I’ve been trying to make sense of in the past hour looking and some graphs, excel sheets, reading written guides but I just cannot get the grasp of it. What I gathered is there are these flight stones that is needed for everything and they drop like trashfrom anything you do in this new patch. There are 4 types of crests. Thats fine. There are some tresholds for m+ which crests drops when. He gear you get can be upgraded to a certain level depending on what raid or how high m+ you did. I know these crests are capped and the weekly cap is rising each weekly reset.
My issues are:
1: I have no idea what are the current caps are for each crests. I dont wanna relive the experiencr i had with the valor upgrade system where I was upgrade this and that bit of gear piece by +2 (or 3?) ilevels and getting hit by the realisation thar I wasted my valors on items that i replaced with the next week and leaving me with not enough valor to upgrade the better higher ilvl gear.
Coming from issue 1. I am scared to upgrade any of my items in the fear of not having enough flightstones and crests for items that are better
I have no idea at which level of m+ i get the lowest ilvl item that can be upgrade to the highest ilvl item possible in the current content from the end of the chest dungeon.
Similarly for issue 3. I have no clue what level of m+ I have to do to get the lowest ilvl of item that can be upgraded through grinding to the highest ilvl possible in the current content from the weekly vault
Crafted gear… A total black spot in my brain. I know there is this spark thing that needed for high ilvl gear from weekly quests. But I have to combine 4 thingies into one thing and these things have 4 types of them. What are these things and where I get them I have no clues. Also there are these titan matrixes. I think they are called like that. No idea where to get them and there are 2? 3? of them. And i have no idea what combinations of the above mentions things gets me the highest ilvl.
I could experiment and find it out on my own but since all these things are weekly capped and time gated and you dont get them back from disenchanting the items you dont need anymore I would rather not experiment.
Crest are not capped, fragments are. I converted all my aspects in Wyrm this week to increase my ilvl.
Actually no, this encourages you to upgrade.
Flightstones are easy to acquire, and reupgrading an item that you have already higher cost no crest and less flightstones up to the same ilvl.
17
20 reward 447. 18 444. 16 reward 441.
In any of those 3 case, no upgrades are possible.
You need 4 crest to craft the old “Primal Infusion” that was used to increase the crafted gear ilvl, the type of crest basically change depending on what infusion you need.
Each crest is capped at 10 per week it’s been available. Whelp and Drake are at 30 (450 fragments) while wyrm and aspect are at 20 (300 fragments).
Let’s go through each question one by one.
Crests are for upgrading slots, not items. This means if you loot a 411 head, spend crests to get it to 424, and then loot a different 411 head with better stats, you’ll only need flightstones to upgrade it. Flightstones cap at 2k but can be farmed indefinitely, meaning you’re actually incentivised to keep spending them so you can get more.
17s from 428 hero 1/5. These are the items that can be upgraded to 441 using 3 wyrm crests and 1 aspect crest per slot. 19s drop 431, saving you one wyrm crest.
Pretty sure it’s 8 but I may be mistaken.
Crafted gear takes an enchanted crest, which is made by enchanters with 4 crests of the same type and some mats. You should only make aspect crests using 4 of those and mats for upgrading crafted items to 447. Do not make enchanted wyrm crests at all.
The maximum number of wyrm crests you will ever need to max out every single slot (16) is 64. This is if you do 11 keys for loot, then max upgrade that to 437 AND THEN do 17s to get 428s to upgrade to 441. So even being as wasteful as possible the most resources you’ll ever need is 6 week’s worth.
If you hover over the fragments in your bag, you’ll see what the current cap is. The cap goes up every week. You don’t miss out if you haven’t hit a previous cap. The number just keeps going up.
So you can see here that the current limit is 300 fragments and I’ve only gathered 174 so far. This week’s cap is 300 and it will go up again with next reset. It doesn’t matter if I go and get them now or later.
Don’t be scared to upgrade stuff. Once you’ve upgraded a slot, it’s done as far as spending crests goes. So if you have a Champion item that you’ve upgraded 8/8 to bring it to 437, if you then get a Hero item, reupgrading to 437 will only cost flightstones, and half the flightstones it cost you before. There is no limit on how many flightstones we can farm. It just has a hard cap of 2k. The upgrading that replacement chest from 437 onwards to bring it to 441 will cost crests and flightstones.
This chart shows all the gear levels, crests and gear ilvl brackets and what they cap to.
The Vault level from keys
Keystone Level
End of Dungeon Item Level
Great Vault Item Level
2
402
415
3
405
418
4
405
421
5
408
421
6
408
424
7
411
424
8
411
428
9
415
428
10
415
431
11
418
431
12
418
434
13
421
434
14
421
437
15
424
437
16
424
441
17
428
441
18
428
444
19
431
444
20
431
447
At the moment we earn half a spark a week by completing a quest in Loamm. There is a chance to get additional drops doing content if RNG favours you.
This guide covers the best embellishments
And crafting hasn’t really changed, you can go to Valdrakken and look what is required to recraft, or craft a new item from scratch. The ingredients you provide determine things like ilvl. For example for the highest item level you will need to provide a Enchanted Aspect’s Shadowflame Crest.
I am someone who learns best by doing. So I appreciate this is all a lot to take on at once. I did read the wow blog when it came out but I’ve had to refer back to it several times while getting to grips with it all
Just keep asking questions, we’ll all try to help as much as possible.
Awesome! Still need to do +11s to get the crests to upgrade them but that seems like a massive ilvl bump for those who’s content is lower end mythic+ and something people have been asking for for a while.
It’s just bad. Instead of farming a bit of valor in like 4 dungeons, you now have to spam high and low keys to farm your weekly crests.
Everyone told me it was super good, so it must be. Reminds me of Torghast.
It’s unnecessarily complicated, and just like all bad systems, the devs will double down on it before claiming they were wrong and coming up with another even worse system for next expansion. It’s the WoW cycle at this point.
Yes, it did. But that is not cause of this system. They could have opened raid upgrades with valor as well. So, it’s not really a merit of this system per se.
We have the gear categories which dictate how far they can be upgraded, catching up to that level when replacing only costs flightstones, the ranges for upgrading are better.
This is a far superior system than the M+ valor system.
It can seem hard to get your head around to start with but it’s far better than the system we had before. That doesn’t make it perfect but there is no denying this is better.
They’ve taken the feedback on board about making people do +11 bracket for a specific type of crest fragments. Which is positive.
But we are all different ofc. You can prefer the old system. Nothing wrong with that.
