I’ve looked several places and not really seen this question raised so I thought I would ask at the source.
I’m to the point in the game where I can purchase mandates for most of the factions. My intent being to drop them in my shared stash and give them to new characters.
I gave one for Homestead to one of my new toons and then I realized, well crud, I haven’t met them yet so I have no idea if that worked or not.
So the question is does your character have to be aware of a faction for mandates to work on them? Or should you wait to until you meet the new faction before applying the mandate?
Not that the ?12K iron bits? matter that much in the scheme of things, but I couldn’t think of a good way to test it since I applied it (Homestead as it was the first one I unlocked) after leveling my character to 18 in Crucible so I had no Faction information available at all on that character and I still didn’t have access (at that particular point in time) to the mandate from Devil’s Crossing.
Okay, from what I can tell you should not apply the mandates and I would also assume Writs while the character is in Crucible as they don’t seem to stick.
On a positive note if you have applied a mandate to a character when you look at the description of the mandate in your stash it will say in red letters at the bottom that a mandate has already been applied to the character.
I always thought you couldn’t apply them to characters that weren’t the ones which originally bought them, since their description says ‘soulbound’ and when used in other contexts within the game it means the item becomes unusable by any other character.
Anyway that doesn’t seem to be the case and one way to check if they’re activated is to open your reputation window (shield icon bottom left of UI) where you’ll see a ‘+’ sign on the specific faction if you’ll be gaining a bonus. Hovering on it you will see how high % increase you’ve got.
Writs are soul bound. Mandates are not (so they can be put in your transfer stash and shared with your other characters).
For what I’ve observed you can’t see the + if you haven’t met the faction.
Hence my confusion as to whether or not a mandate I had applied had actually taken effect. Turns out it did not, but that was because I applied it while I was in the Crucible. Worked fine once I applied it in the main campaign.
For further clarification, you do not get +Rep for killing things a faction would normally give you +Rep for until you’ve met the faction in game.
E.g. Homestead appreciates you killing heroic beasts, but until you’ve made it to Homestead and have done something to make the faction aware of you (talk to someone in the faction), you’ll not gain +Rep for killing heroic beasts.
