MIDNIGHT PREP

I have made a checklist that follows the guide below. If you’d like to use it, you can find it here. Dev from Refined has created an addon that automatically updates whenever I update the checklist!

My guild has also made a Loot Helper spreadsheet like last season if you’d like to share it with your guild leader or loot council.

If you want to buy me a coffee, you can do so here. Thank you for all your support over the years!

What’s changed for Raiders in Midnight?

If you don’t care about any of this, you can skip to the Weekly Guide.

Blizzard has harkened back to the days of Mists and Cata where we are getting a tier split amongst multiple raids with a slightly staggered release date including a heroic week. Week 1 of Season 1 will have mythic 0 dungeons and include LFR, Normal, and Heroic difficulties of the 6 boss Voidspire raid and the 1 boss Dreamrift raid. Week 2 will include the mythic versions of these raids and unlock M+ as well. Week 3 will unlock the LFR, Normal, Heroic, and Mythic versions of the 2 boss raid March on Quel’danas, which will contain the Omni-Token and the two hardest bosses of the season.

There are some advantages to this - split raid IDs opens the possibility for not having to extend earlier in the season if you still want to reclear. If you’re working on the 6th boss of Voidspire, you can still clear Dreamrift quickly. If you’re working on March of Quel’danas, you could quickly clear the first 3 bosses of Voidspire and the Dreamrift to get 2 raid vault slots each week while still working on the March bosses. For the truly degenerate amongst you, you could even try to do mythic Dreamrift splits because it won’t affect the lockout of Voidspire or March. I look forward to seeing what y’all cook up!

Next, the changes to gearing in Midnight.

• Crests are now track-specific. Hero track items require heroic crests only, mythic track items require mythic crests only etc. That means you can upgrade hero items to 5/6 and 6/6 and theoretically not sabotage your mythic progression (more on that later).
• They removed valorstones! YAY!
• The champion track (normal raid difficulty) is reduced to a 6 rank track. Items at 6/6 champion are the equivalent of 2/6 hero, making normal mode trinkets, tier, etc. weaker than they currently are.
• Upgrade costs now increase with each step. Going from 1/6 to 2/6 is 10 crests, 2/6 to 3/6 is 20 crests, 3/6 to 4/6 is 30 crests etc. This changes upgrading an item from requiring 75 crests to 150.
• The crest cap is raised from 90 to 100, but the upgrade changes significantly slow full gearing and increase the amount of work you’ll need to do each week to make sure you don’t waste crests.
• Finally, one handed weapons suck and non-crafted 2h weapons suck. More on that below.

A small change with tier tokens. Tier tokens are now sorted by armor type. Tier tokens from The Dreamrift have the prefix “aln-” and Tier tokens from The Voidspire have the prefix “void-”. Plate wearers use the Alnforged and Voidforged tokens, Mail wearers use the Alncast and Voidcast tokens, Leather wearers uses the Alncured and Voidcured tokens, and Cloth wearers use the Alnwoven and Voidwoven tokens. Be aware that the Omnitoken will not become available until the 3rd week.

Another nice change is that once you acquire your 4-set bonus for the first time, all content can drop catalyst charges going forward. This makes queueing for LFR to try to get tier pieces so that you can activate your 4set bonus ASAP very important. Once unlocked, you can catalyze that higher item level non-set piece from M+ easily and still guarantee the ability to catalyze the random mythic armor piece you get from your vault.

There is a new system called Prey that shares the reward of 1 heroic item per week with Delve, meaning you can pick between Prey or Delves to get your 1 heroic item per week. However, when it comes to repeatable stuff, it’s likely Delves will be a better choice for farming Myth crests and other items later in the season. I highly recommend keeping up with Moleman’s Delve Compendium if you are interested in Delves and their various rewards.

There are a wide variety of consumables following in the same track as Dragonflight and TWW. You have your typical primary, secondary, and tertiary enchants. The only new twists are a crit damage ring enchant and an embellishment that doubles the strength of the special crafted Jewelcrafting rings and amulets. There are the normal sharpening stones by Blacksmiths but there’s also a new enchanting stone that gives melee attacks an arcane damage proc. While these are interesting, we all know we’re just going to do what sims tell us to do :( Food buffs return as highest secondary and primary stat but also increase your stamina as well, providing some extra survivability for those early weeks. You can still combine 10 feasts or 5 food buffs to make them hearty.

There are a wide variety of new renowns but none provide any direct power to players. Instead, they have all the recipes that you’ll need to make oodles of gold from your fellow players. There are some references to a “powerful” item at higher renown but these items are not in the game currently. Praise be, Neryssa now has a guide on Icy-Veins!

What are the ramifications of the new upgrade system?

With the old upgrade system, picking a weapon from the vault was excellent because it let you craft in other slots and let you fully upgrade the weapon to 6/6. This made sense when crest costs were linear - 15 per upgrade. You’d obviously prefer upgrading a weapon to gloves. Now, however, that final +4 ilvl upgrade costs 50 crests and you lose the typically stronger weapon embellishment. Casters don’t even want to do MH+OH - you’re spending 200 precious Mythic crests to get your weapon slot to the same power as spending 100 Mythic crests. Crests, especially with the new upgrade system, are simply much more important than the 2 sparks saved. Note: this suggestion assumes that crafting costs 100 crests as seemingly intended, not the 60 currently on beta. If crest cost for crafting stays at 60, you are even further incentivized to craft a 2h due to future crest saving costs for 1h+OH.

By setting up the system this way, Blizzard is directly incentivizing players to sandbag their gear to gain power later: You’re not going to spend Heroic crests until after you are done with reclear on week 3 and after week 4 when you’re finally at 4/6 hero track or better in every slot, you have some weird choices to make. Which pieces do you upgrade each week? You can only upgrade from 4/6-5/6 twice a week and every time you low roll and upgrade a slot that you get a Mythic track from raid or vault that week you gain less power than others who get that item in a different slot. Over the course of the 8 weeks it takes to have every item at the ilvl equivalent of 6/6 hero, there’s a high risk for power loss due to item replacement. Obvious choices are going to be 1x ring, or an offhand weapon, stuff like that, but eventually you’re just going to be straight up gambling and praying.

Early mythic progression vault breakpoints are very powerful. Every item in your vault you claim at 3/6 or 4/6 is going to be a significant ilvl increase over other people. Unless they change M+ vault to having scaling ilvl drops, taking an item from your m+ track is going to feel very bad compared to taking it from your raid vault. Taking a 3/6 from your vault is the equivalent of getting 30% more Crests per week - taking a 4/6 is 60% more Crests per week.

How do I properly upgrade my gear?

Outside of Guilds who clear mythic in less than 4 weeks, spend zero heroic crests until after you are done with reclear on Week 3. Spending Heroic crests before this time is a high risk choice that can significantly hamper your power progression. Because you cannot control which slots you are offered in your vault or what mythic items will drop for your raid and be awarded to you, you have a good chance that any item you upgrade in the first 2 weeks will be replaced by a Mythic piece, wasting the hero crests you spent. Because Hero crests are useful through at least week 8, you don’t want to waste these.

The general rule of thumb when upgrading Heroic pieces is that you want to upgrade every item to 4/6 and then items to 5/6. The exception is heroic trinkets you know you won’t replace until after progression ends because you know those crests won’t be wasted. When upgrading Mythic pieces, you want to upgrade to 4/6 in every slot and when you have weeks with extra crests, upgrade an item from 4/6 to 6/6 for the +4 ilvl jump at rank 6. (33% more ilvl for 25% more crests).

Why hold crests for “3 weeks”?

I have seen a few players kneejerk reacting to this thinking that I’m recommending they sandbag their team for 3 mythic weeks. It’s important to understand that's not what I am saying. I hope I don't have to add GIFs of subway surfers on each side of this guide!

The first week is normal/heroic only - most CE teams should be able to full clear N/H (even with their splits) without sending upgrades. If you are a team that thinks that you won’t be able to clear without sending crests, you should consider telling your raiders to do so. This advice is clearly not tailored to your guild and that’s okay. Teams WR 1000+ higher may want to send crests to make these kills easier.

The second week is another full reclear of normal and heroic and then your first mythic progression. If you are a team that is trying to prog pre-nerf Araz or Stix and you need every bit of that DPS, then again, this advice is not tailored to you. You should send crests because you’re one of less than 30 teams in the world progging these bosses. However, for the teams between WR 30 and WR 1000, you’re going to be stepping in and doing your equivalent of Vex/Cauldron or Plexus/Soulbinder. You shouldn’t need to send upgrades to kill these bosses. If your guild does happen to hit a wall and wipe at ~1% on a boss, then your raid leader should ask raiders to send some upgrades. However, again, that’s a small minority of people who read this guide.

Now, everyone else. Week 1 was heroic and maybe splits, week 2 was reclears and maybe splits and a couple mythic bosses. Week 3 is a quick reclear before getting into mythic in earnest. Do your reclear and THEN send heroic crests, to make sure that the items obtained from vaults, crafting, and reclear don’t waste crests. Then you’re at full strength heading into your first real progression boss - post-nerf araz or stix if you’re in the wr 50-400, or loomithar/rik if you’re in the wr 400-1000 range. This is what’s going to guarantee you the most success for the next couple weeks instead of wasting precious crests the first two weeks on items you replace so that you parse slightly higher on a boss you were already going to kill.

Weekly Guide for Midnight launch

• Level all the characters you’re wanting to use in early Midnight for splits or just for crafting and fun. Or be a degenerate like Xerwo and have 38 characters for splits. Darkmoon Faire should open on Sunday for faster leveling and rep gains.
• If you are a crafter or completionist, try to minimize the amount of sidequests you do because the Darkmoon Faire renown buff will become available on Sunday and provide 10% renown gains.

• Do not spend any crests unless told to.
• Grab the Darkmoon Faire buff while doing any sidequests for renown if you care about that sort of thing
• Unlock delves to tier 8(tier 11 if available) and farm for ?? ilvl gear and crests
• Should have additional content information as I find it, but likely do prey stuff
• Do any world quests that give gear upgrades.
• Queue random heroics for ilvl 224 pieces
• Currently, Wowhead claims that vault progress opens this week with the opportunity to earn up to Champion track (normal difficulty) pieces from vault. I can’t confirm that myself, but if it is possible you should delay crafting anything until March 17th because the vault could replace items.
• You can craft this week if you want to save time on Tuesday reset but if you will have time to do M0’s before raid, I recommend pushing crafting back to next week. See below for recommendations if you want to do it immediately.

• Do not spend any Heroic or Mythic crests.
• Do LFR for tier pieces (reason here)
• Complete a world tour of M0’s
• Kill world boss
• Likely do prey for 1x heroic piece
• Do PvP quest for guaranteed hero track neck or ring (don’t upgrade it).
• Do high level bountiful delves with coffer keys, use map if possible.
• Before raid, Craft as many 246 ilvl pieces using 60x Veteran Dawncrests each, including 2x embellishments in weak slots that you can keep while doing splits. Currently, in beta, the crest cost to craft is 60 Crests. In TWW, it was 30 crests. If this changes, I will update it.
• Before raid, Craft to fill out slots with 233 ilvl pieces using 60x Adventurer Dawncrests each. This can technically be an extremely small Adventurer crest loss for Heroic Week because random heroic ilvl will be bumped to ilvl 230 but you’re going to want to spend time doing things other than spamming heroic.
• Can spend normal crests on temporary upgrades to make raids easier. Prefer trinkets that you might take a few weeks to replace.
• Clear as much of Normal and Heroic as you can.
• Total Crests spent so far: 0/100 Heroic

• (the week you should take off work)
• Do not spend any Heroic or Mythic crests.
• Do LFR for tier pieces (reason here)
• Kill world boss
• Likely do prey for 1x heroic piece
• Do high level bountiful delves with coffer keys if they give heroic pieces, use map if possible.
• Can spend normal and below crests on temporary upgrades to make raids easier. Prefer trinkets that you might take a few weeks to replace.
• Farm +10’s for 3/6h 266 item level pieces, vault slots and all your various Crests. If +10’s are too much of a struggle, do at least +8’s to get 2/6 hero track gear.
• If lucky enough to get a mythic item from raid, you can upgrade it twice without affecting any advice below. Just adjust the advice until it sorts out again.
• Total Crests spent so far: 0/200 Heroic, 0/100 Gilded
• Ending item level: 15x266

• Open your vault for a 272+ myth track item. Upgrade this crafting (see instructions below)
• Craft a 2h mythic weapon at 5/6 285 unless your class discord strongly recommends against it. (Reason here) Currently, in beta, the crest cost to craft is 60 Crests. I am assuming it’s going to change to 100 crests to match the new upgrade costs. If it does not, craft recommendations are likely to change and you’ll want to craft every slot as it will be more efficient than upgrading the same slot.
• If you don’t have 4p, do LFR for tier pieces (reason here)
• Farm +12’s for vault slots and all your various Crests.
• Reclear raid.
• Before mythic progression, spend your heroic crests upgrading as many items from 3/6 266 to 4/6 269. Remember that each upgrade costs 30 crests, letting you upgrade 10 items total. I recommend leaving one ring, trinket, and the slot you know you’re going to craft in 2 weeks unupgraded.
• Upgrade your 1/6 272 myth track vault item three times, to 4/6 282, for a total of 60 crests.
• Total Crests spent so far: 300/300 Heroic, 160/200 Gilded
• Ending item level: 3x266, 10x 269, 1x 282, 1x285(crafted)

• Open your vault for a 272+ myth track item.
• Farm +12’s for vault slots and all your various Crests.
• We are going to assume that you have obtained 1 piece of Mythic loot at 2/6 276 ilvl from your first 2 raid weeks.
• Upgrade 2 of your 3/6 266 items to 4/6 269 for 60 Crests. Upgrade one 4/6 269 item to 5/6 272 for 40 Crests. Prefer to upgrade a heroic trinket or ring that you are less likely to randomly replace. Your 1 remaining 3/6 266 item should be in a slot you’re crafting next week.
• Upgrade your 1/6 272 myth track item three times, to 4/6 282, for a total of 60 crests.
• Upgrade your 2/6 276 myth track item two times, to 4/6 282, for a total of 50 crests.
• Total Crests spent so far: 400/400 Heroic, 270/300 Gilded
• Ending item level: 1x266, 10x 269, 3x 282, 1x285(crafted)

• Open your vault for a 272+ myth track item.
• Farm +12’s for vault slots and all your various Crests.
• Craft your second item at 5/6 285 mythic for 100 mythic crests
• Upgrade two 4/6 269 items to 5/6 272 for 80 Crests. Try to pick items that are unlikely to be replaced in your vault. Alternatively, upgrade 1 item to 276 if you know it won’t be replaced.
• Upgrade your 1/6 272 myth track item two times, to 3/6 279, for a total of 30 crests.
• Total Crests spent so far: 480/500 Heroic, 400/400 Gilded
• Ending item level: 7x 269, 2x 272h, 1x 279, 3x 282, 2x285(crafted)

• Open your vault for a 272+ myth track item.
• Farm +12’s for vault slots and all your various Crests.
• We are going to assume that you have obtained 1 piece of Mythic loot at 3/6 279 ilvl from the last 2 raid weeks.
• Upgrade three 4/6 269 items to 5/6 272 for 120 Crests. Try to pick items that are unlikely to be replaced in your vault. Alternatively, upgrade 1 item to 276 if you know it won’t be replaced.
• Upgrade your 1/6 272 myth track item two times, to 3/6 279, for a total of 30 crests.
• Upgrade two 3/6 279 myth track items one time, to 4/6 282, for a total of 60 crests.
• Total Crests spent so far: 600/600 Heroic, 490/500 Gilded
• Ending item level: 2x 269, 5x 272h, 1x 279, 5x 282, 2x285(crafted)

• Open your vault for a 272+ myth track item.
• Farm +12’s for vault slots and all your various Crests.
• For the purposes of this guide, we will assume you craft your third item at 5/6 285 mythic for 100 mythic crests. Do this if you can guarantee it to replace a heroic slot and you don’t have a lot more mythic items than this guide assumes. If you are flooded with 1/6 and 2/6 myth items, consider upgrading those instead of crafting.
• Upgrade your last two 4/6 269 items to 5/6 272 for 80 Crests. Alternatively, upgrade 1 item to 276 if you know it won’t be replaced.
• Upgrade your 1/6 272 myth track item one time, to 2/6 276, for a total of 10 crests.
• Total Crests spent so far: 680/700 Heroic, 600/600 Gilded
• Ending item level: 5x 272h, 1x 276m, 1x 279, 5x 282, 3x285(crafted)

• Open your vault for a 272+ myth track item.
• Farm +12’s for vault slots and all your various Crests.
• We are going to assume that you have obtained 2 pieces of Mythic loot at 2/6 276 ilvl from the last 2 raid weeks.
• Upgrade your last two 5/6 272 items to 6/6 276 for 100 Crests. With an average amount of luck, you are now done with Heroic crests. Some players may finish on week 7, some players on week 9 depending on RNG.
• Upgrade your 1/6 272 myth track item one time, to 2/6 276, for a total of 10 crests.
• Upgrade four 2/6 276 myth tracks one time, to 3/6 279, for a total of 60 crests.
• Upgrade one 3/6 279 myth tracks one time, to 4/6 282, for a total of 30 crests.
• Total Crests spent so far: 780/800 Heroic - done with these, 700/700 Gilded
• Ending item level: 2x 276h, 4x 279, 6x 282, 3x285(crafted)

Your upgrade logic is as follows: get every item to 4/6 282. After that, start upgrading slots to 6/6 289. You’ll probably prefer to upgrade all the way to 6/6 289 due to the +4 jump from 5/6 to 6/6 but you’re going to start simming every single week your crest usage - it’s probable that you’ll want to swap to a 1h + crafted OH at some point, which costs a full week's worth of crests to make that swap. Just keep upgrading and remember that if turbo boost exists as it did in seasons 2/3 of TWW, you’ll be farming 1500 more crests to upgrade items to 7/8 and 8/8. Excited to do 75 +12s 3 months into the season?

Frequently Asked Questions

Addons I recommend for Midnight

You can remove terrible friendly nameplate bars with:

Run the following command to gain fps. Blizzard is currently tracking lots of hidden questions in the background. Each tracked quest costs a bunch of fps. This untracks hidden quests.