WoW The War Within: Warbands, explained

If you’re an altoholic like me, there’s nothing more fun than starting a new World of Warcraft character from scratch. Keeping multiple characters up-to-date with current content does get tedious, but fortunately, The War Within is adding a new feature to smooth things out—Warbands.

What are Warbands in WoW The War Within?

In The War Within, Warbands let you link characters to share equipment, resources, banks, and Reputation. You do this by adding characters to your Warband list.

Warbands are account-wide and can include characters from both factions. Given guilds are now cross-faction too, there will be less friction between Alliance and Horde characters than ever in The War Within. Warbands are limited to your characters in one region, though, so if you have characters on both EU and NA realms, they will remain separate.

List of all Warband features in WoW The War Within

All characters within your Warband can access:

• A shared bank where you can easily trade items between your alts.
• Renown, so you only need to grind each Faction once.
• Achievements.
• Warbound items—certain items are labeled Warbound until they’re equipped, meaning you can put them in your shared bank for an alt to use. As soon as you equip a Warbound item, it stops being Warbound. 
• Flight paths, so traversing the world on alts will be much easier.
• Transmog Collections, and they’ll be armor-agnostic. 
• Reputation.
• Currencies—these won’t be entirely Warbound, but you can freely transfer them across different characters so you don’t accidentally spend them.

So, if you enjoy playing several characters with different factions, races, and classes, Warbands in WoW The War Within will make leveling less tedious so you can focus on enjoying the content.

How Warband conversions work in WoW The War Within

You don’t need to merge Reputations, flight paths, transmogs, or other Warband features by hand. Instead, this will happen automatically when you log in into any of your characters in The War Within pre-patch for the first time. I have to warn you, merging all your progress might take a while, but sit tight and wait patiently until it’s completed.

Important changes coming with Warbands in WoW The War Within

Reputation and Renown

After setting up your Warband, all the Reputation and Renown you’ve earned become account-wide. All characters in the Warband share rewards, but you only get them once. During the conversion process, you automatically get the highest Reputation for a specific faction. For example, if you maxed out Dragonscale Expedition with just one character, but not your main, all your characters will have that Renown track maxed out.

Not all Reputations will be account-wide, though. For instance, the Winterpelt Furbolg and Glimmerogg Racer factions from Dragonflight will remain tied to your character and not your account. Initially, only The War Within and Dragonflight factions will be account-wide, but Blizzard plans to work its way backward through past expansions. On top of this, the Reputation bonus provided by the Human passive ability, Diplomacy, is being removed.

Quest rewards

When you do a quest in The War Within for the first time, you get a bonus reward, which likely includes a Reputation bonus with specific faction. When you do these quests on an alt, you’ll get a currency reward instead, akin to Dragon Isles Supplies that you can send to your other characters.

Achievements

Almost all achievements in The War Within are account-wide, and the devs are entirely removing the concept of a character-based achievement score. Having said that, a couple of achievements will still be character-specific, like Insane in the Membrane and Gladiator.

Currencies

In The War Within, currencies won’t be account-wide from the get-go, but you can send them between your characters as you please. Blizzard wants to stop players accidentally spending currency on the wrong character. You won’t need to buy special items to transfer currencies to your characters—you can simply do it from the character tab. There are a few exceptions, though, like Cosmic Flux from Shadowlands and Crests from Dragonflight.

Bank

The War Within adds one more tab to your bank—the Warband Bank. You still have your regular bank and reagent bank, but the new tab will be available for all your characters to use. As expected, you can place any non-Soulbound items into the shared Warband Bank. The feature is planned to ship later in The War Within, but hopefully it will be worth the wait.

Gear

The War Within introduces Warbound gear that you can easily transfer to other characters. Once one character equips this gear, it becomes Soulbound. Warbound gear is available from dungeons, raids, and Delves. It’s ideal for gearing up your alts, because they normally end up wearing whatever scraps you can get.

Transmogs

Finally, all your characters can collect any type of transmog you stumble upon. That means you can add plate items to your transmog collection, even if you pick them up on a cloth-wearing character. You don’t need to be able to equip the appearance to collect it, which will save a lot of time running old raids and dungeons for transmogs.