How many characters are you playing in The War Within?

Now that we’ve had roughly half of an expansion to get used to the idea of our characters all working as a cohesive unit, it’s time for a bit of a retrospective on how our approaches to selecting which World of Warcraft character to play have changed. From the earliest days all the way through Dragonflight, choosing from your army of alts needed to be balanced against duplicated or split achievements, non-optimized reputation gains, and (deep breath here) having the perfect transmog piece drop while you’re playing a character with a different armor type.

The many quality of life changes in The War Within have made that decision easier to bear. Warbands have meant a near-universal sharing of achievement gains, account-wide reputation progress, and an easy way to pool currency and resources among your alts. Eliminating the restriction on acquiring transmog by armor type has meant that I don’t have to fret that I finally beat the Chess Event on my alt of the week only to have the wrong token drop from Prince Malchezaar on a Karazhan transmog run.

That has led to a drastic upswing in the number of characters that I regularly play. Of course, the definition of “play” could mean any number of things, but in this case I have eight or nine toons that could jump into a Mythic dungeon if the desire suddenly struck me. Before our adventure to Khaz Algar, that number would have been two at the most.

Let’s not forget to account for the increased pace of leveling, which continues to approach hyperspeed. With a bonus for every max-level alt, events like the Winds of Mysterious Fortune, and the “alts only” Remix mode, it has never been quicker to reach end game content. I’m positive that a lot of players who always wished they could have a top-tier Warlock but didn’t have the time to level another character now have one max-level Warlock of each spec.

Even with the addition of Warbands and all of the other systems, some players will still stick to one character. Sometimes on the login screen, my brain short-circuits for a few seconds and I choose my main character purely by force of habit. So how many characters have you been bouncing between in The War Within?