What To Do First In WoW: The War Within Pre-Patch (2024)

There are a lot of new World of Warcraft: The War Within features that have been added to the game as of the 11.0 pre-patch update, including a variety of the new TWW systems. Upon logging in, you will find that some things have changed in TWW – like the new Warband camp in the character select screen.

Thanks to all these changes, you may find it hard to decide what to do first in The War Within prepatch. Players returning to the game after a long break to play the new WoW expansion will find it all even more unfamiliar. This guide explains what you should do first in WoW: TWW, including suggestions for new content and features to check out, as well as a basic overview of the Radiant Echoes TWW prepatch exclusive event.

Customize Your Warband Character Select Screen

After getting past the log-in screen, which shows off the new The War Within artwork and introduces the new TWW main menu music, you'll find that the Character Select screen has been radically changed. Instead of static characters in front of a race-related backdrop, four of your characters can be selected to sit in front of a live-rendered fire at a camp.

Drag and drop four of your characters into the "Favorites" tab at the top left of your character list to see them show up at camp. Their position at camp corresponds to their placement on the list – the first Favorite sits on the left, while the last of the four Favorites sits at the far right.

It's a welcome change to the character select screen that hasn't seen any major changes (barring the Character Creation UI) in many expansions. Take a minute to set up your main Warband characters, but don't worry too much about who is and isn't in your favorites. All of your characters count in your Warband for the new Warband features, your top four favorites are just the characters who are displayed by default on the new Character Select screen.

Try Out New WoW Settings & TWW QoL Options

Set up your new Character Select screen, then log into your favorite character and get ready to take on The War Within pre-patch content. Before you get too deep into the new talents, Skyriding system, or the new prepatch event, though, it's a good idea to check out some of the great new TWW quality of life options – and there are a lot of them.

Number one on many players' minds is the new Arachnophobia mode. This setting turns every single Spider-type enemy in the game into a Crab. It's debatable how much less scary these enemies are, but for people who are truly disturbed by spiders, Arachophobia Mode is going to be a must-enable setting for The War Within, especially in Azj-Kahet.

But there are a lot more new options too, some of which aren't actually highlighted in the normal Settings menus.

• A new Camera optionThe War Within introduces allows the camera to be obstructed by thin environmental objects. Instead of jumping closer to your character, some objects in the world will now allow the camera to pass behind them. Normally, this would obstruct view of your character, but you can enable a Silhouette to appear instantly upon this feature being activated.
  • This is not available in the normal settings menu. Open up chat, and type "/console cameraIndirectVisibility [1]" to turn on the new WoW camera obstruction mode.
  • You can turn on Silhouette mode in the Combat section of the Settings menu.
  • You can adjust how sensitive this feature is by typing the follow-up command "/console cameraIndirectOffset [0.0 to 10.0]", entering a number between 0.0 and 10.0 to modify how thick objects must be to enable the new WoW camera mode.
• Because Warband progress is shared across your entire account, quests that have already been completed by another one of your characters will be highlighted on pick-up.
• Guilds can now invite members from across Realms, increasing the pool to recruit from even further after Guilds became factionless.
• New quest icons and quest tracking options allow more control over the world map, and more control over targeting certain quests over others.

Check Out New 11.0 Talents & Re-allocate Points

Upon logging into your characters after the 11.0 update, Talent points will be completely reset. This is because almost every class received major class overhaulsThe War Within will properly finalize, and a completely reworked Talent tree on top of that. Though Hero Talents are not yet available as they unlock at Level 71, there is still plenty to parse to get to know your Class as it will work in the next WoW expansion.

Some Talents have been removed, changed, or swapped for other places in each Talent tree to allow more choice in how you play your character. It will be impossible to know which specs and Talent arrays are best until The War Within launches, but you can use the Prepatch to test out your class, see if the changes work for you, and try out different Talent options before the release of the expansion.

Try Skyriding With ALL Flying Mounts (& Druid Form)

One of the most highly requested features to be made baseline in World of Warcraft is the Skyriding system. Introduced in Dragonflight as the expansion-exclusive Dragonriding, Skyriding is a completely different form of flying than many WoW players have become accustomed to. Instead of flying from one static point to another relatively slowly, Skyriding lets you ride the winds and use a variety of in-flight mechanics to soar over the landscape.

Originally, you could only use a select number of Dragonriding mounts with this flight system. But as of the 11.0 prepatch, almost all WoW mounts can be used for Skyriding, bringing this speedy and satisfying traversal system to non-Dragon mounts for the first time.

Take some time and look back on some of your old favorite WoW flying mounts that have been neglected since the launch of Dragonflight and set some new favorites. You might not be able to customize the Clutch of Ji-Kun like you can customize the Dragonflight Dragon mounts, but it's definitely nice to be able to choose any Flying mount without worrying about losing out on Skyriding.

Start The Radiant Echoes TWW Prepatch Event

The Radiant Echoes event is the The War Within pre-patch event, which brings players back to iconic locations and landmarks from World of Warcraft history. To start this event, you must have completed the Dark Heart questline, after which you can talk to Khadgar again to learn about the Radiant Echoes of Azeroth.

On launch, this event took place once every 90 minutes, however, a recent major update to the event made it constantly rotate in the active zone, rotating zones on an hourly basis. After this update, you can repeatedly run the same world events in the active zone for more Residual memories, and repeatedly defeat the boss that is summoned at the end of the event until the zone timer runs out. It doesn't end when the timer runs out, it just goes to the next zone.

There are three Radiant Echoes zones: Dragonblight, Dustwallow Marsh, and the Searing Gorge, each of which can be accessed from the Portal Room beneath Dalaran (Legion). In each zone, players have to complete six world quests to summon a Remembered Boss, one of three of the most iconic enemies in WoW history.

• Dragonblight: Remembered Lich King
• Dustwallow Marsh: Remembered Onyxia
• Searing Gorge: Remembered Firelord

Every day you can pick up a quest that grants a ton of Residual Memories, the primary currency of the pre-patch (this used to be Weekly per character). This new currency can be used to get Raid-ready gear (for the end of Dragonflight), a variety of cosmetics (like Pets and Mounts) with the Azerite effect, and a handful of other handy and even Heirloom-unlocking items.

Start farming this event early to get useful gear that you can trade between your Warband characters, allowing you to jump into the endgame for Dragonflight relatively easily. Remember that you can trade this currency between characters, too.

World of Warcraft: The War Within

Franchise

Warcraft

Base Game

World of Warcraft

Platform(s)

PC

Released

August 26, 2024

Publisher(s)

Blizzard

Genre

MMORPG