WoW: The War Within Release Date Announced

In what struck me as quite a bold move, Blizzard Entertainment has officially announced not just one, but the next three expansions coming to World of Warcraft. These three expansions, titled The War Within, Midnight, and The Last Titan, are collectively referred to as “the Worldsoul Saga.” The first of these three expansions is slated to release this year, thus bringing a conclusion to the current expansion, Dragonflight. I’d like to briefly discuss several major details about The War Within, including its officially confirmed release date (barring any abrupt delays, of course). Let’s get down to brass tacks, folks.

I suppose we’ll start with the facts that I can report in a more rapid-fire fashion and work our way up to the aspects that need more detailed explanations. First up, World of Warcraft: The War Within is currently scheduled to launch on Monday, August 26, 2024, at 3 PM Pacific Time. The War Within is planned to follow Blizzard’s global launch schedule they’ve used for the past several expansions, so TWW should be live whenever your regional equivalent of that hour arrives. You can currently pre-order The War Within if you’re interested; I’ll go into more detail about that shortly.

As a related note, Blizzard has now officially confirmed that the limited-time WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria event is scheduled to conclude at 4 PM Pacific Time on Monday, August 19, 2024, exactly one week before the launch of The War Within. This is purely speculation on my part, but I would imagine that all the Timerunning characters that have been created during WoW Remix will become normal “retail” WoW characters during that week. Blizzard hasn’t said anything about that idea at the time of writing, though, so it seems we’ll just have to wait for any news that might crop up.

It’s a tradition that new World of Warcraft expansions have what’s known as a “pre-patch” before the full expansion’s launch. Pre-patches often contain their own limited-time events, and The War Within is no exception to that. The War Within’s pre-patch event, called “Radiant Echoes,” will allow players to battle powerful memories of major villains from WoW’s past and earn currency that can be spent on, among other things, powerful catch-up equipment you can transfer to any alts you might have that are under-geared. You can check out Wowhead’s preview of the Radiant Echoes event here if you want more details.

Speaking of the Radiant Echoes event, however, it’s important to note that this extravaganza will likely not launch until at least a few days after The War Within’s pre-patch reaches live servers. At the time of writing, there’s no confirmed release date for the pre-patch itself, but Wowhead reports that an in-game splash screen claims the Radiant Echoes event will begin on July 30, 2024. Wowhead has used this information to offer some speculation as to when the content update might be available, which you can read more about here if you’re interested.

The War Within’s pre-patch will also bring with it some major changes to existing gameplay systems and mechanics, as well as introduce some entirely new systems that Blizzard will be implementing and expanding upon throughout The War Within’s tenure as the current expansion. Some minor entries of that list of updates are as follows: Newly-created Dracthyr Evoker characters will now start at level 10 rather than 58; the Chromie Time leveling system will be updated to cover levels 10-71; and Dragonflight will replace Battle for Azeroth as the first expansion through which new players will be required to level a character.

You’ll also find that it’ll take considerably less time to get characters from level 1 to 70 once The War Within’s pre-patch is live compared to the time it takes to do so in Dragonflight. More specifically, according to Icy Veins, players will need 53.94% less character experience to progress from level 1 to 70 in The War Within compared to the current situation on live servers. If you’re curious about which specific level brackets are the most drastically changed by this update, Icy Veins has a list of those stats available to read here.

Before I get to the new system coming in The War Within’s pre-patch that has me the most excited, I also want to note one final publicized change to an existing gameplay mechanic. All characters will now automatically learn the Master Riding skill upon reaching level 30, and the Master Riding skill’s flying mount speed will be increased from its current 310% to 420%. If you’re anything like me, you’re eager to see the extent to which that significant boost to flight speed will allow you to “blaze” through the skies, if you catch my drift.

Finally, there’s what I consider the most exciting aspect of The War Within’s pre-patch, namely the new Warbands system. In brief, the Warbands system will make it much easier for you to play as many alt characters as you might want by making huge portions of WoW’s gameplay account-wide, regardless of past hindrances that affect players’ ability to mail important items to their alts, such as having characters on many different servers. With this new system, you’ll be able to share things like equipment, crafting reagents, and many different currencies among all your characters much more easily than ever before.

The main way you can go about this is by purchasing tabs in your Warband Bank. The Warband Bank functions very similarly to existing guild banks, except the contents of these banks will only be accessible to your characters rather than any other players with whom you might be in the same guild. You can have a maximum of 5 tabs in your Warband Bank, each of which contains 98 inventory slots. The catch is that Warband Bank tabs cost increasing amounts of gold – specifically, buying all 5 tabs will cost you about 3.1 million gold. You’d better start saving up!

I mentioned earlier that I’d like to share more details about pre-ordering The War Within, so I’ll conclude this report by doing exactly that. As has been the case with the past several WoW expansions, there are currently three digital editions of The War Within available for pre-order. Each edition offers more bonuses and goodies in exchange for the extra cash you’ll have to shell out. Here’s a chart explaining which edition of TWW will give you what additional bonuses. Interestingly, those who pre-order the most expensive edition will gain access to The War Within four days before its full launch.