Gear up your Warband for The War Within during the Radiant Echoes pre-patch event

The War Within is less than a month away, and the Radiant Echoes pre-patch event offers a great chance for catch-up gear. With the recent experience nerfs and the Mist of Pandaria: Remix game mode, raising a character to max level has never been so blisteringly fast. Your Warband may have recently grown by one or two (or nine), so rounding out everyone’s gear before plunging into Khaz Algar may be towards the top of your pre-expansion to-do list. If so, you can answer the call of Khadgar (again) and defend Azeroth from hostile memories to ensure that your weapons and armor will give you a fighting chance on launch day.

Plan on fending off quite a bit of memory slime because there is a full slate of void-inspired item level 480 Veteran gear to collect, all of which can be upgraded to ilevel 502. That should last you about halfway through the new expansion before questing in The War Within offers better replacements.

The currency for the event is Residual Memories, which is earned throughout the three rotating zones where Azeroth’s past foes are currently invading. You’ll get a handful for defeating mobs, 10 for completing the tasks scattered about each zone, 500 for vanquishing the boss of each rotation, and 1,500 for each invaded zone’s weekly quest.

Here’s a rundown of how many Residual Memories you’ll need to upgrade each slot:

• Cloaks, Bracers, Necks, Rings, and Trinkets for 2,000
• Shields and Off-hands for 3,000
• Shoulders, Gloves, Belts, and Boots for 3,500
• Helms, Chest, Legs for 5,000
• One-handed weapons are split by primary stat: Strength and Agility Weapons for 4,000 and Intellect Weapons for 5,000
• Ranged and Two-handed weapons for 8,000

The full look for each armor type definitely fits in with the vibe of our coming battle against a personified void knife.

This gear will also occasionally drop from event sources, so you may want to wait until you see what you get for free before going on a spending spree. Don’t forget about the new currency transfer feature — it looks as though there won’t be any penalty for sending Residual Memories from one character to another, which means that you can rotate through your Warband completing the three weekly quests for repeated caches of currency that won’t be locked to any specific character.

Finally, if gearing up your level 70 alts wasn’t enough, you can power through adding more members to your Warband with the Band of Radiant Echoes. This heirloom ring has haste and mastery, and you can create it by buying a Lifeless Stone Ring for just 25 Residual Memories and combining it with essences that drop from all three events zones. Given the current leveling pace, I am almost afraid that new heirloom gear will take the time required to hit max level into negative territory and reset the servers to a time when you needed to spend hours upon hours killing crocolisks just to survive the weakest enemies in the next zone over.

Radiant Echoes begins on July 30, and it runs right up until the August 26 launch of The War Within. Vanquishing the adversaries of Azeroth’s past should earn you all the gear you need to begin the next chapter of the story.