Reputation, transmog among WoW features accessible account-wide with upcoming Warbands system

At long last, Blizzard Entertainment is making it easier for WoW players to integrate the progress they make on their alts with their main characters thanks to “Warbands,” a new system coming with the game’s next expansion.

In The War Within next September, the Warbands system will allow certain features within WoW to be treated on an account-wide basis, with things like reputation and transmog sets becoming connected across all of the characters on your WoW account.

Warbands will include a group of your alts, and each of the characters you place into your Warband will have certain progression systems interwoven between them. “The goal of this system is really to be the representation of the philosophy shift about really respecting the time of the player behind the keyboard and not those individual characters,” WoW associate game director Morgan Day said in a panel at BlizzCon earlier today. 

WoW players have been asking Blizzard for account-wide reputation for the better part of the last decade. When reputation became exceptionally grind-focused in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, and the growing number of factions in the game reached a point where retracing your progress became borderline impossible, the need for an account-wide system became evident.

In The War Within, all of the reputation and renown you earn on one character will translate over to the other characters in your Warband.  

Warbands will also open the door for more systems to become account-wide, including characters’ banks. No longer will you need to have dedicated alts that you’ll be sending items to in hopes that they can store them in their banks. Now, with the addition of Warbands, you’ll have one big happy family of alts that can store all of your items. 

Plus, Warbands will give players access to even more transmog options, including items that are otherwise equippable by certain classes. For example, if you have a cloth-wearing class in your Warband, you’ll be able to share any cloth appearances that you collect with plate-wearing characters without having to farm instances over and over again on those separate classes.

This will be exceptionally important for players farming rare, armor-class-specific items such as the Tusks of Mannoroth or First Satyr’s Spaulders. If items like those drop while you’re farming their respective instances with a class that can’t use them, the Warbands feature will save you from running those dungeons and raids again. 

Warbands are a complete way to represent all of the progress that you make as a WoW player as the restrictions that were previously set to just one character will now blend between each of your alts. When they go live alongside The War Within in 2024, alt enthusiasts across Azeroth should see their lives get a whole lot easier.