Wrath of the Lich King's penultimate patch hit this week paving way for the last major raid of the expansion, Icecrown Citadel, which houses the all-important Lich King. As a part of the patch, a number of quality of life features were introduced and a big one was focused on saving players bag space - the beginnings of collection UI in Classic.

Although we saw Mounts and Pets first make their debut with the launch of Wrath Classic, they weren't quite up to par with their retail counterparts, instead using their original interfaces Wrath introduced "back in the day". They lacked the modern-day features WoW players expect - scroll bars and search fields, and looked out of place even to those who played back in the day with their awkward design choices.

With this week's update though, all of that changes! With those changes also comes account-wide Toys, Pets, Mounts, and Heirlooms, so if you managed to secure yourself a highly coveted Amani War Bear in Burning Crusade, now your Death Knight can ride it without issue.

Wrath Classic's New Mount Tab

It's about time Wrath gets some UI makeover! Bringing in the same UI that players on retail have for mounts makes finding your sweet rides all that much easier with the ability to favourite your mounts.

This UI is a cross between the interface that was added in Mists of Pandaria and the updated one present in Warlords of Draenor. The only part missing from the interface is the "Summon Random Favourite Mount" skill which was added in Draenor. Who else is glad we skipped over the Cataclysm design entirely, which wasn't a huge revamp over the Wrath version?

 

Thanks to Wowpedia for the older screenshots.

Additionally, as a part of the Patch all mounts now scale to your riding skill so if you want to ride some of the "slower" rides now they will be at their best possible speed. They've also made changes so outside of Dalaran and Wintergrasp, you will now be able to use your favourite flying mounts as ground mounts, which is a very welcome change.

Wrath Classic's New Pet Journal

We're not too far off Battle Pets with Mists of Pandaria one after Cataclysm, assuming Blizzard continues to bring back all the old World of Warcraft content in order, so it's interesting to see a simpler version of the Pet Journal present in Wrath. Notably absent are the different categories of pets that you would normally be able to search by, such as Mechanical, Beast, and Magical pets. We also don't have the ability to revive our battle pets nor can we assemble a team of our finest warriors... which makes quite a bit of sense considering we can't fight with our WoW Pokemons... yet.

Pets also don't have levels or rarities yet, but you can indeed favourite them, but like Mounts, there is a lack of a "Summon Random Favourite Battle Pet" option.

What's That? A Toy Box? What Year is This?

Originally introduced in Warlords of Draenor, a full three expansions after Wrath of the Lich King proper, the Toy Box has made its way into Wrath Classic. Upon logging in for the first time, your Toy Box will be empty and you'll need to right-click to "use" all your toys to get them into the box.

Once added, however, your toys will no longer take up that precious bag space and you can go back to collecting transmog for the potentially Cataclysmic introduction coming soon to a world near you.

That's an entire Netherweave Bag (and a slot) that my Paladin has saved which means we're off to fill it up immediately and complain about our bags being too small again. I am incredibly thankful that clicking on all those Toys didn't result in a level-crushing disconnect like the Warlords of Draenor launch event. There was this annoying bug that would happen during launch night where right clicking a toy resulted in a disconnect, which then meant if you were on a High or Full population realm you'd be stuck waiting in a queue. That multi-hour queue was not fun.

Heirlooms, More Accessible Than Ever

Have you ever forgotten which character you mailed your precious Heirlooms to? Or perhaps you don't want to buy two copies of the same trinket but you'd sure love to have them - now that doesn't matter! Upon purchasing Heirloom gear, it will now be added to your Heirloom Tab and is accessible across all your characters, both on Alliance and Horde. No more managing mail - unless of course you want to put enchants on the gear and you don't have an easy way to buy them on your alt.

Much like the Toy Box, the Heirloom Tab on retail was originally added in Warlords of Draenor, though in its first major patch, 6.1.0. Is Blizzard trying to tell us something?

Why the Interface Love?

Tinfoil Hat
Equip: Talk about crazy stuff.

No one outside of Blizzard has any idea what is next for WoW Classic, but we are expecting to hear Blizzard's next plans come BlizzCon this year in early November. The community really wants to see a "Classic Plus" of which there are several ideas floating around which include creating brand new content to add to the game that doesn't even exist on Retail, or bringing forward content from the main game, but balancing it for a completely different audience. While this isn't the purpose of this article and we could talk for many moons about what exactly that balancing entails, Classic WoW is a completely different type of game vs Retail and it's clear there are players that enjoy the format and don't want to see it broken up which is why it is important that Blizzard either makes the choice to respect those players or simply continue on the path of time.

That continuing option, of course, is Blizzard releases Cataclysm, or perhaps we go into seasonal content where there is some kind of increasing difficulty with dungeons, and potentially raids, through added buffs like we're seeing with the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma dungeons. Could some newer UI indicate that Blizzard is moving to pull more of the new UI forward into Classic to enable a slightly more modern take on the interface, which in many ways could use some quality of life adjustments, and could show that with quality of life also comes newer systems? Mythic+ would likely be an accepted addition into WoW Classic, especially if the Vanilla and Burning Crusade dungeons made it into the mix.

The only major part of the "Collections" set of user interfaces is the Transmog interface, which has its initial system, but no interface, normally arriving in Cataclysm. It wouldn't at all surprise me to see Cataclysm alongside the retail Transmog interface, which means you won't need to hold onto your old gear for much longer. Or, is transmog against the spirit of WoW Classic?

Listen, it's all a stretch but isn't that the entire point of the Tinfoil Hat to begin with? Though the tinfoil does a very poor job of stretching.

What do you think Blizzard is up to bringing forward newer versions of interface elements? Are they just bringing up new elements to keep both games more inline for easier code sharing or is there more to it? Let us know in the comments below.