, too—whereas before you could only collect appearances that your specific character could equip, that's no longer going to be the case. Reputation and Achievements are also going account-wide with a few noted exceptions. For reps, Blizzard's going to gradually convert most into Warband reputations, meaning "any progress made on one character will be shared with all your characters."
There are a couple of asterisks there, such as minor, for-flavour grinds like the Winterpelt Furbolg and Glimmerrogg Racer reputations: "Winterpelt Furbolg has a language learning component that doesn't make sense to be shared across characters, and the Glimmerrogg Racer reputation is more of a personal standing in the snail races."
Achievements will follow a similar trajectory, with some outliers like "Insane in the Membrane, since the hard part of this achievement is maxing out diametrically opposed reputations." Progress is going to be retroactively applied, too, so if you made small bits of progress to an achievement across multiple characters, that'll all be combined when you next log in.
There'll also be mechanisms to share things like map exploration, quest progress, and currencies across your Warband. All of it is confirmation that Blizzard really is throwing away its old sacred cows for the better—make no mistake, Warbands are a complete game changer for World of Warcraft. Mandatory repeat grinds are a dead and buried, may they never be missed.
