I remember the exact day I gave up being a hardcore World of Warcraft player. I started out Battle for Azeroth strong with three max-level characters before the first reset, a highly-engaged clan that ran two separate raid groups twice a week, and a determination to push Mythic+ keys higher than I ever had before. Unfortunately the expansion quickly started to lose its luster. I disliked Azerite Armor and Azerite traits, which were difficult to decipher and ultimately led to boring, generic builds. I also didn’t jive with the weekly activities like Island Expeditions and Warfronts which became a chore after the first couple of weeks. Most of all I hated the Grand Challenger’s Bounty, the random weekly reward for completing Mythic+ dungeons that was never guaranteed to be a significant upgrade.
There’s nothing worse than grinding an entire week of the most difficult content available just to be rewarded with something useless, and if your luck was particularly bad that could happen to you over and over. On the seventh weekly reset after an especially unrewarding week of grinding, I opened my Grand Challenger’s Bounty to find yet another piece of underleveled gear with lousy Azerite traits, and decided I’d had enough. I didn’t quit fully that day, but it was certainly the beginning of the end of my time with BFA.
I dabbled in Shadowlands, but by that point my friends were still resentful over the previous expansion, so I just played through the story before I moved on to other games. Shadowlands’ version of the Grand Challenger’s Bounty was the Great Vault, which offered multiple options for end-of-week gear depending on how you grinded and how many different activities you participated in. That system was slowly refined throughout the expansion and tweaked for Dragonflight. I’m back into WoW with the new expansion and grinding hard again largely thanks to the Great Vault. Finally, I actually feel rewarded for the effort I’m putting in.
The Great Vault is a bit complicated, but once you understand how to take advantage of it, it’s easy to see how beneficial it is. Every week you have the potential of earning a maximum of nine pieces of gear to choose from: three from raids, three from Mythic+ dungeons, and three from PvP. If you defeat two raid bosses, run one Mythic+ Dungeon, or earn 1,250 Honor points in PvP, you’ll get a piece of gear at the end of the week. Do all three and you’ll have three to choose from, continue doing all three activities and eventually you’ll have your choice from nine different pieces.
The new Great Vault is perfectly tuned to drive engagement, and I’m incredibly satisfied with it. The more you do the more options you have, meaning the better your odds will be of finding a best-in-slot piece of gear. Even if you don’t go all the way each week, every additional option dramatically increases your chances of getting something useful. I will still be disappointed if I open my vault and find a bunch of gear I can’t use, but the chances of that happening now are dramatically reduced.
The refinements made to the Great Vault at the end of Shadowlands and at the start of Dragonflight make a big difference too. The requirements have been drastically reduced, and now you only have to run a total of eight Mythic+ dungeons in a week to earn the maximum number of rewards. This is fairly manageable without needing to dedicate your life to WoW, but the more you run dungeons with increasingly higher keys, the better your choices will be. I don’t feel punished for doing the minimum, and I still feel rewarded if I do extra. That’s the sweet spot for this kind of reward.
Most importantly, you can finally earn raid gear without actually needing to raid. In Dragonflight, the Great Vault options come from multiple activities, not just the ones you participate in. So, if all you do is Mythic+ dungeons, you can still earn the highest quality raid gear. I don’t have a clan anymore and I’m not in a position to commit to a bi-weekly schedule, but I can do a few dungeons throughout the week when four of my friends are around. It’s so nice to know I can still earn the best gear even though I can’t raid.
The only change I would make to the Great Vault at this point would be to have it reward three pieces of gear, one from each category, but I also recognize that gear progression needs to be gated to some degree to stop people from getting too strong too quickly. There’s a lot to love about WoW right now, but having powerful rewards and a strong sense of progression will make or break the experience for me. Luckily, Dragonflight is finally nailing it.