This guide will tell you all details of pre-season gear uprades and progression during the first week of patch 10.1 Embers of Neltharion and let’s slow walk through how gearing and progression is going to work in this patch.

Keep in mind: some specific info here might be inaccurate because PTR stuff, but you should be able to walk away with a general idea of what to do. Let’s focus on acquiring gear, currencies, and some basic understanding.

Gear You Can Get

When you start questing and land ways to mobs in the first week of 10.1, you’ll mostly be picking up Explorer Level Gear. This gear has an item level range of 376 to 398. So, it can be slightly higher than the Forbidden Reach Gear. This range also happens to cover Normal and Heroic Dungeons, so you can expect Explorer Level Gear to drop from here as well.

You may also run into a few pieces of adventure and even Veteran Gear, which is worth paying more attention to. Adventure Gear ranges from an item level of 389 to 411. Veteran Gear ranges from 402 to 424, which during this pre-season period is the highest item level you can get. Mythic Zero Dungeons are where you can farm for Adventure Gear while Veteran Gear may be found in a later part of the quest campaign if you can get to it.

And there are weekly chests like the one you get from the Aiding the Accord quest that you pick up in Valdrakken and you should knock that one out. There’s also a weekly quest called “A Worthy Ally” to help out the Niffen. That’s almost identical to the Aiding the Accord quest, where you get rap and do activities and you just get a bunch of goodies.

Sniffen Seek

Another source of decent starting gear is the zone activity, Sniffen Seek. It’s a low stakes puzzle solving kind of escape room sort of feel with limited combat and from the feel of it. You can do this up to three times a week. You just have to work for it. The first dig is free. You get one each reset. You can get more chances by finding maps and you can get one from completing the Worthy Ally Quest each week. And finally, you can use your WoW 10.1 Gold to purchase a map from a vendor once per week by trading in Barter Bricks.

Barter Bricks are a trading currency that you obtain in the zone that you use on all sorts of different stuff, including another one of those maps, and it’s cheap. There’s some other cool stuff you can get from the Sniffen Seek activity, but we’re focused on the gear side of things. You should just do this activity and get the gear you want.

Flightstones & Crests

Now, let’s talk about Flightstones and Crests. These are found in various quantities and qualities all over the Dragon Isles, not just a new zone. Killing Rares, cooking soup, digging holes in the ground and game activities, Flightstones are all over the place. You can only hold 2,000 of these at a time, but there’s no daily or weekly cap. These are made to be earned and spent freely. And they are our currency, so there’s no bag space taken up.

Crests during the preseason at least will come in two flavors: Whelpling Shodowflame Crests and Drake’s Showflame Crests. They can come as a whole or in the form of fragments. You just put 15 together to make one.

If you do Whelpling level activities, you will get Whelpling Crests and if you do Drake level activities, you will get Drake Crests. Basically, depending on the difficulty level of activity that you do, you get the gear and the upgrade materials to match it. These basic crests are also pretty easy to find. You’ll get them from world quests to weekly loot boxes to digging and more. These fragments and crests will take up Reagent Bag space, but they stack up fairly high, so it’s not like the hugest burden.

There is a cap on the crest that grows throughout the season. At the start, you can only create 10 of each crest, which limits just how many times you can upgrade your gear to higher levels per week. It’s not meant to get the idea of infinitely farming for upgrades entirely. But it is mostly meant to prevent the most degenerate behavior within the first like two or so weeks of the season. Next week, the cap is going to go up for these two crafts. New crest will be introduced and from me, you’re going to learn how these crafts might not be needed at all for certain upgrades.

There is a way to pick up extra crest fragments if you’re interested. A vendor (Spinsoa) in the zone sells bags of these and you can purchase one of these bags per week. The vendor asks for Unearthed Fragrant Coins, and these are earned from completing public events out in the new zone. They’re pretty easy to find. They look like a horn on the map. They’re sort of like world quests, but not. They don’t show up on the map unless you’re within a generous range. But you still need to explore to find them. They can take up more time than a world quest to complete, but as a public event, everyone who is participating shares credits. So, in a big group and especially early in the patch expect a lot of traffic and for these to get knocked out really quickly.

Also Read: WoW Classic: Season Of Mastery 2 Could Be Insane!

What To Do For Players Who Participate In “Big Three”?

For those who actively participate in “Big Three” content, which is organized raids, PVP and Mythic +, you may be probably out gear almost everything that’s being offered to you during this pre-season. Flightstones are going to be important to collect, but not critical. Just do what you feel like doing for now.

The only thing I would say to pay attention to would be Veteran Gear, that drops because item level 424 gear is not to the upgraded NPC. Plug it in and it’s going to ask you for certain resources. It’ll definitely ask for Flightstones and it may ask for one or two kinds of crests or not at all.

Finally, there’s a quest that you can pick up to complete your first Spark of Shadowflame. You can use it to craft a new piece of gear or to upgrade Season 1 gear to Season 2 gear, which will have up to an item level of 424. The reagents needed to take this gear even higher aren’t going to be available until the following week.

Crafting or recrafting this gear is going to take a skill equivalent to crafting Season 1 gear without any Primal Infusions, so this is going to be very accessible. I suggest choosing your piece of gear wisely.

Summary

Let’s summarize. Don’t worry about upgrades outside of Veteran Gear. Work towards getting that first Spark of Shadowflame. Get your first piece of 424 or gear. Get as far as you can into the quest campaign for some possible Veteran gear and reputation. Knock out the zone activities and try to keep your stock of Flightstones fairly high for when the season starts the following week.