The biggest change in the way World of Warcraft Players manage multiple characters, and the game is available this week. Say goodbye to your disparate roster of characters spread across servers you barely remember joining, and say hello to Warbands.
All of your characters are now a unified team of heroes, from both the Alliance and Horde, ready to share banks, reputations, currencies, and more. This is a major change 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.
The key to Warband’s change is that the World of Warcraft The team wanted to focus on the player, more than the character. If you win on one character, your wins should feel like they carry over to the other characters you want to play as, too.
“We don’t want players to feel like they have to play alts to keep up. But we hope that because it’s easier to play alts, you’ll feel like you’re not missing out on progression,” said Peter Hodge, a principal software engineer who worked on Warbands (and who hails from New Zealand and Australia).
“We hope this will make experimentation easier. For those who love their main character and use their Warband to store their funds and nothing else, this is also entirely possible.”
The new Warbands system aims to make it feel like your second, third, or tenth character isn’t always one giant leap away from participating in the latest fun activities you want to do with your friends.
Warbands: All Characters, All Realms, All Factions
Starting with the new patch, all of your characters will appear in a cool list for you to choose from, regardless of realm or faction. On the new login screen, you can choose your four favorite characters to be brought to the forefront, and there’s also a new search box to bring up any other character by name. Warcraft The team also hinted that we might earn new Warband camp backgrounds in the future, whether through special events, defeating bosses, or other rewards.
“Early on, there was some confusion about whether your Warband was just the four characters on the login screen,” Hodge says. “But no, it’s your entire account. It’s all the characters. Everywhere in the game where we had a battle.net account, we tried to change it to Warband or Warbound to make it more fantasy-focused. But it’s functionally the same thing.”
“Warbands are kind of a trench coat – a bunch of different features wrapped in a trench coat. So we had to deal with challenges on a case-by-case basis.”
Weapons and armor
For those who see their outfit collection as the true end goal, Warbands are the promised land. All armor and weapon restrictions are removed from what a character can collect in the name of the Warband. If you bag one, you can add it to your collection. To make things easier, all characters can now see every armor type and class appearance in the game, so you always know if you’ve found the “perfect” piece you’ve been looking for.
The only exception is level tokens, which must be exchanged by a character of the relevant class. Previously, these tokens could not be exchanged for other characters. Now you can!
A new type of Warband-friendly gear is also coming. Beyond the usual Bind on Equipment or Pickup, there is a War Bind until equipped.
Read: Exploring the art and design of history for World of Warcraft: The War Within
“Warbound until equip gives us a great opportunity to do things like, when you complete a dungeon, a raid, or even a world quest, we can give you an extra personal loot item that might not even be for your class,” Hodge explains. The goal is to give you gear that’s just behind the level of content you’re playing and can quickly level up your other characters.
Finally, when rolling for items in raids or dungeons, any appearances you have not yet obtained that do not fit your current character can be obtained with the “transmog” button instead of the “greed” button. Preference will be given to characters of the appropriate class being played in the party, but transmog also takes precedence over standard greed rolls.
Quest
Similarly, when you collect 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 receive a new text message to let you know if that 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 desertion penalty now applies account-wide, preventing players from switching between characters to spread their despair in other arenas or battlegrounds.
The bank
How are you going to share all that gear? Clutter your mailbox? No! The new Warband Bank is ready to hold all the items you want to share between characters. You can purchase up to five tabs with 98 storage slots each (starting at 1,000 and going up to 1.5 million gold). From “war-related until equipped” items to any other random items you collect, and all your profession reagents. You can even craft items on any character using reagents stored in your Warband Bank.
“There’s a new series of tutorial quests for warbands that introduce some aspects of warbands,” Hodge explains. “One of the rewards for these quests is a new toy that gives you access to the warband bank in the field.”
Currencies
Beyond gold, your Warband can also share a variety of in-game currencies. These are often obscure and hard to track, but the new system makes it easy to find where your currencies are in your Warband and quickly transfer them to your current character. With just a few clicks, you can pour Dubloons, Coins, Anima, Medals, Badges, Shards, or whatever else you need onto the character that needs them.
At launch, currencies are primarily drawn from the last three expansions, with increasing numbers drawn from previous expansions. Player Power currencies are an exception, to avoid players feeling like they need to use them across multiple characters to optimize high-level play.
Reputations
Starting with those who are in The internal war And Dragon FlightAll reputations and fame will be applied account-wide. More reputations will be added, going back in time, with the goal that almost all reputations will work this way.
“We’re not committed to making every faction in the game account-wide for a couple of reasons,” Hodge says. “The first is factions. There are cases where it really doesn’t make sense. Like the Aldor/Scryer example. If we made it account-wide, you’d only be able to choose one for your entire account.”
“Some also feel thematically connected to a character. Dragon FlightExamples of this are Winter Furbolg, where you learn their language, and the snail race. ‘This character really did that’ seemed applicable here.
Achievements
More and more achievements are tied to the entire account in the game, but we’re taking another step forward. The biggest change is the achievement progress tracking. It now applies to the entire account as well. On patch day, you may find that you’ve now automatically earned a set of new achievements if the tracker combines your past efforts, helping you cross the finish line.
The exception is special circumstances, such as Arena Season Gladiator Titles. But again, wherever it makes sense, achievements will work for all characters.
Discovery and events
Each flight point will now be unlocked account-wide, and there’s even a cool new achievement coming that improves flight path movement speed by 25% when you unlock each flight point in an area. It starts with The internal warbut I hope that we will eventually return to the old areas as well.
There’s also a new Warband toy – The Warband Map To Everywhere All At Once – which will reveal all regions of the map that have been fully explored by at least one other character on your account. One click and it all opens up for you.
Recent changes to how event rewards work are also relevant to this new era. Since the recent Fire Festival, your first kill of the day for a major event drop receives a significant drop rate increase, but no other character can get that drop on the same day. This puts an end to 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 small additional drop rate increase to protect yourself from bad luck until you finally get the drop.
The World of Warbands
Hodge explains that this change seems obvious to players, but it created a huge technical challenge for the engineering team. In some cases, decisions had to be made to avoid having to rewrite 20 years of underlying code, particularly around currencies and banking access for players with multibox accounts.
“It’s really satisfying to dive into some of these things,” Hodge says. “Things that we haven’t touched on in a while. And in making some of these things account-wide, we’ve had to tackle some really old tech debt and challenges. But these are future-proof features that are being added to Wow and for Warbands, we have a very, very long list of things that we would like to continue to add to the Warbands feature set.
The idea of ”grind” is always part of the journey in any MMO at some level. But with Warbands, it feels like Wow gives players the opportunity to progress in places where it feels fun and rewarding, not just because it’s mandatory.
The pre-patch for The internal war The expansion, which brings Warbands to the game, goes live from July 24, 2024.