Alt Gearing Guide — Step-by-Step & Transcript

[00:02] modern wow. When you're gearing up your main you are starting from nothing. no crests. But your alts do not start off like that because your war band has been stacking up so many advantages as you've been

[00:16] playing. Cheaper upgrades, actually cheaper than you'd think. Banked gear, transferable currency, free catalyst charges. There is so much and it means completely different to gearing your first. And because of Dalaran and pray,

[00:30] the journey actually involves content that you can turn your brain on for. So band already gives you, the sources you might be sleeping on and the weekly loop that is going to get you from leveling greens to the hero track nice and quick.

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[02:48] character. And that means your warband bank. If you've been doing endgame stuff like rares, treasures, delves, prey, dungeons, or raids, well, you've been picking up warband until equipped gear without even thinking about it. So, open

[03:00] dumping all that into and throw it onto your alt. And by now, most people will find a stack of adventurer and veteran pieces that can take a fresh 90 from leveling greens to 220 or 230 before you step inside a single dungeon. And in my

[03:15] doing a few other things, I've actually even got some champion gear that my alt can start with. And that is enough to jump straight into, say, tier five, six, seven, eight, nine delves instead of grinding your way up from the very

[03:29] bottom. So, that's good. The second big thing then is our crest discounts. This is the big one, and most people don't realize the scale of this. Whenever your main hits a certain item level in every gear slot, you unlock a warband-wide

[03:43] achievement. And what it does is it halves your upgrade costs on all of your alts up to that threshold. So, these achievements are Adventurer of the dawn requiring 237 in every slot and that will cut all upgrades to 237 down to

[03:59] costing only 10 crests instead of 20. Beyond that, there's veteran of the dawn at 250, champion of the dawn at 263, and hero and myth basically follow the same pattern. What that'll basically mean is twice the upgrades from the same crest

[04:13] spend. But, what if I told you it actually gets even better? And that's transmutation way more efficient on alts. So, the way that works is when you can no longer use a type of crest, you can trade in 30 of

[04:26] those for 10 of a higher tier crest. That's pretty good, but with upgrades normally costing 20, well, you don't get that many upgrades. Now, you get twice as many upgrades for that same amount of transmuting. And the more you get those

[04:40] upgrades, the more you'll unlock new types of transmutation, meaning you can blast your way up the upgrade tiers. It's pretty huge. And because your alts burn through a fewer crest per upgrade, you'll have a huge surplus to trade up

[04:53] and that's even better now that the weekly caps have rolled on and they're now like 7 800 plus. And what all this does mean for our video is that if you're a few item slots away from unlocking the next threshold of discount

[05:06] on your main, then you should probably finish that first because that discount will apply to every alt you gear this season. So, that's all pretty good, but there's also four free bits of champion gear

[05:19] you do need renown to unlock them, but you already have that renown because, means you can pick up a helmet from Silver Moon Court at renown nine, neck from the Amani tribe at renown nine, waist from the Harathi at renown eight,

[05:33] and a trinket from the singularity at renown seven. Getting each of them does require doing a quest for the faction, but hey, it's four bits of 246 gear. And you should also know that it's worth doing the console upgrade things for the

[05:47] singularity because that will make their trinket a good bit more powerful. So, first as you are walking through your weekly rotation. Now, even if you've not hit max level, this kind of thing matters and that's because some of the

[06:02] some of the world event things like the Silvermoon Court, well, those events actually drop end game strongboxes regardless of your level. That means the paladin I'm currently leveling up has actually got some end game gear that

[06:16] it's already earned just from doing the leveling process. discounts, but the next thing is kind of similar and that is with crafting. You see, your alt gets catch-up sparks of radiance. They'll drop from delves,

[06:30] dungeons, and weekly quests at an accelerated rate until you've caught up to the current cap. Now, each armor piece or one-hander will cost two sparks to craft and two-handers will cost four. And in terms of item level, at max

[06:43] And in terms of item level, at max quality using no crests for the craft, a quality using no crests for the craft, a spark will come out at item level 259, which is the equivalent of hero one out of six. And that means that, well, with

[06:55] one craft, your weapon can go from a leveling green to literally end game. another weapon lying around such as war bound equipped one, you'll want to craft impact. But there is a little bit of a trap depending on how you plan to play

[07:10] the game. So, if you're not really going to be doing myth content, this isn't as important, but if you are, you should know about it. So, hero crests can be used, of course, on these crafts. And the hero empower crests go all the way

[07:22] up to item level 272. So, to have a bunch of those is really awesome. Now, each will cost 80 hero crests. So, basically, it's not really worth doing if you're going to be getting myth crests and you just want to craft at

[07:37] myth item level. But honestly, now that we're many weeks into the season and the caps are so high, Yeah, if you just want to craft a bunch of hero stuff, yeah, do feel free to do that. But, either way, a good thing you can do is just craft two,

[07:50] three, maybe four pieces right now at their baseline level of power, item level 259. You can use them now, and if you want to re-craft later, once your crest pool can absorb that cost, you can go and do that. Now, when you're

[08:02] crafting gear, you really want to check in with your class Discord or just a class guide, because they'll tell you what the best embellishments are for that craft. It's absolutely worth using those, cuz they're really powerful. And

[08:14] source of sparks, do remember to pick up and do the Adrin's weekly quest. It'll give you a spark, and you'll finish it passively while you're doing other covered, let's go and do some sources that you are probably sleeping on.

[08:32] This is the kind of thing that's so easy to miss. So, Zar'an is a NPC who was added in the War Within. The good news is he is back in Midnight. He's the delve vendor, and now he can actually sell everything, meaning weapons, armor,

[08:46] is he has a randomized stock that refreshes every run. Now, to unlock him, you need to get Delver's Journey renown level five. Once you get that, Zar'an level five. Once you get that, Zar'an will spawn from any tier six or upward

[09:01] find him with a selection of champion gear, which is sold for under coins. And the prices range from 1,000 for shields and off-hands all the way up to 4,000 for two-handers, trinkets, and major armor slots. That's amazing for alts. It

[09:17] is flat out just more gear per run. But, it gets even better, because at renown nine, which you may not have hit yet, but you'll probably hit soon enough, he starts selling hero gear. Yeah, hero gear, and that's for a new currency

[09:30] that's called Untainted Mana Crystals. You'll get about 45 of these for doing a single bountiful tier 11 coffer and smaller amounts from tiers eight through 10. So, as you get those, you'll actually be able to buy yourself hero

[09:44] gear. Now, another nice thing here is that undercoins are warband loads of bits gear from Z'eran, that's actually fine. If you're anything like me, your main is maybe got 10 or 20,000 undercoins just sitting around. All you

[09:57] need to do is open the currency transfer window and send whatever you need over he's selling. Now, if you wanted to fully use this system, you could just spam non-bountiful tier eight plus runs and cycle through Z'eran's selection,

[10:13] because his stock refreshes every run. Though, to be honest with you, that that never do it. If you really want to, you can, but I wouldn't recommend it. But, especially if you're a War Within player, maybe in its first or second

[10:27] season, is that the Delver's Journey track is actually now a gearing path. It's more important, more relevant, it has more interesting things. And of first season of the War Within, most people just treat it as background noise

[10:41] includes another feature that unlocks at level eight of the Delver's Journey. It's called Warbound in Blood, and it unlocks Champion Warbound equipment from tier nine plus delves. So, that means as you're doing tier nines, you'll be

[10:55] getting a steady drip feed of Champion gear to give to your alts. Pretty damn mentioned, at renown nine, you'll get from Champion to Hero, which will mean the tier 11 bountiful coffers will be able to drop hero equipment directly and

[11:10] untainted mana crystals that you can spend at Z'eran. So, what this basically means is we now have a solo path to getting lots of hero gear without mythic plus, without raiding, which is pretty new for World of Warcraft. As you do all

[11:26] this, you'll get loads of crests, but there's actually a way to spend less and get more. We covered this in our launch gearing guide and it's even better for alts with the warband crest discount. And it works like this. Our upgrade

[11:38] tiers actually have some overlap and that means that say a veteran six out of six bit of gear is item level 250 and a champion one out of six bit of gear is item level 246. Now here's the thing. If you upgrade a veteran piece to six out

[11:54] of six using veteran crests, it will hit item level 250 and that will trigger the free upgrade thresholds for your champion piece, which means you can then swap over to it and upgrade it to 250 for free. And this of course works at

[12:10] every tier boundary, so it will save you hero crests and even myth crests. And of your alts and all the stuff with the transmutation, you will be able to transmutation, you will be able to stretch your crests so much further than

[12:23] you were able to on your main. The next big thing for gearing then is Nullius. You'll find Nullius in the Torments Rise delve in Voidstorm. It's got two difficulties, normal and hard and here's what's really cool. The first kill you

[12:35] get in your character will be a really big one where you will get 30 hero crests and if you kill him on the hard difficulty, you'll get 30 hero and 30 myth. And the neat thing is that those don't actually count towards the weekly

[12:47] cap. Now after that, your weekly re-kills will give you five myth on the harder difficulty, which of course it does count towards the cap. What it does week gets you five more myth crests, which will get you closer to being able

[13:01] which will get you closer to being able to spend 80 myth crests on a really big chunky bit of crafted gear. But that's actually not the only thing housing quest. This one is honestly goofy in just how many crests it can

[13:15] give you for basically zero work. So it's weekly, it's tied to housing and it will give you a stack of crests of your choice. Now this can be done on your new character and I would recommend just picking the hero crests because they are

[13:29] the video, we've covered a lot of things. So, the next I'm going to do is bring it all together in a weekly loop that you can basically just learn and do that you can basically just learn and do on your alts.

[13:43] mentioned so far, your freebies, your spark crafts, and Zaron, here is your you'll want to do two nightmare difficulty prays. That will give you champion gear drops and hero in your great vault. Then, you'll want to do a

[13:58] weekly quest, which is called a nightmarish task. That will get you 20 hero crests and a beacon of hope. And the beacon of hope is pretty awesome. It's a usable item that will summon in the nemesis boss Nullius inside your

[14:12] next delve. And when you do that, he'll appear, you'll fight him for a bit, he'll drop a loot box, and inside that loot box, you'll get a treasure map. You'll be able to use that treasure map to get an extra chest. And if your alt

[14:24] is a bit lower, you'll of course want to do the hard prays as well. Now, your you veteran gear and they'll fill your great vault with champion choices, which is pretty good. And every pray hunt will also drop coffer key shards, which of

[14:37] course you'll need for your bountiful delves. And that's essentially why we tend to do our pray hunts first. The next thing then is delves. You'll want Astrolord's quest inside a tier eight plus delve. Use that, beat Nullius, then

[14:52] loot the trove hunter's bounty, and then use that bounty. The bounty will mean that the next tier eight plus delve you do will have a hidden trove at the end, After that then, you just want to do

[15:05] your bountiful delves. Now, you can get six restored coffer keys each week from the 800 shard cap, but you can also buy two more at Delver's Journey renown level six for 2,000 under coins each. And to recap our item levels, you'll be

[15:18] doing tier eight bountifuls to get champion two out of six gear, and you'll want to do tier 11 because that'll give you champion gear plus four gilded stashes per week. Those will contain hero crests by default, but by the time

[15:32] you get Delver's Journey renown four, those will also start containing five myth crests each. So, that's 20 myth crests a week just from delves, plus another five from killing Nullius. And the first time you kill Nullius, you'll

[15:46] actually get 30. And for most people, the goal is to get 80 myth crests so that you can make a piece of item level 285 gear, which is basically it's as high as crafted gear goes. It is super powerful, so you'll want that. Now, one

[16:00] more thing about delves and alts, do remember that Veressa's progression is account-wide, so your alt will benefit from every upgrade that you've got on your main. So, even at the lower levels, your delve companion will be much

[16:12] stronger than she was whenever your main was just starting off. And that means you should be able to push higher tier delves on alts sooner than you may the delves, do go and kill the Nullius minions. You'll see four of them per

[16:26] run. That'll upgrade the Nemesis strongbox, which will get you some more crests and also some more under coins, which is all good because those under coins can be used at Saran to buy champion gear. And of course, whenever

[16:38] you reach level nine of the Delver's Journey, you'll be able to get hero gear from Saran as well, which is pretty sweet. Well, there are some other them is the world boss. So, the world boss will give you one bit of champion

[16:51] boss will give you one bit of champion gear per week that is warbound. It's only one a week for your entire warband, but basically just kill this every week and toss whatever it gives you into your warband bank. You can't go and do them

[17:03] in your alts, of course, but the only real reason to do that is the world quest reward, which will be like 1,000 gold. Isn't really much. Okay, let's cover dungeons then. So, you can do mythic zeros. They're on a daily lockout

[17:15] rather than a weekly one, which means you can go and blast out 29 bosses, each you some champion gear. And certainly, if you enjoy dungeons, this is pretty damn generous, but otherwise, prey and delves will probably give you more gear

[17:31] per hour invested. And all that leads me into Mythic Plus. So, plus two keys will give you champion gear from the end of dungeon chest and hero gear from the start, but you'll want to get your way to plus six as soon as you can, because

[17:44] that's when the end of dungeon chests will actually give you hero gear. Beyond that, plus nine is where myth crests will start dropping from the end of dungeon chest, which is a fairly meaningful breakpoint if you're pushing

[17:56] towards getting loads of empowered spark crafts or loads of myth tier upgrades. But there's another goal you'll want to hit, which is Keystone Master. That's that doing every dungeon at like plus six to plus seven. And after you get

[18:09] six to plus seven. And after you get KSM, you will be given a bonus catalyst charge, which will mean the getting your tier gear will be really easy. I mean, come on, the game is absolutely showering you with champion and hero

[18:21] gear now. And one thing you should know is the dungeons are easier this season. There are fewer binary mechanics, like binary win-loss. There's more time to react to things. It's very much designed for the post-add-on world. And if you're

[18:34] going to be pugging it, do be sure to use the group finder play style filter and just uncheck competitive and join learning or relaxed groups. So, that's dungeons covered. The next thing then is blasting out some LFR for

[18:47] there's a whole bunch of wings available really doesn't matter. What you'll want is tier tokens. That's cuz getting your four set as fast as possible is kind of worth using veteran tier pieces. Though,

[19:02] catalyst charge at the start of the season and a charge every two weeks after that, and a fairly generous catch-up, I actually think most people will be able to skip this and just

[19:14] catalyze themselves a full four set of either champion or hero gear. And compared to the past, there's another cool thing, which is the Catalyst Catalyst charges drop from raid bosses and plus bountiful delves and PvP, which

[19:30] will basically mean you you can kind of feel free to spend those charges on um like even lower item level pieces just so that you get your four set bonus. And while you do all that stuff, you will have crests to contend with. And you'll

[19:44] honestly, the game just gives you a shitload of crests these days. As of the time of recording, the caps are 700 for adventurer, veteran, and champion, and then 400 for hero and myth. Though they go up by 100 every

[19:59] enough, God, you'll you'll just have so many crests. You'll be swimming in the damn things. Now, your spending priority for them is weapons first, then chest, head, and legs, then shoulders, waist, hands, and feet. And of course, strong

[20:13] the things that will be last are the bracers and jewelry. And that's just cuz with them. And as you do your upgrades, be sure to use the crest skip trick that I covered earlier. And honestly, there's barely any point doing a whole segment

[20:28] because we've covered most of them, and the game just showers you in these things. I mean, hell, you can farm adventurer crests by just flying through the void balls that will spawn inside zones. So there you go. The big message

[20:41] here is that all the progress you do in your main gets your warband more powerful, that unlocks discounts, you'll have banked gear, you'll be able to efficiently. It is just so much more smooth and alt-friendly than WoW

[20:54] basically has ever been in its history. I've played WoW since like a bit of I've played WoW since like a bit of vanilla and mainly TBC onwards. So if journey in loads of different classes and specs, this is basically the best

[21:09] summary of info, there'll be some of that on our site, and you've got a bunch I think you should check out this video next because it's uh well, it's the different techniques, so I guarantee at

[21:22] different techniques, so I guarantee at least one of them will fit your tastes.