Wilderness Warbands

Wilderness Warbands is a dangerous Distraction & Diversion, composed of heavily defended storage camps guarded by the followers of the different Gods. These camps are founded to gain an advantage for the followers of a particular God once their God returns. They will set up camp in the Wilderness every 7 hours, one time at each of the three locations. Quercus, an ancient seer Ent, will send out adventurers to fight in the camps to balance the followers of the different Gods in Guthix's name. Quercus can be found just outside the Grand Exchange agility shortcut. Warband events are synchronised on each world.

The activity was released on 25 March 2013 and was first mentioned in Jagex's special Behind the Scenes post.

Time for the next warbands
As a new camp is set up every 7 hours, the time at which these camps takes place is repeated every week. You can find the times (UTC/Game Time) a camp is set up given the weekday:

Gameplay
Players will be notified via a server-wide notice when a Wilderness camp appears. To find a camp after missing the notice, you can talk to Quercus in Edgeville, near the Grand Exchange shortcut. Quercus will also inform you when the next camp is if there is not one currently occurring.

Players must then head to the camp and avoid any attention by the sentries posted around the camp. Most of the camp's followers always face towards the centre of the camp and are incapable of noticing the player: You must pay attention to the pair of followers sparring with each other, as one of them can spot you if you come too close to the camp's outer edge.

Note: If you don't see these things, the camp is already alerted and you will have to kill the NPCs without reinforcements to help.

Players can then sabotage the god's beam in the middle of the camp by finding a spot close enough to the beam in a direct line of sight and draining/siphoning it in a similar manner to Runespan.

Succeeding in the sabotage will teleport in allied NPCs to attack the enemy warband, and grants five additional minutes to kill the warband and loot the tents before the camp collapses. Players can intervene in the fight if they choose to, or let the reinforcements finish it. Players should be careful when fighting the warbands, as they use abilities, and the general can execute powerful ultimate abilities, including a variant of Meteor Strike.

Failing to stealthily sabotage the beam results in the whole camp turning hostile without any reinforcements to distract them from attacking players, and only five minutes to clear the camp and loot the tents.

Even after the general dies, any remaining enemy followers will need to be killed before you can loot the tents. Participating in looting will skull you and holding the looting supplies in your inventory will prevent you from teleporting. Only three out of the five tents can be looted, corresponding to a random mix of three of the five skills that supplies can grant experience for, and players may loot a wand of treachery. This will reset when the player loses or turns in items. There are only 1,000 pieces of loot, and players may obtain loot by killing other players or taking unclaimed drops from dead victims (including oneself). Players can be attacked whilst looting, there are no combat level restrictions (that means a level 138 can attack a level 3 player if the level 3 player looted at least 1 item in the same instance). If a wand of treachery has been looted, the game will announce to everybody in the vicinity that a wand has been found, and the player who has looted it will glow for 20 seconds, as well as have their Prayer Points reduced to zero. Only one wand can be found per camp, though no looter is guaranteed to get it. If the player holding the wand is killed, the wand will be dropped for others to acquire. The next subsequent player to acquire the wand will not glow or have their Prayer Points reduced to zero.

While players cannot teleport with warbands supplies in their inventory, if they can make it to Daemonheim, they can be transported out of the Wilderness. They can be brought either to Taverley or Al Kharid by sailing via the Fremennik at the eastern docks. From Al Kharid, you can run northwest and use the Lumbridge canoe to go to Edgeville.

Logging out or disconnecting while inside the Wilderness will immediately remove all warbands supplies.

Enemies
Various enemies may be encountered while looting camps. Two of each type of follower is in a camp, and each camp has one general. Attacking them will cause the player to automatically switch to multi-combat (if in single-combat).


 * Note: All followers are level 120.

(Players of all levels can attack you while participating in this activity.)

Rewards


Note: If you enter the lobby or try to hop worlds then your supplies are automatically destroyed.

Warbands grant experience in a number of skills, depending on which tents are available at the time and which tents you choose to take loot from.

Reward items are also looted from the tents in the camps in the Wilderness. Several different items may be acquired:


 * Prayer xp is given for converting the beam.
 * Summoning xp is given for summoning reinforcements.
 * Slayer xp is given for participating in killing the camp leader.
 * Farming, Construction, Herblore, Mining and/or Smithing supplies. Each camp will have 3 of these 5 possible skills.
 * A Wand of treachery can be acquired once per camp. This does not mean that a wand is guaranteed to be looted.

You can directly loot a total of 25 supplies per camp before you have to go to Quercus to turn them in, however more can be acquired from killed players, making the true maximum 28 supplies if your entire inventory is filled. Looting a Wand of treachery will not count towards the limit. You can loot from 3 camps every day, resetting at midnight UTC. Even if you are killed and lose everything, your attempt will still count as one of the three. However you can return to the same camp to try again without penalty. This generally means that you can loot a maximum of 75 items per day, but only if you manage to get the maximum of 25 from every camp. Once the items are looted, players are tele-blocked and must walk/run back to Quercus to exchange them for a XP reward associated with the items.


 * $$\text{xp}(s, l) = s \left(\frac{l(l-2)}{2} + 50 \right)$$

is given for s supplies handed in, where l is your skill's level).

The supplies can also be handed in for 4,000 coins each, totaling 300,000 coins per day if all camps are looted. If a player manages to kill someone with supplies in the Wilderness they can pick them up. The supplies can be given to Quercus for either experience in the skills the supplies belong to or 4000 coins for each item. Since skills like smithing and farming are considered expensive skills to train (fast) trading in supplies for XP is by far the most common option especially since the coin value is significantly less than the XP is worth (based on coins per xp in those skills).

template = Template:Wilderness Warbands calc form = ppf result = ppr param = 1|Number of supplies|1|int|1-75 param = 2|Skill level|1|int|1-99

Trivia

 * Assuming players hand in 25 Skill supplies from each warband, it would take a player participation in 148 warbands (a minimum of 50 days) to go from level 1 to level 99 in a skill. It would take a player participation in 1685 warbands (a minimum of 562 days) to go from level 1 to 200 million experience in a skill. For both of the calculations, it's been assumed that players go to all 3 camps every day, which spawn every 7 hours, and manage loot and escape with 25 supplies for every camp.
 * When reinforcements come in to fight a warband, they start off by attacking a follower who is weak to their combat style. For example, a Saradominist thaumaturge (magic user) will first attack a Bandosian reaver (melee user).
 * Each follower is weak to a specific attack style that another follower uses. The mages are weak to arrows, which are used by the rangers; the rangers are weak to slash weapons, which the warriors use; and the warriors are weak to fire spells, which the mages use.
 * When a general uses his magic attack on a player, ALL players within range will be hit.
 * Warband followers do not use abilities when fighting each other, only when fighting players.
 * Warbands are one of few Distraction and Diversions that cannot be reset using a D&D token.
 * Warbands were "tweaked" on 11 June 2013. The tweaks were:
 * Synchronized worlds, as before players could hop from world to world to gain massive amounts of XP (and possibly profit) per warband. Each one now occurs every 7 hours.
 * Attempting to log into another world while in the wilderness causes all of the looted supplies to disappear from your inventory.
 * There are only 1000 lootable supplies per camp. This is equal to 40 players with full loot, since 25 is the maximum amount of supplies per person per camp.
 * Quercus will now exchange the supplies for XP on their respective skill, or turn them into 4000 coins per supply.
 * Whenever a player entering the camp has been spotted by a Warband NPC, an exclamation mark can be seen over their heads. This is likely a reference to the many games where an exclamation mark appears above enemies when they spot you.
 * Strangely, while melee users for each faction of warbands have different weapons, range and magic users all use the same bow and staff respectively.
 * If dropped supplies are left unclaimed after you or another player dies, it is possible to recover them if you can get to the spot where they / you died quickly enough. Picking up supplies from a dead player does not skull you (though obviously attacking a player will), and a small number of supplies may be saved if you manage to die without a skull.