Bank Alts In WoW Forever: Do You Need One? What Is It For?

In World of Warcraft Forever, you will be out and about in the world a lot. Travel is slow and returning to a big city takes time. Yet, you will pick up lots of potential loot, crafting materials, and rare objects, many of which you have little use for yourself, but which can be precious to other players.

The bridge between your adventures and managing your inventory is the bank alt or auction house alt, and every WoW Forever player should have one.

Guide Contents

• What Does a Bank Alt Do?
• The Best Professions for Your Bank Alt
• The Best Class and Race for Your Bank Alt
• The Best City for Your Bank Alt

What Does a Bank Alt Do?

Your bank alt will live in a major city and the trinity of an Auction House, a Mailbox, and a Bank will be their domain.

You will want to send any valuable items you pick up and don’t need to your bank alt such as:

• Bind-on-equip (BoE) armor pieces and weapons
• Cloth
• Ore and Gems
• Leather
• Herbs
• Meat and other food ingredients

What About Grey & White Items?

For grey items, the right destination is the nearest vendor. Just sell them. But when an item has even a white name, there is a chance it is valuable to someone. At the very lowest levels, this might not be the case, and it costs 30 copper to send an item stack by mail, so some things are just not worth it, but fairly quickly you can start making a better profit from selling things in the auction house compared to selling them to a vendor.

Typically, low-level white items are cheap in the beginning but pick up some more value when the number of people adventuring in low-level areas decreases. With WoW Forever’s emphasis on alts, this effect may be more muted than in Classic. Still, holding on to some white items to sell them later can be an effective market strategy.

Quick Maths: If the AH sale price of an item is higher than the sell-to-vendor price + 30 copper + deposits for any failed sales (low-demand items), your bank alt is the right person to handle it.

Using A Bank Alt For Storage

Sending things that you pick up along the way to your bank alt also serves as temporary storage in the mailbox and postpones managing the inventory to another time. Items are stored in the recipient’s mailbox for 30 days, after which they are automatically returned to the sender. They are then stored in the sender’s mailbox for another 30 days, after which they are destroyed if not picked up.

Mail between your own characters arrives instantly in WoW Forever, so you can use your bank alt to store anything you need and get it back at a moment’s notice. Note that you cannot send mail across Factions, Rulesets, or Regions, you need a separate bank alt for each if you play on multiple servers or both sides of a PvE server.

The Best Professions for Your Bank Alt

Perhaps surprisingly, picking up a couple of key professions on your bank alt is actually highly recommended.

Bank Alts & Enchanting

You can increase the value of your bank alt with professions. In WoW Forever, even a level 1 character can learn Enchanting and Disenchant high-level items. This becomes even more powerful when combined with addons that build you a personal database of auction house prices (such as Auctionator) and compare the price of enchanting materials to the price of the item itself (such as Disenchant Buddy and Disenchantry).

This enables you to make informed decisions on what to sell and what to Disenchant for materials: although note that Disenchanting results are somewhat random.

Bank Alts & Other Professions

Other professions are generally less useful, because a level 1 character can only get Professions up to skill 75. You need to reach level 10 to unlock 150, level 20 to unlock 225, and level 35 to unlock 300. This can help you plan if you want to level up your bank alt a bit.

Tailoring can be an exception early in the game however, because even a skill level 1 Tailor can create Linen Bags for some early storage.

The Best Class and Race for Your Bank Alt

You can use any race as your bank alt. Any class is fine as well, although there can be minor perks to some classes if you level them up a bit: Rogues can open lockboxes and Mages can create Portals. But if you never level up, it really does not matter.

The Best City for Your Bank Alt

Most Azeroth capital cities are functional locations to park your bank alt in. Each of them has an Auction House, a Bank, and Mailboxes readily available in WoW Forever (unlike vanilla), although Stormwind and Ironforge (Alliance) and Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff (Horde) have somewhat shorter distances between them than Darnassus and Undercity.

The least viable city for a bank alt despite having an Auction House is Valanaar in Zephras Isle. Valanaar is not a rested zone throughout, so you cannot instantly log out when you are outside the Inn, and the Inn is some way away. Even a level 1 Skyborne can take a Skycutter to Azeroth, so if you really want a Skyborne bank alt, you can run them to another capital.