World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

In next week’s update, Siren Isle patch 11.0.7, we will make several adjustments to the availability of Gilded Harbinger Crests and to the acquisition of all Crest types through Mythic+ dungeons.

Gilded Crests and Mythic-track gear represent the pinnacle of available gear from a Season, and are meant to be rare, but we have seen feedback that both the availability of these Crests and the costs of crafting top-tier gear fell prohibitive.

Changes

• Currency rewards from Mythic+ dungeons (Crests, Gold, Valorstones) now scale by keystone level, and completing a keystone outside of the timer now always deducts 4 Crests.

Difficulty	Crest Type	# Dropped, Timer Beaten	# Dropped, Timer Expired
Heroic	Weathered	10	n/a
Mythic	Carved	10	n/a
+2	Carved	12	8
+3	Carved	14	10
+4	Runed	12	8
+5	Runed	14	10
+6	Runed	16	12
+7	Runed	18	14
+8	Gilded	12	8
+9	Gilded	14	10
+10	Gilded	16	12
+11	Gilded	18	14
+12	Gilded	20	16

• Number of Gilded Harbinger Crests needed to purchase a Nascent Gilded Harbinger Crest reduced to 60 (was 90).
• Number of Harbinger Crests needed to purchase trade-up bags reduced to 45 (was 90).
• Harbinger of the Gilded achievement now requires item level 636 in every slot (was 639).

For players who are functionally finished with their gearing journey, the bar for the Harbinger of the Gilded achievement has been a bit too high, precluding the use of crafted gear and requiring luck to fill every slot. Lowering the threshold from item level 639 to 636 should add a little more flexibility and ensure that players who are completing the hardest content feel they can unlock the final Warband discount.

The changes to Crests awarded from Mythic+ have two main aims:

• Ideally, challenge and reward should be directly correlated. Until now, players whose primary goal was optimizing Crest income were incentivized to run the lowest difficulty that awarded their desired Crest type, even if they were capable of completing much more challenging content. This had the secondary effect of making it much harder for players just entering the Gilded range to find groups for Mythic 8 keys, because they were often competing for slots with players who really belong in 10s, 12s, or even higher.
• While it is important for all members of a Mythic+ group to have a shared interest in finishing a dungeon within the timer (rather than just the key-holder), dropping from a reward of 12 Crests down to 5 Crests when the timer was missed felt overly punitive. Currently in patch 11.0.5, for example, a group who fails to beat the timer in a Mythic +7 will receive more Crests for their effort than a group who crushes the timer in a Mythic +4.

We hope that a difference of 4 Crests strikes a better balance of incentivizing group effort, while still feeling rewarding.

Our goal with these changes is to help players who are attempting to push into the upper echelons of content, as well as those who have alts they’re looking to gear up to match the progress of their mains.

Thank you for all the feedback that helped shape these changes, and as always, we’ll be following closely to see how this reward structure plays out in 11.0.7.