Say hello to tabbed banks, and goodbye to Void Storage, in WoW patch 11.2

Blizzard dropped a little bit of a bombshell of a last-minute patch 11.2 feature: personal banks will be getting a Warband Bank-style makeover, while Void Storage (which we once nominated as one of the strangest holdovers from Cataclysm) and the more recent Reagent Bank will be going away — and rolled into the bank.

The wording about purchasing versus unlocking is admittedly confusing, but this feature is live to test on the PTR, so we have some information on how it works.

• A number of bank tabs will be given to existing characters for free based on level — or, if below 80, level and what features you had unlocked.
  • When you log in on a character who is currently level 80, all of your new bank tabs will be unlocked.
  • If you log in on a character who is below 80, they will unlock some number of tabs based on how far they’ve leveled, plus an extra tab each for the Reagent Bank and each tab of Void Storage that they had unlocked. A level 70 character who had all of those unlocked will also unlock all six tabs, for instance.
  • Three bank tabs is 288 item slots, which is more than a maximally-stocked bank right now can currently contain.
• Characters created after this changeover will have to buy their bank tabs for the prices listed in the post.
• Anything from your bank, including the bags in your current bank slots, will be inserted into the first three tabs of the new bank. This will not take into account any spacing you currently are doing manually, and arranges things vertically (like guild banks and Warband banks, unlike the regular bank) so you may find the order has changed.
• If you had the Reagent Bank unlocked, your fourth tab will be labeled “Reagents” and will contain everything that used to be in the Reagent Bank. Both the new tabs, and the current Reagent Bank, are 98 slots, so this should fit just fine.
• If you had Void Storage unlocked, your fifth and sixth tabs will be labeled “Void Storage” and the contents of Void Storage will be moved into it.

There are some advantages to these new bank tabs. These contain the same kind of customization and filtering options as the Warbank — which means you will be able to set filters by expansion, item type, and so on. Want to have a tab devoted entirely to bits and bobs from Legion? You got it. Want a reagent tab for the current expansion and a second one for everyhing else? Done. Reportedly, the new bank also fixes one of the biggest remaining annoyances with the Warband Bank: right-clicking an item deposits it into the current tab if possible, rather than into the first available slot.

That said, this kind of process is not without problem, and players are right to be leery of Blizzard automatically touching their valuables; in the changeover of banks in The War Within, guild banks found items went missing and Blizzard’s final response was “sorry, can’t fix it.” There is currently a bug of this kind in the process on the PTR: Plain Letters, the ones you can make out of any piece of in-game mail, are blank after the changeover. Whether this is a side effect of the transfer or a side effect of the characters who wrote the mail not being present on the PTR is unknown at this time. Additionally, there is that note about how during “times of great demand,” the bank conversion process may be delayed, locking you out of your bank entirely until it’s finished — and there is no greater time of demand than the first day or two of a new patch, when this process will be running for many characters.

My advice: take anything from your bank and Void Storage that is of value, sentimental or otherwise, and place it in your inventory before August 5th. Your bags may be temporarily cluttered, but it’s better than losing a letter from a treasured friend, a quest item that’s no longer unobtainable, or your first-ever legendary item. This will undoubtedly be a great boon once it’s complete, but processes like these that run automatically rarely ever account for every possibility.