World of Warcraft: The War Within's pre-patch is coming soon—alongside Warbands, a quality-of-life game changer that lets you share rep, gear, and currencies across your alts

World of Warcraft: The War Within won't be kicking off until August 26—but some of its marquee features, including Skyriding and Warbands, are going to be arriving early as per anannouncement post by Blizzard on the game's official website.

Landing July 23, The War Within pre-patch will see players answering «the Call of the Radiant Echoes». This event has players battling across three zones in 90-minute cycles (which will get faster as the event goes on, as a catch-up mechanic).

During these events, you'll need to put down echoes of past bosses—including Ragnaros, the Lich King, and Onyxia—to grab Residual Memories. These'll get you fun transmogs, an heirloom ring, item level 480 gear, mounts, the whole shebang. It looks like it's gonna be a fun romp around Azeroth before we all get strapped into Metzen's three-expansion long wild ride, but I'm personally more excited about two juicy quality-of-life features: Skyriding, and Warbands.

Skyriding is pretty straightforward to explain, so I'll start there: A ton of flying mounts, including druid flight forms, are going to be converted over to the new Dragonriding system. This is massive, since Dragonriding—a more fluid, momentum-based way to get around—has been one of the best additions to WoW in years. Skyriding marks its graduation from expansion-specific feature to evergreen travel buff.

Warbands, however, are a little more complex. Thankfully there's a full explainer post that gets into the nitty-gritty, which I'll summarise below.

Warbands mark the start of Blizzard's new alt-friendly approach to WoW. Your character select screen will now be split up into «scenes», which are little camps with your characters standing in them. They're a little bare-bones presentation wise at the moment, but Blizzard's planning to add more backdrops going forward.

While these scenes only let you add four characters to each, that's mostly just for flavour—all of your alts are going to be a part of the same Warband, including