Fastest ways to gear up alts

What’s the fastest way to gear up my alt? It depends on what you are willing to do (and what your friends are willing to carry you through). The chart above gives you the various options (click here for a higher res version). I also scoured the internet for more details & tips, so you don’t have to.

• Old Apexis Crystal items can now be bought with gold. 1000 Gold buys you 630 iLvl and it goes up to 20,000 gold for iLvl 675. The vendors are found in Warspear and their names all start with dawn-seeker. World of Moudi has a guide on this (and Baleful items).
• Crafted items start at level 640 and can be upgraded to stage 4 ‘cheaply’ with items made by each item’s crafting profession. Truesteel Essence is the example for Blacksmiths, which costs 15 Savage Blood among other items. Mighty Essence upgrades to level 5 and uses 30 Felblight. Savage Essence upgrades to level 6 and uses 60 Felblight. World of Moudi has a nice guide for crafted upgrades and obtaining Felblight.
  NOTE: Recall that the secondary stats on crafted items are random. You can reroll them with an item made by each profession, and they are cheap (Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, Tailoring, Jewelcrafting). So if you might have the item for a while and you’re upgrading it, a few rerolls might be worth it.

• Mythic dungeon items start at 695 but have a chance to have a higher iLvl. The higher the iLvl, the lower the chance. So for planning purposes, you might want to select the lowest iLvl, if you don’t want to count on higher iLvl items dropping.
• Baleful items can drop from mobs in Tanaan Jungle, with a higher chance from rare in Tanaan and are BoP. You can also buy them from a vendor (Ravenspeaker Thelnaas in Tanaan) with Apexis crystals (BoP) for 5,000 Apexis Crystals (10,000 for weapons). They have a base item level of 650, but there’s a chance they proc to a higher iLvl when opened. You can upgrade any Baleful item to 695 with an Empowered Apexis Fragment. You can buy this from the same vendor for 20,000 Apexis crystals.
  • Note: The secondary stats on these items are random, and cannot be rerolled. The only way to get an item with better stats is to get more of the Baleful tokens from mobs or the vendor.
  • Super tip #1 The Empowered Apexis Fragment is BoA, so you can farm Apexis Crystals on your main, buy the fragments, and send them to your alt.
  • Super tip #2 You can also get Baleful gear from shipyard missions, which are actually BoA. So you can send it to any alt that wears the armory type specified.
  • Super tip #3 comes from @TheSlickRock on Twitter: You can also get BoA Baleful tokens when doing “Call to Arms” on your main – and people have reported that each satchel tends to contain several BoA Baleful Tokens. Call to Arms is the extra reward you get from queuing for dungeons and raids on the much-needed role (like tanks / healers). However, “Call to Arms” can double up on rewards if you run them on your alt instead of your main, because you can also collect legendary ring requirements at the same time.
  • More info! The Grumpy Elf has a fantastic guide aimed at people somewhat unfamiliar with all of the in’s & out’s of Baleful items. Also, the super tips are credited to him
• Tanaan Jungle Treasures have guaranteed 650 items, here’s a guide to find those. Thanks to Rades for the tip!

• PVP options even if you hate it! Thanks to @Volstatsz and @Uabtodd on twitter, I learned that you can get a lot of good gear from PVP, even without PVPing. You can buy Champion’s Honor tokens on the AH which give you 1,000 honor and 1,000 conquest points. A spot check on a few realms makes it look like the average price for a Honor token is 10,000 gold. Items cost 1,250 – 3,500 Honor or Conquest points from vendors in Ashran (Marshal Karsh(A)/Warlord Noktyn(H) and Marshal Gabriel(A)/General Aevd(H).  Remember, the PVP gear for Warlords has the same stat allocation as PVE gear, so you aren’t losing anything.
• Buy BOE Hellfire Citadel gear on the auction house. Normal HFC drops slightly under-level iLvl 695 belts, Heroic HFC drops iLvl 710 belts, and Mythic HFC drops iLvl 725 belts. Expect these to be pricey investments, but they can fill a single armor slot with a very solid piece of gear which you can then Valor upgrade for an additional 10 iLvls. (Tip is thanks to Elizabeth Harper’s earlier article about gearing up).
• Also, boosted characters automatically get a 640 gear set and level 3 garrison. Thanks for the tip, @Elkagorasa.

I also wrote a longer article about this on the Ask Mr. Robot blog. It includes instructions to filter gear lists to quickly find the best sources for you based on what you are willing to do. For example, I cover things like…

• The option to set the raid difficulty to the levels you’ll be doing to gear up (not where you intend to be after gearing up). If you don’t want to do LFRs, then either uncheck the raids you won’t be doing at all, or set it to normal (or whatever your friends will carry you through)
• Filters for world bosses
• The option to set the part of the legendary ring progress you’re on, or will be getting soon
• And of course, filters for all of the other sources listed, like Crafted, Baleful, PVP, etc.

Here are some of the filters you can use on Ask Mr. Robot.

Then when you click on any piece of gear, you’ll see a ranked list of items you can get with your (limited) alt activities. Check out the full article here.