What a 4-Alt Farm Roster Costs
A farm roster is not a free second income. Four characters carry 8 profession slots between them, but every slot arrives with a trainer trip, a storage problem and a stretch of levelling before it returns anything. This is the arithmetic of that plan in Forever, with the parts we cannot cost yet marked as unknown.
8 slots spread across 4 names
Four characters hold 2 primary profession slots each, so the whole roster is 8 slots and nothing more. The free gathering manual handed out in the early levels covers Herbalism, Mining and Skinning, which means 3 of those trades can be started on any character without paying a trainer. The rest have to be learned the ordinary way. That single fact is what makes a roster attractive: the cheapest slots in the game are the ones that pull raw materials out of the world, and a main can only hold 2 of them.
The usual layout puts gathering on the characters that will spend their evenings outdoors and crafting on the one that sells. A common split is 2 gatherers feeding 1 crafter, with the 4th name kept for whichever trade turns out to be short-handed once the realm settles. Which trade that is depends on how many players picked each trade, and nobody can read that in the first week.
Fishing sits outside the 2 primary slots in every Classic version so far, so it does not compete with a gathering choice. We have not seen Forever state otherwise, but treat it as the pattern rather than as a confirmed rule, and check the trainer on your own character before planning a slot around it.
The bill before the first stack arrives
Every name on the roster repeats the same opening costs. Bags are the one nobody budgets for: a gatherer with small bags stops the route to walk back, and bag slots a gatherer buys are paid 4 times over on a 4-character plan rather than once. Bank space is the same story at a smaller scale, because ore and hides sit waiting for the crafter to need them.
Crafting slots add a trainer and often a continent crossing to reach one, which is the part of funding a second character that gets paid in hours instead of coin. Then the trade has to climb, and stacks consumed by profession ranks come out of the same bank the gatherers are filling. A crafter on an alt is a buyer long before it is a seller.
None of that counts the levelling itself. Each character has to reach the bracket where its route is worth running, and levelling hours and the gold they cost apply to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th name exactly as they did to the first. The honest way to read a roster is as time spent now against material flow later.
Legacy points pull slots in a different direction
Profession milestones hand out Legacy progress as well as recipes, which changes what an idle slot is worth. A trade taken to its crafting ceiling returns something to the account beyond anything it sells, and buying Legacy progress with reagents is the version of that where stacks bought from other players are converted straight into account progress rather than into goods.
That matters for a roster because it argues against the usual advice. The standard plan treats every alt slot as a supply line and judges it by what it mails home. If points are also handed out for reaching a crafting milestone, a slot that never sells a single item can still be earning, and the cheapest route to those points may run through a character you otherwise have no reason to play.
Spent points then feed back into the farm itself, since points spent on gathering yield change what the same route returns per hour. Points are also not free to move around once committed, and resetting Legacy talent points is charged separately from the class trainer, so a roster built around one perk is awkward to rebuild around another.
What reaches the main, and what we cannot cost
Materials only matter once they are in front of a buyer. Everything a roster gathers has to travel by mail or guild bank to whichever character does the selling, which adds a delivery step to every route and a dependency on channels staying open. What that looks like when they are not is set out in a hold on trade and mail, and the ordinary mechanics of moving coin back the other way sit with moving gold between your own characters.
The wider effect is on supply rather than on your bank. One player running 4 gatherers lists more raw material than 4 players running 1 character each, because the alts have no spending of their own to absorb it. That is the pressure described in a second and third character, and it is why a roster can be profitable for you and still push the price of your own stacks down on a busy realm.
What we do not know. We have not seen confirmed figures for how many Legacy points a profession milestone awards, whether those points are held per character or shared across the account, or whether a second character earning the same milestone is paid again. Until that is published, no honest comparison can be made between the cost of a 4th name and the account progress it returns. Plan the roster on materials, and treat the points as a bonus whose size is unknown.
Questions
Is 4 characters the right number for a farm roster?
There is nothing special about 4. It is simply the point where the 2 free gathering trades, a crafter and a spare slot all fit without doubling up, and where most players stop because the storage and mailing overhead starts eating the evening. A roster of 2 does most of the same work with far less upkeep, and a roster of 6 mostly adds queue time at the mailbox.
Should the alts pay for their own bags and trainers, or the main?
Funding from the main gets the roster working faster, but it hides the cost. If you want to know whether the plan actually pays, keep a rough note of what each character needed before it returned its first full load of material, because that is the figure the roster has to earn back. The mechanics of either approach are the same; only the bookkeeping differs.
Do Legacy points make an extra alt worth rolling on their own?
We cannot say. The award for reaching a crafting milestone has not been published as a number, and nothing we have seen states whether points are account-wide or per character. If they are shared across the account and paid once, a second crafter adds no progress at all; if they are paid again, the maths changes completely. Treat it as unsettled.
Does running several gatherers lower the price of what they gather?
On a busy realm it contributes to that, yes. Alt gatherers produce material without the matching consumption a played character has, so the stacks they list are pure supply. One roster does not move a market, but the pattern is common enough that the trades with the most practitioners are usually the ones where raw material sells slowest.
Sources
- Blizzard's official news feed, where profession and Legacy system details would be published if they are confirmed — World of Warcraft news.