TLDR: Bored Shadow Priest makes Evoker alt and tries to get it as high ilvl as he can without doing raids or mythic dungeons. Documents progress.
Hello!
A few days ago I made a post about how it’s now possible to acquire 437 ilvl items without running player made group content. This is anything where a player cannot use the queue system to enter and must either form a group or join a group made by another player, stuff like Mythic0 / Mythic+ and raids outside of LFR. Partly I wanted to do this for fun because I want an alt to mess around with but I also wanted to see how the system feels to work with for the opposite end of the scale.
I decided after making that post that I’d also make an alt and give it a go myself, so yesterday I levelled an evoker and started going about getting the character as ready as I could with a single day’s notice.
5 Timewalking dungeons, yielding a 415 champion track ring
Bought a 415 champion BoE Chest and Belt from the AH (Mainly because I needed to get to the ilvl bracket for LFR in time to queue it)
Completed 6/7 Campaign chapters and upgraded all the quest gear I got to 398
Went into LFR and looted 3 items. Tier Legs, Tier Gloves, and a Trinket.
Ran 5 heroic dungeons and got bracers, as well as a second 415 chest from the weekly quest.
Got 402 Cloak and Weapon from the world event weekly quests.
What I’ve spent
2500~ Flightstones
Whelp crests to upgrade gloves, legs, cloak, wrists, and weapon to 411
Drake crests to upgrade chest 415-418, legs 411-421, and gloves 411-415
Observations
The only reason I had enough Flightstones is the 50% discount. We’ll see how flightstones feel next week if there are more upgrades that require them. I expect I’ll be keeping a lot of these items for a while. There’s definitely an argument to be made that flightstones aren’t available enough from the open world.
The highest ilvl items available doing this are the later normal drops from timewalking caches, for this reason it feels safe to upgrade items past 415 with crests that you don’t expect to make crafted on for a while (Like LFR tier)
Spark catchup was pretty much immediate, admittedly it’s only 2 fragments
With the quest to kill Sarkareth and only 2 Wyrm Crests available from Tomorrow’s vault it’s unlikely I’ll choose to do any crafts next week. Primary candidates are bracers (As the optimal craft for evokers) and staff.
Going forward I’m also only going to play the character a few hours a week. Do the weekly world content, LFR, 5 Heroics, and a bit of pottering about doing world quests / campaign chapters for flightstones.
Crafted items are fine, they’re how I intend to get the bulk of my item level later on. I know it’s theoretically possible to have full 437 in every slot doing this, I’m more curious about how it’ll feel to actually do, what drake and whelp crest rates are like if you never do Mythic+, and how many flightstones it takes when you again cannot run mythic+.
Ok but a raid is rather defined by its size (10+) than the way the group is formed, so technically, you broke your own rule. x)
Don’t you need enchanted crests for crafted gear upgrades? Haven’t used any yet but took a look at the recipes for enchanted crests on my enchanter mage last week… oof…
No. I poorly defined my own rule in a tldr because it’s a tldr. Meaningless technicalities when the point of this is to see what gearing is like for those who struggle with / do not engage with content outside of queues.
I do apreciate your endeavor but I feel somehow you kind of cheated…a bit…
One of those is at least 150k…so lets say 300k for both even though it might be more…in the current economy 300k is a lot.
But I do wish you the best of luck in seeing the world from the solo perspective.
Worth pointing out I got the same chest from the heroic weekly box so it ended up being completely wasted, the main reason for doing it was to get to 386 ilvl that night so I could queue LFR before the reset.
Had I started doing it earlier in the week I wouldn’t have bought those two items, and I will take into account the fact I have the 415 belt when I look at the items I’m acquiring in future updates. I’m not trying to “win” anything so I don’t really see it as cheating, just a factor I need to account for. The same as the fact every upgrade costs 50% flightstones due to the fact my main has a 441 in every slot.
Also they were 15k and 20k respectively. Nothing close to what you suggest.
Looking at the server of Meanprincess; That is the server of my first char. When i got into doing group content people mentioned i should use consumables and such, finding out food costed around 90 gold each on that server. After ‘half a year’ on max level i transfered my char to a bigger server, getting a complete eye opener where food was 5 gold each.
So this ‘situation’ might be a server thing
(disclaimer, it is quite some expansions ago i was on bronze dragonflight)
This indeed might be due to realm too.
I am not on Bronze anymore either,I have some chars on Azjol Nerub now,medium pop.Still nothing below 130k here either.
Maybe on bigger realms is 15k…dunno…I wish I had those prices,I d buy some gear too.
I doubt it’s going to be much of a factor long term though. I already got the same chest from a weekly box and at a rate of 1 437 a week I’ll see another belt before the one I have ends up mattering.
Funny enough I have like 3 belts…one adventurer one veteran and one champion,from different places…and like 4 weapons,decided to keep only the champion version for both.So yeah things might not matter much in the long term.
It is, yes. The idea is to RNG enough champion items from the heroic weekly cache and timewalking to have 4 main slot pieces to catalyst into tier, and then fill the rest with 437 crafted that I can make with the wyrm crests I buy from my vault. Then maybe I get lucky and find a 437 trinket or cloak from the last 2 bosses at some point in LFR.
The question isn’t whether it’s theoretically doable or not, because I know it’s doable, it’s about how long the process takes, if it requires substantial RNG, if the resources required are feasible for the average solo player (Flightstones) and how the gradual character progression feels from a player perspective.
This is the first time ever that it’s been possible to reach above heroic raid ilvl without doing player made group content, I wanted to experience that progression for myself and bring attention to it so more people are aware it’s an option for them.
