wow Warlords of Draenor Alpha: Toy Box UI Preview

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We preview WoD's upcoming Toy Box UI feature!

There are many highly anticipated changes coming with the Warlords of Draenor expansion, including major spell and ability changes for every classes along with an entire continent's worth of new content. The UI is receiving some overhauls as well, and there certainly has been no shortage of suggestions of features the players would like to see in the upcoming expansion. Blizzard is doing their best to make the best-needed adjustments to their in-game UI to improve the base functionality and integrate better default features so players won't always have to rely on on add-ons.

One such feature, which has been highly-requested, is the Toy Box, a new collection screen which allows players to store certain novelty items for later ease of use. This feature allows users to "learn" such items, similar to how one would learn a pet or a mount, and then the learned item will show up in the new Toy Box interface! From this window, a Toy can be dragged to a hotkey and used just like a spell! No more having to dedicate bag space to toy bananas and transformation items! Check out our in-depth preview of Warlords of Draenor's upcoming Toy Box feature!

The Toy Box has been added as a new tab attached to the current Pet and Mount Journal. There is not yet a key binding option for the Toy Box, but it's easy enough to access using the Pet or Mount Journal keys, then simply opening the Toy Box tab. Of course, we can expect this to be changed by launch. Opening up the Toy Box presents a window full of faded-out item icons, along with a progression bar at the top showing how many Toys have been obtained (out of a possible total). There is also a search function, as well as a Filter box which allows players to filter to show Collected or Not Collected (or both), along a variety of source filters.

The vast majority of items included in the Toy Box will be account-wide. If you obtain a Toy on a character, once learned it can be used by any character on your account. This should make it a bit easier to re-acquire some Toys which may have been discarded. For example, if a quest reward Toy has been deleted, the same player will be able to use a different character and learn the Toy reward to add it to the Toy Box. However, there may be a select few items which will not be (Blizzard has not yet revealed details on which items would be excluded). The Toy Box is faction-specific to your character, and will not display unlearned Toys which are faction specific (such as Gnomeregan Pride on a Horde character).

Many players are concerned with whether or not they will be able to retroactively re-acquire Toys which they may have deleted in the past. This will, of course, all be up to the developers and their resources. Blizzard Community Manager Nethaera has stated, "We'll see what happens, but it may be possible to get you back the Toys that were quest rewards. We'll have to see about anything else though." Technically, it would be possible to scan completed quest, achievement and archaeology data to re-reward any Toys from these sources, but we'll have to see what Blizzard decides to do with that. In the meantime, it may be best to hold on to any Toys, just in case.

Using the Toy Box

As mentioned above, the Toy Box has been attached to the Pet and Mount Journal. Items which can be placed in the Toy Box are now labelled "Toy" in the tooltip. All Toy items will have a new function and feature new text reading, "Use: Adds this Toy to your Toy Box." (similar to the "Use" text found on Mount and Pet items). Once a Toy has been used, it will be consumed and disappear, though there is no word yet on whether or not some toys will NOT be consumed (such as Trading Card Game items) though, of course, they will still remain bound to the character/account when used. When the Toy has been learned, the icon for the corresponding Toy will become filled-in and the Toy will now feature a golden border. You can right-click on any learned Toy and a menu will pop up with two options, "Favorite" and "Cancel." If you add a Toy to your favorites, it will be moved to the beginning of your Toy Box.

Toys will essentially now function as spells, and a Toy can be dragged from the Toy Box interface onto the action bars. This will create a hotkey that, when used, will activate the Toy's ability. The Toy hotkey will then go on cooldown, and the mouseover tooltip will indicate the remaining cooldown. Pretty simple! We'll have a part two of our Toy Box preview posted very soon, in which we'll run down the list of currently available Toys and where you can get them!