Today, The War Within pre-patch goes live in World of Warcraft. Along with the patch details, Blizzard has also released dates for the start of the dungeon and raid schedule for the new expansion.
The pre-expansion patch includes a number of new features, including Warbands, Skyriding, updated maps, and more. Level 70 players can also start a new questline, Visions of Azeroth, which leads into the story of The War Within.
Warbands make their debut In this patch and offer the ability for you to share Renown, achievements, collections, and even a Warband bank with all of the characters on your account. This also means that every character on your account has access to any of the item appearances you've collected, in addition to class tokens from Legacy raids. So feel free to dress up your alts in new ways.
Skyriding is the new name for Dragonriding, since the update expands the ability to many flying mounts in most flyable areas all around Azeroth. This gives you two options, choose Skyriding, which you can now learn at level 10, or the older style introduced back in The Burning Crusade, which they call Steady Flight.
There are a number of other features available in this pre-patch, including some of the adjustments to talents, balance changes, and more. There's also a new PVP feature, Rated Battleground Blitz solo queue.
On July 30th, the pre-expansion event, Radiant Echoes, will also go live. This event runs through the expansion's release on August 26th. Participate to collect Residual Memories, which you can use as an event currency to purchase items from vendors in the zones.
With all of these additions, Dragonflight Season 4 comes to an end and we get to look ahead. The key dates for upcoming content have been released, with August 20th being the date of the PVP pre-season, and August 22nd the start of expansion early access and normal dungeons open, before the full launch on the 26th.
Beyond that, September 10th opens The War Within Season 1, with raids opening up, followed by additional unlocks the next two weeks.
