The biggest change is how World of Warcraft players manage multiple characters aired live this week. Say goodbye to your awkward list of toons scattered across servers you can hardly remember to join and say hello to Warbands.
All your characters are now a unified team of heroes – Alliance and Horde – ready for you to share banks, reputation, coins and more. It’s a massive change for the MMO as it approaches its 20th year, so we’ve got all the details to help you know what happens when you touch the new login screen.
The key to the first generation change is that World of Warcraft the team wanted to know the player, more than the character. If you win it on one character, your wins should feel like they carry over to other characters you want to play.
“We never want people to feel forced to play alts to keep up. But we’re certainly hoping that because it’s going to be easier to play alts, you’re going to feel like you’re not going to lose progress,” said Peter Hodge, Lead Software Engineer who worked on Warbands (and originally comes from New Zealand and Australia).
“We hope it just makes it easier to try something. For those who love their main character and use their Warband for bankroll and nothing else, that’s totally fine too.”
So the new Warbands system is all about making you feel like your second, third, or tenth character isn’t always a giant mind away from participating in the latest fun things you want to do with friends.
Warbands: All Characters, All Realms, All Factions
From the big new patch, all your characters will appear in a nice list to choose from – regardless of realm or faction. On the new login screen, you can choose your four favorite characters to put front and center, and there’s also a new search box to pull up any other character by name. of Warcraft the team has also hinted that we may gain new backgrounds in the Warband camp in the future, either from special events, boss beats, or other rewards.
“There was some confusion early on if your Warband was just the four characters on the login screen,” says Hodge. “But no, it’s all your account. It’s all the characters. Anywhere in the game where we’ve had a battle.net account, we’ve tried to replace it with Warband or Warbound to make it more fantasy forward. But functionally it’s the same thing.”
“War belts are something like a jacket feature – a bunch of different features wrapped around a coat. So we had to face the challenges case by case.”
Weapons and armor
For those who treat their clothing collection like the real bottom, Warbands is the promised land. All armor and weapon limitations are removed from what a character can muster in the name of Warband. If it fits in your bag, it can be added to your collection. To make it easier, all characters can now view every set of armor and class looks in the game, so you’ll always know if you’ve found that ‘just right’ piece you’ve been looking for.
The only exception is level set tokens, which must be earned by a character of a specific class. Previously, these tokens could not be traded with other characters – now you can!
A new type of Warband-friendly drop gear is also coming. Beyond the usual binding on equipment, or binding on pickup, it is Warbound until it is equipped.
Read: Exploring art and story design for World of Warcraft: The War Within
“‘Urbound to gear’ gives us a really great opportunity to do things like, when you clear a dungeon or clear a raid or even a world quest, we can have an extra piece of personal chop for you that can not even for your class,” says Hodge. The goal is to give you gear that’s just behind the level of content you’re playing, which can quickly bring other characters up to speed.
Finally, when you’re looking for items in raids or dungeons, any appearance you haven’t gotten yet that doesn’t fit your current character can be rotated with the ‘transmog’ button instead of ‘greed’. Preference will be given to the correct class characters playing in the group, but the transmog also takes priority over the standard greeds.
Looking
Closely related, when you’re collecting sets of quest items 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 clothes. Quests will also get a new text message to let you know if this mission has already been completed by another character in your warband.
For PVP fans, if you are tired of defectors ruining your game, there is good news. The relinquishment penalty is now extensive as well, to prevent them from jumping between characters to spread their joy across more arenas or battlefields.
Bank
How are you going to share all that gear? Close your mailbox? No! The new bank for Warbands is ready to put all those items you want to share between characters. You can buy up to five tabs with 98 storage slots each (starting at 1000 and going up to 1.5 million gold). From Warbound to Equipped items to any other random items you collect and all your reagents for professions. You can even create each character using reagents stored in your Warband Bank.
“There is a new line of research for the Warband tutorial to introduce some aspects of warbands,” says Hodge. “One of the rewards for them is a new toy that gives you access to the Warband bank in the field.”
currencies
Beyond gold, your Warband can also share many, many in-game coins. These are often obscure and hard to track down, but the new system allows you to easily find where your coins are in your Warband and quickly pull them back to your current character. Just a few clicks and you can pour Dubloons, Coins, Anima, Medals, Badges, Shards, or whatever else you need onto the character that needs them.
At first, coins are mostly returned through coins found in the last three expansions, with more coming from earlier and earlier expansions over time. The exception is player power coins, to avoid players feeling like they have to grind these coins with multiple characters to optimize high level play.
Reputations
Starting with those in The War Within AND Dragonflight, all reputation and fame will become widespread. More reputations will be added, going backwards over time, with the intention that almost all reputations will work this way.
“We’re not committing to every faction in the entire game going wide for some reason,” Hodge says. “Number one is fractions. There are times when it really doesn’t make sense. Like the Aldor / Scryer example. If we expand that account, you can only choose one for your entire account.”
“Some even feel thematically connected to a character. IN Dragonflight, these examples are the Winter Furbolg, where you learn their language, and the Snail Races. “This character really did it” seemed applicable there.”
achievement
Many achievements have been more and more extensive in the game, but we are taking another step forward now. The biggest change is achievement progress tracking – this is also account-wide now, and on patch day you may find that you’ve now automatically scored a bunch of new achievements if tracking combines your past attempts, giving you raised above the line.
The exception is for specific circumstances, such as Gladiator titles from arena seasons. But again, wherever it makes sense, achievements will work for all characters.
Exploration and events
Every flight point will now be unlocked account-wide, and there’s even a cool new achievement coming that improves flight path travel speed by 25% when you unlock every flight point in an area. This is starting with The War Withinbut hopefully it will eventually return to old areas as well.
There’s also a new Warband toy – the Warband Map for Everywhere at Once – that will reveal all regions of the map that have been fully explored by at least one other character on your account. One click and everything opens up for you.
Recent changes to how event rewards work make sense for this new era as well. Starting with the last Fire Festival, your first kill of the day for a major event drop gets a significant increase in drop rate – but no other character can have this drop on the same day. This draws a line under the old art of trying to farm events using every character you own. You can try once a day, and each day you’ll get a small increase in the drop rate for some protection from bad luck until you finally, finally get the drop.
World of Warbands
Hodge explains that this change seems obvious to players, but created a massive technical challenge for the engineering team. In some cases, decisions had to be made to avoid having to rewrite 20 years of core code – especially when it came to currencies and banking access for players using multibox accounts.
“It’s been really satisfying to get under the hood of some of these things,” says Hodge. “Things we haven’t touched in a long time. And in making some of these things account wide, we’ve had to address some really old technology debts and challenges. But these are evergreen features that are being added WOW and for Warbands we have a very, very long list of things we’d like to continue to add to the Warbands feature set.”
The idea of ’grind’ is always at some level part of the journey in any MMO. But with Warbands, it feels like WOW it’s giving players the chance to brawl in places where it feels fun and rewarding to do so, not just because it’s required.
Pre-patch for The War Within expansion, which brings Warbands to the game, goes straight from July 24, 2024.