How to upgrade gear in WoW Midnight — no valorstones required but you do need more crests

The gear upgrade system has changed in World of Warcraft: Midnight and you will no longer need valorstones to upgrade gear, only Dawncrests and gold. Dawncrests are the new seasonal currency and work just like the different crests from The War Within seasons. The drawback of these changes is that the types of Dawncrests you need have been expanded, and you need to use specific Dawncrests to upgrade your gear based on its track.  Each track is still tiered from 1 to 6 where 1 is where each item begins and 6 is the highest item level the item can be upgraded to, with the ilvl and stats increasing each tier until that cap is reached.

This sounds more confusing than it is but it’s worth pointing this out up front because if you aren’t paying attention, you could end up wasting your time and resources. We’re here to make these changes make sense, so let’s jump into the Midnight gear upgrade changes.

How much does it cost to fully upgrade a piece of gear?

Since there are five different types of upgrade “tracks” that are present on gear items in Midnight and in order to upgrade gear, you need to use a specific Dawncrest for that track and gold:

1. Adventurer Dawncrest for Adventurer track gear ilvl 224 – 237.
2. Veteran Dawncrest for Veteran track gear ilvl 237 – 250.
3. Champion Dawncrest for Champion track gear ilvl 250 – 263.
4. Hero Dawncrest for Hero track gear ilvl 263 – 276 but for crafted gear, the range is ilvl 259 – 272 based on quality.
5. Myth Dawncrest for Myth track gear ilvl 276 – 289 but for crafted gear, the range is ilvl 272 – 285 based on quality.

Each track tier upgrade costs 20 Dawncrests so it takes 100 Dawncrests to upgrade an item fully, i.e. 100 total Adventurer Dawncrests for upgrading an Adventurer track item from tier 1 to tier 6. The good news is this 20 crest cost is static for all tracks so the crest cost doesn’t escalate but the trade off is you are capped at earning 100 Dawncrests per week, so fully upgrading any piece of gear takes an entire week.

Crest and upgrade vendors in Silvermoon City

At the Crest Exchange (marker 13) in Silvermoon City’s Bazaar is the item upgrade vendor, Cuzolth, who you’ll pay these crests and gold to in exchange for upgrading your gear. In this same area is Vaskarn, the crest exchange vendor, who will let you exchange higher-level crests for lower-level crests, and thankfully crests acquired this way don’t count against your weekly cap:

• Bundle of Adventurer Dawncrests (10) for the cost of 10 Veteran Dawncrests
• Pouch of Veteran Dawncrests (10) for the cost of 10 Champion Dawncrests
• Satchel of Champion Dawncrests (10) for the cost of 10 Hero Dawncrests
• Pack of Hero Dawnrests (10) for the cost of 10 Myth Dawncrests