Reforged Update - October 3rd 2026

Azeroth has been given another good whack with the engineering hammer. This update brings some important improvements to the Allegiance system, Playerbots, Wintergrasp, and our trusty little utility companion, now officially known as the Aethro Box.

Your chosen allegiance now carries more weight throughout the world.

Faction-based quest and content checks will now properly recognize whether you’ve pledged yourself to the Alliance or Horde, rather than always judging you by your character’s original race.

After all, if an Orc swears allegiance to the Alliance, Stormwind should probably stop checking his birth certificate every five minutes.

Playerbots have received a hefty cross-faction brain upgrade.

Bots now use their active allegiance when determining friends and enemies, random bot factions, arena teams, guild faction information, faction chat, and several other systems.

In short: your bots should have a much better idea of whose side they’re actually on.

Ever have a bot following you through a phased quest only for them to suddenly lose track of half of reality?

Grouped Playerbots will now synchronize with their real master’s phase while outside battlegrounds.

This should prevent phased quest NPCs, enemies, and objects from mysteriously vanishing from your bots’ version of Azeroth.

Wintergrasp passengers should no longer occasionally slip into another dimension.

Old Alliance and Horde control-phase effects are now properly cleared before the current Wintergrasp defender phase is applied.

This fixes an issue where vehicle passengers could become hidden or desynchronized from the driver.

Your siege engine crew should now remain in the same plane of existence. Revolutionary technology.

The old SmartStone has officially received the Aethro treatment.

It is now the Aethro Box, complete with updated descriptions and service messages.

Same useful collection of services. Much better name. Consider the cardboard enchanted.

The standalone Sanctuary Stone is being retired.

Existing Sanctuary Stones in your bags or bank will be cleaned up automatically when you log in.

If your character doesn’t already have an Aethro Box, we’ll give you one. If your bags are stuffed with seventeen stacks of questionable loot and there’s no room, we’ll attempt to send it by mail instead.

With the Sanctuary Stone heading into retirement, the AethroSanctuary addon is going with it.

The next time the updated client is launched through the Aethro Launcher, the old AethroSanctuary addon will be automatically removed.

The addon existed to support the standalone Sanctuary Stone, and with that functionality now living inside the Aethro Box, there’s simply no reason to keep its rather temperamental Lua file hanging around.

One less addon. One less glitchy Lua file. One less thing for the goblins to break.