Crests and Upgrading

Crests are the currency you spend to move a piece of gear up its upgrade track. You earn them by doing content, you hand them to the upgrade vendor, and the item's rank goes up by one.

There is a crest for each tier of content, and a crest only works on the gear it matches. The currency you earn from hard content upgrades the gear that comes from hard content. You cannot spend your best crests on a low piece to rush it, and low crests will not carry a high piece to its ceiling.

One crest per track, and no substitutions: a Myth item is moved by Myth crests and nothing else. You cannot spend a stockpile of the tier below to rush a piece, and the crest you are short of is always the one you need.

You will sometimes see a track listed against two crests elsewhere. That is the rank overlap showing through — a track's first ranks sit at the same item levels as the top of the track beneath it, so gear *at those item levels* might be on either track. Which crest you need still depends on the track written on your item, never on its item level.

Each rank costs 20 crests. A track has 6 ranks, which is 5 steps from bottom to top, so taking one item the whole way costs:

20 crests × 5 steps = 100 crests for one item, start to finish.

The cost per rank is flat. It does not climb as the item gets closer to its ceiling, and there is no surcharge on the last step. If you have read otherwise somewhere else, check the arithmetic against the number of steps — 6 ranks is 5 upgrades, not 6.

That single number is the one worth memorising. It turns "should I run this?" into arithmetic: if an hour of something pays you 40 crests, it has bought you two ranks on one item, and you can compare that against an hour spent anywhere else.

Every crest has its own set of sources, and harder content pays in better currency. This is the whole economy in one table — if you are wondering whether to push a key higher or step a raid difficulty up, the answer is usually here rather than in the loot.

Crests are capped per crest type, and the cap is best understood as a running total for the season rather than a weekly allowance. It rises by the weekly amount at every reset, and what you have not earned yet stays available.

That is the good news for anyone coming back mid-season or playing irregularly: a week you skip is not lost. The ceiling kept climbing while you were away, so your first week back can earn several weeks' worth in one go until you catch up to it.

What the cap does do is put a floor under how fast anyone can gear. Once you are level with it, extra runs pay only their loot — and that is usually the moment to switch activity rather than push a higher key.

A handful of sources hand out crests outside the cap entirely. They are the best value per minute in the game, and they are the easiest thing to forget because most of them do not repeat.

Take the once-per-season ones as soon as you can reach the content — they are a fixed lump of currency sitting behind a single clear, and there is no reason to leave them there. The weekly ones are worth doing before anything repeatable, for the same reason: they are finite, and your keys are not.

Leftover low-tier crests are not dead weight. Vaskarn will trade them upward at 10 lower crests for 1 higher, one tier at a time.

The rate is deliberately poor, so this is a way to clear a stockpile you have no use for, not a strategy. The exchange only runs upward — you cannot break a high crest down into low ones.

This is the single most valuable thing on this page if you play more than one character.

Once any character on your account reaches a given item level, upgrades on that track become 50% cheaper for every character you own — 10 crests a rank instead of 20. The discount is earned once and applies account-wide, permanently.

The practical consequence: your first character is not just your first character. Pushing one character's item level up is what makes the next three cheap to gear, which is why a serious alt week usually starts by finishing something on the main.

The planner does not treat a crest as a flat reward, because a crest is only worth what it can currently buy you. It works out how many ranks your gear actually has left, what those ranks are worth in overall item level, and prices every crest at that rate.

So the same run is worth different amounts to different characters. On a character with a lot of upgrade room, crest rewards dominate the ranking. On a character that is capped on a currency or has nothing left to spend it on, the planner values those crests at zero and sends you somewhere else.