Information about the upcoming Diablo Immortal has been swirling around the internet for over a year, but it hasn’t always been clear or reliable. One of the game’s central new systems, Warbands, was never explained or even properly unveiled, and future players were left to piece together tenuous influencer reports and untrustworthy leaks from older builds. Thankfully, the most recent Blizzard pre-launch press event delivered lots of concrete details on how Warbands and the Warband Stash work in Diablo Immortal.
Diablo Immortal Warbands
To put it simply, Warbands are like mini-clans inside your regular Clan. Each Clan in Diablo Immortal consists of up to 100 players, and within the Clan, players can group themselves in parties of eight, which become their Warbands. These parties are ongoing, just like your Clan membership. While it is possible to leave and join a Warband freely, it is advised that you stick with your Warband once you have found mates with similar schedules and goals. This allows you to coordinate better, compete for rewards against other Warbands, and share loot through the Stash — more on that later.
To access Warbands, players need to progress to the city of Westmarch, which is one of the zones in Diablo Immortal. There they can interact with an NPC hanging by the Dead Tree, who will unlock the Warband Camp and explain the system’s basics. Once you have formed a Warband with up to seven other players, you can hang out at the Camp, discuss your plans in a private Warband chat, and most importantly, take on PvE content together for rewards and some mild competition with other Warbands.
There are a couple of questions remaining about Warbands in Diablo Immortal. First, while we can assume some form of matchmaking or looking-for-group feature will exist, we don’t know for sure what it would look like, and whether it will allow new players to easily find the right Warbands within their Clan. Secondly, we don’t know if Warbands will be able to eventually take part in PvP in Diablo Immortal, or have any form of direct competitive gameplay.
Warband Stash and item sharing
Playing with your Warband in Diablo Immortal yields two types of rewards. First, defeating enemies and conquering PvE activities effectively as a group will help place your Warband higher on the Helliquary Raid Leaderboard. The Warbands that make it to the top spots on that Leaderboard are given Scoria, one of the game’s currencies.
The second reward is less permanent, but nevertheless quite fun as it will allow you to enjoy more build variety and a sense of contribution and camaraderie, rather than just cold hard cash or cosmetics. While tackling PvE dungeons with your Warband, you are given Warband Chests. Each time you open one of these, they deposit a random item in your Warband Stash, which is shared by everyone in your group. From the Camp, you can access the Stash and take any one item from it; if you want to take a different item, you need to return the first one. An access log shows which player has taken each item.
If the player who originally deposited a particular item leaves your Warband, so does the item. The Warband Stash allows party members in Diablo Immortal to share loot and reap the benefits of teamwork, while also motivating them to stay together longer.
