Season 2 of Midnight moves the whole gear ladder up by 46 item levels and rewrites the rules that decide where those levels come from. Crests carry a new name, raid Great Vault rewards jump an entire upgrade track, bonus rolls cost half what they did, and the Catalyst finally stops eating your secondary stats. Season 1 habits will cost you. Players who spend on instinct burn crests in slots the new vault rules were about to fill for free.
Every number below comes from the Season 2 upgrade tracks, crest sources and Great Vault rules as they stand for The Venomous Abyss and the new Mythic+ pool. The ceiling this season is item level 344, and the route to it is shorter than most people expect.
Five tracks, six ranks each. Two extra Myth steps sit above the normal ceiling, and the tracks overlap at the seams: a fully upgraded Champion piece lands at 308, which is the same as Hero 2/6. That overlap drives the early-season upgrade math, and it is the first thing to internalise before spending anything.
| Track | 1/6 | 2/6 | 3/6 | 4/6 | 5/6 | 6/6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adventurer | 266 | 269 | 272 | 276 | 279 | 282 |
| Veteran | 279 | 282 | 285 | 289 | 292 | 295 |
| Champion | 292 | 295 | 298 | 302 | 305 | 308 |
| Hero | 305 | 308 | 311 | 315 | 318 | 321 |
| Myth | 318 | 321 | 324 | 328 | 331 | 334 |
Myth 6/6 is not the ceiling. Ascendant Venomstones push a piece to the equivalent of Myth 8. Very Rare drops and loot from the last two bosses of the raid arrive at Myth 9, item level 344, whether they come off the boss or out of the Great Vault.
Dawncrests are done. Season 2 runs on Adventurer Mistcrest, Veteran Mistcrest, Champion Mistcrest, Hero Mistcrest and Myth Mistcrest, all of them separate currencies from the Dawncrests that Season 1 ran on.
Costs stayed flat. Every rank costs 20 crests of the matching tier, so a piece taken from 1/6 to 6/6 runs 100 crests total. Scaling costs briefly appeared on the test realm and were pulled back out as a bug, which means the Season 1 habit of budgeting in blocks of 20 still holds.
Crests stay locked to their own track. Hero crests upgrade Hero gear and nothing else, so pushing a Hero piece to 6/6 never touches the Myth budget you are saving for raid drops. Trading a lower tier upward is possible, but it is a separate transaction at a different vendor.
Both vendors stand together in Silvermoon City near the Sanctum of Light, at 48.6, 61.7: Cuzolth runs the upgrade window, Vaskarn trades one type of crest for another. Two discounts sit on top. Between them they decide how much a second or third character actually costs you.
The practical read: your first character pays full price and every one after it pays half. Honestly, if you plan to gear an alt this season, finishing the tracks on your main is the cheapest thing you will ever do for it.
The source list is the table worth bookmarking. It tells you which content pays for which upgrades, and it is why a Heroic raider and a Mythic+ pusher end up on completely different spending plans.
| Mistcrest | Upgrades to | Earned from |
|---|---|---|
| Adventurer Mistcrest | 269-282 | Repeatable outdoor events; Tier 4 Delves |
| Veteran Mistcrest | 282-295 | Repeatable outdoor events; Raid Finder The Venomous Abyss; Heroic season dungeons; Delves tiers 5-6; Trovehunter's Bounty tiers 4-5 |
| Champion Mistcrest | 295-308 | Weekly outdoor events; Normal Venomous Abyss; Mythic season dungeons; Mythic+ 2 to 3; Delves tiers 7-10; Trovehunter's Bounty tiers 6-7 |
| Hero Mistcrest | 308-321 | Heroic Venomous Abyss; Mythic+ 4 to 8; Delves tier 11; Trovehunter's Bounty tiers 8 and up |
| Myth Mistcrest | 321-334 | Mythic Venomous Abyss; Mythic+ 9 and up |
Look at the Hero row. A +4 key pays Hero crests, and so does a +8 — the tier does not change until +9 flips you into Myth crests, so early in the season that band is where almost all of your upgrade currency comes from.
Crests also set the item level of anything you craft, and the crafted ceiling sits one step below the upgrade ceiling of the same tier.
Champion crests carry no crafting line. Crafted gear comes in two rarities, and Adventurer and Veteran crests raise the Rare tier while Hero and Myth crests raise the Epic tier, which leaves Champion out of the system entirely. The crafted ladder therefore skips from Veteran straight to Hero, and that gap matters when you are deciding whether to craft in week one or wait for the Hero band to open.
The headline change is the Great Vault. Raid vault rewards now jump a full upgrade track above what the same difficulty drops off a boss, which is the largest single shift in how Season 2 gearing works.
Blizzard was explicit about why: Mythic+ rewards had outrun Heroic raiding in Season 1, and the Voidcore pace made the whole season resolve faster than intended. The fix hits both ends at once.
That last line is not a gearing rule, but it shapes one. Blizzard's stated intent is to pull pressure off tanks and healers and put it on damage output, which is an argument for feeding your first upgrades into throughput slots.
Read this before you pick. A Heroic vault pick is Myth 1/6 (318) while the bosses themselves drop Hero-track gear that tops out at 315, and boss drops climb with position, so the later a boss sits in the raid, the higher its loot. Our Great Vault guide breaks down slot thresholds and reset timing across all three rows.
| Difficulty | Boss drops | Great Vault |
|---|---|---|
| Raid Finder | 279-289 (Veteran) | Champion 1/6 (292) |
| Normal | 292-302 (Champion) | Hero 1/6 (305) |
| Heroic | 305-315 (Hero) | Myth 1/6 (318) |
| Mythic | 318-344 (Myth) | Myth 6/6 (334) |
On Mythic the last two bosses, The Coiled Altar and Ula'tek, drop at Myth 9 (344), and so do Very Rare items. Those are the only pieces whose Great Vault reward also reaches 344 — every other Mythic vault slot caps at 334.
Lairs are world bosses, reworked. The Tidebound Grotto and its boss Nymrissa Wavecaller now sit in an instance of their own, scaling up to flexible Mythic for 15 to 25 players, with a summoning stone outside the entrance the way Delves work. The Grotto opens at World difficulty with the patch and picks up Normal, Heroic and Mythic scaling when the season starts, which makes it the cheapest boss loot of the season for anyone without a raid roster.
The three rows fill on their own counters, and each row hands you up to three choices:
A ninth dungeon adds nothing. You still take exactly one reward out of the whole vault, so filling the cheap thresholds across all three rows widens the pool you choose from rather than handing you more loot, and the dungeon row asks for a single run to open its first slot. Every earned slot can roll a tier piece, dungeon and world rows included, so a character who never sets foot in the raid can still open a set bonus out of the vault.
The vault itself sits in the bank in the neutral sector of Silvermoon City, at 50.2, 66.2. There is a second one in the Horde sector at 71.8, 65.1, but it has no Vaultkeeper standing next to it.
Nebulous Voidcore is available as a Great Vault reward option from the first week of the season, straight out of the vault interface. Decimus has moved on. Orin Straylight took over the work and relocated to the Catalyst in Silvermoon, and he needs eight weeks of research before he starts handing out one Voidcore per week.
No weekly quest this time. Once you help Orin start his research at the beginning of the season, the weekly Voidcore arrives on its own from week 8 onward.
Ascendant Venomstones are the Season 2 successor to Ascendant Voidcores, and they arrive later in the season rather than at launch. They push a single item to the equivalent of Myth 8, one step under the season's ceiling.
The eligible slot list grew. Weapons and trinkets carried over from Season 1, and necklaces are new. For what it's worth, a neck you are happy with is the safest stone target of the whole season, because the slot rarely gets replaced once it is right.
Stones come off the same top-end content that already fills your vault: every Heroic and Mythic raid boss, Mythic+ keys at +10 and above, Tier 11 Bountiful Delves, and the Champion gear boxes from Nightmare Prey hunts. Each upgrade takes ten of them, and a piece only qualifies once it is fully upgraded on the Hero or Myth track, or a max-quality craft at the matching item level — so the slot has to be finished before a stone can lift it.
Do not spend stones on a slot the raid can still solve. A Myth 9 weapon from the final two bosses lands at 344 and outranks anything a stone can do to that slot.
Mythic+ pays two ways: the piece that drops when you time the key, and the Great Vault slot it fills for next reset. Both climb with keystone level, and both stop climbing well before the top of the ladder.
| Keystone | End of dungeon | Crest | Great Vault |
|---|---|---|---|
| +2 to +3 | 295 (Champion 2/6) | Champion | 305 (Hero 1/6) |
| +4 | 298 (Champion 3/6) | Hero | 308 (Hero 2/6) |
| +5 | 302 (Champion 4/6) | Hero | 308 (Hero 2/6) |
| +6 | 305 (Hero 1/6) | Hero | 311 (Hero 3/6) |
| +7 | 305 (Hero 1/6) | Hero | 315 (Hero 4/6) |
| +8 | 308 (Hero 2/6) | Hero | 315 (Hero 4/6) |
| +9 | 308 (Hero 2/6) | Myth | 315 (Hero 4/6) |
| +10 and up | 311 (Hero 3/6) | Myth | 318 (Myth 1/6) |
Two things fall out of this table. The end-of-dungeon drop caps at 311, so a key never hands you Myth-track gear straight up — that comes only from the vault at 318 or from the raid. Thing is, the vault itself stops improving at +10 too, so keys past that buy rating and Myth crests rather than a better vault slot.
The Catalyst finally behaves. A converted piece keeps the secondary stats of the item you fed it along with any cantrip effect it carried, so feeding it a well-itemised Mythic+ drop no longer costs you the stat spread you built around.
That change moves the Catalyst up your priority list. A Mythic+ drop with the stats you want is now worth converting, where in Season 1 the conversion could hand back a piece itemised against your build.
Four-set first.
A set bonus outweighs the item levels you give up getting there in nearly every spec, and the Catalyst is the deterministic way to close the last slot when tokens refuse to drop.
Tier gear in The Venomous Abyss drops as class-grouped tokens rather than finished pieces. Four families split the roster by armor type, so the only token that matters to you is the one your class rolls on.
| Token | Armor | Classes |
|---|---|---|
| Venomforged Idol | Plate | Warrior, Paladin, Death Knight |
| Venomcast Idol | Hunter, Shaman, Evoker | |
| Venomcured Idol | Leather | Rogue, Monk, Druid, Demon Hunter |
| Venomwoven Idol | Cloth | Priest, Mage, Warlock |
When the token you need refuses to drop, the Catalyst is the backfill: feed it a non-set piece in that slot and convert. Our Matrix Catalyst guide covers charge sources and the conversion rules in full.
Patch 12.1 goes live on 11 August and Season 2 opens a week later, on 18 August. That gap is a real gearing window rather than dead time: the dungeon pool, the Coiled Isle and Delves all pay crests before the season ladder even starts.
The spending order follows one rule: never pay crests for an item level the vault is about to hand you for free. Everything else is detail.
Crafting sits lower on the list than it did in Season 1, and honestly it is not close. A Hero-crest craft tops out at 318, and a Heroic vault pick now arrives at that same 318 for nothing. Crafting is also paced by Spark of Tides, an optional reagent that sets a craft's starting item level between 292 and 305 depending on crafting quality and marks the piece as Tidal Crafted. Sparks come from weekly quests and end-game activities, so the ceiling on strong crafts is how many you have banked. Craft for an embellishment you actually need, or for a slot the season keeps refusing to fill. Not for raw item level.
Altar of Fangs and the rest of the new dungeon rotation open on Heroic and Mythic 0 during this week, and the Coiled Isle campaign opens with the patch. Nothing here is seasonal. None of it goes to waste when the season flips, and European realms run the same week one day later, with the season starting on 19 August.
Season 2 opens The Venomous Abyss, Mythic+ and the Bountiful Delve tier together, and Mythic 0 drops to a daily lockout. Your first Season 2 vault is waiting at the same moment, stocked by whatever you cleared during patch week, so this reset opens with a reward instead of ending with one.
Your first vault filled entirely by season content lands, and Raid Finder opens its second wing. This is the reset where the season stops being setup and starts being progression.
The pattern settles. Vault first, then Hero crests into breadth, then Myth crests into the pieces you are certain of.
Hero crests stop mattering. Everything from here is Myth crests, vault picks and Voidcore rolls.
Orin Straylight finishes his research and starts paying out one Nebulous Voidcore per week, with no quest attached. Ascendant Venomstones open up at the same point.
No. Season 2 uses Mistcrests, a separate set of five currencies. Spend Dawncrests before the season flips.
344, from Very Rare items and the last two Mythic bosses of The Venomous Abyss. The Mythic Great Vault otherwise caps at 334, and Ascendant Venomstones reach Myth 8.
20 crests per rank, 100 to take an item from 1/6 to 6/6, plus a small gold fee. That is the full price. Once your warband has outgrown a track everything on it costs half, and the scaling costs that showed up during testing were a bug that has since been removed.
+9 and above. Keys from +4 to +8 all sit in the Hero band, so pushing inside that range changes the gear and the vault slot rather than the crest tier.
Finish the tracks on your main first. Each of the Mist Feat of Strength takes 50% off that track's crest costs for every character in the warband, and Vaskarn will trade surplus crests up a tier. After that, outdoor events, Delves and the dungeon row of the vault carry an alt through the early tracks without touching your raid currency.
Craft for an embellishment or for a slot nothing else has filled. Hero crests set a crafted piece at 305-318 and Myth crests at 318-331, so a craft has to be measured against what your vault is already handing you that week.
Later in Season 2 rather than at launch, in the same stretch that Orin Straylight begins his weekly Nebulous Voidcore payout in week 8. They work on weapons, trinkets and necklaces.