WoW: The War Within Pre-Patch Drops Soon

Fellow denizens of Azeroth, it is nearly time to begin waging yet another war in the World of Warcraft, specifically The War Within. Although the expansion itself won’t launch until late August, its pre-expansion update (“pre-patch”) will be live quite soon. In fact, you can likely even download it right now if you’ve allowed your Battle.net client to download pre-release content in advance. Here’s a decently detailed rundown of what this update contains to make the most of its updates and overhauls. I’ll begin with the more rapid-fire bits of news and go forward from there.

The War Within’s pre-patch, also known as Patch 11.0, is scheduled to be released on Tuesday, July 23rd, 2024 in North America. As is usually the case with major WoW updates, there’s no telling how long World of Warcraft might be unplayable due to maintenance on that day, it’s nigh impossible to predict exactly how long the game’s servers will need to be kept offline. At this point, all I can offer is my usual advice: I wouldn’t skip work on patch day just to play the second the servers come back up. I suspect most employers wouldn’t appreciate that, anyway.

Even though this update will launch on July 23rd, its unique pre-expansion update (known as Radiant Echoes) will not begin until a week later, on July 30th, 2024. The Radiant Echoes event will allow you to complete timed activities in certain zones and earn an event-specific currency that you can spend on, among other things, catch-up gear for your alt characters who might need some upgrades before tackling The War Within’s leveling experience. There will also be rather powerful Dalaran-themed weapon and armor sets, and a new Heirloom ring you can purchase with the event’s currency if you’re interested.

Patch 11.0 will introduce multiple new systems and updates to existing game mechanics, many of which will be further fleshed out as The War Within’s content roadmap progresses. These features and updates include, but are not necessarily limited to: Warbands; Skyriding, the permanent replacement for the Dragonriding mechanic introduced in Dragonflight; and the ability to create cross-realm guilds. I’d like to go over some notable details about each of these. In the event you want to know more about any of these topics beyond what I list here, I’ll include links to further reading where appropriate.

First up is the new Warbands system. This will allow you to share things like crafting reagents, character gear, faction renown and reputations, and even many different in-game currencies like gold among all characters on your World of Warcraft account much more easily than ever before. There’s a common misconception going around that you can only have four characters together in one Warband. This is not the case; your Warband contains all existing characters on your WoW account, regardless of their faction or the server on which they were created. No more having to mail things between alts!

I should also note that Warbands will only include all characters in each individual World of Warcraft account. In other words, if you have multiple WoW accounts that are all part of the same Battle.net account, or if you have WoW accounts in more than one global region, you won’t be able to combine all the characters from each of those accounts into a single Warband. According to Wowhead, the process of creating your Warband will automatically begin the first time you log into WoW once this update is live, though you might have to wait a bit for this to complete.

A major part of Warbands is the Warband Bank. This functions almost exactly like existing Guild Banks, except the contents of your Warband Bank are only accessible to your characters as opposed to any other players with whom you might be in a guild. Players can have a maximum of 5 tabs in their Warband Bank, each of which contains 98 inventory slots and can be customized and set up in the same ways Guild Bank tabs can. You’ll have to purchase each Warband Bank tab with increasing amounts of gold, although the first two tabs are likely easily affordable for most players.

As I said earlier, you can store things like equipment, crafting reagents, and gold in your Warband Bank. However, unlike Guild Banks, you can’t spend gold directly from your Warband Bank to pay for equipment repairs as you can with funds deposited in Guild Banks. You’ll first have to withdraw any gold you want to spend. That being said, your characters can use crafting reagents via their professions directly from your Warband Bank without having to withdraw those materials first, just like how the character-specific Reagent Bank works. You don’t have to be near a bank to make use of this latter feature.

You’ll also find that many pieces of character equipment coming in The War Within will have the new “Warband until Equipped” tag attached to them. You can deposit these items in your Warband Bank so they can be retrieved later by your other characters who can equip them. So for example, if you happen to loot any “Warband until Equipped” Plate armor as a class that can’t wear Plate armor, you can store it in your Warband Bank and save it until the next time you’re playing as a character that can use it. I’m sure this will indeed be quite handy.

Another part of the Warbands mechanic also makes it so that Transmog appearances can now be collected by all classes, regardless of whether your current character can use those appearances or not. If you want to run through a legacy dungeon or raid to loot a specific set of Leather armor, this change means you no longer have to clear that instance as a class that can use the appearances you’re looking to loot. Using Transmog appearances is still restricted in the same ways as always, though – no Mages wearing full Paladin appearances anytime soon.

My last note about Warbands is that with the introduction of this system, most achievements will become account-wide and many different currencies can be easily and quickly transferred between your characters. However, it’s important to note that some transferable currencies, such as Honor, don’t have a 100% conversion rate. That means you’ll lose a certain amount of these currencies each time you send them between your characters, so you’ll have to account for that. Hopefully these losses won’t be prohibitively high, but time will tell. Currencies you can send between characters will reportedly be marked with a campfire icon.

Moving on, that brings me to Skyriding. Arguably the biggest change compared to the original Dragonriding is that Skyriding will be usable with tons more flying mounts. More specifically, 464 existing flying mounts will be updated to allow them to use Skyriding. Wowhead has a list of all those mounts you can check out here. Dragonriding Glyphs (now called Skyriding Glyphs) will still exist in The War Within, but thankfully you’ll no longer be required to collect them in order to unlock new Skyriding skills. Instead, you’ll passively gain Skyriding Proficiency as you level up; you’ll unlock new skills that way.

If you’re not keen on Skyriding, you’ll be able to switch relatively quickly and easily between that and Steady Flight, the term used to refer to the original flying mount system introduced all the way back in The Burning Crusade. You’ll just click a button in your Spellbook, wait for a five-second cast, and then you’ve switched to your preferred flight mode. In order to use Steady Flight in The War Within’s new zones, though, you’ll first have to complete a multi-part achievement. You’ll be stuck with Skyriding until you do that, but at least that sure beats walking everywhere.

Lastly, players will now be able to create and join cross-realm guilds once The War Within’s pre-expansion update is live. Blizzard has also removed the previous restrictions on cross-realm Mythic Raiding as part of this patch, which I’m sure will interest a not-insignificant portion of WoW’s player base. Keep in mind that Mythic Raiding won’t be available until the start of The War Within Season 1, however, which will likely happen a few weeks after the expansion has been released. I think that just about covers everything, folks! I hope to see many of you in Azeroth on patch day.