How is your Season 1 gearing-up journey going?

We’re well into Season 1 of The War Within, and that means we’ve left our dragon-branded weapons and armor behind in favor of all new loot. With a few new features and some tweaks to others, it was anticipated that climbing the gear ladder in TWW would be easier than ever before for casual players. With a few weeks under your belt, have you found that to be the case?

It’s a bit hard for me to judge this time around because my playtime is at a high water mark compared to the last few expansions. However, I have already hit the middle of my goal range for average equipment score, which was an average in the 600-610 neighborhood.

World Quests and Heroic Dungeons were a good way to start out the max level gear grind, but I am sure I’m not alone when I say that Delves have really been a way for me to increase my average item level and actually feel powerful while I do it. Having a large number of difficulty tiers was something I was worried would be overly complicated, but it turns out that the flexibility in both challenge and time commitment are exactly what I’m looking for in end-game content that I can do without grouping up.

The Great Vault and the Weekly World Bosses have also been instrumental in my quest to see how high I can push my equipment quality. This week I need to focus on upgrades, so I’ll be searching for good sources of Valorstones. Who knows, I might actually feel bold enough to try out some Mythic+ dungeons.

I have to say that maintaining my army of alts has not been the resource drain that I feared it would be. When my playtime has bottomed out in the past, I felt I needed to make a hard choice between doing high-level content on my main or ignoring the end game in order to level or begin to gear other characters. The implementation of Warbands really has made it feel like I can choose which character to play without leaving the rest stuck in the mud.

Features like stacking experience boosts for each level 80 you ding have made it a breeze to level your next character in whatever way appeals to you most. The new cache system was another thing that I worried would seem overly complex, but being able to choose which world events to do on each character makes it easy to feel like your whole Warband is gearing up even if you only log on to a character for twenty minutes in a given week.

So how is your quest to gear up in Khaz Algar going? Are you running the end-game content you were planning on, or have you changed up your plan? There’s still plenty of time before the season runs out and we start it all over again.