World of Warcraft: How To Cross Faction Raid Properly

After decades, World of Warcraft will allow Alliance and Horde to play cross-faction. This will enable both sides to raid together as one team, greatly lowering queue times. However, some caveats and obstacles to doing this correctly include not having shared guilds to organize instanced content.

Players will be able to create cross-faction groups for high-level content like raids, Mythic dungeons, and rated PvP. However, the feature will not extend to more common or relaxed instances like Skirmishes or Heroic level dungeons. All of these style raids will initially be pickup groups, though more organization options may arrive.

The Cross-Faction feature will first be tested on PTR version 9.2.5. After an undetermined testing period, it will then go live to the official World of Warcraft servers. Several functions may be tweaked, added, or removed during that timeframe.

Creating Cross Faction Raids in World of Warcraft

Cross Faction raiding in Word of Warcraft will be available for most content, including legacy instances from older expansions. Some registrations will include Battle of Dazar’alor, Trial of the Crusader, Icecrown Citadel, and others with faction-specific features. While Blizzard is allowing individual raid groups to be formed, Guilds will still strictly be either Alliance or Horde. This means that players will need to go through a few measures to form a raid party consisting of both factions. The main options include:

• Invite Players via Battle Tag or Real ID: players on one’s friendslist that happen to be playing on the other faction.
• Cross Faction Community: those that opt-in to this feature can invite other faction characters.

Additionally, the Group Finder leader can choose to allow other faction players to apply to join the group. World of Warcraft guild leaders can openly disable this feature or further restrict which players join their group. Depending on the server, this may be more beneficial to Alliance-focused groups, as, on average, their population is dwarfed by the Horde.

Cross Faction Party Functions in World of Warcraft

Before entering a raid properly, Alliance and Horde players will remain hostile. Therefore, it is recommended to stay within safe zones to avoid being attacked, either accidentally or by those outside the raid group. Cross Faction groups can openly communicate via party chat but won’t be able to benefit from any cooperative features while in WoW‘s open world.

Once inside the instance, all players will become friendly and can play through the raid as normal. However, as the Cross Faction group will be made from several different guilds, it may be hard to take full advantage of its benefits. This includes a possible lack of perks and difficult item distribution from not having a unified guild bank, DKP, or EP: GP. The burden will more likely fall on the opposite faction members raiding with large guilds – those players should expect not to gain much loot or other rewards unless the raid party fully allows greed rolls on all drops.

To elevate some of these guild hindrances, players may want to consider creating a second guild on the other faction’s side, led by either the exact same leader or lieutenants using alts. This can allow Alliance and Horde characters to interact more easily, organize, and share a common loot method.

World of Warcraft is available on PC.

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