Wilderness Warbands

Wilderness Warbands is a dangerous Distraction & Diversion, composed of heavily guarded storage camps of 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.

How to participate
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. They 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, which then causes another god's followers to appear and start fighting the followers who are in the camp.

It should be noted that most of the camp's followers always face towards the centre of the camp and thus is 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 camps outer edge.

Players can then intervene in the fight if they choose to, and then must fight the general who has several unique abilities. Players should be very careful when fighting the warbands, as they fight like players (in that they use abilities) and the general can execute powerful ultimate abilities, including a variant of Meteor Strike.

Succeeding in the sabotage will teleport in allied warband NPCs to attack the enemy warband NPCs, and grants the players participating 10 minutes to kill the warband enemy NPCs and general and loot the tents before the camp 'dies'. Failing (by guards witnessing a player for too long, the camp getting suspicious after three incidents, or getting too close to a guard) results in the whole camp turning hostile without any reinforcements to distract them from attacking players and only 5 minutes to clear the camp and loot the tents (note that the timer for the camp's life-span begins once the beam is dealt with correctly or 'broken' rather than when the general is killed).

After the general dies, any assisting followers will need to be killed before you can loot the tents. Participating in looting will instantly toggle your single-way wilderness off (into multiway). Only 3 out of the 5 tents can be looted, and players may get various rewards, including a wand of treachery. There are only 1000 pieces of loot and players may obtain loot by killing other players. 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, and have their Prayer points reduced to 0. In addition, it will disable single way combat and level restrictions for attacking that player, and like the other loot, prevents the player from teleporting until they have left the Wilderness. Only one wand can be found per camp.

While the players cannot teleport with the items in their inventory, if they can make it to Daemonheim, they can be transported out of the Wilderness. They will be brought either to Taverley or Al Kharid. From Al Kharid, run northwest to use the Lumbridge canoe to go to Edgeville.

NOTE: Logging out or disconnecting from the server will immediately remove all loot.

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).

Rewards
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. Looting from the tents will cause the player to turn into multi-combat way if they are on single-combat.

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


 * Farming, Construction, Herblore, Mining and/or Smithing supplies. Each warband will have 3 of these 5 possible skills.  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.
 * A Wand of treachery can be acquired once per camp at most. Note that this does not mean that a wand is a guaranteed drop, but that the limit per camp is one wand.

You can loot up to 25 different supplies before you will have to go to Quercus to turn them in. 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. You can return to the same camp however to try again without penalty. After a recent update, there is no longer a wait period of 8 hours between being able to loot. This 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. $$\frac{x^2-2x+100}{2}$$ experience is given per supply handed in (where x=relevant skill's level), for a total of $$25\times\frac{x^2-2x+100}{2}$$ experience for 25 supplies. The supplies can also be handed in for 4,000 GP each, totalling 300,000 GP per day if all camps are looted.

 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

If you are killed or try to hop worlds then your supplies are automatically dropped.

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 manages loot and escape with 25 supplies for every camp.
 * When reinforcements come in to fight a warband, they start off by attacking a follower that 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 you cannot use a D&D token to reset the progress.
 * 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 causes all of the looted supplies to disappear from your inventory.
 * There are only 1000 lootable supplies 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, which could be a direct reference from the Metal Gear series, whenever an enemy spots 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.