Reagent Bank, Toy Box, Void Storage and Stack Size... Sometimes The Little Things are the Best

In case you have not heard the news we are getting a little more storage space.  No sign of new bags yet and if I remember correctly a blue posted on twitter we will most likely not be seeing any new bags in the near future as they believe they have gotten big enough.

So there needed to be other ways for us to clear up bag space and it seems one of my biggest "wants" on my wish list is getting some addressing with the coming of warlords.  Over the years I have posted many articles on things I wanted to see added, and more bag space was always on it.  Or things that I would buy from the blizzard store, bag space was always on it.

When ever you would ask me what were the things I most wanted to see added, in that conversation bag space would come up.  It is a little thing but it is an important thing, at least to me.  In every game I have ever played bag space is the most important thing.

I've played many games and many free to play games, which basically means you buy stuff and one thing is always the same.  In all the free to play games the very first thing I do is go and buy all the options for bag space.  I do not buy the other goodies 99% of the time but you sold me, you made money off me, with anything that provides me with more space.  See, that is how important bag space is to me.  I will actually pay real life money for it.  Even in a game I am just testing out and don't even know if I want to play.  Just to make life a little more bearable while testing it out. Bag space = instant sale.

Warlords is coming with a lot of ways to help clear up bag space and I would say they are all extremely welcome.  As I keep saying, warlords is a one trick pony.  It is all about garrisons.  The expansion has nothing more to offer.  But while it does have nothing more to offer in terms of actual new content that couldn't have just been added via patch it does seem to be offering us a lot in terms of quality of life issues such as storage.  We should not have needed to pay for an expansion to get any of this, but that is a post for another day.  Now we will go over some of the ways that blizzard has been so kind as to give us, or at least me, some of the storage things we wanted.

1) Quest Items:

Stealing a page from Rift, which I said they should have done since the first day I played it, they are changing how quest items work.  They will no longer take up bag space, they will now go directly into your quest book like they do in Rift.

Nothing was worse than picking up a series of quests at a low level when all you had was your starter bag and maybe one 4 or 6 slot bag otherwise and two of those quests give you items you need to use on something and another one required you to pick up four items and bring them back.

This wastes 6 spaces, and when you only have 20 or 22 bag slots (16 plus that 4 or 6 slot bag) to begin with this was very taxing.  More than any other time in the game you do not want to leave anything behind.  You need to pick up everything to vendor it off to make some coin because you are broke.  So you want to pick up everything so you can sell it off.

Having quest items that are given to you to use and quest items you are required to collected appear in the quest log instead of in your bag frees up a lot of very important bag space at a point in time when your bag space is of the most importance it will ever be to you, at the beginning.  What a wonderful change that is incredibly long over due.

2) Stack Size:

Some items, not all, are getting a long needed boost in the stack size they can stack up to.  The last few expansions we saw things like volatile life, fire, etc in cataclysm stack to 250 and kyparite stack to 200 in mists and each time I would see them and think about them I would say, why can't everything stack that high?

It has routinely taken blizzard an extremely long time to update their stack sizes.  Do you remember when healing potions only stacked to 5?  Yeah, it took them awhile to let them stack to 20.  Do you know there are still a great deal of things in game that only stack to 5?  Yes, tons of them actually.

This time around for warlords they are not just adding one type of gathering reagent that will stack higher like the volatiles in cataclysm did or kyparite in mists did, they are adding everything.  Well, almost everything.

Your herbs, ore, leather will all stack to 200.  I just hope our cloth follows suit, and blots, and inks, and gems, and all the other crafting supplies we use.  Even if it turns out that only some of the things like the basic gathering items that come from the gathering professions like herbalism, mining and skinning are the ones that stack to 200 it would be a good thing.  Another one of those about time things.  Larger stacks for things we usually have on us in larger quantities is a nice thing to have.

I do have 2 worries about this however that I would like to bring up. 

One, this will allow bots to farm even more than they used to.  Does this mean blizzard is finally going to try and do something about them or does it mean blizzard is finally going to admit they do not mind if people bot.  One needs to be done or said with this change.  Either blizzard needs a 100% crackdown on this and will actively ban bots on sight or they need to come out and say they do not mind.  They can not remain status quo as have have been for the last years.

Two, are they going to change how these are listed on the auction house?  I am guessing not, they will allow people to list whatever the stack limit is.  I might be completely alone on this one but I believe even if we do now have a stack limit of 200 that we should not be able to list stacks of larger than 20.  Call me selfish if you must but there are various reasons as a buyer why I would not want to see selling stacks of 200.  One is that you will see stacks of many different sizes which in turn clutters the listing.  Two is that you get those jerks that will sell 20 for what a stack of 200 is going for and people will fall for it, they do it with 20 now, but it is more noticeable seeing a 1 in with the stacks of 20 than seeing a 20 in 200 will be, trust me there will be a lot of people complaining.  And three, because I would hate to need 6 of something and go to the auction house and only see stacks of 200 up there.  If I need 6 I might not mind buying 20 if I had to, I will use the others sooner or later, but I would not want to buy 200.  So I believe selling should still be limited to 20, at least for my own selfish reasons.

3) Reagent Bank:

Just take a look at this and tell me that it does not bring a tear to the eye of a pack rat?  It does to me.  I want to reach out and hug it and tell it I love it.

mmm.... donuts

98 slots of increased stack sized love all conveniently located in your bank.  Words can not describe how awesome this is.  I feel like Homer Simpson does about donuts when I look at this.  And do you see that quick add button at the bottom?  Click that baby and all those herbs or ore you gathered while out on your daily pilgrimage of slaughtering the natives will be placed into your reagent storage instantly instead of having to find them all and click them to move them into your bank.

What is there not to love.  98 more slots of storage, larger stacks in that storage space, and all located in a place you have probably visited a million times since you began playing, your bank.  But I bet you that I can make this even more appealing to you if you are not already doing your Homer Simpson impersonation like I was when I saw it.

Get this, now you can craft directly from your bank.  Yes, you heard me right.  You walk into the raid and think, oh crap I forgot my flask and all my herbs are in the bank.  No worries, pop open my professions tab, click on the flask I want to make, and it makes it from the materials in your bank.  So as long as you have the materials in your bank, you can make anything.  You no longer need to carry them around which in my case is awesome because I always carried enough around to make anything for anyone that might need it.  One more bag slot for me on characters with gathering professions because I no longer need to carry my profession bag along with me.

But that does beg the question, what is going to happen to all those profession bags?  They are now really a complete waste.  I have characters that are catch all characters.  I have one where all its bank bags are gem bags, one where all its bank bags are ore bags, one where all its bank bags are leather bags, you get the idea.  With all that stuff going into each characters reagent bag, with larger stack sizes to boot, what is the use of those bags any longer?  Is there a use for them?

With us being able to label our bags and what goes in them, any bag can be a profession bag while out questing.  I no longer need one character to have 6 gem bags in their bank because the reagent bank can hold more and hold them better.

We can still use them for additional space, but that seems like over kill, at least at the get go now that we have this massive storage space available.  What do you think the future of profession bags is going to be?  I think that is a solid question.

4) Toy Box:

I am a self confessed pack rat, a hoarder, a collector and many other things that tend to mean I have a lot of junk.  Some of that so called junk just happens to be toys.  I can not even begin to recall the number of toys I have had to throw away over the years when hard choices in storage needed to be made.  But no longer thanks to the toy box.

 

 

New toys... for meeeee.

From the early looks of it most of the archeology junk seems to go in there and many of the pieces of junk we collected around pandaria as well as most of the junk from the timeless island that we have littering up our bags at the moment.

The most intriguing thing I see there is the innkeepers daughter.  She is a dwarf and all but she most definitely will be a little on the squished side being stuck in a toy box wouldn't you think?  For those of your that do not know, the innkeepers daughter is a hearthstone replacement.  It works just the same, has the same cooldown as your hearthstone would, but when you use it the innkeepers daughter will follow your around for a little bit after it is used.  Now think about that, it is a hearthstone, in your toy box.  Does this mean another free space?  No more need to carry a hearthstone?

I love free space and so do most people but I hear a lot of complaints about this already.  "Why is this not in there?", "How come I can not put this in there?", "This isn't taking all my stuff, what use is it?"

Well in my always grumpy and completely diplomatic way of making perfect sense I will try and answer all those questions in one.  Who gives a crap if it missed a few things or a few things do not fit the definition of toys.  You still just had a boat load of space freed up.  Be happy with that you ungrateful little jerks.

Yes, I understand your complains.  Yes, I might even agree with them.  But as someone that easily has 100 plus things taking up space if they manage to put 90 of them there I am going to be happy to have 90 more free spaces, I am not going to be upset because 10 of those spaces are still used.

I used all 100 spaces because I wanted to keep those things.  Just as I will now use all 10 spaces filled because they do not go in the toy box.  Because I want to keep them.  If you do not want to keep them, throw them away.  Choices need to be made and like I said, I made a lot of choices that saw me throw away things I wish I had kept.  But the ones I did keep I kept because I wanted to keep them.

So will Dartol's Rod of Transformation be in the toy box?  I don't know, but it has been with me for, I don't know, 6 years maybe, and if it is, awesome, a free bag space but if it isn't, it is still worth keeping in my bags just like it was worth keeping in my bags for the last 6 years.  Just because a new system was added does not change the fact it is, in my eyes at least, something worth a bag space.  I am not going to complain because it is not in the toy box, I will just be happy that many others are.

5) Void Storage:

I am not really into trasnmog.  I don't do it on many of my characters.  My warrior does his helm and weapon as does my monk with their helm and one of my DKs with their starter gear but that is about it.  Only my main has a trasnmog set I went out of my way to look for and assemble on my own.  My main has a trasmog that is almost entirely made with things that are no longer in the game including Rhok'delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers and various other things that can no longer be attained.  I do not wear it because I think it is cool to have things no one else can get, I wear it because I think it looks cool.  To me at least and isn't that what transmog is about?

What should I wear today?

If you will notice from the image we are getting a second tab to void storage.  Something I and I am sure many others have asked for.  They could have added more too, heck, they can add one new tab every expansion, I would be happy with that and I am sure the mog enthusiasts would be ecstatic over that idea.

Oddly enough, even as someone that does not trasnmog at all I tend to keep a lot of gear.  Not so much old gear all the time but even current gear.  Maybe this will be better when I get something new and have that let me hold on to it feeling because maybe if I get the four piece I will put this on but not until then, etc.  Stuff like that.  Basically, enough that it clutters bags but with more bank space now it would be fine.  Now with the added bank space we will have with reagents going to their own tab and toys going in a tab of their own as well I will have more space in my bags but before that I used to keep all those pieces I might use some day in my void storage.

Sure, some might call it an expensive way to keep a pair of bracers that I might never use, but it was space and any space that is usable matters to me.  I also have a habit of the "this looks nice" thing where I hold on to something because it looks nice.  Usually weapons.  Not that I ever mog into them mind you, but I still keep them because they look nice.   With that said, they all end up in void storage.

For a great many of people this will be a huge boost to their personal space, something that might not seem like a lot to you or I, but it was something that was needed even if it is not something I would really mind if they added or not, but it is not just about me, it is about everyone and when looking at the bigger picture of not just me, this addition is freaking huge.  Outside of my main who keeps everything that says hunter on it, none of my characters will really need to take advantage of the second tab of void storage but my hunter will finally stop throwing away weapons that I think look nice.  Not like I would ever trasnmog into them, but I just like to keep them.  Hey, I have a problem with being a pack rat, I admitted it, now stop bugging me about it. :P

Side note for those that might be wondering, that mount you spent a ton on this expansion for the reforging on it looks to have a transmog guy in its place since the removal of reforging.  Can't say it will stay that way, but most likely it will.  I was so hoping it would be a personal banker in that space.  You know, a bank only you could use.  But oh well, looks like I wasted 120K for nothing and so did many others.

All in all the future of storage in warlords is looking kind of nice, a big step in the right direction.  But I will end this by saying what I have been saying for years, we still need a way to increase the size of our starter bags blizzard.