Warbands are a new and long-awaited addition to World of Warcraft, giving you far more flexibility when it comes to which character you want to play. This system lets you share certain aspects of the characters on your account such as reputation, achievements, and more.
The War Within is set to release next month on August 26th, but Warbands arrive with the pre-patch and should be live from July 23rd. As the system will be migrating a lot of character data as players log in, just be aware that there might be some delay in the processing of your Warband initially. With all that in mind, here's how Warbands work.
Many WoW players, myself included, have more than one character they like to play but it can become tiresome repeating the same stuff over again. Switching mains never felt good either—I never liked leaving behind my achievement points. Sure they don't actually do anything, but they're almost like a badge of honour, indicating how long you've been playing WoW, or how much time you've wasted, depending on your outlook.
Thankfully, Warbands will share achievements, and many other aspects, across all your characters. All you need to do is log in after the pre-patch goes live and your Warband will start processing.
Here's what's shared across Warband characters:
One thing to keep in mind, however, is that Warbands are region-limited. If you have accounts across multiple regions—North America, Europe, etc—these will have their own separate Warbands.
As mentioned above, most achievements will be shared between all characters on your account. The only exceptions are some of the trickier, personal achievements such as Insane in the Membrane.
It's also worth noting that rewards, such as dungeon teleports for Keystone achievements, are also shared.
One of the bigger bugbears about playing alts in World of Warcraft is having reputation, along with the progression often associated with it, locked to individual characters. Grinding out rep is fine, and is something we've all come to expect from the endgame process, but having to do it on multiple characters gets tedious quickly. The same can be said for expansion-specific currencies.
As far as reputation goes, most will be shared across Warband characters and can be contributed to by any character. That said, you'll only be able to gain reputation from a quest once, the first time you complete it on any character, but you'll be rewarded with a bonus currency if you choose to do it again.
You'll have the ability to transfer currency to other characters in your Warband, rather than have a 'shared stash'. The transfer process is simple and can be done from the currency window, meaning you don't have to rush around looking for a mailbox if you want to share with one of your other characters.
One of the most exciting inclusions in the Warbands implementation is the fact that transmog appearances will now also be shared account-wide. This means that you can learn transmogs for all armor types on your current character, unlocking them for all your alts.
Before, you'd learn all the transmog appearances for the gear rewards a quest offered, regardless of which you chose, providing you could equip it yourself. With Warbands, you'll automatically learn all appearances offered, regardless of armor type.
Perhaps even more excitingly, you can choose transmog on gear rolls in group content if you haven't already learned the appearance. This will score higher than a greed roll, and higher still if your character can equip the item.
Speaking of equipping stuff, the new Warbound gear can be sent to any character in your Warband, assuming you haven't equipped it yet, so as well as your alts looking snazzy, you can get them geared up too.
You and your alts will have a dedicated Warband bank which you can access from any regular bank. This allows you to share items with your other characters easily, though you'll need to buy the bank tabs with gold to begin stashing stuff.
You can also complete a short quest to unlock a portal that lets you access the Warband bank from anywhere, which is super handy if you forgot to pick something up before the raid, or you just need to offload some stuff because your bags are full. Again.
