How to Obtain Catch-Up Gear Before the Scourge Invasion in the Shadowlands Pre-Patch

Posted 2020/10/22 at 9:54 AM by Neryssa

Shadowlands launch date delayDeath's Rising - Shadowlands Pre-Patch Event

EDITOR'S NOTE: Most of the guides linked below have deprecated information such as pre-item squish item levels. These guides are to be used merely as instructions on how to access the content necessary to earn the pieces of gear stating below. The item levels stated in this article are the correct ones in-game.

World Quests

Items from World Quests start scaling from item level 60 to item level 85. As new world quests spawn every couple hours, there are multiple chances of obtaining gear every day.

Gear from Emissaries has a chance to spawn once every day - An emissary can spawn a cache containing a piece of armor, Azerite piece or weapon fit for your specialization. Emissary gear starts scaling from item level 60 to item level 100.

N'Zoth Assault Gear

Rares in Uldum and Vale of Eternal Blossoms have a chance to drop gear tokens such as Black Empire Plate Helm, which can be instantly converted into a piece of gear with item level 78. If you don't get a token that's ideal for your class, you can just save it for other alts, as these are Battle.net account bound!

Completing Assaults will grant you a cache that has a high chance of containing a piece of gear that scales from item level 60 all the way to item level 100, depending on your current item level. In addition, on your very first Assault completion, as part of the Visions of N'Zoth Introduction questline, you will receive a free item level 100 bracers! Assaults can be completed 3 times a week (one major and two minor), so that's 3 chances of high-level loot.

In addition, World Bosses spawn in zones with minor assaults - Vuk'laz the Earthbreaker in Uldum and Grand Empress Shek'zara in Vale of Eternal Blossoms. One world boss is available every week and you can kill them once for two chances at item level 100 gear! Just remember to use a Seal of Wartorn Fate for that second chance at gear.

Legendary CloakAshjra'kamas, Shroud of ResolveHorrific Visions GearBenthic Gear

Benthic gear can be purchased from completing world quests in Nazjatar or purchased from Artisan Itanu / Finder Palta for 5 Prismatic Manapearl a piece. Completing the Nazjatar questline up to Scouting the Palace / Scouting the Palace will award you with 20 Prismatic Manapearls that are usually to be used on another quest to upgrade Benthic gear, but you can simply never complete this quest and purchase 4 pieces of Benthic gear!

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Comment by coolfreezerThere is one Option that is better then all of the above AND pre event:

5 mask visions. you get 125 ilvl for the 1st one of the week and any subsequent you get 120 ilvl. i get that it is capped by the amount of echoes of nyalotha and coalescing visions, but you can do easily 5-6 per week and cover most of your gear slots.Comment by radicarlThere is one Option that is better then all of the above AND pre event:

5 mask visions. you get 125 ilvl for the 1st one of the week and any subsequent you get 120 ilvl. i get that it is capped by the amount of echoes of nyalotha and coalescing visions, but you can do easily 5-6 per week and cover most of your gear slots.Comment by TailleventI have some alts that I got to max and never played again. What is considered a minimum viable ilvl for starting the scourge events with them? That's the part that's not clear. I'm not going to spend hours on this if I can play them with crap gear.Comment by Nevcairiel
5 mask visions. you get 125 ilvl for the 1st one of the week and any subsequent you get 120 ilvl. i get that it is capped by the amount of echoes of nyalotha and coalescing visions, but you can do easily 5-6 per week and cover most of your gear slots.Comment by UrushnorEarn gold and buy uncanny and trinkets
or
Level crafting, do some pvp for marks of honour and make your own uncanny gearComment by NevcairielI have some alts that I got to max and never played again. What is considered a minimum viable ilvl for starting the new expansion with them? That's the part that's not clear. I'm not going to spend hours on this if I can play them with crap gear.Comment by AlasperThere is one Option that is better then all of the above AND pre event:

5 mask visions. you get 125 ilvl for the 1st one of the week and any subsequent you get 120 ilvl. i get that it is capped by the amount of echoes of nyalotha and coalescing visions, but you can do easily 5-6 per week and cover most of your gear slots.Comment by TailleventI have some alts that I got to max and never played again. What is considered a minimum viable ilvl for starting the new expansion with them? That's the part that's not clear. I'm not going to spend hours on this if I can play them with crap gear.Comment by NeryssaThere is one Option that is better then all of the above AND pre event:

5 mask visions. you get 125 ilvl for the 1st one of the week and any subsequent you get 120 ilvl. i get that it is capped by the amount of echoes of nyalotha and coalescing visions, but you can do easily 5-6 per week and cover most of your gear slots.Comment by dokeefe1986You can loot Nazjatar supply drops in warmode every 25 ish minutes if you hop phases. Or every 45 ish minutes per phase. The box has 80+ gear for every slot. Join ruin discord and communities. We post the boxes all the time and reinforce. Tell them Devin sent you. I have geared 15 toons using this method.Comment by ultrakineticYikes @ this article. The easiest way by far to gear up a fresh 50 is to go back and forth between Nazjatar and Zuldazar zones and collect war crates. You only get the cp once per day but you get a piece of gear every time. Get your cloak, pick up a darkmoon trinket from the ah or crafted pvp gear for slots you didn't get from war crates. Make sure you do ap wq along the way so that you level up your neck, which helps to increase the ilvl of the emissary rewards.

THEN do gear wq after you've gotten a few pieces from crates so that the wq will give you the max they can, and fill out the rest of your gear, then do m0's, and then turn in emissaries with gear rewards after you've gotten those to be maxed.

Can do all of this and get decently geared in a day now, and it goes much faster if you already have a decently geared max level character and can trade mask runs with a friend. If you can do that, do it first, do as many mask runs as you and your friend can stand.

EDIT: just leveled up another character and unfortunately war crate gearing was hotfixed. Leaving the original comment here because it's obvious that the fine ppl at Wowhead weren't aware that war crates had previously given gear that was 10 ilvl higher than the highest wq gear and that you could farm them all day, but that's been hotfixed, not only has the ilvl from them been reduced, but also you can only loot them once per day now. Not sure why this hotfix isn't an actual news article tbh, seems like pretty big news to me.

2nd edit though, this article is still really bad and don't follow it, at all. No matter what your method of gearing up a fresh character is, ALWAYS DO YOUR WORLD QUESTS LAST! You want to do every other method of bumping up your ilvl first, so that you increase the ilvl of the wq, and then you do all of them, and in turn that will end up increasing the ilvl of the emissaries (which you really do at the very last, after wq).Comment by CedricDurAs a fresh level 50 myself and who left before the visions patch what I did was head down and grab benthic gear for all slots. This replaced all my level 50 gear for level 66. Then I grabbed a coupled WQs that had a weapon and a couple of rings. My trinkets haven't been replaced.

Now I have started with the cloak and unlocking the visions. I am not super invested in all of this as the new expansion will replace everything, but it is best to grab some gear to help with playing. I want to grind the bee and the underangler, and finally complete the visions to nab the backpack. These are pre-expansion goals and so a bit of gear isn't bad to have.Comment by PharuneDuring Hallow's End you can also get ilevel 82 rings, a 1-H sword, and a plate helm from the Headless Horseman event.Comment by DollchThere is one Option that is better then all of the above AND pre event:

5 mask visions. you get 125 ilvl for the 1st one of the week and any subsequent you get 120 ilvl. i get that it is capped by the amount of echoes of nyalotha and coalescing visions, but you can do easily 5-6 per week and cover most of your gear slots.Comment by TomtaurenI was really waiting the gear from the pre-patch. I already gave every alt the cloack, but to give them gear from assaults x 14, not gonna do that :( too much time on that and honestly the gear from scourge invasion is easier.Comment by NurmatBlizzard, stop stallingComment by deathlavitzrings and trinkets are going to be in high demand to raise the ilevel for catch up gear, the head body shoulder etc slots and to a point weapons are easy to come by. A heroic dungeon run if you can raise your ilevel high enough for rings/trinkets are pretty fast last I did it. It was pretty much a loot pinyata. Edit: that means timewalking will be fast as well - from a vendor buying any applicable trinkets that look decent and usually can find rings as well.Comment by ktministerWas actually kind of fun to just start beta with ilvl 75 and earn better and better gear. You felt more powerful as you leveled and the gear reward was something you looked forward too. The leveling was quite fast anyway

I'd rather just spend the time right now to level as many chars you can, on the realm and faction you want.Comment by couchpotato2013Hope everyone is enjoying patch 8.4. Absolutely no reason why they couldn’t have delayed this patch until 2 weeks before the actual zombie launch.Comment by KalcheusHope everyone is enjoying patch 8.4. Absolutely no reason why they couldn’t have delayed this patch until 2 weeks before the actual zombie launch.

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