Thinking about using a second character to add some extra rewards and tokens as well as another playstyle to keep things fresh. But rumour has it that this character might as well be on another account since none of your achievements or outfits or sprint buffs are carried over. Is that true? It seems kinda mental if it is.
These are all character specific. Unless you mean from the TSW vanity transfer. Those go to every new character you make. (Except achievements.)
Edit: That said, you don’t have to do it for trying another playstyle since you can unlock all abilities on one alt.
Most people I know play there alts to:
A.Play another faction
B.Do some special playstyle like Roleplay with him/her
From an achievement/stuff collecting point of view a new char does nothing for you.
I am a TSW vet, and I mainly play my alts to get extra MoF. If you are a patron, you can earn an extra 12k a day (on each), which means with a new slot in ~16 days, you begin to turn a profit with them.
Once your main AP/SP caps, it also becomes less of a “waste” to do things on your alts, especially since most people want to farm more than their 8 main missions a day for Agents. So once you cap dailies on your main, you swap to your alt/s and do those, for more agent chances, which also gears them up a bit for “possible” future endeavors. If you had had 3 characters in Tokyo before the key nerf, you could have made some serious MoF’s with them, so if anything ever comes along like that again, having basic geared toons for open world is nice.
Also, you get more dungeon chances without skipping every boss but the last for Agents as well, just spamming E1, and being an “undergeared” Tank/Healer (Assuming you know how to rotate cooldowns as a tank) is a hell of a lot easier/efficient than DPS as well, so queuing for that is nice.
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Thanks all 
Very informative. Seems like my motives arent really applicable. Honestly, my main is really off on the completionist trip, but its mighty boring, just wanted the alt for a second crack through the content with lots of side quest skipping (and more dungeon/pvp since ive completely avoided both on the main).
Definitely not looking at this for min/max resource building (though your info will def help those who are), just want a more casual second play through now i know where to go. Took her through to the start of kingsmouth and realised i couldnt even collect my daily login patreon rewards (already collected on my main). So yeah, id rather make my main look fabulous than have two characters buzzing about in jeans and a tshirt. Pity, im sure lots of people just want a second character to fix the mistakes on their first, but dont necessarily want to grind through the same achievements again and again; nor have to choose whether to spend their aurum on their main for that one thing youve been saving up on, or some basic taken for granted stuff on the alt you’re just messing about on, but need some QOL.
ETA: What im trying to say is that this is kinda dumb and needs to be addressed
That’s technically a good argument for having a SWL alt. Do dailies, convert character-bound MoF to account-wide Aurum, go shopping with your main.
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Well, you can’t really make any permanent mistakes on your main character. Eventually you will unlock everything. The only permanent thing story wise is: the color of your wings after Tokyo, and the titles tied to it. So unless you desperately need to change something cosmetic, like the gender (Edit: seriously, s3x is censored?!) of your character or the face (you can change your hair and makeup) there is no reason to reroll.
So the only thing you would do by starting over to “fix” a character would be to effectively regrind all their gear again, and regrind their AP/SP. You can unlock everything on your main, so any choices you made will be taken again eventually anyway, there simply isn’t any other use for AP/SP in SWL.
Regarding account vs character, I fully agree. I play GW2 as my “main” game, though I think I have spent more time in SWL the last month or two, and almost everything in that game, including endgame items and gear, is account bound. All the cosmetics, currency, achievements, titles, etc is shared between all characters, so there is no reason to play a single character, and it allows a Lot more freedom to experiment.
That said, since you can unlock everything in SLW on a single character, and anima allocation effectively allows you to play every role (since extraordinary items are fairly low impact) I can understand why they chose to keep the character limitations the way they did. Probably a nightmare to code account binding into their system, given how…eccentric some of their coding seems to be done.
Actually… You can purchase those different colors too.
Well, you can buy a type of them. The basic wings have sparkle effects on them that the purchasable ones don’t, so they aren’t exactly the same. Possibly pedantic, but there is a fairly noticeable difference if you look close.
Fair enough. I personally didn’t see any difference, but that’s probably one me.
A small point, depending on your installation: I find it much quicker to change characters on one account than to log out/exit, restart, and log in on a different account. Also, should your account ever be subbed, two characters on one account can share access to an account bank, whereas two accounts would need two subs to do the same.
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This is the main reason mechanics-wise to have an alt.
Personally I can’t be bothered to go the extra mile for the second round of MoF bonuses on my main, most of the time…but with similar effort, I can do the first MoF bonuses on alts and reap the majority of the MoF reward for a lot less work.
Honestly though I don’t do it much. The thing is you have to be pretty serious about the game to enjoy running the same dailies over and over, and doing them yet again on alts is a quick way to feeling burned out. The grind for equipment is just so long and overwhelming that I can’t really see a good way to “fix” a build by doing it all over again on an alt.
I do all the dailies on my main, unless something unusual happens in my life. And since Agents became a thing, I do them all on my alts 5/7 days a week. Just feels more “balanced” as a whole, since my main is AP/SP capped, so my alts get actual XP credit, but the Agent drops (which my alts actually have a boat load better luck with so far) can be shunted to my main.
What’s wrong with jeans and t-shirts? 
Seriously, though. Being able to claim patron rewards on every character would be insane. That would be up to 8 cache keys a day. That’s never going to happen.
You can, however, now (since the Winter event) claim daily event rewards on each character.
Personally, I have one alt to play through a little on the side and I do eventually want all three factions ranked up purely to be completionist but I’m holding back on that number 3 in case they do some kind of new character event in the future (like SWTOR’s Light/Darkside event or STO’s Recruitment events). Long shot, but I figure there is a chance they might do one before I get my current alt past Tokyo.
Those other games are legitimately alt-friendly to begin with, so having events like that makes sense. In SWL, not so much.
Oh granted, which is why it is a very long shot. However on the flip side, the fact it is so un-alt friendly means a new character event would be all the more purposeful. As you can’t help your alts level up, an event helping them would help counter act that, give the player base another kick-start and perhaps help sell character slots that otherwise aren’t really worth the cost.
If some bogus event makes people care about alts in a game that’s so heavy-handed in its cash grab monetization even something like booster agents is character, rather than account bound, I’ll be the first to offer those customers a bridge in Brooklyn as a great real estate opportunity to complement their super-sensible, forward-looking alt investment.
There is this too as a good reason. The “experience” of the game overall is colored by your interactions with your faction, and each of the factions treats you a bit differently. I remember just feeling utterly lost wandering around Solomon Island as a Dragon, and when faced with a “big choice” I spent a lot of time considering the moral implications of each choice. When I rolled an Illuminati character, though, I immediately lept on the selfish choice. Why? I remember being furious at KG for busting my chops over getting beaten by Beaumont in the library, and I picked the best way it seemed to make myself more “powerful,” or maybe just out of spite.
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