Fresh 90 Gearing Guide — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:00] Hi, I'm Hazel. It's Saturday today, which makes it time to sit down and catch up on what's going on in WoW. This week was the first week of Midnight for everybody, and today I want to sit down and talk about what there is to do as a fresh 90 in Midnight.

[00:17] I want to put together a list, because when I finally reached 90 and found out everything that was going on, I was immediately overwhelmed. So I figure it might be nice to have a list of what you might want to look at doing,

[00:29] especially in your first week, if your concern is item level. If your concern is more just vibes and having a nice time, that is valid. You don't have to do any of this. But if you're kind of confused about where to get gear right now, let's take a look.

[00:44] An important thing to know here is that anything that gives renown is going to be important for early item level because there is a champion-level piece of gear on each of the major renowns. They are relatively early in.

[00:56] I believe we're talking a trinket at Singularity 7, a champion belt at Harati 8, a helm at Silvermoon Court 9, and then a neck at Amani Tribes 9. And those are a pretty big boost to your power, so getting through at least the weekly quest for each of those factions

[01:11] is going to be a big chunk of gearing up. And the other nice thing is that any alts that you might want to play in the future can also benefit from this rep that you've already ground, since it's account-wide. So the first thing on the list, as a fresh 90,

[01:24] if you somehow made it to level 90 without finishing the main story quest campaign, you've got to finish the main story quest campaign. I know it's slow, but most of the endgame is locked behind completing it at least once,

[01:36] so you're going to be spinning your wheels if you don't finish it. Luckily, all of the main story quests should be at the very top of your quest log. They put the campaign right at the top there, so just follow that until you're done. if you somehow did not finish it by the time you hit level 90.

[01:49] If you're not sure, you can double-check to see whether or not you have the Midnight Achievement. That's the one that you're looking for. That's the one that unlocks the keys to the castle. With that done, your next step is weeklies, and I know that's a big phrase that means a lot of things.

[02:03] First of all, it means your Lady Liadrin weekly that you get to choose the activity. This is going to give you a bunch of rep. It's going to give you a spark, which is useful for crafting gear later. You can pick any activity that you like. You're going to end up doing most of it anyways, but if you want to get it done fast, the Argentina one I've heard is very, very quick.

[02:20] As a side note, I love the Argentina. I could wander around it for ages. It's so cute. I'm a huge Hearthstone Battlegrounds fan, so anytime I can hang out with Barkeeper Bob, it's working for me.

[02:32] All right, so you've got your weekly quest done. Next, you want to make sure you've covered your weekly events. At level 90, they've given you this Midnight World Tour quest that kind of helps you keep track of which ones you have and have not done, But effectively, we've got one weekly event for each zone.

[02:45] So you have Solferil's Soiree in Eversign Woods. There's Abundance for Zolomon, even though it's in lots of zones. That's kind of where the weekly is for it. There's the Legends of Haranir in Harandar. And there's the Firmarian Assault in Voidland.

[03:00] There is a weekly quest for each of them that you can pick up in the zone. You should see it on your zone map. It's going to give you lots of renown. And as a nice side effect, you're also getting all kinds of different currencies. You're getting goodies and decor to drop. and you're also getting for your first two like pinnacle caches you get a random

[03:16] piece of veteran gear so you probably got your first one from doing the Liadrin weekly your second one can come from I think any of these I got mine from South Earl Foray veteran gear is pretty juicy if you still in the questing gear you leveled up in so that definitely helps next it is worth mentioning Sojourner This means doing all of the side quests in all of the zones You may not have done all of them while you were leveling

[03:39] I know I certainly didn't. And if you want to get that reputation to get those champion pieces off of the Renown vendors, you get a lot of it from all those questing. You can check on your Sojourner achievements for the various zones

[03:51] to see which quest lines you haven't done yet. This is going to let you unlock the Renown gear faster. This is something I have not gotten around to yet. I know that I should. You can chase these down on your main, and some of these side quest lines are going to require finishing the campaign and or being level 90,

[04:08] but some of them you might be able to do if you wanted a level of second character. You could prioritize doing the side questing you missed the first time, and that should all count towards your achievement. Next, you simply have to dig into prey.

[04:21] You can start in Silvermoon City at the big red crystal location on the map. It lets you pick a prey target, and then, yeah, head out there and do it. The fastest way to do it is by pursuing traps in the prey world quest in the area,

[04:34] but there's no wrong way to do this. You can go do all the world quests, you can do treasures, you can do rares. Make sure that after you fight an ambush off that you click on the thing, the little red guy that spawns, and then also follow the trail to riposte the shadow that spawns after.

[04:48] It's really easy to fly away and miss those, but they give you extra prey credit. You can do eight hunts this week. You can do your four normal hunts, and after having done a normal hunt, there's a short quest line that you can do to unlock the harder hunt, which will give you more veteran gear.

[05:01] You can get adventurer gear from the normal hunts, and I believe two pieces of veteran gear from harder hunts in a week. And of course, there's also goodies you might want on the prey vendor. But it's good gear, and you can do this while you're also getting reputation

[05:14] and doing the events and these other things that you were going to do anyways in the outdoor zone, especially because treasures and rares will give you reputation. And they also have stuff. And also you might get gear.

[05:26] So pick up your prey, get out in the zone. An add-on like Handy Notes can be fantastic for showing you where the treasures and rares are if you're looking for things to do while spawning your prey target that also works towards everything else. I'm a big fan of the prey system so far.

[05:39] I think it's really nice. I find it really nice to have another reason to go out and do world content on your main, basically. I'm a little scared of Nightmare Prey. We don't have that one yet.

[05:51] But the Hard Prey was scary. So I'm a little afraid for the future, but maybe I'll have more deer by then. If you want and you have people available, you can also do the lower difficulties of prey, normal and hard. You can do those with friends or in a group, which can make you feel a lot safer,

[06:06] especially if you're struggling to survive the ambushes. The next item on your list, this might be the hardest sell, but it's also the best source of gear. Do a Mystic Zero world tour if you can. If you can put together or get into a group, doing every dungeon,

[06:21] all of the new Midnight Dungeons at Mythic Zero Difficulty is going to be your fastest source of decent gear. You're getting veteran gear drops from the dungeons. You can get plenty of them. There's no cap to how lucky you can get. And I can tell you that even just doing 5 out of the 8 dungeons

[06:35] got my item level way higher than doing any of the stuff up to this point. If you did only one thing from this list so far, it would be Mythic Zeros. It's not mandatory. It is group content. But it gives you a big power bump that's going to make everything else easier.

[06:49] And also, the dungeons are really pretty fun. I went in totally blind. Definitely died a couple of times, but they're cool. I like them a lot. Last thing on the list this is the least important but will still set you up for success later and that is getting your Delves leveled up to 7 Bountiful Delves are not going to unlock

[07:09] until the actual season starts, week of March 17th, so we've got a little bit of time on that, but sometime between now and then, it would be nice to, if you're going to get Gear Out of Delves, it would be nice to progress your Delves up to level 7 so that you can

[07:23] start level 8 Delves when they come out, basically, with the season. I had better luck in Delves when I swapped my Valira over to healing from damage, because she really wasn't doing that

[07:35] much damage anyways, and the healing helped keep her and myself much safer. Also, she spawns these, like, crystal-looking heart things, which are just cute, so I was enjoying that. This is not a big year source. You can leave this for another week or two if you're

[07:50] not feeling it. Everything else is going to get you geared faster, but there's lots of cosmetics, and it will be nice to have this set up, because it will start to give gear once the season begins. Speaking of getting goodies, one nice side effect of everything that we've been talking about

[08:04] is that there's tons of cosmetics you're getting at the same time. So, while you're gearing up, you're getting decor, you're getting transmog, you might be getting achievements. It's good stuff. If you're looking for even more to do, if you finish all of that, and now you're bored somehow,

[08:20] check out the Light Up the Night meta achievement. This is basically version one of our expansion meta, and it's basically a huge scavenger hunt, having you do lots of the zone achievements that are out already.

[08:33] The amount that you get for doing Light Up the Night is gorgeous, but also all of the component achievements have their own rewards. So just a massive project, tons of goodies to get. If you find yourself bored somehow, this would be a fun thing to work on.

[08:46] You could also start an alt and then do all of it over again. And I am currently really torn between my desire to keep my life manageable and just have the one character that I feel like I can actually finish for the week

[08:59] versus my desire to make a hair in the air. They're out now. I want one. They're new. They're shiny. Another thing that I want to talk about this week, this is slightly old news, but it was really easy to miss

[09:14] because it came out around the same time as the expansion. So I want to talk about this. Well, they basically came out with a post talking about what's in the pipeline coming for WoW housing. They have some caveats here that none of this is a guarantee, none of it has a date.

[09:29] They're talking about things that are in development, so not all of it might make it into the game. But, hopefully most of it makes it into the game, because they talked about some pretty cool things. A couple of highlights from this article, I'll read the whole thing if you want to read through it,

[09:42] but a couple of highlights. They are increasing the core storage, and this one sounds like it's coming sooner rather than later, so that's nice. exterior lighting is coming back. This is something that they had on beta, but then shut it down because apparently

[09:55] it was causing some massive performance issues in the outdoor areas of the neighborhoods. They've so far been preventing us from bedazzling our yards with lampposts, but they're working on bringing it back. They were talking about maybe as a workaround,

[10:07] temporarily having minimum distances between light sources just to try to get it functioning. I am a huge believer in perfect being the enemy of done, so any version that they want to put out, I am happy to work with a limited version for now while

[10:21] they figure out how to make it better going forward. Another thing they talked about were layouts which is something I am dying for And basically what this is is the ability to save share import or export things like your room your yard your whole house and they gave lots of different valid use cases for this Lots of reasons you

[10:43] might want this. You could share your house for somebody else to import. You could start decorating your own house from a community shared layout. Maybe somebody makes a really cute sort of basic starter house out of vendor decor, and you start with that because you've been staring at an empty

[10:56] box and you don't know what to do with it. Relatable. You could use layouts to save a backup version of your house before you tear it down to rebuild. So if you get halfway through your rebuild and you start feeling massive attacks of regret, you could just revert back to a saved state.

[11:10] You could use layouts to make a holiday version of your house that you then put up and take down whenever the holiday comes around. Possibilities are endless. This is massively exciting. I feel like this is one of those features that once we have it, we are going to not remember

[11:24] how we ever lived without it. Another feature they talked about that's coming for housing that I'm, like, really excited about is the ability to finally place pets, like your battle pets, as decor.

[11:36] Indoors, there's going to be the option at first for them to either stay put on the pet bed that you've placed or have them wander around. The pathing for wandering pets, that feature is going to be for indoors only at first.

[11:48] They do want to let your exterior pets wander, but apparently there's technical problems, So for now, at least, or when the feature launches, it'll be indoor pathing only, but you can place static pets indoors or outdoors.

[12:00] And then they did mention there's going to be like a couple of limitations, but for the most part, you're going to be able to just place your pets, and I cannot wait to have cats everywhere. And chickens in my chicken coop.

[12:13] I've got an empty chicken coop. That's sad. Makes you wonder what happened to the chickens. Finally, they talked about showcases, which kind of sounds, if I had to boil it down way too much, like Trial of Style, but for houses.

[12:28] You could submit a version of your house to, like, a themed showcase or a timed showcase. People can tour the contestants and upvote the ones that they liked, and then the winner will get, like, a small trophy. This tech also allows them to do something called visitor codes, which kind of works a bit like a dream address for any Animal Crossing veterans.

[12:47] basically letting you share a version of your house in a separate instance. So for showcases, or I guess just with the visitor code, people that want to tour your house can use this link to tour, like, an instant safe version of your house without actually walking in on you

[13:01] in your genuine neighborhood. So all of that is hopefully coming. I don't know when. I'm terribly impatient, but good news anyway. How are things going on this week? It's just been busy.

[13:13] It's been a lot of midnight. I found leveling to be very slow. It took me four days to hit level 90, which was a big change for my all-nighter in The War Within. I have been loving all of the decor that I've been getting from questing and delves and everything else that I'm doing,

[13:28] but I don't know when I'm going to have time to stop and actually decorate with it. It's too busy. There's too much to do, and the season hasn't even started yet. I feel like the season's going to start, and I'm just going to combust.

[13:40] And that's been the week. Thank you very much for watching. Please stop by and check out a Twitch stream of mine if you'd like to say hi or if you have any questions. I appreciate you guys. Happy Midnight, and I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful day.

[13:53] Bye!