Warbands is the new account-wide progression system in The War Within. Previous account-wide features such as achievements and collections have been rolled into Warbands along with some brand new features, including shared renown and a shared bank. The system is intended to make things easier for players who enjoy playing more than one character.
This guide will cover everything that is included in Warbands and how this system affects your account and your characters.
Warband Character Select Screen
After almost 20 years, the character select screen has finally gotten an overhaul! Now you’ll enter the game from a new camping scene where you can see four of your characters gathered around a fire. The rest of your characters will be listed on the right side of the screen like before. This character list now contains all of the characters on your current WoW account, regardless of realm.
You can see additional information about each character by hovering over their name in the character list. This will bring up a tooltip that lists the following information about the character:
- Name
- Realm
- Class & current specialization
- Item level
- Location in game
- Primary professions
- Mythic+ Rating
- Highest Arena rating
- Total gold
To choose which 4 characters appear around the fire, you can drag them to the Favorites section at the top of the list. The developers have indicated that this screen will be customizable in the future, with different backdrops for you to collect.
Warband Achievements
While many achievements have been account-wide for much of WoW’s history, Warbands are taking it a step further. Your characters will now all share a single Warband achievement score, which will be the total of all of your account-wide achievements plus the character-specific achievements that have been completed by any character on your account. Many more achievements have also had their progress converted to be account-wide, which should make it easier to earn them without having to focus on a single character to do so.
Some achievements are still character-specific by necessity. For example, Insane in the Membrane requires maxing out opposing factions on a single character. Others have been left as character-specific achievements simply because there is no advantage to sharing progress, and players may want to be able to see what each of their characters has accomplished over the years. Achievement rewards will also be Warbound-wide except where there is a good reason to keep them character-specific, such as the prestigious Gladiator title for PvP.
Achievements that have been changed to reflect Warband-wide progress will generally be cumulative, so all of your progress across your various characters will apply. There may be exceptions, however.
Warband Reputations
Most Dragonflight reputations and new reputations in The War Within have been made into Warband reputations. Your progress with these factions will be shared across all of your characters, and most rewards will be unlocked for all of your characters as well. For reputation that you earned before the introduction of Warbands, your Warband reputation level with that faction will be that of the highest that you had obtained on any of your characters.
The following Dragonflight reputations have been converted to Warband reputations:
Some reputations, such as Winterpelt Furbolg and Glimmerogg Racer, remain character-specific for story reasons.
Blizzard plans to work backward through the expansions to convert old reputations to the Warband system in future patches. They plan to skip factions that require character-specific choices, such as The Aldor and The Scryers factions and the Covenants from Shadowlands.
Many quests that grant reputation with Warbands factions will only offer rep the first time the quest is completed on your account. Subsequent characters will receive alternative rewards. This is to prevent players with many alts from easily accumulating a lot of reputation by completing easy, early quests over and over.
The Human racial ability Diplomacy has been replaced for The War Within, so there are no longer any character-specific bonuses to reputation earned. Youcan earn your reputation on any character you wish withoutmissing outon any potential advantages.
Warband Exploration and Flight Paths
With the introduction of Warbands, all flight points are now account-wide, so you won’t have to re-discover them on every character anymore. If you’ve acquired a flight path on any character, it will be unlocked for the rest of your Warband.
Map discovery will be unchanged by default, but there is a new toy in the game, The Warband Map to Everywhere All At Once, which will allow you to reveal every area of the map that has already been discovered by any character on your account. So if you like being able to see your characters’ individual progress on the map, you can keep it that way, but if you want Warband-wide map discovery, that’s an option as well. To get your hands on the toy, you’ll need to have two max-level characters on your account.
Warband Currencies
Another new feature under the Warbands umbrella is the ability to transfer currency between characters. In the Currency tab of your Character window, you’ll now see a Transfer button when you click on many of your listed currencies. Clicking this button will open a Transfer Currency window, where you can select how much you wish to transfer and which of your characters you want to take it from.
In some cases, there will be a cost to transferring currency. In others, currencies will still be character-specific and non-transferrable, usually in cases where they are significant to endgame character progression.
Warband Bank
Warbands come with their own banks, giving you an account-wide personal vault to help you share items and gold across all of your characters. We have a separate guide covering the Warband Bank, including the tab costs, what you can store in it, and how to access it.
Warbound Equipment
There’s a new type of gear in the game for Warbands: “Warbound until equipped.” Similar to “Bind to account” items, these pieces can be transferred freely between the characters on your account, until one of your characters equips it. At that point it becomes Soulbound and can no longer be transferred.
Warbound until equipped gear is planned to be provided in most endgame content as bonus personal loot. It will always be at least a tier lower than the character-bound loot you can pick up in the same place.
Warband Collections and Transmog
Collections have been account-wide since the beginning, but Warbands have brought some new enhancements to Transmog in particular.
Previously, characters could only collect item appearances that they could equip. That is changing with the introduction of Warbands. Now you can collect any item appearance you pick up, regardless of armor type, weapon type, and so on. The exception is class-specific appearances, which can still only be earned by playing the appropriate class. Additionally, when you complete a quest that has rewards that grant item appearances, you’ll unlock all possible options by completing the quest, even those that you can’t use on your current character.
You still can’t use appearances for transmogrification if your character cannot equip them. You can only collect them for use on other characters. To help you keep track of everything, you can now view your collected appearances for any class using a new dropdown menu in the Appearances interface.
As part of this change, you no longer need to equip gear in order to learn its appearance. Now you will automatically collect an item’s appearance if you destroy it by disenchanting it, deleting it, or selling it to a vendor. For BoEs, you’ll be able to convert them to Warbound until equipped in order to learn their appearance if you’re unable to equip them. Note however that you still won’t be able to sell BoE gear on the Auction House if you want to collect its appearance. Although you don’t have to equip it, it does have to be bound to your account.
To accommodate players who are looking to collect item appearances, there’s a new Transmog option available in Group Loot. This option will appear on any item you haven’t collected yet. It has a higher priority than Greed, but lower than Need. If no one rolls Need but multiple people roll Transmog, priority will be given to characters who can equip the item, since they can use its appearance directly.
