Shorter loading times in World of Warcraft? It’s very easy. With just a few changes, you can drastically reduce loading time.
In World of Warcraft, most of us spend a lot of time. It’s annoying when a significant part of that time is spent looking at the various loading screens of Azeroth. Depending on the computer, logging into the game world can take 15, 20, or even 30 seconds.
It becomes even more annoying when you have to pass through multiple portals in succession, for instance, to travel from Valdrakken to Stormwind, then to Boralus and from there to Nazjatar – or even just the next corridor to an instance.
We’ll show you three tips with which you can significantly reduce your loading times in the game.
Where do the tips come from? The YouTuber Bellular, together with his team, conducted some calculations and looked at which settings and addons cause the loading screen to take up a lot of time.
What did Bellular find out? Basically, two factors primarily contribute to increased loading times:
- Loading interface addons for the user interface.
- Loading the game world with the textures.
Those are the two adjustable parameters.
1. Filter Addons
The biggest performance killer in World of Warcraft is interface addons. Essential for many players, addons help organize the inventory, defeat bosses, find group members, or provide a prettier interface.
However, every login requires loading every addon, which adds several seconds to the loading time.
The solution for this – as absurd as it sounds – is another addon called “Simple Addon Manager”. You can download this addon on Curse Forge.
This addon allows you to create different profiles. You can set it so that certain addons are only loaded when you really need them. Especially large resource hogs like “WeakAuras” will hardly be necessary while questing in the open world, and you can only activate them when you load your “Raid profile”.
Create several profiles and consider which addons you really need in which game area.
If you filter out several addons and create profiles for different content, you can already significantly reduce loading times.
2. A chat command saves several seconds
During the loading screen, believe it or not, the game world of World of Warcraft is mainly loaded. Only when all textures are in place is the screen “released” and the loading screen disappears. However, you can adjust a setting so that WoW doesn’t necessarily have to have everything loaded already.
Type the following command in the chat:
/console SET worldPreloadNonCritical 0
Visible restrictions or quality losses were not noticeable to us by using the command.
When you now load a new part of the world – for example, because you travel through a portal or enter an instance, your loading time should be reduced by (depending on the PC) 1-3 seconds. Considering how often this happens in the game, you save a significant amount of time.
If you want to set the setting back to default, just enter this command:
/console SET worldPreloadNonCritical 2
3. Reduce graphics settings
The last tip is quite obvious but still worth mentioning. Loading times are certainly influenced by how high you have set the graphics quality of the game. Some settings add several seconds to loading times, while others bring hardly noticeable differences.
The biggest “damage” is caused by the setting “View Distance”. Go to “Options → Graphics → Graphics Quality (Basic)” and find the slider for view distance. A reduction from 10 to 9 can already save about 2 seconds of loading time. If you lower the value to 5 or lower, you can save another 1-2 seconds.
Please note that World of Warcraft becomes increasingly “ugly” with decreasing graphics settings. It’s important to find a balance between pretty graphics and pleasant loading times. For those who always want the best possible graphics, however, there’s little to be saved here.
What successes have you had with these settings, and how has your loading time changed?
The shorter loading times will definitely help you while farming – because you will soon need a lot of gold.
