WoW’s upcoming Warbands are an alt-lover’s dream come true

In a recent blogpost from Blizzard, we got new details on one of the biggest features coming to World of Warcraft in The War Within: Warbands. These aren’t just a boon for players who have a baseball team’s worth of alt-characters, they’re a bit of a technical marvel as well.

Warbands are, in the simplest terms, a gaggle of four characters across any faction, realm, even account, limited only by region (e.g. Americas, Europe). These four characters can share a whole slew of features, ranging from a collective bank, parallel progression for faction reputation, the ability to trade currencies, and more. Gear will even feature a new binding modifier, “Warbound until equipped,” so that you can toss gear for your alts into their shared bank.

The most impressive bit of black magic is the sharing of things like reputation, mounts, transmog, achievements and currency across accounts. Blizzard is assuming, of course, that these accounts all belong to one player, but the ability to quickly access characters across different subscriptions probably took no shortage of backend labor.

Here’s a quick list of what’s shared within a Warband:

• Gold and most currencies, though some older currencies may incur a character transfer fee
• A collective bank of Warband items, non-soulbound items, and reagents
• Mount, toy, and pet collections
• Most reputation progress
• Most achievements and their rewards
• Map exploration progress
• Flight points

While there are several exceptions to what is shared, like certain achievements and reputations, the trend toward an utterly alt-friendly World of Warcraft that kicked off in Dragonflight seems to be continuing. Warbands are arriving with the pre-expansion patch, which goes live on July 23.