You hit max level on a new alt, the raid logs Friday night, and your item level looks like a parody. The good news in The War Within is that the gap between "just dinged 80" and "Heroic-raid-ready" is the smallest it has been in years. Because Warbands now share crests, gold, catalyst charges, and Sparks across your whole roster, a focused Friday-to-Sunday push can realistically take a fresh alt from roughly item level 590 to a comfortable 630-plus. Here is the route that wastes the least time.

Friday night: build the cheap, fast item level base

Before chasing any boss loot, get the floor up. The fastest blanket upgrade is crafted gear. A crafted chest plus two crafted rings, embedded with a Spark of Omens, instantly fix your worst slots. You get a fresh Spark fragment per Warband each week (two fragments make one Spark), so bank them on your main and spend them on the alt. Everything else you simply buy off the auction house or from a guildmate's crafter using the order system.

Then run Delves at Tier 8. Solo or in a small group with Brann leveled up, a Bountiful Delve rewards gear in the 610-616 range plus Gilded Crests, and you spend a Restored Coffer Key to open the bountiful chest. Knock out four or five Bountiful Delves Friday evening and you have replaced most greens and crafted blues with a real 606-616 baseline, while quietly stockpiling the crests you will need on Saturday.

Saturday: crests, the Great Vault, and Heroic dungeons

Saturday is about crest farming and setting up next week's Great Vault. The crest currencies are the entire economy of gearing right now:

  • Weathered, Carved, Runed, and Gilded Crests upgrade gear up the Veteran, Champion, Hero, and Myth tracks respectively.
  • Gilded Crests are the bottleneck for pushing Hero-track gear into the high 630s, so prioritize content that drops them: Tier 8+ Delves, +7 and higher Mythic dungeons, and Heroic raid bosses.
  • You can convert a stack of the lower-tier crest into the next one up at a fixed ratio, so don't vendor your Runed surplus.

Spend Saturday morning spamming Heroic dungeons for a quick jump to roughly 619 loot, then graduate to Mythic+. Clearing eight Mythic dungeons over the week fills all three Great Vault dungeon slots, and a +7 timed key sets your highest vault reward around the Hero track. The Vault you open next Tuesday is genuinely the single biggest item-level lever you have, so the goal this weekend is to seed it: eight M+ runs, plus a couple of raid bosses, plus Delve completions, light up every Vault row.

Saturday night: the Valorstones and crest upgrade pass

Now actually spend your currency. At the upgrade NPC, push your strongest pieces up their tracks using crests plus Valorstones (the soft currency you accumulate passively from almost everything). A smart order: upgrade trinkets and your weapon first, since weapon item level drives a disproportionate share of your DPS. Don't dump Gilded Crests into a slot you expect to replace from the Vault on Tuesday; bridge those with Runed instead and save the Gilded for permanent pieces.

This is also the moment to use the catalyst. The Tier Set creation NPC in Dornogal converts a non-set piece into your class set token, and charges accrue weekly across your Warband. Two charges turn two pieces into a 2-set bonus, which for many specs is a larger throughput gain than 20 item levels of raw stats. If you have banked charges on other characters, you may be able to assemble a 4-set on the alt the same weekend.

Sunday: tier set, enchants, and the raid checklist

Sunday is polish. Run down a concrete checklist before you queue for the raid:

  • Enchant every enchantable slot — rings, cloak, chest, legs, boots, and weapon. Missing enchants are the most common reason a 630 alt parses like a 615.
  • Gem your sockets, and add sockets via the profession-crafted gem setting where you can.
  • Embellishments: two embellished crafted pieces (and only two — the cap is strict) for a meaningful passive boost.
  • Consumables: flask, augment rune, food, and a weapon oil/stone. On an alt these are cheap relative to the performance they buy.

By Sunday night a methodical player lands around 630-636 with a partial tier set, fully enchanted and gemmed — which is squarely Heroic-raid-ready and fine for entry-level Mythic.

When to just play it out, and when a carry makes sense

Be honest with yourself about the time math. The crafted base, Delves, Heroic dungeons, and the enchant/gem pass are genuinely fast and satisfying solo — there is no reason to outsource them, and grinding your own crests is part of how you learn the alt. Play that part out.

The slow, frustrating bottleneck is almost always Mythic+ at the key levels that drop Gilded Crests. Pugging a fresh alt into +7s with low item level means long queue-and-decline cycles and bricked keys from groups that disband. If your weekend window is tight and you specifically need the high-key Vault slot and Gilded Crest income, a Mythic+ carry or a Heroic raid clear is the one place where paying for a clean, timed run is a reasonable time-for-money trade — you walk away with the crests, the Vault progress, and the loot without burning the whole Saturday in the group finder. If you have the hours, skip it and run your own keys. If you don't, that is the slot worth buying. The rest of this list, do yourself.