A Bank Alt Network Is Infrastructure, Not Storage
Most profession advice is written for one character: pick 2 slots, level them, sell what they make. A roster works differently. The slots are spread over several low-level alts, the materials have to travel between them, and one character stops playing the game to hold the stock and sit by the auction house. This is what that arrangement costs to build and where it tends to break.
The roster is a set of slots, not a set of characters
A single character has 2 profession slots and has to choose between gathering what it needs and crafting with it. A roster of alts has as many slots as it has characters, and the choice stops being a choice. That is the whole argument for the arrangement, and it is also where the cost starts: every extra slot sits on a character that has to be created, levelled far enough to be useful, taught a trade and given somewhere to put what it collects. The slots are cheap; the bodies underneath them are not.
Forever makes the first half of that easier than Classic did. A quest in the low levels hands out a manual for Herbalism, Mining or Skinning and teaches the profession outright, so a gathering alt is productive almost immediately after it leaves the starting zone. The crafting half has no equivalent shortcut, because what Forever changed about professions affects how a trade is learned rather than what it costs to raise. A crafter still consumes materials for every skill point, and those materials come from somewhere.
So the useful way to plan a roster is backwards. Decide which crafting trade the roster is being built to feed, then put the gathering slots that supply it on characters that can reach the right zones, and only then count how many bodies that needs. Built in the other order, you end up with 4 alts holding a collection of trades that do not hand anything to each other, which is the case spreading professions over several alts has to answer before any of it earns.
The bank alt is the one that does no farming
One character in the roster stops being a player character. It parks in a city next to the auction house and the mailbox, holds the stock, posts the listings and receives the coin. Everything the gathering alts pick goes to it, everything the crafter needs comes back out of it, and the only reason it has levels at all is to be allowed to walk between the mailbox and the auction house without dying. In practice that is the character the whole arrangement is built around.
The reason it exists is travel. Without a holding character, every gatherer has to come back to a capital to sell, and hours lost crossing the continent are taken out of the same evening the farming is. With one, the gatherer mails and keeps moving. The trade-off is that the stock is now sitting on a character that cannot defend itself, cannot gather, and is worth nothing if the account ever stops using it.
Where the stock physically sits is a separate decision from who owns it. Mail, personal bank slots and a guild bank are 3 different holds with different rules about how long things stay put and who can reach them, and mail and guild bank holds are the part of the setup most rosters get wrong first. A stack sitting in a mailbox is not storage, it is a parcel with a clock on it.
What the first week actually spends money on
The early bill is not training. It is space. A gathering alt with starting bags fills them within one route and then spends the rest of the trip deciding what to throw away, which turns a farming hour into a sorting hour. Bags are the first purchase that changes output directly, and paying for bag and bank slots comes due on every character in the roster rather than once. A roster of 4 pays that bill 4 times, and the bank alt pays it hardest.
After that comes the crafter. Raising a trade is paid in materials, and a roster is usually built precisely so that those materials are gathered rather than bought. That works, but it means the crafting alt produces nothing sellable for a while and the gathering alts are working for it instead of for the auction house. Plan that stretch as a cost, not as a pause, and the rest of what a new alt costs to start stops arriving as a surprise.
The third line is coin movement. Gold that lands on the bank alt is gold the other characters cannot spend on training or repairs, so somebody has to move it back, and moving gold between your own characters has its own rules and its own record. Treat the bank alt as a till that needs emptying in both directions rather than a vault.
What we do not know yet
Several numbers that decide whether this arrangement is worth building have not been published, and we are not going to estimate them. We have not seen confirmed bag sizes or vendor prices for the early containers in Forever, nor the cost of additional personal bank slots, nor whether the guild bank works the way it does in other Classic versions. Any figure circulating for those right now is somebody's recollection from another client, and we would rather leave the line blank than fill it with a number that moves.
The same applies to mail between characters on one account. How long a parcel takes to arrive, and whether attachments behave differently from plain letters, is the single mechanic the whole roster depends on, and we have no statement that settles it for Forever. If mail is slow, the roster needs a trade-window step and the alts have to meet in person; if it is immediate, the gatherers never have to come home at all.
There is also the Legacy point cap. On the beta an account holds a limited set of points at a time, which means a roster spends part of its allocation on levelling speed for the alts rather than on anything the main would have taken. Whether that cap ships as it stands is not something we can confirm, so check it on your own account before you plan the roster around it.
Questions
How many alts does a working roster need?
Fewer than most plans start with. The number is set by the crafting trade you are feeding, not by how many professions exist. If one crafter needs 2 kinds of raw material, 2 gathering alts and a holding character cover it, and anything beyond that is a second business rather than a bigger version of the first one. Each additional body costs bags, levelling time and a share of your evening, and those costs do not get cheaper as the roster grows.
Does the bank alt need levels at all?
It needs enough to stand in a capital and walk between the mailbox and the auction house safely, and no more than that. Beyond that point, levels on a holding character are time spent on something that will never gather, craft or run a dungeon. The one thing worth checking before you freeze it at a low level is whether any part of your plan requires it to reach a zone or a trainer that a low-level character cannot get to.
Is it better to buy materials or gather them for the crafting alt?
It depends on what the gathering alt would otherwise be doing with the same hour. If the raw material is cheap on the auction house and the gatherer could be collecting something that sells for more, buying is the better trade. If the roster exists precisely because you have the characters and not the coin, gathering is the point of the arrangement. The decision is made per material and per week, not once for the whole roster.
What breaks first in a setup like this?
Storage, usually before anything else. Stock accumulates on the holding character faster than it gets listed or crafted, the bank fills, the overflow goes into the mailbox, and the mailbox is not a safe place to leave things indefinitely. The second failure is quieter: the gathering alts keep collecting materials the crafter is no longer using, and the roster spends its evenings producing stock that nobody in it needs.
Sources
- Blizzard's official site for World of Warcraft, where profession and launch details are published — World of Warcraft official site.