WoW: The War Within – Warbands System, Explained (2024)

Arguably one of the most game-changing new features added to World of Warcraft in The War Within is the Warbands system. Upon logging into the TWW client for the first time, you will immediately notice something is different – all of your characters are listed together on the right, and four of them can be seen around a campfire, ready to be selected.

But Warbands are a lot more than just a new login screen. With this system, it's easier than ever to command an army of Alts, as it essentially lets you share most progression and account-level features across all of your characters, and makes it easier than ever to trade items and now currencies between them. Plus, there's a new Warband Bank feature that lets you share reagents in a simple way.

What Are Warbands – Account-Wide Everything

The new Warband system, introduced in the pre-patch for The War Within, completely revitalizes how the game "acknowledges the player behind the screen" and respects their time spent in-game. Before Warbands were added, the game would tie practically all forms of progression and unlocks to individual characters. For example, you couldn't share Reputations and would have to grind them over and over again on your Alts, and typically speaking, it was difficult to trade items between Alts to catch them up.

With Warbands, though, all of that changes. With Warbands, all of your characters share Achievements (and Achievement progression), Reputations and Renown, currencies can be traded instantly with a new UI option, and the experience of sharing other items (like crafting mats) with your Alts is made significantly easier with new Bank options.

Instead of grinding out the same things over and over again, Warbands make the Alt experience much more streamlined and significantly less painful to get them up to speed – there's even new a new option to highlight quests you have already completed on other characters so you don't waste time re-doing content. According to an interview with chief creative officer Chris Metzen, it's a way that Blizzard is doing more to respect the players' time as the population gets older and has less time to grind WoW.

It might seem a bit complex and hard to understand, but at its core, Warbands allow you to share everything between characters in a way that WoW has never seen before. Plus, there's a beautifully revamped character select screen that displays your top four favorite Alts in a camp, which has been compared to the character select screen from Diablo.

There are a lot of progression systems that all of your characters will now automatically share, and what's especially handy is that your characters who have progressed the furthest in a particular feature will be the baseline for everyone else. These shared progression systems include;

• Reputations and Renown, which will grant the highest level of earned Renown to all characters automatically
• Completed Quests, which are now slightly faded and mention that you have already completed the quest in the text
• Most Achievements, notably including partially completed achievements, but not including a specific sub-set of intrinsically character-based achievements
• Map exploration, which does not apply automatically but instead must be activated with a new Toy, the Warband Map To Everywhere All At Once

If you have one character at Renown 25 with a faction, and another who hasn't even started working on that faction's Renown, that Alt will automatically be raised up to Renown 25 and can get all the rewards associated with that progression, without mindlessly repeating content. You can avoid quests you have already completed (unless you want XP), and it's easier than ever to unlock complex Achievements as each of your Alts can contribute parts to the whole – like the Loremaster achievements.

The one thing that you do have to activate to share is Map exploration. If you want to share revealed areas of the world between characters, you have to use the new (and free) Toy called the Warband Map To Everywhere All At Once. Using this item automatically reveals zones other Alts have explored to your map, so be sure to log into each of your characters and take advantage of this new free Toy.

Warbands Allow Instant Currency Transfers

Another great aspect of the Warbands system TWW introduces is the ability to instantly transfer all special currencies to other Alts. This includes unique upgrade currencies like Flightstones and Sigils, tradable currencies like Resonance Crystals (used to purchase Renown items in TWW), and other items that were previously locked to each character.

To trade Currencies between characters, TWW players should open up their Currencies menu (in the Character screen) on the Alt who will be receiving the currencies. Click the currency you want to trade, then click "Transfer". The character you are playing as will be highlighted on the right side, and you can select your other Alts on the drop-down on the left side. Then, it's a simple matter of typing in how much of that currency you want to transfer, and clicking "Confirm".

The WoW Warbands system allows you to share a lot of non-tangible things between characters, as well as currencies which could not previously be traded. Though it was perfectly possible to send BoEs and crafting mats to your Alts via the Mail system, the new Warband Bank feature makes the process of sharing actual items between characters significantly easier, too.

Warband Banks serve as a shared Bank between all of your characters, and serve as a great place to drop off crafting mats for your Alts' other professions, and items that your Alts could find useful. A new item category, Warbound Until Equipped (or WoE), has been included in The War Within to more easily differentiate which items you can share with this feature and which are character-locked.

What's especially nice about Warband Banks is that you can access it at any time, from anywhere in the world. No longer do players have to run back to the bank to grab mats they forgot for crafting, now you can just pull them straight out of the bank at any crafting bench, or summon a Mobile Warband Bank to grab specific things.

With time, Blizzard plans to retroactively add more features to the Warband system, like old expansion currencies and reputations, though it is mostly locked to Dragonflight and The War Within for now. Spend some time getting used to the new Warband system and take full advantage of Warband Banks to have a much better time playing on your Alts.

World of Warcraft: The War Within

Franchise

Warcraft

Base Game

World of Warcraft

Platform(s)

PC

Released

August 26, 2024

Developer(s)

Blizzard

Genre

MMORPG