Another supplemental episode of The Instance, with Bobby telling you why you should spend those Valorstones now and not later! GET IN THERE! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hey there, World of Warcraft fans. I wanted to get on here real quick and give a public service announcement, and that public service announcement is... Do not wait to upgrade your items in The War Within. Start upgrading them now. Go ahead and upgrade your gear with Valor Stones and Harbinger Crests. Don't wait. Don't hoard them. Upgrade them now.
Okay, what am I talking about and how can I justify what I'm saying? Okay, so for those of you who do not know, as you do content in the War Within, as you do content in World of Warcraft at the end game, you will collect a currency called Valor Stones. And you will also, towards the end, collect an additional currency called Harbinger Crests.
Now, they'll be named different things because there's four different types of Harbinger Crests. We've got gilded harbinger crests, runed harbinger crests, stuff like that. I think there are four different kinds. I just can't remember the names of all of them. What are they? Weathered, carved, runed, and gilded harbinger crests. Now, these items are used to upgrade your gear.
um, as you, there's a, there are, there are NPCs in the main city, um, Dornigal, and they upgrade your gear with their, it's called Kzalth and Vaskarn. They're, Kuzalth is in the crafting section near the auction house, and they do item upgrades. And next to Kuzalth is Vaskarn. They are Drakthir, and Vaskarn does Crest Exchanges.
um anyway you can talk to kazalth to upgrade your items what that means is you're going to start to see that you're going to notice you're going to start noticing that you get items that have um have an upgrade track on them it'll say explorer one out of eight or adventurer two slash eight and those are because those pieces of gear belong to an upgrade track now
Anybody who played through Dragonflight and was upgrading gear, you're familiar with this system.
It's the same system, but this is a public service announcement here for people who maybe didn't experience this in Dragonflight, maybe never understood how it worked in Dragonflight if they did see it, or who are coming back to World of Warcraft or playing for the first time and have no idea what this is.
system is all about now you're going to know what it's about and now you're going to know how it works now what you do is you go to these vent these uh kazalth in dornigal and you say hey i want to upgrade some gear you got so he has a little window that pops up and you drop your piece of gear that that has a explorer or adventurer eventually veteran and champion and hero and myth all these high level higher level
Upgrade tracks. You'll drop one of those pieces of gear into the window where the little green plus sign is. And then there will be a drop-down window that says different amounts that you can upgrade. And the currency for upgrading that gear is some amount of valor stones if it's a lower level piece of gear.
Or as it gets higher up in gear, you will also have to spend not just valor stones, but you will need to spend... um, you'll need to spend these harbinger crests as well.
Um, an example is, I'm trying to find an example in front of me to, to read it to you as I'm talking, but, um, so if you have, so the first explorer gear, so if you're, if it says explorer, uh, and then, you know, some amount one through eight, that's only going to cost valor stones to upgrade. Um,
Adventure gear, if it's Adventure 1 through 4, it'll cost Valor Stones, but as you get to Adventure 5, 6, 7, 8, and you want to upgrade that higher, it's going to cost some amount of Valor Stones plus Harbinger Crests. And the higher the tier of gear it is, the higher the track that it's on, the higher quality or the higher level Harbinger Crests you're going to have to spend. All right.
So, long story short, like, the long and the short of it is, because that part was a lot, just know that to upgrade the gear, you're going to need some amount of Valor Stones and some amount of Harbinger Crests. Okay? You might be tempted to think... well, why would I want to upgrade this gear? Aren't I going to replace this gear later?
And you wouldn't be wrong to have that instinct because, yeah, you're earning these currencies by doing endgame content and things like running heroics. Next week you'll be running mythics, doing daily quests, and then also just quests. currencies, and then also there's a weekly cap to each of these currencies as well.
Valor stones, you can only hold up to 2,000 of them, but the crests, every week you have a weekly cap of 90 that you can earn, and then that cap gets increased by 90 every week. So there's a limited, at least at the beginning here for the first few weeks, there's sort of like a limited number of crests that you can get, and you can't earn more.
after you spend them after you earn that many it doesn't matter if you spend them all you're not going to get any more so you might you might not be you wouldn't be faulted in thinking well i need to carefully spend these maybe i need to save them for a couple of weeks until i get good gear from mythics or i get good gear from um doing doing the raids and gear that i'm going to hold on to for a while i want to upgrade that stuff but i'm here to tell you do not do that
Do not hoard your crests and wait. And the reason is this. Whenever you use these crests to upgrade your upgradable gear, once you have upgraded it, you get a discount the next time you try to upgrade that same slot. And in the case of Harbinger Crests, you will never have to spend those again to get to that same upgrade level. Now that's a little confusing. Let me try to explain it.
I like to think of the Valor Stones and the Harbinger Crests as different, as doing different things. The Valor Stones are like a currency that are upgrading the gear. The Valor Stones are the thing that are actually doing the change of changing that gear from one gear level to another. Think of it as a currency that increases the item level of your gear. That's what the Valor Stones do.
The crests I like to think of as being a currency that upgrades the gear slot that you're slotting it into. So let's say you have a helmet, you have you have a headpiece, you have a helm and you want to upgrade that. It's adventurer level one gear and you want to upgrade it all the way to level eight.
adventurer eight that's going to increase its item level from 571 all the way up to 593 and it's going to cost you a certain number of harbinger crests to do it so let's say you do that let's say you collect your harbinger crests you collect your valor stones and you get a helmet you're running heroics and a nice helmet with uh you know it's got some good secondary stats but it's you had a crappy helmet before so you just want any helmet you can get
You get a 571. You don't care. Secondary stats maybe aren't best, but it's got lots of good strength and stamina on it. So you're going to just take it and you're going to upgrade it to item level 593. That means you upgraded it from adventurer level one all the way up to adventurer level eight. All right. And so you can't upgrade that anymore because it's now adventurer eight out of eight.
Yes, you've done it. You have this item level 593 piece of gear. Cool. Then let's say you're running Heroics again and another helmet drops. And it's item level, you know, it drops at item level 571 also. But oh my god, this helmet that just dropped has the perfect secondary stats. It's got haste and mastery and that's what you want. This other one that you had had versatility and crit.
You don't really care about versatility and crit. This one has haste and mastery. That's exactly what you need. And but unfortunately, it dropped item level 571 again. It's adventure one out of eight. Again, you spent all these crests to upgrade your helmet all the way to adventure eight out of eight.
And it's now it's not got the I wish I had waited for this helmet to drop so that I could upgrade this new helmet. Oh, so annoying. Fear not, my friend, because guess what? Those crests that you spent to get that Adventure 1 item all the way up to Adventure 8, you now don't have to spend those crests again.
If you were to go to the vendor, the upgrade guy, Kazalth, and you were to open up his window and you were to drop the new helmet in, the new 571 helmet that you didn't upgrade... you would go to the dropdown and say, I want to upgrade it all the way to eight.
You would see that he now does not require you to use harbinger crests to get that gear up to item level adventurer, eight out of eight item level, five 93 amazing because you've already upgraded. You can think of it like the crests that you spent before have already upgraded your helmet gear slot to to item level 593.
You now have permission to have item level 593 Adventure 8 out of 8 gear in your helmet slot. That's what you already paid for. Now, you will have to spend Valor Stones. to do it, but a couple of reasons why that's okay. First of all, Valor Stones don't have a weekly cap. They have a cap of how many you can carry, and so yes, you'll have to go back out and earn those.
And that's a little difficult. That's a little challenging. A lot of people are limited by the Valor Stones. You'll have to maybe chain run some Heroics or Mythics or whatever it is that you're running. Do some daily quests. You'll have to earn the Valor Stones again. That's that. You just have to do that.
But because you've already equipped an Adventure 8 out of 8 gear, you already have that helmet that you've upgraded before. It wasn't the best helmet, but you did upgrade it before. Not only do you not have to spend the crests anymore, like I already explained, but you get a 60% discount on how much Valor Stones it costs. So maybe if it had originally cost... I'm just making these numbers up.
But if it had originally cost a thousand Valor stones altogether to get from one to eight, now it will only take 400 Valor stones. So it's a lot easier. It's cheaper the second time around, the second go around. So there you go. That's why you should never wait to upgrade your items at the upgrade vendor. Because the crests you only ever have to spend once on that gear slot.
And the Valor Stones, the next time you try to upgrade it, it will be much discounted. It'll be a lot cheaper and easier to upgrade the second piece of gear. And if you're running lots of content, at the beginning here, it's going to be challenging. You'll be spending a lot of Valor Stones.
But as you move on, as you get higher up in level and you're doing lots of content or higher up in gear level, you're going to find eventually that you're going to stay Valor Stone capped. Um, at least if you're doing consistently doing lots of content, some people have a little bit more trouble because they're, they're not playing as often, which is a thing. Sure.
And so maybe you want to be a little bit careful, but don't worry about those crests, those crests on each gear piece, each gear slot that you spend those harbinger crests on. You'll never have to spend those crests again to get gear to that same level. Um, There's more to be said about item upgrading and how it works and the different tracks.
There's Explorer, Adventurer track, you get Veteran gear, Champion gear, Hero gear, Myth gear, all different levels. There's more to be said about that, but that's a little bit outside the scope of this public service announcement I wanted to do, telling people do not...
try to save those crests do not worry about it just get your item level up right now that's really the focus right now don't even worry about it get your item level up and the reason because you want your item level to be up if you're trying to do higher level gear like mythic zeros next week or even to get into normal raids the reason is because um maybe There's a couple of reasons.
First, the secondary stats are important to fine-tune your gear later. But at the beginning, every item level increase equates to your primary stat increasing and your stamina increasing, which means you'll have more health. So you'll be able to stay alive longer and you'll be able to get more of your primary stat, whether that's strength or agility or something like that.
All of that always increases with item level regardless. So that's why they say get your item level up. Item level is more important than anything else. Secondary stats can be tweaked later as you find better side upgrades. The other reason to go ahead and start upgrading your gear and getting your item level as high as you can...
is because there are certain things like, like, like world crest, when you do world quests, and item gear drop, drop from world quests, the, the, the item level of the gear that drops from world quests for you is going to be determined by your current item level. So you'll eventually hit breakpoints, like you might be seeing item level 560 gear dropping from world quests.
And then eventually you'll hit a certain average item level on your character that will unlock a breakpoint where now item level 568 items are going to start dropping from world quests. And the only way to hit those breakpoints and unlock, so to speak, the higher item level gear dropping... on world quests is by increasing your average item level.
So in the beginning here, at least for the first few weeks, as you're trying to get into raid and dungeon content, mythics and raids, what you got to do is get your item level up and don't hesitate.
upgrade it now stop hoarding your currency stop hoarding your crests and your valor stones just spend them because it's going to help you in the long run all right that's my public service announcement um thank you everybody uh for listening and i'll see you around
This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Yes. Get more at frogpants.com.