How to Gear Up Fast in Midnight

How to Gear Up Fast in Midnight TL;DR

• At level 90, start with world quests, Heroic dungeons, Hard Prey, and Tier 1–4 Bountiful Delves to build Adventurer gear.

• Next step is Tier 5–6 Bountiful Delves, Nightmare Prey, low Mythic+, and LFR for Veteran gear and your first meaningful Vault reward.

• Once you’re around 240+, push Normal raid, Tier 8–11 Delves, and Mythic+ 1–5 to move into Champion gear.

• High progression comes from Mythic+ 6+ and Heroic raid for Hero-tier gear, then Mythic+ 10+ and Mythic raid for Myth-tier gear, which is the highest.

• Always fill your Great Vault with the highest item level options you can manage for weekly gear spikes.

• Don’t chase item level blindly; stat profiles and trinket effects can beat raw ilvl, especially compared to PvP gear in PvE.

BoEs, consumables, and day-to-day expenses are set to drain your gold super fast. You can skip the gold grind and cover expenses entirely - just buy WoW gold on Playhub. Best prices and secure delivery guaranteed.

WoW Midnight Gearing Changes

While the M+ gear and raid-tier pieces are still way more powerful than anything else you can get your hands on, actually getting gear sufficient to complete said activities is way easier than in TWW.

• The Explorer gear tier has been removed, and we now start from the Adventurer tier. This change makes reaching the ilvl needed to partake in heroic dungeons, normal raids, and m+ quite easy.

• New open-world activity, Prey, now allows you to get gear up to ilvl 269. Not only does it reward gear and upgrade Dawncrates, but it also progresses your “World” tier weekly vault. Prey’s rewards are highly intertwined with Delve since Prey hunts can drop you bountiful coffer key pieces. Since for unlocking all 3 vault rewards you’ll need to complete 8 activities total, counting Delves and other open world activities, I’d recommend you do 4 Preys each week, then proceed with Delves and world quests. For detailed Prey activity info, check out our Midnight Prey system guide.

• Crest amounts needed to upgrade items have been increased, but the highly disliked Valorstone currency introduced in The War Within is now completely removed. The Crest amounts needed will start at 10 and increase by 10 with each upgrade tier.

These changes create a system where casual players can quickly get to respectable ilvl gear sufficient to clear open-world content and lower difficulty instances easily, while players looking for a challenge can spend little to no time grinding low difficulty dungeons for gear and get straight to hard content.

Fastest Gearing Strategy in WoW Midnight

Once you hit level 90, your gearing progression will begin. From there, you have multiple ways you can progress your character’s gear, depending on which playstyle you prefer. While doing dungeons and delves is the classic way to gear up early on, there are alternatives now. Here’s how your optimised gearing path should look like:

1. After reaching lvl 90, you should do World Quests, Heroic dungeons, Hard Preys, and low-level Bountiful Delves to earn Adventurer-tier gear. To actually be able to clear all of this, you’ll need to get to an average ilvl of approximately 230 to have enough stats to perform well, which corresponds to the Adventurer tier gear earnable through World Quests, Heroic dungeons, and low-level Bountiful Delves. You should also absolutely do weekly bosses every week since they drop insanely high-level items, but I had abysmal luck trying to get anything good out of them. Getting crafting gear is a great way to quickly raise your ilvl at this stage.

2. Next, your goal should be to be able to clear tier 5 and 6 bountiful Delves, hunt Nightmare Preys, and do low-level M+ dungeons. You can mix up LFR raid in as well for occasional drops, but it won’t be relevant early in the patch’s lifecycle. Combining these activities should yield you Veteran-tier gear, which is ilvl 233 to 243. You can also get your first weekly Great Vault reward, bringing you up to an average Ilvl of 240+, which should be able to let you complete higher-tier M+ dungeons, normal Raid difficulty, and tier 8-11 delves runs. 

3. From there, the sky is the limit. You’ll be earning Her-tier gear of Ilvl 259-269, efficient enough for clearing M+ dungeons of +10 and higher, as well as mythic raid tier for the best gear in the game. The trick for steady progression on this level is to know your BiS items, actually understand which M+ dungeons are worth investing your time in, and which raid bosses you should target farm every weekly reset. 

Largely, the system is a lot like it was in many previous expansions. There are also several progression tips I want to stress:

• Always fill out your Great Vault with as high of an ilvl rewards as possible. This is a great progression tool for potentially large weekly gear spikes since you’re getting gear of higher ilvl than the content you’re actually clearing. Great Vault essentially guarantees you progress, unless you get extremely unlucky.

• Spend time researching your BiS gear sources before running any content, don't repeat my mistakes, and waste time running dungeons with bad drop rates for you specifically.

• If you’re a group player, don’t underestimate the rewards Prey and Delves can provide you with early on. You can get ilvl 259 gear from Nightmare Preys and high-tier Delves without investing much time or trying too hard.

• Do not sweat over your ilvl too much. What really matters is your performance - how well-tuned your stats are, how good your trinket effects are, and so on. For example, you can quickly raise your ilvl with PvP gear, but its versatility-heavy profile is pretty bad in PvE.

Midnight Gear Types and Sources

If you’re a player returning to the game after a long break, gear types could be pretty confusing for you. What they really are is just the source separator of sorts, pointing out where the gear has been acquired and how high its upgraded ilvl could be. Let’s get all types explained:

• Unranked - 207–217 ilvl: not upgradeable. Comes from quests, plus Normal dungeons.

• Adventurer - 220–230 ilvl: 6 upgrade tiers. Drops from world activities, Heroic dungeons, and Tier 1–4 Delves.

• Veteran - 233–243 ilvl: 6 upgrade tiers. Drops from Pinnacle Cache, Tier 5–6 Delves, non-seasonal Mythic dungeons, and LFR.

• Champion - 246–256 ilvl: 6 upgrade tiers. Drops from world bosses, Tier 7–11 Delves, Mythic+ 1–5, and Normal raid tier.

• Hero - 259–269 ilvl: up to 6 upgrades. Comes from Tier 8–11 Delves, Mythic+ 6+, and Heroic raid tier.

• Myth - 272–289 ilvl: 6 upgrade tiers. Drops from Mythic+ dungeons of level 10 and higher and Mythic raid tiers.

If you’re confused about the Crests' acquisition source, it’s simple - you get them by doing the same content tier that provides that item’s tier loot. For example, you’ll get Champion gear upgrade materials by running mythic+ dungeons from +1 to +5.

 With gearing path and gear types out of the way, here’s a handy cheat sheet you can refer to when deciding what to do next:

As you can see, there are lots of gearing options to choose from for both solo and group players.

WoW Midnight Dungeon Gearing

Ever since the Legion came out, dungeons, namely the M+ ones, are the prime source of high-level gear. You can get the same ilvl gear running +10 dungeons or higher, and you can do them infinitely, while raid gear can only be collected once a week. Here’s a dungeon gearing cheat sheet:

If you choose the right approach to the dungeon gearing and pick out the dungeons you have the odds to get BiS items from, you can gear out in no time. 

WoW Midnight Raid Gearing

While Raids are not as good in upgrade consistency as Dungeons are, you’ll still want to do them weekly since many BiS items are gated in this content exclusively, especially the Tier set gear if it’s viable on your spec. Here’s how the ilvl layout looks like in Midnight’s raids:

Contrary to the dungeons, Raids are your weekly one-time drops, but I think there’s something cool about having raid-exclusive items to chase and hope for going from one reset to another. Your upgrade track for each tier will look like this:

Remember to kill 6 bosses every week for your Great Vault, and don't ignore lower difficulties; sometimes, you can still get impactful upgrades from some of the bosses here.