During the beta, PCGamer sat down with Blizzard leadership to discuss alts in WoW Forever. The general philosophy around alternate characters is to give players a chance to experience all of the new leveling content in the game and provide account-wide benefits.
As Blizzard continues to develop new content for WoW Forever, much of this will be available as part of the leveling journey. One of the goals of inserting new content into low-level zones is to make sure that players never have to take the same path twice.
To incentivize players to roll multiple characters, Blizzard is introducing the Legacy Points System to WoW Forever. This system will act as account-wide talent points, which will allow players to complete challenges and earn bonuses on each character. Some Legacy Point benefits include:
- Earning additional Rested Experience
- Increased Health and Mana regeneration
- Enhancements to Professions
- Increased Honor gains
Along with these early-level benefits, Blizzard is also considering adding one more thing to WoW Forever: account-wide banks.
| Vice president and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas says Forever’s emphasis on alts has the team considering options that might support that gameplay, including swiping things like warband banks from the modern game. |
What is the Warband Bank?
Originally introduced in The War Within expansion, the Warband Bank allows players to access shared bank tabs from across all their characters in the game.
In addition to the regular Bank tab, each character on the account is also able to deposit and withdraw items from the shared Warband tab. This is obviously limited to non-Soulbound items. Currently in WoW Forever, if a player wants to send items from one of their characters to another, they need to use the Mail system, which is a hassle.
| “Particularly with a Legacy system that encourages playing alts, taking out the extra couple of steps of having to mail items manually from your main to your alt—logging over, taking them out of the mail, I don’t know that’s in anyone’s interest,” he says. “An account-wide bank is something I could see adding in the not-too-distant future.” |
While Blizzard has improved this process by making mail sent between characters on the same account instant, creating a shared tab in the Bank would make this process even easier, especially for new players. Blizzard may need to consider restricting this between characters of the opposite faction, but overall, a Warband Bank would be a great quality-of-life addition to WoW Forever.
