World of Warcraft: The War Within’s big pre-patch event is live now, and it’s intended as a way to quickly gear up characters or even level up new ones ahead of the MMO’s new expansion on August 26. However, as players quickly realized, the new Radiant Echoes event isn’t good for either one of those things due to how it’s currently structured.
On paper, the event sounds fun. Memories of Azeroth’s past manifest in one of three older zones, requiring players to complete various objectives in order to summon a boss from the game’s long history, like the Lich King, Onyxia, or Ragnaros. Defeating enemies and the bosses, as well as completing objectives, earns players a new event currency, Residual Memories, that can be used to acquire catch-up gear and various cosmetics.
It seems simple, but the main issue currently plaguing players is how infrequently the event is actually active. Rather than being active almost all the time, as many players expected and is usually the case for the game’s pre-patch events, players complete the event for one zone in just a few minutes, after which it takes about an hour and a half for the event to cycle and begin in another zone. In the meantime, the game tells players it can stick around in the zone where the event was recently completed to farm lingering enemies, but those enemies drop such a small amount of event currency that players would need to kill thousands of them to earn enough to be able to purchase a single item. The best way to earn Residual Memories is to complete a daily quest that awards 1,500 of them, but even those can only be done three times a day on a single character, and still requires players waiting around for hours in order to complete.
This is, unfortunately, not a mistake but by design. In a blog post detailing the event, Blizzard states that the interval between the event zones will be 90 minutes long for the first week. On week two, it will become more frequent, rotating every 60 minutes. For the third and final week of the event, it will cycle every 30 minutes.
The event being such a grind kind of goes against the whole purpose of the rewards, as the gear is meant to prepare characters for The War Within before quickly being replaced in the expansion proper. Given that the expansion is only a month away, it seems pointless to grind out the event as it currently stands, given how long it will take to gear up a single character and how quickly that gear will become irrelevant.
Players, as they do, took to the WoW subreddit to voice their complaints. One player said they felt “scammed” re-subbing for the event, comparing it unfavorably to the well-liked Legion pre-patch event from 2016.
“If you’re not there right when it starts, it dies in like three minutes,” Lpunit writes. “There is basically nothing to do outside of this event other than a 15 minute ‘story’ quest where nothing really happens. Does anyone else remember the Legion pre-patch event? It was just nonstop going.”
The amount of time between events is the main point of criticism, with another player pointing the absurdity of it all.
“It’s 90 minutes waiting for five minutes of lagging where you wish you can even see the boss to tag it, then wait in the lag if you get a reward,” Ur-shak writes. “I stopped today to think what’s the gameplay of that and the more you think about it the more absurd it is.”
Given player feedback, it wouldn’t be surprising if Blizzard quickly pivots on its intended plan to ramp up the event cycle over the next few weeks and instead lets it run almost constantly from the get-go, but Blizzard has not yet released an official response to player feedback.
In the meantime, thanks to the new Warbands feature, players can funnel gear and event currency from one character to others on their account. That does make the event grind a little more tolerable, as the event’s daily quest is completable on multiple characters and the currency earned can be funneled to other characters as needed, but it still requires players to wait around for the event to actually start.
The War Within, which introduces new sub specializations called Hero Talents for each class as well as a new form of endgame content called Delves, releases on August 26. Those who purchase the WoW: The War Within 20th anniversary collector’s edition or digital epic edition can start playing on August 23.
