How Gearing Works
If you have just come back and the currencies, tracks and weekly chests all arrived while you were away, start here. This is the whole loop in one page.
The loop, in four sentences
Endgame gearing is one repeating cycle, and every system you have heard of is a part of it:
1. You do content — dungeons, raids, delves, things out in the world — and it drops gear. 2. The gear has a ceiling. What drops is rarely finished; it has a track and a number of ranks left. 3. You spend currency to raise it toward that ceiling. 4. Once a week the vault opens and hands you one more item, chosen from what you did.
Then the week resets and you go again. That is it. Everything else is detail about which content, which currency and which item.
The three things worth learning first
Most of the confusion around gearing comes from three systems. Learn these and the rest is bookkeeping.
| System | What it decides | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Upgrade tracks | How good a piece of gear can eventually become | Item Levels and Upgrade Tracks |
| Crests | How fast you can get it there | Crests and Upgrading |
| The Great Vault | The one free item you choose each week | The Great Vault |
The order matters. Tracks tell you what a drop is worth, crests tell you what it costs to finish it, and the vault is the reward for having done the content that produced both.
Where to actually start this week
If you are freshly back at max level and everything is behind, the honest order is:
- Do the easy solo content first. It is a real catch-up path, not a consolation prize — it drops
gear up to item level 295 before you upgrade any of it.
- Get into group content as soon as you can queue for it. The easier raid difficulties and low
keys are not much harder than the solo content, and they are where the upgrade currency actually comes from.
- Fill one vault slot in two different rows. Two cheap slots beats one expensive one when you are
starting from nothing.
- Upgrade the highest track you own, not the lowest item level you own.
Gear this season runs from 266 to 334, with 6 ranks on each track. The gap looks enormous from the bottom. It closes much faster than it looks, because the catch-up content is tuned to move you quickly and the difficulty you are running matters more than the hours you put in.
The rest of the systems
Once the loop makes sense, these are the systems that shape a real week. None of them are required reading on day one.
- Mythic+ — Timed dungeons, and the key level worth running rather than the highest one you can survive.
- Raiding — Four difficulties, weekly lockouts, and where the top of the ladder actually drops.
- Delves — Short solo dungeons that gear you for real — the fastest catch-up if you play alone.
- World and Seasonal Content — The outdoor layer, and the best currency-per-minute in the game.
- Tier Sets and the Catalyst — Set bonuses, and how to finish the set without waiting on luck.
- Bonus Rolls — Extra chances at loot you already earned, and the ranks crests cannot buy.
- Crafted Gear and Sparks — The only gear you choose rather than hope for, and what top players actually craft.
- PvP Gearing — A complete gearing path of its own — and the one system we do not optimize.
- How a Season Unfolds — What is locked, what pays less than it will, and exactly when each of those changes.
- Alts and Your Warband — Why the second character is far cheaper to gear, and how to run an alt week.
How ResetReady uses this
Everything on this site exists to answer one question: given the hours you actually have this week, what is worth doing?
The planner reads your characters, works out what each activity would be worth to each one in overall item level per hour, and ranks them. It is the same loop described above, with the arithmetic already done — including the part where an activity stops being worth your time because you are capped on what it pays.
All gearing systems