Rejoice! The Pre-Patch for World of Warcraft: The War Within is almost upon us. In mere hours (Tuesday, July 23, 7AM PDT), class updates, user interface changes, mount collection-wide Skyriding, and more will be making their way into the game. And best of all – Warbands activate! For a 20-year-long alt-a-holic like me, this is impending heaven – the ultimate quality of life upgrade.
One disappointment is that the actual Pre-Expansion Event “Radiant Echoes” won’t be live for another week (July 30th), but Blizzard haven’t been shy about posting a batch of articles outlining what’s on tap for July 23rd. The War Within Pre-Expansion Content Update Notes provides info on pretty much everything. You may have glanced over some of this content before but it’s newly up-to-date and worthy of a deep dive.
Radiant Echoes Event Quote:
“The event occurs in four stages and cycles between three zones. Portals in Dalaran will be available to take you directly to the event staging area and a return portal is available in each of the event zones so that players can quickly return to Dalaran and head into the next occurrence of the event. When the event is active in a zone, the portal will have an additional golden glow to indicate that it is active.
Players will be able to accumulate Residual Memories to use to purchase items from various vendors in each of the zones. The rewards that can be earned in this limited time event are: item level 480 equipment, 32 slot bag, 30 slot reagent bag, mounts, pets, and a heirloom ring.”
Break out the s’mores – it’s time for Warbands!
Warbands Quote:
“Expand the potential of all your World of Warcraft characters with account-wide progression across your Battle.net® account, regardless of faction—including shared Renown, a Warband bank, Achievements, Collections, and more! To help players continue expanding their collections and style their alternate characters how they want, any character can collect any item appearance, regardless of whether they can equip the item.”
Explore the notes while you wait through the inevitable “Extended Downtime” fairly certain to arrive before we can actually dive in.
Also in the news today, you’ll want to have a looksee at The War Within Season 1 and Raid Schedule Overview and User Interface and Quest Updates in The War Within articles.