3 quality of life changes coming in World of Warcraft: The War Within

There’s been a lot of hype around a lot of the major changes coming in World of Warcraft: The War Within — and with good reason. The Warband system is likely the biggest, allowing characters to benefit from even more of the player’s overall achievements than they did in World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, including an account-wide bank akin to a personal guild bank in size and utility.

With big changes like Warbands and the expansion of the Skyriding system (previously called Dragonriding), it’s easy for smaller things to slip through the cracks. Here are a few you might have missed.

Warband Mentors

We’ve reported on this one previously, but it’s worth mentioning again: for each character (up to 5) that you raise to level 80 in The War Within, your lower level alts will get a 5% experience boost. That means after you’ve leveled 5 characters to maximum, every other character you play will level 25% faster.

Additionally, if you unlock the Dynamic Duo achievement by leveling 2 different classes to maximum, you’ll acquire a new map toy to uncover all regions which have been fully explored on any Warband character with the press of a button. (We assume this toy will be granted retroactively to those who have already earned the achievement.) Hopefully, having Warband-wide exploration achievements will also reduce the achievement spam that such toys usually generate.

Spellbook search and filter

In addition to having a shiny new layout, the spellbook now features a search bar with a couple of quick toggles, including a “Missing from action bar” quick query and a button to hide passives. Like bag search, a spellbook query will filter for words found in the spell description, so it should make things easier to find even if you can’t remember the name of what you’re looking for.

This is one of those things that seems small, but it’ll likely save a ton of time and hassle going forward.

Skyriding talents and toggles anywhere

There was a bit of confusion during the launch of World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria regarding how to access a timerunner’s Dragonriding talents. While a couple solutions exist, The War Within makes all of that moot with a new option at the top of the Mounts pane. To spend your Skyriding Proficiency points (which you will now gain as you level rather than from Dragon Glyphs), open this pane and click the Skyriding dropdown from along the top.

Beneath the Skyriding dropdown you will find two options: a Skills and Unlocks button where you can view and assign your talents, and a new spell called Switch Flight Style which you can drag to your action bar or simply press from here. Switch Flight Style is a long cast which will dismount you and toggle between Skyriding and the old-school “steady” flight.

Another option which should probably be in this menu but which is currently tucked away inside the Skills and Unlocks pane is the Ride Along toggle. With the Ride Along Enabled option selected, a single party member can ride along with you “on specific mounts”, forgoing the need to skyride themselves. Previously, this toggle was only available by speaking with an NPC in the Dragon Isles.