World of Warcraft finally receives cross-faction play: How to group, and more details

After about 20 years, World of Warcraft is making a massive change: cross-faction play is here. This feature was added to the 9.2.5 update, bringing the Horde and the Alliance together in combat.

In many cases, servers have been dominated by one faction, leaving one side weaker than the other when it comes to both progression and PVP. Now that cross-faction gameplay has come to World of Warcraft, this has all been changed.

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World of Warcraft receives cross-faction play in 9.2.5, here's how to take part

Now that this update has hit the title, a vast amount of in-game content is now available for players to take part in, regardless of whether they serve the Horde or the Alliance. It’s a very exciting feature, adding promise and change to how players approach the title's content.

While this is a huge step in the right direction, not every bit of in-game content can be done cross-faction. In addition, guilds are still single-faction, so players can’t join an alliance guild as an Orc Death Knight and start raiding with them.

To join a cross-faction group, players must know the BattleTag or Real ID name of the person they want to invite to the group or be in a cross-faction World of Warcraft community. Listed below is the content that can be experienced in a cross-faction group:

Premade Groups in Group Finder for WoW content

• Normal Dungeons
• Heroic Dungeons
• Mythic Dungeons
• Mythic+ Dungeons
• Raids
• Rated Arena/Battlegrounds
• Torghast

It’s important to note that the group leader may choose to list their group as same-faction only. While in a party, players remain unfriendly towards each other outside of the instances, though they can communicate in party/raid chat as normal. They can also use 'Say' and 'Yell' while in close proximity to one another.

Inside of the instance, players will be shown as friendly towards one another. Like same-faction content, they can earn achievements together, trade loot, and partake in everything else that players are used to.

Cross-faction content will also allow players to play legacy instances/content and is available at all levels of gameplay. This means that most of the classic raids can be played in a cross-faction group so that players can collect loot and achievements together.

There are some restrictions to keep in mind, though. Certain classic content is particularly based on faction warfare, so this cannot be done in cross-faction mode in World of Warcraft. The following classic content cannot be done this way:

Faction-based content

• Trial of the Champion
• Trial of the Crusader
• Vault of Archavon
• Icecrown Citadel
• Baradin Hold
• Siege of Boralus
• Battle of Dazar’alor
• Darkmaul Citadel (Exile’s Reach)

Some of these make perfect sense. Icecrown Citadel also has two very different cutscenes and approaches to one of the battles and also has a faction-vs-faction battle on airships.

It’s also important to note that regular matchmaking will not feature cross-faction gameplay. All cross-faction gameplay will be done in premade groups or by friends inviting their other cross-faction friends to complete World of Warcraft content with them.