The Shadowlands of World of Warcraft The expansion has not been possible for a little over a month and the endgame is in full swing. In previous expansions, it felt like players’ endgame time was shifted in a dozen different directions with no clear indication of where their time would be best spent. But thanks to Shadowlands‘ With the new Great Vault system, everything in the endgame – from Raids to Mythic Plus to PVP – fits together and feels important.
The Great Vault gives players loot at the start of each week based on the content they completed in the previous week. Unlike the weekly caches from previous expansions where you only got loot for completing Mythic Plus dungeons, the vault gives you a reward option for every type of content you run, and offers more options for loot, ever more content you run.
For example, if you do a Mythic Plus dungeon, you will only get one reward. However, when you do four, you can choose from two loot options. The same goes for PVP and raid content. The more you do, the more loot options you’ll get from the Great Vault.
The Great Vault doesn’t necessarily tell you what type of content to do, but it’s a nice arrow pointing you in the right direction. By putting the different types of rewards in one place, everything you do each week feels like it is serving a specific purpose.
The system serves as a handy checklist of all the weekly services you should perform. I signed up for a week on Monday evening – the evening before World of WarcraftWeekly reset – checking my vault just to see that I had one dungeon less than the 10 dungeon reward. So I grabbed a few friends and jumped into a quick late night dungeon to make sure I woke up the next morning with the best possible rewards.
All of the additional options that the Great Vault offers also give players more freedom of choice when it comes to equipping than Impressiveis ever allowed in the past. When I checked my rewards the morning after my tenth dungeon, I had six pieces of loot to choose from. While previous expansions would have given me my prey randomly, this time I had to choose. I grabbed a brand new weapon at a much higher item level than the one I’d used (Lakalis Spire of Knowledge at a bad item level of 184). It wasn’t the top-of-the-range gear in my vault, but it was the one that benefited me the most, which made it feel like a much bigger and more personal upgrade than a new helmet that I didn’t even want.
Perhaps the most impressive feat of the Great Vault is how effective it is at covering up some of the other weaknesses of it Shadowlands. For example, Mythic Plus dungeons give less overall loot thanks to the new drop rate change that Blizzard has implemented. ShadowlandsThe currently most challenging content, the heist of Mythic Castle Nathria, only drops three pieces of loot per boss to split it among 20 players. While these changes could easily have caused the endgame gear to go into a full blown crisis, the Great Vault’s weekly rewards offer keeps players from getting too frustrated.
In previous extensions, gear in ImpressiveThe endgame could be a listless process. It was always clear that you had to create content to get gear and that the harder content would make better gear, but knowing where to spend your time was difficult and each activity felt separate. in the ShadowlandsThe Great Vault, however, serves as a convenient roadmap for your weekly goals and lets whatever you do help ensure you get a very special piece of loot each week. The added clarity and direction make it an excellent bridge to a slightly leaner future for World of WarcraftEndgame.