How to get gear in The Great Vault in The War Within

The War Within is bringing some changes to The Great Vault, making it a bit easier to earn a weekly piece of high-level gear. Players will be able to unlock up to nine slots per week by completing end-game content. At the weekly reset, those slots will generate loot based on the difficulty of the content completed and players can select one piece of gear from among the fabulous prizes.

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Whether you opened up the Great Vault each week during Dragonflight or haven’t ever utilized this feature, it’s worth taking an in-depth look at how this expansion’s version is going to work.

When, where, and how to use the Great Vault

The Great Vault can be found in the bank in the Earthen capital of Dornogal, the main player hub city for The War Within. You can open the interface right at the vault door in the bank, or on the Dornogal map, to check your progress at any time or claim your weekly reward. This feature goes live on September 17th, one week after Season 1 starts.

The premise behind The Great Vault is pretty simple: by participating in max-level stuff, you get one extra loot drop per week. The more stuff you do, the more options you have to choose from, but you still only get one item each week. The gear available scales with the content you’re doing, and it looks like this iteration of the Great Vault will sometimes reward gear that is slightly higher quality than what drops from the content you run to fill it up.

This means that the vault could be an important way to increase your overall item level throughout Season 1. There are three ways to add items to The Great Vault: defeating raid bosses, completing dungeons, and running Delves or participating in World Activities (which replaces the PVP option from Shadowlands and Dragonflight).

Group up to clear dungeons and raids

This aspect of the Vault is largely unchanged. There are three slots to unlock for participating in raids, and three slots to unlock earned by completing dungeons. The gear that will drop will be a step above what drops in the dungeon or raid you actually completed. For example, Heroic dungeon final bosses will drop i580 equipment, but your Great Vault reward from that would be i593.

The vault remembers the difficulty level of the content you ran and awards gear based on the highest-difficulty instances, so don’t worry about lowering the quality of your rewards by running Heroic dungeons with your friends if you’ve already finished 8 Mythic+ runs that week. For dungeons, anything above Normal difficulty counts towards your Great Vault reward track, and that includes Timewalking (which counts as Heroic).

• 1st slot: 1 Dungeon
• 2nd slot: 4 Dungeons
• 3rd slot: 8 Dungeons

Only the current raid counts towards Great Vault progress, so for Season 1 of The War Within that would be Nerub-ar Palace. This category rewards more slots for more bosses, rather than requiring a full raid or even wing be cleared. Everything from LFR to Mythic is included, and again, the rewards are based on your highest difficulty boss kills. For this category, the loot rewards are from the drop tables of the bosses you vanquished. This means that even on with a sketchy LFR group that downs two bosses but wipes repeatedly on the third before disbanding, you’ll find a piece of gear from one of those two vanquished bosses in your vault the next week (whether you won a loot roll in the raid or not).

• 1st slot: 2 raid bosses
• 2nd slot: 4 raid bosses
• 3rd slot: 6 raid bosses

Go solo with Delves and World Activities

While the third row of potential rewards was previously for PVP content, the Great Vault is switching this expansion to give gear for completing World Activities or the new Delves feature. World Activities are the recurring events that happen outdoors in max-level zones. For Dragonflight this would have been things like Time Rifts and the Superbloom. So far we know about four World Events that will take place in the new zones of Khaz Algar, and more are certain to be added as we progress through the expansion.

Delves are a brand-new feature that allow players to tackle 10-20 minute adventures alone or with a group of up to 5 players. They have a whole host of rewards and progression on their own, but they will also contribute to filling gear slots in The Great Vault. Delve difficulty starts at Tier 1 and goes up to Tier 11, and the vault rewards will increase in quality with the highest-tier completed that week. World Activities count as Tier 1 difficulty for the Great Vault, so to pump up your average gear score you’ll want to run more difficult Delves. Similar to dungeons, the items that will appear in The Great Vault from running Delves will be a few item levels higher than what you can expect to drop in the Delve itself.

• 1st slot: 2 Delves or World Activities
• 2nd Slot: 4 Delves or World Activities
• 3rd Slot: 8 Delves or World Activities

At each weekly reset, if you have accomplished at least the first tier of any of the three vault categories, the icon for The Great Vault on your Dornogal map will glow. This means you can open it up and collect your loot. Be sure that you’re in whatever spec that you’d like an item for, because the loot is generated at the point you click on the vault itself inside of the Dornogal bank. You’ll be able to take your time and peruse up to nine options, but you are limited to taking one home with you. After that, the vault resets and you start over unlocking the slots for the week ahead.

Bad luck, it happens

Sometimes you open up the Great Vault door and receive nothing but disappointment. If none of the generated loot for that week would be an upgrade for you, there’s always the option to claim a few Algari Tokens of Merit, which can be exchanged at the vendor who hangs out next to the vault. You can claim 2 if you unlocked one slot, 4 if you unlocked two slots, and 6 if you unlocked three or more slots. You are limited to carrying 12, and you can spend them on Valorstones and crests, a Nerubian Gemweaver which can add a gem socket to an item, or 1,000 gold.

The Great Vault will be an important way for top raiders to accelerate their path to glory, as well as casual players who are looking for a bump in their gear score in order to finally conquer the next Delve tier. Whichever end of that spectrum you happen to fall on, be sure to check your vault progress throughout each week, and may your vault rolls be the gear you’re looking for.

Originally published August 26, 2024; updated September 10, 2024.