Blizzard is making some major changes to gear upgrades in WoW Dragonflight season 3

On Sept. 7, Blizzard Entertainment revealed the next big patch of World of Warcraft Dragonflight—Guardians of the Dream. The patch, naturally, comes with lots to look forward to—raid, zone, PvP changes, tier sets, the list goes on. On top of all this, players can look forward to major changes to the gearing system.

Shortly after Blizzard announced the new patch, players could dive into the meat of the patch by studying the first round of PTR development notes. Although there are quite a lot of changes on the list, what caught my eye are the much-needed tweaks to the gearing system.

First of all, the upgrade track of Hero and Myth gear is increased by one, meaning Hero gear now has six levels, and Myth four.

The most heart-warming change, at least in my opinion, is that Crests will no longer take up bag space and Crest Fragments are becoming a thing of the past in Patch 10.2. But, that’s not all, because players can finally exchange lower-tier Crests for the higher one when you reach “Crest’s item level or higher.” In simple terms, this means once you’ve upgraded your gear to an average item level of at least 411, you can trade Whelpling Crests for Drake Crests. This will apply to all Shadowflame Crests.

Patch 10.2 will also make PvP gear upgradeable with Flightstones and Crests, and not Honor. So, because of that, rated PvP activities will award both of these currencies.

The only downside of this is that the Crest cap is now 90, and you can only purchase six upgrades per week with them. Honestly, this is rough, especially because you can now get 10 upgrades per week.

But, credit where credit’s due—these changes will make the gearing process way easier, but there’s one critical change missing from all this: Lesser Crests dropping from higher Mythic+ dungeons. Blizzard still hasn’t found a solution to high-end players being forced to run lower keys. For example, if you’re missing Drake Crests to upgrade one or two pieces of gear, you have to run Mythic+ dungeons between levels six and 10 to get it, instead of these crests simply dropping at higher keys too.

Still, the testing has just begun and there’s more than enough time to fix this problem.