How have Warbands changed the way you approach new content in The War Within?

It’s been three months since the launch of The War Within, and we’ve had plenty of time to become acclimated to the new Warbands feature. Reputation being shared across all characters on your account was the thing I was probably most looking forward to, but including nearly all achievement progress, transmog, and currencies has really been a game changer.

I started this expansion out by playing through the main story in each zone with my main, a blood elf mage who’s been at the top of my character list for fifteen years. However, once I hit the level cap and started to outgear a lot of the rewards from quests and world events, it really did feel like my Warband was working as a coordinated group of adventurers.

In previous expansions, players needed to decide which reward they got from many tasks. For a world event like Superbloom, once your main character outgrew the gear rewards, you would need to choose — gain a huge chunk of reputation while vendoring high-end gear, or getting a nice upgrade armor piece for an alt and throwing away the reputation reward. What this typically meant was running the same events multiple times each week to collect the rewards one by one.

In The War Within, shared reputation and currency means that you can complete each event once per week without feeling like you are wasting any time. Some tasks can be completed by characters who haven’t quite hit level 80, and others get assigned to alts who have hit the level cap but are still sporting gear from the Dragon Isles. You can even fine-tune your to-do list to be sure that you maximize your pile of gear to be disenchanted or complete a bunch of humanoid-heavy world quests with a Tailoring alt.

All of this was mostly expected, but what struck me was a thought that I had when I was contemplating the new zone we’ll be headed to in 11.0.7, the Siren Isle: I don’t have to send my main character. For the first time in a decade and a half, I might explore a new area with whichever character I am drawn to the most when the new content drops, without a penalty.

Sure, I always had the option to do this. Some players change their ‘main’ character every expansion or more. But the idea of being able to get credit for new quests and achievements, trade currency around, and possibly even totally skip a zone with my main was not what came to mind when Warbands were first announced earlier this year.

Nevertheless, some things never change. I’m currently deep into the ongoing Felcycle Secrets of Azeroth event with my main character — it would feel almost wrong to play through something so character-specific on an alt. But what about Undermine and Season 2? Will I lead the charge into the goblin capital with my same old mage, or will I explore the new zone and content with other characters first? I don’t think I even had an alt for the first five years that I played World of Warcraft, so the fact that I am contemplating this at all means the Warbands feature is working as intended.

So how has account-wide progress changed your approach to the game? Do you still have a character you spend most of your time on, or have you fully embraced being the ringleader of an army of alts?