The new expansion for World of Warcraft called The War Within is releasing in just about a month from now. I've been quite excited for this ever since they announced in November of last year. The current expansion, Dragonflight, has been really good in my opinion and I've been playing it on and off for the almost two years it has been live. It is however time to move on to something new and the current pre-patch that has been released for the game is the first step towards that.
Warbands are here
This patch doesn't bring any new content to the game. The purpose of the pre-patch is to introduce the technical changes and features that are coming to the game in the expansion. There's a lot to be excited about this time around. Warbands are one of those things.
Warbands makes the game a lot more alt friendly and casual player friendly that it has been before. Your warband consists of all your characters. These characters now share their reputation standings with the in-game factions as well as all kinds of currency between them. Prior to this update all of this used to be separate for each character making it a small nightmare for casual players to re-.roll their characters if they wanted to play a new class or race. You'd basically have to do a ton of grinding to get all of that back to where it was with your main character. With this update we don't have to worry about that anymore seeing as all of that is now shared progress.
Another huge thing is that transmog and appearances can be collected for all classes by all classes. Before you could only collect transmog and appearances that a certain character or class could use. Rogues for instance could only collect appearances for leather armor, one-handed swords, one-handed axes, fist weapons and dagger. Now rogues can also collect the appearances for other classes meaning no drops are even wasted. This is a huge quality of life feature for the game.
If you're a collector you basically had to farm appearances for each specific character before. Now, all of that is shared as well. It's so frustrating farming an old raid for a two-handed sword appearance over and over again that never drops for your warrior only to have it drop every week on your rogue who can't collect the appearance.
Dynamic flight
One of the coolest features that was introduced in the Dragonflight expansions was skyriding. It's basically a much more fun and interactive way to fly with different skills to increase speed and height that's also affected by gravity. The only downside to this was that it was locked to just a few months that you gradually unlocked throughout the expansion. All your 500 mounts that you've been hard at work collecting were now unusable and collecting dust in your collection.
This patch introduces dynamic flying which means you can now use skyriding on almost all the mounts in the game that supports flying. It's such a huge breath of fresh air to not be stuck using only 6 different mounts. I've been sitting here for an hour cycling through the different mounts I have to see how their animations are and it's been a lot of fun. A big win for this patch in my opinion.
There's a few hiccups to address with this patch but overall it's a big upgrade to the game. Once they sort out all the weird balancing changes that has happened it's gonna be basically perfect. There is a pre-expansion event starting in a few days so I'm quite excited to give that a try as well.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.