If you’re engaging with endgame content, the Great Vault is slated to be a core part of your progression. The problem is that it’s a lot harder to get completely to grips with it compared to the Mythic+ weekly chest of expansions past. It’s the follow-up to those gearing systems, but it has a lot more to unpack than just finishing the highest key you can each week. It’s undeniably more flexible than before and therefore more likely to provide useful loot, but you’ll need to understand how to maximize it or it ends up more or less the same.

The most important thing to remember is the Great Vault rewards you for doing more content. It still places a preference on high performance, but it also scales with how much you play. You can still do one M+ every week and get a piece like before, but it’s prone to all of the same issues. If you instead complete ten M+ runs you’ll get a selection from three options which is vastly more likely to give you a usable upgrade. Gone are the days of getting the same pair of pants three weeks running.

The Great Vault Basics

So, how does the Great Vault work? On a basic level, it’s simply a guaranteed loot drop from your preferred content once a week. You’ll find it near the bank in Oribos, and it functions as bad luck protection. Even if you run your usual number of dungeons for the week and get nothing from the runs themselves, you’ll still get to open the vault for a guaranteed quality drop.

In the past, this was exclusively a feature of Mythic+ that rewarded higher ilvl pieces than the end of dungeon chest to counterbalance the infinite “spammable” nature of M+. This is still true for specifically M+, your Great Vault rewards will have a significant lead over your actual end-of dungeon drops in ilvl to keep M+ from completely outstripping every other source of gear. In practice, this means high-end M+ is going to be slower than farming a raid, but more-or-less equal to progressing that raid in gear acquisition.

Between now and then, PvP gained a separate chest in the style of the Mythic+ weekly. For players who engaged with both PvP and M+, this makes the Great Vault worse. You still only get one pick no matter the number of activities you engage with. Doing more increases your selection, but not the number of selections you get to make. With the addition of raid providing weekly drops, this means that you’ve significantly increased your choices if you’re a multi-content player, but you’ve actually lost one drop.

The math works out to say this is still probably better because you’re vastly less likely to get stuck getting the same few slots by random chance. It does have a much lower ceiling for how quickly you gear if you’re very lucky.

Maximizing Your Vault

The core tenet that doing more things gets you more options to select from gives you the basic gist. As an upside, these drops are duplicate protected down to the equipment slot. You won’t just be unable to get the same item offered twice, you won’t see multiple leg slots or multiple necks. This sounds rough for targeting specific drops in a slot, but consider that before the same was still true, since you only got one drop, rolling the wrong trinket still locked you out from the right one. It’s not ideal for targeting but it is vastly better than before.

However, the ilvl of those drops might not be what you expect. To maximize your vault, you need to understand exactly how the drops work. Unlike before, where your best performance always dedicated the rewards, the new vault looks at the worst performance among your top runs.

This is a little confusing on first blush, and for M+, the first slot still works out to checking your best run. First, check the number you need to run for an additional choice. For Mythic plus, this is four runs, followed by 10. Imagine your dungeon completions in order from best to worst and cut off the list after these numbers. Say for the four dungeons you completed a +8, two +6’s, and a +4 as your bests. The Complete 1 milestone would give you +8 loot, as it only looks at your best run, however, the Complete 4 milestone would only give +4 despite that you completed a +8, because it restricts to your 4 best, but chooses the lowest among the top 4.

For raid, you have to grapple with this immediately because the first milestone requires 3 boss kills. If you finish 2 bosses in your guild’s heroic progression for the week and get your last kill in a normal public group or LFR, your drop will be the lower ilvls. This incentivizes a very different play pattern from before. In the past, it was ideal to do one single piece of content at your absolute limit before doing easier content that could reward small upgrades.

With weekly rewards now giving you a greater likelihood to get a proper upgrade with more content done, but those rewards scaling with the lowest of your top x performances you are actually encouraged to do as many as 10 dungeons or a Nathria full clear at your highest difficulty. As a run-on advantage for players, this means that there are going to be more players at any given time working on that sort of content because of greater loot incentive which means an easier time forming or finding groups yourself.

PvP is the exception to this new rule. Your PvP options have their ilvl scaled based on your highest rating win that week. Score a win in the 2.4k bracket, and earn the requisite honor and your drops will be from that bracket. If you’re the type for PvP, this makes it a great source of gear options.