Nothing is more enjoyable than maxing out your main World of Warcraft character and starting an alt. But leveling them up could be a tedious ordeal—until now. In The War Within, WoW’s upcoming expansion, a new feature called Warbands will make your alt-leveling experience far more enjoyable.
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 can do this by adding characters to your Warband list.
Your Warband is account-wide and can include characters from both factions, so you don’t have to worry about Warbands being Alliance-only or Horde-only. This will be beneficial as many players like their alts to join the same guild as their main character, and seeing as guilds are now cross-faction, it will make raids and completing the new delves and dungeons much easier.
Warbands are limited to your characters in one region, so if you have characters on both EU and NA realms, for example, they will remain separate.
List of all Warbands features in WoW The War Within
All characters within your Warband have access to:
- A bank where you can add or remove items shared among your alts.
- Renown, so you won’t have to do the tedious renown grind again.
- Achievements.
- Warbound items—these items are labeled Warbound until they’re equipped, meaning you can transfer them to the bank for an alt. If you equip the item, it will no longer be Warbound.
- Flight paths.
- 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 leveling several characters with different factions, races, and classes, the Warband feature in WoW The War Within will make your leveling experience less tedious so you can focus on enjoying the content.
How will Warband conversions work in WoW The War Within
Luckily for you, you won’t need to merge your reputations, flight paths, transmogs, and all other Warband features by hand. Instead, this will happen automatically when you log in into any of your characters in The War Within for the first time. Warbands are going live with The War Within pre-patch. I have to warn you, merging all your progress might take a while, but sit tight and wait patiently until it’s completed.
Most important changes coming with Warbands in WoW The War Within
Reputation
When you finally get your own Warband, all earned reputation and Renown track progress become account-wide. All your characters share rewards, but you only get them once. During the conversion process, you’ll automatically get the highest reputation for a specific faction. For example, if you reached maximum reputation with Dragonscale Expedition with just one character, but not your main, all your characters will have the Renown track maxed out. The reputation won’t be added together.
Many different reputations will be account-wide, but not all. For instance, Winterpelt Furbolg and Glimmerogg Racer from Dragonflight will remain tied to your character and not your account. At the beginning, reputations will be account-wide for The War Within and Dragonflight, and Blizzard plans to work its way backward to past expansions. Still, the same rules will apply.
On top of this, the Human passive, Diplomacy, is being reworked, but details have yet to follow.
Quest rewards
When you’re completing campaign or side quests in The War Within with your main and alts, you still get the regular rewards, but when you’re doing it for the first time, you get a bonus reward. The bonus reward most likely entails a reputation bonus with specific faction.
When you’re completing them with an alt, you’ll get a currency reward akin to Dragon Isles Supplies that you can send to 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’s logic behind this decision is to prevent cases here you accidentally spend a currency on the wrong character. You won’t need to buy special items to transfer currencies, but you can do it from your character tab. Again, there will be exceptions, like Cosmic Flux from Shadowlands and Crests from Dragonflight.
Bank
This expansion is adding one more tab to your bank—the Warband Bank. You’ll still have a reagent bank and your regular bank, but this new tab will be available for all your characters to use. There will be five tabs offering 98 slots, and buying the next slot will cost you more gold. As expected, you can place any non-Soulbound items here. The bank feature is meant to come later in The War Within, but it will surely be worth the wait.
Gear
On top of all other gear types you can get in WoW, The War Within will have Warbound gear that can easily be transferred to other characters. Once you equip this gear, you can’t send it to other characters. It will be available from dungeons, raids, and Delves. Warbound gear is great 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 clothies aren’t limited to cloth items and can add plate pieces to your transmog collection. You don’t need to be able to equip the appearance to collect it, which will save you a lot of time when running old raids and dungeons just for transmogs.
