Thread: Let's talk about storage solutions

About the mailbox use for storage thing, correct me if Im wrong - Im not too experienced with it.

You mail item X to char Y. The mail remains 30 days in their mailbox until it automatically returns to the char you send it from.
From there on, you have again another 30 days to process the mail ( resend it to char Y ) or it will be lost forever.
Effectively you can bounce items around for about 50 days ( I wouldnt want to risk logging in on the 60th day haha ) .

I never been a great fan of this, but I see how this works if it does this way.

About buying out tab 5 and 6 of the guildbank : it depends a lot on what you put into it as well imo if its worth to purchase it.
Lets say linen cloth is never worth it because thats worth 20g per slot tops if stored in there, but lets say 20 infernos , thats about 2000g per slot ( not even talking about inflated prices - just current market prices on a lot of non superhigh pop server ). If you would have the capacity to fill enough slots with that worth, it will pay itself out and has the luxury of convenience added to the mailbox system.

Im having a couple of 4 slot guild banks at my disposal and I find it increasingly hard to actually fill everything with goods worth the slot.
The guildbank storage way has a disadvantage if you are an altmaniac that some of your high level toons need to be in a shitty guild.
Just make sure that the ones benefitting from perks are in your high level guild obviously.

Only your enchanter needs to be in a high level guild :P

Having used all of these types of storage at one time or another, I'd have to say I prefer the guild bank approach, I have 9 of them as only my main is in a real guild (he's also my enchanter, couldn't have worked out better if I planned it that way) and they all have filled out to 6 tabs over time.

During the transition from wrath to cataclysm, I used the alt bank storage method, profession bags in all slots, all slots full. This allowed me to bring a large stockpile of vanilla, burning crusade and wrath materials with me. I also had 2 personal guild banks at that point, but it was before I got really serious about making gold. When I got serious, I started really thinking about guild banks. However, the alt bank storage is a solution I still use to this day.

Each of those alt guilds started with a single tab and then were increased as space was needed. It's much easier now that I'm sitting on 350k to justify dropping the 5k for that last tab than it would have been when I was sitting on 30k or 50k, but for an initial investment of less than a thousand gold I felt it was worthwhile to have that long-term storage. I also took on a new guild only when I felt that I could afford to do so.

That all said, I still use the mailbox thing on a regular basis as well. My main banker/purchaser is also my scribe, so all of the herbs I get are mailed to an alt who just leaves them in the mail queue until it's time to hit "return" to send them back for processing. I also end up mailbox-storing quite a bit of elementium and obsidium as there isn't always enough bank space to store the overflow anymore. Thankfully, TSM's automail feature makes it pretty painless to sort the ores and herbs to their intended recipients.

I guess my point is that sometimes what you want is a combination of the different options. Just because I found that I could afford 54 tabs worth of guild banks doesn't mean that my alt's banks or even their mailboxes sit empty and unused.