WoW’s new Warbands have an amazing toy you need to use now

World of Warcraft‘s Pre-Expansion Content Update is now live and it’s brought a ton of changes ahead of The War Within’s release. One of the major additions is Warbands, and there’s a new toy that you should use as quickly as possible.

Once you have decided which four characters you would like to have in your Warband, log into one. As well as getting a ton of new quests and changes to the UI, there should be a new toy in your collection for you to make use of.

Known as The Warband Map to Everywhere All At Once, using it reveals all of the regions on the map (as long as at least one character in the Warband has fully explored it at some point).

This essentially renders many of the previous map toys obsolete, though some of the scouting options may still have limited usage. The new Warband Map is just one of the ways that Blizzard’s new system aims to make World of Warcraft more alt-friendly.

With the arrival of the pre-patch, all of the major Warband features are now live for players to try. The first is a new shared bank, which can be unlocked by completing the brief questline that starts in Gadgetzan.

There is also a new type of loot known as Warbound. This essentially binds loot to a Warband, rather than to the individual character, allowing it to be traded and used to gear alts more efficiently in The War Within.

Many of the trading systems have also been simplified, which should make trading items between characters via the UI possible, rather than having to mail everything. The last major change sees many achievements made account-wide, allowing players to reduce their time investment and hunt on multiple characters.

The full release of The War Within is scheduled for August 26, or August 22 for those who have early access.