Season 4 of dragonflight is my first time actually making a push in PVE with a raiding guild and I have some BIS gear now that I need to upgrade, but the season max on crests has me confused. For example, the season max on drakes crests is 360, and at 15+ crests per upgrade, and up to 14 upgrades required for some pieces (e.g., Neltharus), I’m wondering if upgrading minimum item level BIS gear is a good idea or if I should wait for the item to drop at a higher initial upgrade level. I realize the drakes crests are required at first and at some point it switches over to wyrms crests, but I’m not sure when or how the math works out. If I buy all my tier pieces with with bullion at minimum item level will there be enough crests in the season max limits to fully upgrade everything? What about the other slots? Thanks in advance.
It’s not a “season” cap, it’s a weekly cap, it gets increased each each week by 90 I think.
360 is the cap for this week, next week it will be 450 (if it is 90 per week).
So if you max out at 360 this week, you cannot earn anymore, but come Tuesday you can earn 90 more.
Thanks for explaining that. Seems like it will be possible to upgrade everything? Just not right away?
Correct, but if you have BIS, probably worth upgrading those now.
That’s correct. In time you’ll be able to upgrade everything. If you want to hold onto some crests it might be a good idea to wait until you see what next week’s vault rewards you. But you can really spend them on whatever you want.
If you receive an item with a higher item level than your current slotted item, the upgrade system will allow you to bypass the crests required to upgrade your current slotted item to the new slotted item’s item level. There will also be a flightstone discount for that item slot until you’ve caught up to your highest item level of that slot that you’ve received for the season.
For example, if you have 1/8 champion gloves and next week’s vault offers you 1/6 heroic gloves, accepting those heroic gloves would allow you to upgrade your champion gloves to 5/8 without requiring any crests.
For this reason, a lot of players will spam M+ 7 dungeons to loot any heroic pieces they can get their hands on, bypassing drake crests altogether.
I guess my next decision is whether to use my tokens of merit to buy wyrm’s crests or use them for sockets
It actually is a season cap. The cap just grows each week. This way people who start late or on Alts can catch up.
Example.
Week 1 is 10
Week 2 is 20
Week 3 is 30
Player X starts at patch launch and farms their 10 each week
Week three starts and player Y decided to resubscribe and start playing again.
Player Y is at the same cap of 30 as player Z
Always sockets.
So to follow up, it seems that once you have a certain item level in a gear slot, upgrading a new piece of gear in that slot to that same item level costs no crests and reduced flghtstone costs. So assuming flightstones are plentiful, there seems to be no reason to save crests for BIS gear. Just save sockets and enchants for those?