We’re now officially in the home stretch; the first piece of Shadowlands content launched this week with the pre-patch event Death Rising. There’s a lot to get done during this upcoming pair of weeks that’ll get you ready to hit the ground running in Shadowlands. Most notably there’s piles of free alt gear, enough to cover all your basic equipment slots by default, and weapons and jewelry if you’re lucky with drops. There’s even a bag tied with the maximum size currently available on offer for you.
You’ve probably heard of daily quests in Icecrown, world bosses from Wrath returning and some of the more exotic features. These aren’t where you start! Though some of the sundry content is available immediately, like Nathanos, the event questline is going to be important for much of what Death Rising offers. Finish up your quests and you’ll have a bevy of activities with the Argent Crusade to get your characters ready for Shadowlands with a few long-term prizes (like that bag) along the way.
The Questline
Death Rising starts in the capital cities with a quest that gets automatically offered when you log in. This will lead you to Genn Greymane in Stormwind or Lor’themar Theron in Orgrimmar and get you up to speed with a cutscene covering the time between Bolvar and Sylvanas’ duel in the Shadowlands trailer and the beginning of the event. Afterward, you’ll be sent to help out the Argent Crusade which will eventually guide you to Nathanos, and Icecrown, alongside offering your first few Argent Commendations. Once you’ve gotten to Justicar Trueheart, the faction differences have stopped and you’ll be on your way.
For the most part, you can just follow the objective markers and things are relatively simple. In a few places things branch out and if you’re hoping to get everything unlocked as quickly as possible, you’ll want to avoid a few detours that send you off to do something you’ve unlocked. The first is killing Nathanos, which doesn’t gate your progress in the questline, and can be saved for whenever you’d like to do it, especially since it requires a large detour to the plaguelands. From there, the scourgestone quest doesn’t need to be done right then, but it will progress fairly naturally as you do other activities anyway, just don’t focus on finishing it and move through the main quest as you’ll be wasting free progress you would’ve gotten doing other things. Once you’ve established the foothold, week one’s non-repeatable quests are done and you have access to the meat of the event.
World Quests, Dailies and Rares
The majority of week one’s rewards are tied to a weekly World Boss quest, Nathanos Blightcaller, and the Dailies and Rares over in Icecrown. These are where you’ll be spending most of your alt time. The full set of catch-up gear costs 135 Argent Commendations. This won’t be too hard to get but does take some amount of work. The fastest way is definitely by killing rares if you’re looking to knock it out quickly. Dailies give between 3 and 5 commendations, and they are relatively easy, but once you’ve completed Strange Scourgestones, you can turn in the amount of Pitch Black Stones dropped on average by the rares for the same 3 commendations. When they’re up, a purple skull on your map will tell you where they are.
The upside is that the bosses are pretty heavily swarmed and this makes them fairly easy. The downside is that they’re on a twenty-minute spawn timer, so you’ll need something to do in the meantime. Their spawn points are usually pretty easy to find if you’re going past by the giant clumps of waiting players. If all that waiting doesn’t sound like your thing, though there are enough commendations available from the dailies and main quest without any rares killed. They spawn in a specific order that is the same every time, so if you’re looking for the drops from a particular boss, like Bronjahm’s 34-slot bag, you’ll need to wait for the cycle to entirely repeat for another chance. With 20 bosses on offer and 20 minutes between spawns, it takes 6 hours and 40 minutes for the repeat. Depending on your particular scheduling, this likely means you’ll only get one to two attempts on a given rare a day; counting on drops from them to cover gear slots is therefore inadvisable. 
The final leg of Week 1 is then the Nathanos Blightcaller world quest in Eastern Plaguelands. This is a fairly standard world boss for the most part, but even with the likely piles of players that you may find there, it can still be fairly punishing. While it’s unlikely for a group to wipe, depending on the population of your realm experiencing heavy lag isn’t out of the question, and Nathanos places high damage ground AoEs. Unfortunate lag spikes can leave you standing in an AoE and dead before you have control back; this sort of thing often clears itself up over time with longstanding content. With Nathanos’ limited nature as part of Death Rising, it seems possible that he’ll be fairly laggy for his two-week lifespan. If you don’t have lag getting in the way, don’t stand in the green puddles and you should be fine. He drops a guaranteed ilvl 115 weapon. This is pretty excellent for classes that only use one weapon and only have that category on their loot table like Arms Warriors or Blood Death Knights. Classes that have access to an offhand or shield get things a bit worse as they have to hope to not roll the same hand’s equipment each week. This could also prove troublesome for Frost Death Knights and Fury Warriors if Nathanos already uses their Shadowlands loot specs containing both one and two-handed weapons. Other dual-wielding classes should be safe, as their weapon drops are not locked to a specific hand and are always interchangeable, unlike Frost which has no use for a single one-hander if it happens to get a one-handed weapon and a two-handed weapon.