Hello, Librarian Husky here! Welcome back! Pre-patch is not long away; it drops on the 23rd and the event starts on the 30th. Some content will be removed from the game, some things will stay, and some things will be easier, like leveling, while others will be harder. The mission for me and my team today is to help you sort out what you want to do next.

Raids

Let’s talk about Raids. The Awakened raid rotation is going to continue until the Pre-patch event begins. After that, all three Raids will become permanently Awakened until the War Within launches. You don’t need to clear them right now, but it would leave you with some time to focus on preparing alts and enjoying the new transmog stuff because it’s going to be way more efficient and doing things like honing your UI.

Clearing Awaken Raids

Clearing the awaken Raids on normal difficulty, all of them, will reward you with the voyaging Wildering Mount. It’s quite nice and it’s also sky-riding enabled. Then, clearing all awaken Raids on heroic difficulty gets you the Awakened Hero title. Push that to Mythic, and you will unlock portals to each of the raids. These portals will be a bit of a lifesaver for farming up your transmogs later.

Pre-Patch Benefits

Pre-patch makes these portals way more useful because they, along with dungeon portals, are being made account-wide with warbands to do some specific amounts. This includes the ahead of the curve for R.

Shadow-Flamed Version Availability

This Shadow-flamed version of him remains available until the Pre-patch. If you missed it in season 3, you’ve got another chance now. You can obtain it by defeating Farak on non-Awakened heroic difficulty, which will be considerably easier than the Awakened version you’ll have to tackle beyond the Pre-patch. So, definitely hit that up now.

Mythic Farak Mount

The Mythic Farak mount will become significantly harder to obtain after the Pre-patch. If you’re not planning to do Awakened Mythic anytime soon, your best chance to clear it in Mythic is during a non-Awakened week. This is your way to get that mount before the War Within officially launches.

Drop Rate Changes

When the War Within officially launches, the mount will follow the rules we expect for Mythic-only mounts. Its drop rate will decrease from 100% to 1%, making it significantly harder to obtain.

Farming Legendaries

Farming for Nazaro and Falath will be more challenging post-Pre-patch. The items you need come from Sareith, Abis, and Farak in Mrail.

Acquiring Legendary Items

If you’ve not acquired them, definitely now is the time to do that because all the Raids will become permanently Awakened. Being Awakened doesn’t increase your chance of getting the legendary item.

Mount Drop Rates

There are mounts with drop rates that will not change with War Within, but they will become much harder to get. These include the Raz transformation from Vault, the Shadowflame Highland Drake from Abis, and the Red Farak from Amir Drasil. It will be harder in the future when our characters aren’t powerful enough to solo the prior expansion, and you’ll struggle to get enough players together for a group. So now’s definitely the time.

Antique Bronze Bullion

Speaking of Raids, we have the Antique Bronze Bullion. These are pretty big now and will likely disappear when the Pre-patch ends. You definitely want to make use of them. You can earn these by defeating Awakened raid bosses and through the Mythic dungeon weekly quest. Even LFR difficulty rewards these, so if you’re far behind, do not worry; you can get them from LFR.

Catch-Up System

The catch-up system for Antique Bronze Bullion works such that you can normally loot one bullion per week, but it kicks in if you’ve fallen behind the curve. For example, if we’re 10 weeks into the patch and I have 10 bullion from playing, but you have zero, I would keep getting one per week, but you would get multiple until you’re caught up. They just keep dropping if you keep doing the content, and since they drop from LFR, it is easy to catch up.

Spending Antique Bronze Bullion

You can spend them on really powerful gear, but at the end of the expansion, there’s no point. Instead, I think you should invest them in the Cosmetics Vendor. It sells raid weapon transmogs for one bullion each. You even get to pick the color of gear you want, so with enough alts, you could make massive progress. There are some really cool weapons to get there.

Jigglesworth Mount

You can also get the Jigglesworth Mount, which is a bit weird, but it is the Shadowlands season 4 mount and otherwise unobtainable. You can buy it for only three bullion. Basically, that means focusing on the bullion will allow you to get loads of weapon transmogs and also a mount.

Season 4 Mythic Plus Rewards

Season 4’s end marks the disappearance of several Mythic Plus rewards, and the season will end with the Pre-patch on the 23rd. Here’s what you can focus on until then. If you hit 1500 rating, you’ll get the Draconic title. With today’s gear, that will be a walk in the park. Hitting 2000 rating gets you Keystone Master, which grants you the Infinite Armageddon Mount, a pretty neat mount. With today’s gear, 2000 is real easy.

Higher Ratings and Rewards

At 2500 rating, you will get a feat of strength. Timing any Dragonflight dungeon at plus 10 or higher will earn you a portal to that dungeon. With War Within, these portals will be account-wide, making it handy for getting around the world.

PvP Goals and Rewards

If you’re reading this, you’re probably like me and firmly out of the running for the top rewards. Let’s knock out PvP. You need 1800 rating for the elite armor sets and 2400 for the elite weapon arsenals. For 2400 rating, you also get a tabard. The Gladiator’s mount looks pretty nice and is for five 3v3 matches above 2400 rating. If you’re going extra hard, there are the top 0.1% titles for 3v3 and solo Shuffle.

Vicious Mount

The other side, which is far more achievable for most of us, is the vicious mount. It comes from filling this bar by doing solo Shuffle Arena and RBGs above a rating of 1000. This is rather achievable, but it’s not a full FOMO situation. The way the vicious mounts work is that you can buy prior ones using a saddle, so basically, don’t worry.

End of Pre-Patch Events

The mix then ends on August 19th, which is just a few days before the War Within Early Access begins. That’s the tail end of the Pre-patch, so you don’t have to fret right now. You have loads of time. There are, of course, a ton of cosmetics to be slurped up, but I think you should focus on the ones that are exclusive or otherwise very hard to obtain.

Exclusive Achievements and Rewards

What that means is all Feat of Strength achievements and their rewards, the Gush heirloom weapons, the class sets which are recolors of the Trading Post set, the Theore tabard and toy, and finally, the 32 mount recolors. That is quite a lot.

Tracking Progress

Good news is, I’ve got something to make it easy for you—a tracking spreadsheet with all you need. Bronze costs and check marks for everything so you can track your own progress. The good news is Blizzard substantially buffed bronze rewards from just doing the daily quests, LFG, and a few raid clears. It is now blazingly fast.

Black Market Auction House Inventory

Now is the time; the current inventory of the BMAH rotates out at the end of August. I’m not talking about the auction stuff we’ve had for years now. This is a new vendor at the Black Market Auction House packed with gold-themed recolors, and they probably are made of gold because they’re bloody expensive. They will cost you a lot, but they rotate out pretty soon.

Dragonflight Cosmetics

A quick note on Dragonflight cosmetics: this is not essential, but I think it’s something you should do now because it will be easier when Dragonflight’s content is populated. The Dragonflight tier sets look fantastic, and getting raid groups is going to be easier now than in the future. There are crafty ways of earning these tier set cosmetics, and we made a guide full of pointers that you might find helpful. Now is absolutely the time.

World Awoken Achievement

A World Awoken is the expansion-wide meta achievement. Earning it is a big feat and one you should do now because it will be harder when the aisles are depopulated. Now you know what stuff’s going or at least what will be harder to obtain.

Preparation Actions

The Pre-patch will bring blazing leveling speeds, so whether you’re choosing Mob Remix or Chromie Time Walking, you’ll be zooming from 1 to 70 faster than ever. This means that right now is the perfect time to prepare and take action.

Focus on Other Activities

Now is probably the time to focus on other things rather than leveling, especially because any leveling that you do via the Radiant Echo event will also earn you that event currency. So, you may as well focus your leveling time then. But there is crucial action to take before the Pre-patch, and that is to create an evoker.

Creating an Evoker

Currently, evokers start at level 58, but post Pre-patch, evokers will start at level 10 like any allied race. By creating an evoker now, you are saving yourself 48 levels of leveling, which will save you time. So, create one now, do the intro experience, and park the character in a capital city to earn some rested XP.

Professions and War Within

Next, professions in War Within make them far more playable. The big picture is that it is still the same system as Dragonflight; progression won’t carry over, but now is a good time to get familiar with it. Dragonflight’s usability problems, like often feeling behind in knowledge, were rough, and War Within is trying to fix them.

Concentration and Crafting Orders

They’ve also got Concentration, which is basically the replacement for the RNG of inspiration, making crafting more predictable. There are also NPC crafting orders that refresh twice a week, making your progression smoother. If you are far behind, more of these NPC work orders will spawn. This means if the profession problems of Dragonflight kept you from engaging, now is a brilliant time to plan your professions and get ready for the expansion.

Warband Bank

Another tangentially related improvement is the Warband Bank. It will revolutionize multicar crafting by centralizing your crafting reagents, reducing the amount of bag sorting drudgery. This change will be a significant quality-of-life improvement.

Bank Slots and Gold Management

Thing is, it comes at a cost; it is just over 3 million gold to unlock all of the bank slots. The good news, though, is that getting the first few is a lot cheaper. Here’s how much it costs: that’s a lot of money, and you should probably work out your gold earning goals in the game to make the most of that when the expansion comes out. To make that seem just a little bit more alluring, there’s actually a quest that will give you a toy that lets you access this bank anywhere, which is pretty crazy. You basically have an account-wide stash.

Organizing and Preparation

Next, I want to talk about some things that you’ve probably been putting off: little frustrations like bags and UI things in WoW that feel like work. The way to do this is to think, “What will my future self be glad that I did now?” For me, my to-do list includes cleaning out the bank and bags for all of my characters, clearing out quest logs, and reviewing add-ons to cull those I’m not using or won’t use. Doing a spring clean is super high value; nothing is worse than logging in on launch day just to be driven mad by your UI or kicking yourself for not emptying your bags.

Joining a Guild

One of the best things for me in WoW is the guild that I play with. If you’re not in a guild, now is a really good time to start looking because lots of guilds will be recruiting. Being in a guild enhances the game experience significantly.

Transmogs and Warbands

When the Pre-patch hits, anything in your bags will actually be learned account-wide. With warbands, you can learn transmogs from other armor types. This will give you a big day-one surge for your mog collection. It will be great, and I’m certainly wondering what will happen with the Idari.

Preparing for Pre-Patch

Warglaive in my hunter’s bank now. A quirk of this system is gear tokens; they cannot be used by the wrong class, but Pre-patch will make them warbound, meaning you can send them to your alts. So, do not sell all the random vendor trash in your bags. Keep that stuff there because it will be learned account-wide when the Pre-patch happens.

Managing Gear and Tokens

If you’re leveling characters and get bits of gear that the character you’re leveling cannot use, keep them and put them in your bank. When the Pre-patch launches, that stuff will be learned account-wide. Other than that, you can prepare with a little bit of knowledge and experience.

Following the Story

There’s a bunch of lore that leads into this expansion, so if you’re not up to date with it, now is perhaps the time to start paying attention to the story. If you do, you’ll get more out of it. We will have guides to help you with that coming up soon.

Taking a Break

Now is actually one of the best times to not play World of Warcraft. You will likely enjoy The War Within more if you’ve played other games and had a good time. When you come back to World of Warcraft, your palate will be cleansed, and you can appreciate the new content more.

Thank you for diving into our guide! Discover our exceptional WoW Retail boosting services and elevate your gaming experience with our top-tier boosts.