Whether you've been hard at work, or you swapped characters entirely so that you have to start all over again, getting left behind in World of Warcraft is never fun. Today’s video is from Kelani, he shared some tips of what you can do to help catch your characters up to everyone else and which systems let you get there a bit faster.
Renown
Firstly, one of the easiest things to catch up with in Shadowlands is Renown. If you are behind in Renown, you can earn extra Renown from almost any type of max level content. Your daily callings are one of the most reliable sources because they will tell you if they're going to reward a Renown or not. Just look at the calling rewards when you pick it up. Sometimes they will have Renown as an extra reward, sometimes not. So be sure to check your callings each day to see if the new one will help you catch up.
Completing a dungeon has a chance to reward Renown. The World Boss each week will give you a Renown. Taking part in battlegrounds can sometimes reward Renown. If you are doing anything to progress at max level, chances are you're going to get some extra Renown just by playing. Callings and dungeons seem to be the best bet for catching up quickly.
As you zoom through the early Renown levels, you will unlock more Campaign Quests as well, which will reward Renown. So be sure to work through them as they become available to keep caught up. The maximum Renown you can earn from these extra sources depends on the current max available Renown. So if a player who's kept up with Renown and has Renowned level 21, that's the max for that week. The level you can get to with this speedy catch up is that max level minus 2. This is because you have two weekly quests that reward Renown and also minus one for each Campaign Quest you haven't completed that is available at the max level Renown.
If you want to catch up in one week, you should not hand in your two weekly Renowned quests from your Covenant until you've finished every available campaign chapter and have earned enough extra Renown from callings or dungeons and other sources to reach the current cap minus two.
If you are leveling an alt and trying to get them caught up, you can actually earn four Renown while leveling if you choose the Threads of Fate leveling path. Each zone has a big quest that rewards a huge chunk of experience and one renown in a follow-up quest after you complete it. Every single thing you do relating to a zone including completing quests, World Quests, bonus objectives and even running dungeons will give you progress towards these quests. So by the time you hit level 60, you should have finished a couple of them at least, which is just a quick boost of Renown to get you going and then you can catch up with the other sources listed above.
Not every part of your Covenant Sanctum has a catch-up mechanic though. When it comes to farming for anima to fuel your Sanctum upgrades, you don't really have any way to speed things up. So you will likely be behind in anime and therefore Sanctum upgrades for a while.
One of the weekly quests for your Covenant is to recover souls from the Maw. This starts off rewarding you with five redeemed souls per week. Redeemed souls are needed to upgrade your Sanctum as well as anima. This quest is the only source of redeemed souls and there is no real catch up to earn any more. So redeemed souls will likely be your major bottleneck here and the only way you can really try to catch up to that is making sure you complete this soul quest every single week.
It is worth noting that because the max available Renown level has now passed 20. Getting to 15 can be incredibly quick by using some of the Renown catch up we talked about earlier. Renown level 15 is very important because when you hit that milestone, the quest to recover souls starts to reward 10 redeemed souls instead of just 5. So if you get to Renown 15 quickly, you will actually start earning double redeemed souls to help you catch up even faster.
Gear
Another aspect of every character that every player will want to get caught up with is gear. Gearing up in Shadowlands is significantly slower when compared to previous expansions. So naturally catching up is going to be a bit slower as well.
The good news is we do have a few options to speed things along. If you haven't managed to get up above item level 170 yet, then take another look at the Auction House. This will obviously cost you gold but it's much faster than plodding through dungeons and hoping for some lucky drops. Now that the expansion has been out for a while, you should be able to pick up item level 168 crafted gear from other players or from the Auction House. This will typically be a bit more expensive than the earlier crafted gear, but if you have some gold to spare, it can save you a lot of time in gearing up.
Apart from buying yourself a few item levels, you have to jump on the same gear treadmill as everyone else. There really isn't too much you can do to speed it up. I strongly suggest you get at least one mythic+ Keystone done every week. This will provide you with at least one item in your weekly Vault, which will nearly always be an upgrade for you. I would try to do as much content as possible to fill out the other choices in your weekly vault, such as killing raid bosses and taking part in rated PvP. More choices means you have a higher chance of getting an item that is an actual upgrade and therefore not wasting that weekly loot. So anything you can do to increase the odds here is going to be incredibly valuable because the item level of weekly Vault rewards are typically higher than the content you're running or at the very least the same item level. It should provide some great rewards week after week. Outside of that you just need to run higher mythic+ keys or take part in normal or heroic raiding to get the big gear upgrades.
Now if you are really struggling to gear up your characters, I would recommend hopping into some battlegrounds. Whether you win or lose a battleground, you'll be earning honor. You can head to the PvP vendors in Oribos and straight up buy some gear with your honor currency, while the gear does start off relatively low at just item level 158. The great thing about honor gear is you can upgrade it with more honor, so if you earn enough honor you can keep upgrading your PvP gear until it gets to item level 197. The only restriction on upgrading this is your Renown level, so if you grind out enough honor and you get caught up with Renown, you can work towards item level 197 gear by just doing battlegrounds. You can use this to completely gear up your character or just to help fill in some of the lower slots you might have. The same goes for the conquest vendor. If you venture into rated PvP and earn enough conquest to buy that gear, that's a relatively easy way to get item level 200 pieces of loot. Upgrading these ones relies on racing, so that might be a bit too involved for a lot of players.
Ledendary
Another very important part of gearing up progression is crafting and upgrading a Legendary. To do this you're going to need soul ash. Sadly this is one system that doesn't really have any major catch-up mechanics. The maximum soul ash you can get from Torghast is 1140 per week. You can get that if you clear both available Wings of Torghast on the highest difficulty, which is layer 8. That's the only major reliable source of soul ash. So if you're behind in this specific category, there isn't really anything you can do to go faster. Just make sure to clear Torghast on the highest layer you can each week, preferably in both Wings and you'll be earning a good amount of soul ash to help craft and upgrade to Legendaries.
There is one thing you can catch up with relating to soul ash. The story quests that you get from Bolvar to go into Torghast to find our captured allies used to have a weekly limitation on them - one set of quests per week. Now that all of the quests have become available, the Dev Team has also lifted some of the weekly restrictions for working through them. So instead of only being able to complete one story quest per week, you should be able to continue the story without the weekly time gating. Most story quests reward you with a good chunk of soul ash and the total you can acquire from completing all of these story quests is 900 soul ash. That's almost enough to craft your very first Legendary. So if you complete all of the quests that Bolvar gives you and you can go through the entire storyline, that will give you a quick boost of solace to get your Legendaries rolling.
That should be all you need to help get your characters all caught up with the major systems and features in the Shadowlands expansion. There is still some time to catch up before Shadowlands 9.1 hits. Or you can buy Gold WoW directly on MmoGah with cheap price. We are also a website where you can find many useful Shadowlands guides. Stay tuned to us and I will see you next week!
