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  5. Alts and Your Warband

Alts and Your Warband

The second character is far cheaper to gear than the first — and most of the reason is progress your account has already earned without telling you.

Why the second character is much easier

A new character at max level looks like starting from nothing. It is not, and the difference is large enough to change how you plan a week.

A lot of progress in this game is earned once, by your account — not by the character who earned it. Your alt inherits it the moment it exists, and most people never find out how much they are already carrying.

The upgrade discount

The big one. When any single character on your account reaches a given item level, every character you own upgrades that track 50% cheaper — 10 crests a rank instead of 20, permanently.

Reached on any characterThen every character upgradesA full item costs
282Adventurer gear at 10 a rank50 instead of 100
295Veteran gear at 10 a rank50 instead of 100
308Champion gear at 10 a rank50 instead of 100
321Hero gear at 10 a rank50 instead of 100
334Myth gear at 10 a rank50 instead of 100

Read the right-hand column again. Fully upgrading a piece costs your alt half what it cost your main, for no reason other than that your main got there first.

Which gives a clear order of operations: finish pushing one character before you spread out. Every threshold your main crosses is a permanent discount on the next three characters, and crossing it later means paying full price for everything you upgrade in the meantime.

What else your account already has

Beyond the discount, these carry across characters:

  • Warbound gear. Much of what drops from solo and world content can be sent to another character —

until it is equipped, at which point it is stuck. A piece your main will replace next week is a significant upgrade for your alt today, so send it before you equip it.

  • The warband bank. Shared storage that makes the above practical, and where currency-adjacent

items should live rather than on whoever looted them.

  • Reputation and account-wide progress. Much of the slow grind is earned once. An alt frequently

walks straight up to a vendor your main unlocked.

  • Knowing what to do. Not a mechanic, but the real one: a second character costs a fraction of the

first because you are no longer finding out what pays.

Check what is warbound before you equip anything. Equipping is the moment the option to pass it down disappears.

A realistic week on an alt

The mistake is running an alt the way you run a main — full raid night, a stack of keys, the lot. An alt does not need the ceiling, it needs the floor, and the floor is cheap:

1. Solo and world content first. It has no invite bar and no schedule, and it pays up to item level 295 before any upgrading. This is where an alt closes most of the gap. 2. The uncapped currency sources. Ten minutes each, they ignore the weekly cap, and they are worth the same on an alt as on your main — see crests and upgrading. 3. One cheap vault slot in two rows. Two picks for far less time than one row taken to its third slot. 4. Spend the discount. Upgrade the highest track the alt owns, at half price, and stop.

What to skip: pushing high keys, stepping up a raid difficulty, and chasing the last few item levels. Those are main-character activities. On an alt they cost the most time for the least movement.

Spare currency on a main

Currency itself does not transfer between characters. But a main that is finished upgrading is sitting on currency doing nothing, and Vaskarn will trade the lower tiers upward at 10-to-1 — which is at least something, and better than a stockpile you will never spend.

The more useful move is earlier: once your main stops gaining from upgrades, the hours you would have spent earning its currency are worth more on an alt that is still climbing.

How ResetReady uses this

This is what ResetReady was built for. The planner reads your whole roster and ranks across all of it at once, so the question it answers is not "what should this character do" but "where do my hours go this week, across everything I play".

That routinely produces advice a single-character view cannot: forty minutes on an alt that is badly behind beats another key on a main that is nearly finished, because the alt gains more item level per hour — and the planner knows your main's thresholds have already made that alt's upgrades cheap.

If you only take one thing from this page: finish pushing one character before spreading out. The discount it earns pays for everyone after it.
PreviousHow a Season Unfolds

All gearing systems

Start here

  • How Gearing Works
  • Item Levels and Upgrade Tracks
  • Crests and Upgrading
  • The Great Vault

Where gear comes from

  • Mythic+
  • Raiding
  • Delves
  • World and Seasonal Content
  • Tier Sets and the Catalyst
  • Bonus Rolls
  • Crafted Gear and Sparks
  • PvP Gearing

Playing the season

  • How a Season Unfolds
  • Alts and Your Warband

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