The biggest change to how World of Warcraft players manage multiple characters goes live this week. Say goodbye to your awkward roster of toons, spread across servers you can hardly remember joining, and say hello to Warbands.
All your characters are now a unified team of heroes – Alliance and Horde alike – ready for you to share banks, reputations, currencies, and more. It’s a massive shift for the MMO as it approaches its 20th year, so we have all the details to help you know what happens when you hit the new login screen.
Key to the Warband shift is that the World of Warcraft team wanted to acknowledge the player, more than the character. If you earn it on one character, your victories should feel like they carry over to other characters you want to play, too.
“We never want people to feel required to play alts to keep up. But we’re certainly hoping that, because it will be easier to play alts, you’ll feel like you won’t be missing out on progression,” said Peter Hodge, Principal Software Engineer who worked on Warbands (and originally hails from New Zealand and Australia).
“We’re hoping it just makes it easier to try something out. For those who love their main character and use their Warband for bank storage and nothing else, that’s completely OK too.”
So the new Warbands system is about making you feel like your second, third, or tenth character isn’t always a giant grind away from joining in on the latest fun things you want to do with friends.
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Warbands: all characters, all realms, all factions
From the big new patch, all your characters will appear in one nice list to choose from – no matter the realm or faction. On the new login screen, you can choose your favourite four characters to place front and centre, and there’s also a new search box to pull up any other character by name. The Warcraft team has also hinted we might earn new Warband camp backgrounds in future, whether from special events, beating bosses, or other rewards.
“There was some early confusion about whether your Warband was just the four characters in the login screen,” says Hodge. “But no, it’s your entire account. It’s all the characters. Anywhere in game where we’ve had battle.net account, we’ve tried to replace that with Warband or Warbound to make it more fantasy forward. But it’s functionally the same thing.”
“Warbands are something of a trenchcoat feature – a bunch of different features wrapped in a trenchcoat. So we’ve had to deal with challenges on a case by case basis.”
Weapons and armour
For those who treat their collection of outfits as the true endgame, Warbands is the promised land. All armours and weapon restrictions are removed from what a character can collect on behalf of the Warband. If if goes in your bag, it can be added to your collection. To make it easier, all characters can now view every armour type and class appearance set in the game so you will always know if you’ve found that ‘just right’ piece you’ve been looking for.
The one exception is tier set tokens, which must be cashed in by a character of the specific class. Previously, these tokens could not be traded to other characters – now you can!
A new type of Warband-friendly gear drop is also arriving. Beyond the usual bind on equip, or bind on pickup, is Warbound until equipped.
Read: Exploring the art and story design for World of Warcraft: The War Within
“‘Warbound until equip’ gives us a really great opportunity to do things like, when you clear a dungeon or clear a raid or even a world quest, we can have an additional piece of personal loot drop for you that might not even be for your class,” says Hodge. The aim is to give you gear that’s just behind the tier of content you’re playing that can bring your other characters quickly up to speed.
Finally, when you are rolling for items in raids or dungeons, any appearance you are yet to collect that isn’t suited to your current character can roll with the ‘transmog’ button instead of ‘greed’. Preference will be given to correct class characters being played in the group, but transmog also gets priority over standard greed rolls.
Questing
Closely related, when you are collecting quest item sets while playing an expansion campaign, all item types – cloth, leather, mail, and plate – will be unlocked, so you won’t have to play the same campaign four times to get all the outfits. Quests will also get a new message in the text to tell you if this mission has already been completed by another character in your Warband.
For PVP fans, if you’re tired of deserters ruining your game, there’s good news. The quitter penalty is also now account-wide, to prevent them from bouncing between characters to spread their joylessness to more arenas or battlegrounds.
The Bank
How are you going to share all that gear? Clog up your mailbox? No! The new bank for Warbands is ready to put all those items you want to share between characters. You can buy up to five tabs with 98 storage slots each (starting at 1,000 and going up to 1.5million gold). From ‘Warbound until equipped’ items to any other random stuff you collect, and all your reagents for professions. You can even craft on any character using reagents stored in your Warband bank.
“There’s a new Warband tutorial quest line to introduce some aspects of warbands,” says Hodge. “One of the rewards for those is a new toy that gives you access to the Warband bank out in the field.”
Currencies
Beyond gold, your Warband can also share many, many currencies in the game. These are often obscured and hard to track, but the new system lets you easily find where your currencies are sitting across your Warband, and quickly pull them onto your current character. Just a few clicks and you can pour Dubloons, Coins, Anima, Medals, Badges, Shards, or whatever else you need onto the character that needs them.
At launch, the currencies mostly go back through currencies found in the past three expansions, with more to come from earlier and earlier expansions over time. The exception are player power currencies, to avoid having players feel they have to grind these currencies across multiple characters to optimise high level play.
Reputations
Starting with those in The War Within and Dragonflight, all reputations and renown will become account wide. More reputations will be added, going backward over time, with the aim to have almost all reputations work this way.
“We’re not committing to every faction in the entire game becoming account-wide for a couple of reasons,” says Hodge. “Number one is factions. There are cases where it really doesn’t make sense. Like the Aldor / Scryer example. If we made that account wide you can only pick one for your entire account.”
“Some also feel thematically tied to a character. In Dragonflight, those examples are Winter Furbolg, where you learn their language, and the Snail Racing. ‘This character really did this’ seemed applicable there.”
Achievements
Many achievements have been increasingly account-wide in the game, but we’re taking another leap forward now. The biggest change is achievement progress tracking – this is account-wide now too, and on patch day you might find you have now automatically scored a range of new achievements if the tracking combines your past efforts, lifting you over the line.
The exception is for specific circumstances, like Gladiator titles from arena seasons. But again, everywhere it makes sense, achievements will work across all characters.
Exploring and events
Every flight point will now be unlocked account-wide, and there’s even a nice new achievement arriving that improves flight path travel speed by 25% when you unlock every flight point in a zone. That is starting with The War Within, but hopefully that one eventually goes back through old zones as well.
There is also a new Warband toy – The Warband Map To Everywhere All At Once – that will reveal all map regions that have been fully explored on at least one other character on your account. One click and it’s all opened up for you.
Recent changes to how event rewards work also make sense for this new era too. Starting with the recent Fire Festival, your first kill of the day for a major event drop receives a significant increase in drop rate – but no other character can get that drop on the same day. This draws a line under the old art of trying to farm events using every character you own. You can try once per day, and each day you get a little extra bump in the drop rate for some bad luck protection until you finally, eventually getting the drop.
World of Warbands
Hodge explains that this change seems obvious to players, but created a massive technical challenge for the engineering team. In some cases, decisions had to be made to avoid needing to rewrite 20 years of underlying code – particularly when it came to currencies and bank access for players running multibox accounts.
“It’s been really satisfying to get in under the hood of some of this stuff,” says Hodge. “Things we haven’t touched in a while. And by making some of these things account-wide, we’ve had to tackle some tech debt and really old challenges. But these are evergreen features that are being added to WoW and for Warbands we have a very, very long list of things we’d like to keep adding to the Warbands feature set.”
The idea of ‘the grind’ is always on some level part of the journey in any MMO. But with Warbands, it feels like WoW is giving players the chance to grind in the places where it feels fun and rewarding to do so, not simply to do it because it is required.
The pre-patch for The War Within expansion, which brings Warbands to the game, goes live from 24 July 2024.
