wow Official Warbands Preview for the War Within

[Staff 1,475]

The pre-patch arrives on the 23rd and Warbands come with it, so Blizzard have prepared this overview for the huge new feature coming to WoW!

Warbands (Source)

Expand the potential of all your World of Warcraft® characters with account-wide progression across your Battle.net® account, regardless of faction—including shared Renown, a Warband bank, Achievements, Collections, and more!

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Getting The Band Together

Upon first logging into World of Warcraft, the Warband conversion process automatically enables many of the game's progression systems to be account-wide. Players will not need to log into each character individually for all progression, items, etc., to convert; however, there may be a short wait for the system to completely process your Warband the first time you log in. The Warband conversion process can take up to 20 minutes or longer, and depending on the amount of data being processed, there could be a login queue.

The new Warbands system is effective for all characters on a player's Battle.net account and the items, Collections, and progression they share. It's important to note that your Warband is limited to characters within a single region (for example, the Americas or Europe) but spans every realm, faction, and even subscription you may have within that region.

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Just Hangin' Out

When you log in to the game, you'll see a selection of your characters on the login screen, waiting for you to choose who you will go on your next adventure with.

You can assign four characters to one scene, with more scenes planned for you to collect in the future. In addition, to make it a little easier to see who's who in your Warband at any given moment, there’s additional information about each character during character selection.

Once in a Warband, you will no longer need to swap between realms to see characters on those realms. The one exception is if you have multiple World of Warcraft subscriptions within one Battle.net account. In this case, you will only see the characters on the account you're logged in to, even though all your characters across subscriptions are included as a part of your Warband.

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Carting Around Your Band Equipment

Share Items between your characters on a single Battle.net account in one convenient place—your Warband Bank.

The Warband Bank can be accessed by bankers throughout the game, and all characters in your Warband can access the bank to deposit and withdraw items freely. It will provide up to five tabs with ninety-eight available inventory slots each. Each tab can be purchased for an increasing amount of gold, customized with an icon, and organized like a Guild Vault. This bank is in addition to your individual character bank vault.

Any non-soulbound item can be stored in the Warband Bank. The bank will also behave like the reagent bank, allowing you to craft using reagents from it without having to withdraw them. In addition, the bank will allow you to deposit and manually withdraw gold across characters in your Warband.

Also, similar to pet battles, players who play multiple characters simultaneously on multiple World of Warcraft accounts will find that only the character that logs into the realm first will have access to the Warband Bank.

The UI and functionality of the character-level bank will be adjusted in the future, and tabs like the Warband bank will also be adjusted. Bags will no longer be needed in the character bank when this change occurs. This change won't alter the number of slots currently available in your bank but will shift them from bags to tabs.

Warbanding Together for Better Banking

Completing the"Warbanding Together" storyline quests in and around Gadgetzan will get you access to heaps of storage for your Warband. You will be rewarded the Warband Bank Distance Inhibitor spell after finishing up. This spell allows you to summon a personal portal directly to your Warband Bank, where you can make withdrawals and deposits for 10 minutes (4hr Cooldown).

"Now that we've got all the transpositional data we could ever for, all we need to do is set up a wormhole in a suitable banking establishment, and we'll be dropping gear into each other's pockets from the field in no time!"

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Sharing is Caring. Friend!

While gear is one of the primary forms of character-specific progression in World of Warcraft, Warbands makes managing and collecting them more convenient and alternate character-friendly.

Warbound until Equipped

Warbound until Equipped (WuE) is a new type of gear. Gear that is WuE can be freely traded across your Warband but becomes Soulbound once it's equipped by a character.

WuE gear will be available within Raids, Dungeons, and Delves. Whenever you earn loot, you will have a slight bonus chance to gain an additional piece of WuE gear as personal loot. This gear will be at least one lower tier than other loot from that source (currently a whole upgrade track lower (e.g., Hero-> Champion), and it could be gear usable by any class.

Also, simply playing the game can occasionally earn you a single-tier gear lower than your current gear. Consider sending it to help an alternate character or take a chance and try a new class you've been meaning to try.

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Enhancing Your Transmog Collection

To help players continue expanding their collections and style their alternate characters how they want, any character can collect any item appearance, regardless of whether they can equip the item. Class-specific appearances are an exception and will still be collectible only by that specific class.

It's important to note that these changes only affect your ability to collect appearances. Existing rules on which characters can use any given appearance are not changing (e.g., a Priest getting a plate helm drop will unlock the appearance for your plate-wearing characters, even though they cannot use plate appearances themselves). You can view appearances on any character of any class or race within the appearances UI.

It's also easier to collect appearances from unbound items. You will no longer need to equip the item to add it to your collection. Any time an item is destroyed via disenchanting, deleting, selling, etc., you will automatically collect the appearance. You can also collect the appearance from Bind on Equip (BoE) gear by converting it to "Warbound until Equipped" instead.

Existing gear in your character-level bank or bag inventory will be automatically added to your Transmog collection when you first log into that character.

Any gear that drops with a transmog appearance you haven't collected yet will have the Transmog option to roll for it rather than the Greed option (Transmog has higher priority). This system will expand to allow players on one character to add class-specific items they can't equip to their Transmog collection. It will allow a player on a mage character to collect a warrior item and add it to the Transmog collection for use on a warrior character instead.

When rolling for Transmog, any gear that drops that can be equipped by your current character will get a higher rolling priority than those rolling with characters who cannot equip the item (e.g., a priest will always beat a warrior when both roll Transmog on a piece of cloth gear).

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Warband-Wide Reputation

When you have a Warband reputation, any progress made on one character will be shared with all your characters. Rewards will also be unlocked for all characters, although the form this takes will vary per reward. Warband-wide rewards will be granted only once, while some rewards will remain character-specific and need to be collected on each character.

Once a reputation is converted to Warband-wide, reputation progress will display as the furthest any character in your account has achieved. For example, if you were at Renown 5 for Valdrakken Accord on one character and Renown 10 on another, your new Warband Valdrakken Accord Renown will be 10.

Several reputations will not be converted for various reasons. Like the Winterpelt Furbolg and Glimmerogg Racer, due to not fitting within the fantasy for those reputations—Winterpelt Furbolg has a language learning component that doesn't make sense to be shared across characters, and the Glimmerrogg Racer reputation is more of a personal standing in the snail races. These are also minor reputations that are not as impactful Warband-wide.

Additionally, converting reputations in previous expansions will take some time to implement, so it will happen over time. A limited number won't be converted; for example, Aldor and Scryer in the Burning Crusade and the Covenants in Shadowlands won't be converted because they represent per-character choices.

First-Time Quest Rewards

Players can earn a bonus quest reward for any quest completed for the first time on their Warband. An additional, unique bonus will be granted for completing a quest additional times.

Quests will only deliver Reputation as a first-time completion bonus. On additional completions of the same quest on alts, players will earn a bonus reward currency similar to Dragon Isles Supplies instead of Reputation. This currency will be freely transferable across the Warband and can be used to purchase various Warband-level rewards such as cosmetics, mounts, and pets.

This allows you to complete quests for any character you want without impacting your Reputation or progress. Whichever character completes them first will earn the Reputation for your Warband.

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Achieving Greatness

With Warbands, all achievements are considered "Warband". A total Warband achievement score will be tracked and displayed, and this score will be the sum of all account-wide achievement points plus the points from any character-specific achievements completed on any character.

Many achievements have become account-wide—approximately 2000 across all expansions, with a few rare exceptions. Specifically for achievements, doing the activity on one character is part of what makes it hard or interesting, such as Insane in the Membrane, since the hard part of this achievement is maxing out diametrically opposed reputations.

In addition, any achievements that would not benefit from shared progression across characters, such as Memories of Teldrassil, will be left character-specific so you can see what cool things you have done on specific characters. This will not impact your achievement score, rewards, or ability to complete achievements.

Most of the rewards granted by achievements are Warband-wide. In many cases, the reward will span across the entire Warband, such as for most titles. In other cases, the whole achievement will be converted, and its reward will be account-wide. For example, dungeon teleports earned by Keystone Hero achievements will become account-wide, both in the achievement and the reward.

The primary exception to Warband-wide rewards is those intrinsically per character, such as Dreaming of Wyrms.

Another exception is achievements celebrating highly prestigious accomplishments on a specific character, like the Gladiator: Dragonflight Season 3 achievement, whose title and progress will remain character-specific.

For most achievements, we are adding your progress across all your characters. For example, if you have done 200 personal crafting orders on each of three different characters, the Personal Crafter achievement will immediately be completed upon login.

There are a few achievements where it only makes sense to take the highest value across your characters, such as the Reach Level 70 achievement. In most cases, these are not converted as there is no benefit. We will use the highest value you have reached on any character for the exceptions where there are.

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Map Exploration

For those who may not be as interested in re-exploring every map on all your characters, we are adding The Warband Map to Everywhere All At Once toy that will reveal all maps of regions fully explored by a member of your Warband. Have two max-level characters and this map can be yours!

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Share the Wealth

To help avoid confusion over spending the wrong currency on the wrong character, the currency is not fully Warband-wide; instead, it can be transferred between individual characters in your Warband. So, instead of relying on buying a unique item and mailing it to an alt, you can directly transfer any shareable currency from other characters to the one you are currently playing within the currency User Interface (UI).

Currencies intended to purchase Warband-wide items such as cosmetics, pets, and mounts will usually be completely free to transfer between members of your Warband.

In cases where a currency is earned on a character with the intent that the character will be the primary user of the currency, but an excess needs to be moved to an alternate character, there will be a slight loss in the transfer of that currency, specifically for older currencies where this value loss was accomplished via an item purchase, such as Cosmic Flux from Shadowlands.

Adjustments will be made to older currencies, and Warband transfer will be enabled on many where appropriate.

Note that there will still be many currencies that will remain non-transferable because they represent important character-based progression. Two examples of these are the Crest and Flightstone equivalents in The War Within.

Shared Flight Points for Your Warband

Flight points will also be account-wide. For standard flight points you have yet to learn, you will only have to collect these on one character, and they will be unlocked across your Warband. Flight points that have already been collected on any character across your account will be unlocked for your Warband.

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Get out there and expand your troupe of brave defenders of Azeroth. Happy alting!

[azatoth668 2]

We need cross server intra warband crafting orders!

[Migol 433]

I really wish Warband characters could share crafted soulbound gear.    IE your inscriptionist Druid crafts a staff for your Mage that would ordinarily have to go through the order system and all that.