Now that the entire covenant campaign is available, gearing alts (or players who started leveling right now) is relatively easy (altough a little time consuming) until around ilvl 200-205. Renown catchup makes getting to renown 22 quite easy, and once you reach that level you can upgrade both covenant and honor gear all the way to ilvl 197. Covenant gear gives you all the armor pieces, then honor can give you the other slots (neck, rings, weapon/s, and trinkets).
For Honor farming i recommend epic BGs and arena skirmishes. The first ones give a ton of Honor even if you lose, and they dont last for long except Winterspring. Arena skirmishes dont give a lot but they usually end quickly (altough some 3v3s can get quite long if healers keep pumping infinitely and nobody focus them), so they are also a good method for honor farming.
Then after you reach that ilvl range you would need to put your feet into more challenging content like raids, M+ or rated PvP. If you arent much into raids i would recommend the other two, because once you get to ilvl 200ish, LFR/Normal isnt going to give an upgrade to your gear, and Heroic can be quite difficult for people who dont know mechanics.
Imo the early gearing is way better than in BFA. 200 ilvl is equivalent to around ilvl 445 in 8.3 which was more or less the maximum you could get without doing challenging content. In BFA it was harder to get that gear since only heroic warfronts (once ~2 weeks), emissaries (once per day and not guaranteed to give loot) and weekly events (once every several months) gave you 445+ gear without effort. Here you can reach Normal raid ilvl doing nothing except WQs and unrated PvP.
On bfa i got 12 alts, all pre-raid ready. On shadowlands I only have 2. No, it will be a pain. Titan-forging was a great way to gear alts. Now itâs gone.
WQ where a great way to gear alts, now, they give crap ilevel item until you are renow 15-18. And that takes a bit. WQ are gone.
The only good thing is that the class set is improvable, but you will need to do all chapter of story to improve it to max 197. Wich takes a bit.
This issue is that blizzard have manipulated player behaviour in SL so that you have to come back daily/weekly in order to progress. It is not very easy to gear up an alt in one session. You need to do a minimum amount of content week in/ week out. This is not fun and is by design to prolong subscriptions⌠I am praying it backfires immensely and that the majority of people quit rather than embrace this design, its the only way they will back away from these sorts of shenanigans.
Specifically Reknown but also soul ash has to be done weekly, as well as conduits which have to be done in drips and drabs.
Back in BFA you could hit max level and instantly jump into Nazjatar and start doing visions (or get carried through a 5 mask) to gear up. There was content to do and oppurtunities to gear up.
Loot is so sparse now that even if you get carried in raids/M+ you likely wont be getting hand me down loot.
Add to this world quest, the ilvl is reliant on your ilvl and your reknown progress (which is gated weekly, even the catch up is gated). It adds up to either play on blizzards schedule or have a bad time.
it depends on what you plan to do with those alts. If you want to try and make an alt your second, third, fourth, or fifth main character, then it isnât very friendly. However right now if you plan to do heroic content, LFR, World quests and bosses, then it is extremely friendly.
Gearing an alt is super easy. You get 200 item level for âfreeâ
However the âfreeâ part is actually just doing the covenant campaign and getting some catch-up renown. Which can be a lengthy quest line but can be caught up in a week or two.
However making that alt into a 2nd main does take a bit to get all the conduits and legendary powers.
