The casual player’s guide to gearing up in The War Within Season 1

Arachnophobia Mode ON — it’s time to don our most stylish spider-stomping boots for the launch of The War Within. While many of the Dragonflight gear systems will be carried over in some form, there are enough changes and new features that we thought a quick guide would be helpful. The good news for casual and/or solo players is that many of these changes will make it easier to obtain higher-quality gear than expansions past. Let’s break down what drops from where, and what benchmark you’ll need to participate in your chosen end game content.

I find it helpful to know the entire item level range for a given season. While the top-geared toons from Dragonflight will be sporting i528 gear on the boat to the Isle of Dorn, many characters will be in the neighborhood of 480 from the Residual Memories pre-patch event. Any new alts fresh from the timeways of WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria will be at 467. Where we’ll end up as we progress through our subterranean adventures during Season 1 will be somewhere between 560 (max-level quest rewards) and 639 (Mythic Raid gear).

I’m a casual player, with the level of casual-ness varying depending on what’s going on in my life as well as how much the current content draws me away from running Icecrown Citadel for the six hundredth time. I’m not very likely to end up clearing Mythic Nerub-ar Palace for another two or three expansions. However, I do want to find the most efficient ways to bring up my gear score while playing the aspects of the game that I enjoy the most. For The War Within Season One, someone like me might set a reasonable goal of gearing up to the 600-610 range.

Know your upgrade levels

Just like in Dragonflight, much of the gear that we’ll acquire can be upgraded with various currencies. There are several overlapping tracks with names of increasing impressiveness. While you don’t need to memorize it, coming back to this list will be the simplest way to know where you stand and what the next step is.

• Explorer 560-580: Normal Dungeons, Outdoor Activities, Delves Tier 1-2
• Adventurer 571-593: Heroic Dungeons, World Quests, Delves Tier 3-4
• Veteran 584-610: Mythic Dungeons, LFR, Delves Tier 5-6
• Champion 597-619: Mythic +2 to +6 Dungeons, Normal Raids, World Bosses, Delves Tier 7-11
• Hero 610-626: Mythic +7 to +10 Dungeons, Heroic Raids
• Myth 623-639: Mythic Raids

Flightstones are out, replaced by a functionally identical currency called Valorstones. Crests are back, and they are now known as Harbinger Crests. Instead of the Whelpling-Drake-Wyrm-Aspect tiers, we will have Weathered-Carved-Runed-Gilded. If you played Dragonflight, this system will be very familiar. If you skipped the Dragon Isles and have no idea what’s happening, know that you will receive these currencies from most max-level content and use them to upgrade items within the above tracks. The more difficult the content, the higher tier crest it rewards. It’s a nice way to pump up your average item level without needing to seek out new gear.

Delving into Delves

Launching with The War Within is a new feature called Delves. These are in the vein of Battle for Azeroth’s Island Expeditions or Torghast from Shadowlands — something to do at max-level that is dungeon-adjacent. While you can group up with 1-4 other players, you can also run these by yourself. This could prove to be critical because the higher-difficulty Delves drop gear on a level that was previously very difficult to obtain without running group content.

You’ll start at Tier 1, and each tier you complete will unlock the next. As the tiers progress, the rewards will become more lucrative. The lower tiers will give loot on par with normal dungeons, while the highest tiers drop gear that can be upgraded to the level of heroic raid items.

We’ll know more after launch day, but some of these Delves will be marked as ‘Bountiful’. These are the ones that will drop the gear that’s worth writing home about, with a catch: the chest at the end of the Delve requires a key to open. You’ll need to collect 100 Coffer Key Shards from World Quests and Events to create a Restored Coffer Key, so to be efficient about gearing up from Delves you’ll want to wait until you’ve got a key in your inventory to seek out a Bountiful Delve.

Depending on how much you enjoy Delving (and how difficult you find the content), you could find yourself obtaining gear on par with Heroic Raid and high-level Mythic Keystone Dungeon equipment. Given that there’s a slew of related achievements and we’ll be spending Season 1 spelunking with Brann Bronzebeard, I am certainly going to see how far Delves will take me on my gearing up journey.

It pays to have friends

There are four Renown factions that players will work with at launch. As you progress through the track, there are two points where you are rewarded with gear that could give you a boost depending on how early you focus on impressing each faction. Reaching level 7 awards an i584 Veteran piece, and achieving level 16 gives an i597 Champion piece. Both of these are at step one on their given upgrade tracks, so the level 7 gear can be boosted to 610 and the level 16 gear can be boosted to 619 — although you might have to come out of your casual shell to earn the crests to fully upgrade Champion gear.

This is good news for casual players who are going to hit max level and focus on things like world quests and weeklies — hitting those Renown milestones will net you gear that could have a big impact. Another change in The War Within comes from the new Warband system, where Renown is shared across all of your characters. You’ll need a lot of Resonance Crystals, this expansion’s Dragon Isles Supplies, but this is another potential way to boost your alts.

Let the Great Vault take you higher

Don’t forget about the Great Vault, a weekly reward of a single piece of high-level gear. There are tracks for completing dungeons (Heroic, Mythic, or Timewalking) as well as defeating raid bosses (and yes, LFR counts). One change for The War Within is that the PVP track has been replaced with a World track, meaning that Delves and other World Activities will give credit towards your vault reward. Each track has three tiers, meaning that you can choose one of up to nine pieces of gear — the more you play, the less chance that your weekly reward will be for a slot you already have better gear in.

The higher the difficulty of your activity, the higher the item level of your reward. World Events count as Delve Tier 1, but if you complete a higher tier Delve then your Great Vault reward will be higher. Think of it as one weekly free drop from the highest-difficulty content that you completed that week. This is a boon for casual players — if you only managed to kill the first two bosses in LFR but the group fell apart after two wipes on the third boss, you Great Vault reward the next Tuesday will be an item from those two defeated bosses’ loot table.

What’s your end game?

If you’re a casual player, you probably already have a pretty good idea of what kinds of things you’ll be most interested in doing for the first few weeks of The War Within. This does seem like it will be a good expansion for trying some new things, running the new versions of your favorite categories of content, and not feeling like you’re very undergeared if you decide to dip your toe into running Mythic Keystone dungeons or joining a pick-up normal raid.

A lot of the early end-game content should get your gear above the requirement for LFR, which we’re guessing is about 567. Drops from heroic dungeons, delves, and LFR will be the ones you’ll spend your currency upgrading. With the Great Vault and Renown rewards to boost you higher, hitting the 600 mark should be achievable without feeling like too much of a grind.