World of Warcraft players aren't pleased with The War Within pre-patch event: With 90 minute waits in between bosses and somewhat-stingy currency rewards

GamesMMOWorld of WarcraftWorld of Warcraft players aren’t pleased with The War Within pre-patch event: With 90 minute waits in between bosses and somewhat-stingy currency rewardsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

A radiant echo of Ragnaros in World of Warcraft: Dragonflight raises his mighty hammer.

Recent updatesAugust 2, 2024:Blizzard has issued a quick-fix patch that addresses most of the concerns below—improving rewards, looping the event in the zones it’s impacted, and more.You can read the full details here. Original story follows.

Recent updates

August 2, 2024:Blizzard has issued a quick-fix patch that addresses most of the concerns below—improving rewards, looping the event in the zones it’s impacted, and more.You can read the full details here. Original story follows.

The War Within’s pre-patch is here for World of Warcraft—and it’s kind of a banger when it comes toquality of life features. There’s the Warband system, better transmog farming options, dragonriding coming to all flying mounts, and, uh, a weird glitch thatbrings your alts back from the dead, apparently.

The actual pre-patch event, though? Similar to the waves of grumbling over Plunderstorm andMists of Pandaria: Remix, it’s rough out there.

Here’s the rundown: TheRadiant Echoesevent, like a lot of pre-patch events, gives players the opportunity to grind out a unique currency for powerful catch-up gear, mounts, cosmetics, and all the usual suspects. To get these, you need to cycle between three zones where an event will pop every 90 minutes.

The complaints are a two-parter. First off, the event is a little stingy with its rewards. Let’s use a chest piece as a temperature check: One of these items will run you 5,000 residual memories (the event’s currency).

There’s a weekly quest for every zone on rotation that awards 1,500 memories per turn-in for a total of 4,500 memories a week, given there’s three zones. Killing an event’s main boss gets you 500, killing a mini-boss during the “Scattered Memories” phase gets you 25, and the events themselves get you 10.

Let’s just ballpark that at around, say, 6,000-7,000 memories a week if you do the weeklies and stop—assuming there’s a lot of players in the zone and you’re not going to be there for every Scattered Memory boss kill.

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Granted, with the advent of Warband currencies, you can share echoes between your alts—so you could repeat the weekly quests across four max-level characters for far more memories if you wanted. Still, a mandatory repeat grind just to funnel memory bucks to the character you want gear on kinda sucks, on the face of it.

Mind, you do get gear drops from the event itself, but its two mounts will both run you 20,000 memories a pop (and it’s still frustrating to rely on RNG if you’re aiming for something specific, anyway).

The other half of complaints are aimed at the actual event cycle. This being a populated MMO, the actual “event” part usually comes and goes very quickly, leaving players waiting for anhour and a halfbefore it spawns again. If you want to see how busy these things get, here’s a nice, apt screenshot from our resident WoW enjoyer and senior guides writerSarah James.

(Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

A radiant echoes event wherein the Lich King is being swarmed by players.

Now, as per the explanatory blog post, Blizzard intends to reduce this timer down to 60, then 30 minutes as the event progresses, but why not just have it start at 30? Who benefits here?

Players are, it seems, not having a good time. As one player on thegame’s subredditputs it: “So wait a second, if I am not there at the EXACT time the event rotates, I’m essentially f*cked for another 90 minutes until it rotates again. Awesome.”

Things are, expectedly, even worse on the official WoW forums. “This is a prime example of Blizzard not respecting the players time,” writesone playerafter asking if the event was “some kind of joke”. Anotheraddsthat “even the Shadowlands pre-patch event was better than this, and we all know how that expansion went.” Oof.

I’ve yet to hop in and give it a whirl myself (Final Fantasy 14’s savage tier just came out and I’m on that crafter grind—papa needs a new bike) but this does seem to me like an easily avoidable situation.

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