Gearing a fresh alt for PvP feels brutal the first time you do it on a new character: you walk into a battleground at 480-something item level and get globalled by mains in fully upgraded gear. The good news is that the catch-up curve in modern WoW (The War Within, Season 2) is far kinder than it used to be. The path from a freshly-dinged 80 to a respectable PvP item level is mostly about knowing which currencies to farm, what order to upgrade in, and which track each piece sits on. Here is the actual route, not the vague "just do some BGs" advice.

The two currencies that matter: Honor and Conquest

PvP gear in The War Within comes from two vendors, and they sit on different upgrade tracks:

  • Honor gear starts at the Combatant track. It caps lower but you earn Honor extremely fast from random battlegrounds, Skirmishes, and the daily/weekly PvP quests. This is your floor — the gear you buy to stop getting one-shot.
  • Conquest gear starts on the Gladiator track and upgrades much higher. Conquest is gated: you earn it from rated play (Solo Shuffle, rated Arena, rated Battlegrounds) and a weekly catch-up cap that grows every reset, so even on a late alt you are never permanently behind.

The trick most people miss: in PvP combat your gear is scaled up to a flat PvP item level via the Versatility-boosting PvP trinket and the PvP ilvl bump, so the gap between a fresh Honor set and a maxed Conquest set is smaller inside instanced PvP than the raw ilvl numbers suggest. That is exactly why an alt can become competitive in a weekend rather than a month.

Step one: dump Honor into a full Combatant set immediately

Before you queue a single rated game, buy a complete Honor set. Do not cherry-pick. A full set, even at the base Combatant rank, gives you the PvP ilvl bump on every slot and — critically — your full set bonus and the largest stat budget for the least effort.

The fastest Honor faucets right now:

  • Random Battlegrounds and Epic BGs — the first win of the day is a big chunk, and Epic BGs (Ashran, Wintergrasp-style) pay out heavily for objectives even on a loss.
  • Solo Shuffle — yes, it is rated, but every round still dumps Honor, and you start banking Conquest at the same time. For an alt, Shuffle is the single most efficient queue because it pays both currencies at once.
  • The weekly PvP quest ("Sparring with the Enemy" style) which hands you a large lump of Conquest and Honor for a set number of wins.

Prioritize upgrading your weapon and trinkets first with Honor — weapon ilvl drives the biggest single chunk of your damage, and PvP trinkets give you the Versatility and a trinket effect you genuinely need to survive.

Step two: convert the Honor set into Conquest pieces in the right order

Once you are taking rated games, every Conquest piece you buy replaces an Honor piece on a higher track. Spend Conquest in this priority:

  • Weapon — always first. The ilvl jump here is felt in every single ability.
  • Trinkets and the off-hand/ranged slot — high stat budget per slot.
  • Tier/set pieces (head, shoulders, chest, hands, legs) — buy these to keep your class set bonus active. If you are mixing PvP and PvE tier, plan which slots come from which source so you never drop your 2-set or 4-set.
  • Remaining armor slots last, since they carry the least stat weight.

Then funnel your weekly upgrade currency (the crests/valorstone-equivalent) into pushing those Conquest pieces up the Gladiator track. The weekly Conquest cap catch-up means a returning or late alt can buy several pieces in week one rather than one per week.

The honest math: when to just play it out

If you enjoy battlegrounds and Solo Shuffle, gearing an alt is genuinely fun and you should just queue. A motivated player can have a full Honor set the same day and meaningful Conquest pieces within a few evenings. The grind is short and the games are the content. Buying your way past that would be paying to skip the part that is actually enjoyable.

Where the calculus changes is the part of alt PvP that is not fun: climbing rating on a class you do not yet know. Rated ladders are skill- and comp-gated, not currency-gated. If your goal is a specific rating milestone — pushing past the 1800 wall for the elite-tier appearance, or hitting Duelist/Gladiator for the mount and title — that is no longer a gearing problem. It is a coordination and execution problem, and on a barely-played alt you will eat a lot of losses (and rating decay on your MMR) learning it.

Where a rated carry actually fits

This is the one spot where buying time makes sense, and only this spot. A rated carry or coached arena/RBG carry is a time-for-money trade when:

  • You want the 1800 Elite weapon/armor appearance for the season but the seasonal clock is running out and your alt's MMR is stuck.
  • You are chasing a Gladiator mount or rank title that you simply cannot push solo because you lack a consistent 3s team or RBG group.
  • You have a main's worth of skill but zero time to schedule rated sessions, and the cosmetic reward is time-limited.

For everything below that — getting an alt geared to enter rated, farming Honor, filling out a Conquest set — a carry is a waste of money. The catch-up systems already do that work for you in days. Buy a rated carry to skip a rating ceiling, not to skip gearing. If you do go that route, treat it as buying the seasonal cosmetic you would otherwise miss, and make sure it is on a current-season, in-house run rather than account sharing you are not comfortable with.

The two-week alt PvP checklist

  • Day 1: Random BGs + Solo Shuffle until you can afford a full Honor set. Buy weapon and trinkets first.
  • Days 2-4: Keep queuing Shuffle for dual Honor/Conquest income. Replace Honor weapon, then trinkets, with Conquest versions.
  • Week 2: Complete the Conquest set, keep your class set bonus intact, and spend upgrade crests pushing key pieces up the Gladiator track. You are now rated-ready.
  • Only then, if a rating-locked seasonal cosmetic is on the line and the season is closing, consider a rated carry to clear that specific wall.

Gear your alt yourself — it is fast and it is the fun part. Pay only to skip the rating grind that gear cannot buy you, and only when a time-limited reward justifies it.