Unlike Shadowlands, with all the changes to PVP scaling and how accessible PVP gear is now, you won't be able to just stop people by quickly out-gearing them in Dragonflight, so just being decked out in the best gear might make you look and feel fancy but it still won't be enough. So here we would like to break down the PvP gearing system, as well as how to get the BiS PvP Gear in WoW Dragonflight.

WoW Dragonflight WoD Gearing System

If you have read anything about PVP in Dragonflight, you will have heard about this - WOD-style gearing is back. For the uninitiated, let's quickly blaze through what we mean by WoD-style gearing. Warlords of Draenor introduced a dynamic item level to PVP gear, the concept is the same as in Shadowlands, each item had its real item level and then a second item level that would activate whenever the player entered PVP. 

What made the system impactful was the actual value that the gear scaled to - PVP gear and WOD would scale to be above that of the very best PVE gear, this made it almost impossible for PVE gear to make an impact in the competitive PVP meta. Despite being a popular solution, WoD style gearing was ditched after a single expansion every expansion since has involved another major overhaul to PVP gear. Each season of Shadowlands had a massive power gap between the top and bottom end of the gear curve, this gap created a massive imbalance and gearing was gated behind a grueling grind. This system felt like something from Dante's Inferno but at least it was on theme for Shadowlands. 

WoW Dragonflight PvP Hornor & Conquest Gearing

On its face, Dragonflight's PVP gear system is identical to the final season of  Shadowlands, there are two tiers of currency honor comes primarily from non-raid PvP such as Battlegrounds and Conquest is mainly earned from rated PVP such as Arena.

Honor Gear

• From unrelated activities

• Used to buy lower-level gear

• Has a 15k cap, but no limit on how much you can earn

Conquest Gear

• From rated activities

• Used to buy the very best PvP gear

• Limited in how much you can earn

Conquest is used to buy epic items that have an upgrade track that is limited by your highest rating, but the crucial distinction is that the scaling behaves like it did in WoD, the number is not simply 13 item levels above the base level but a fixed value a big one. When you buy an item, it's PVP eye level is already added to max, the upgrade path is only relevant in PVE content. For season 1, all Conquest gear scales to item level 424 this is on par with the highest level of PVE loot, so you buy any Conquest piece and that item is immediately the strongest item you can obtain for the purposes of PVP. This is an enormous quality of life and game balance Improvement for the game, this is what we wanted to see from Dragonflight and what we expected to see when Holika declared that WoD style gear would make a return.  The item level span of PVP gear has also been compressed quite a bit, at rank 1 Aspirants item would scale to 265 item level in season 4 of Shadowlands, and Gladiator gear would go as high as 311, which is almost 50 item level and averages out to around 40% more Budget on the Gladiator gear, and that is excluding borrowed Power Systems. 

In Dragonflight, the difference between Honor and Conquest Gear with that same math is a mere 9%, all of this is to say that PVP autofill is dramatically more balanced and more approachable. As a result, you were allowed to skip PVE content that doesn't interest you, the honor gear scales above the majority of PVE gear the conquest gear scales above is essentially all of it. It should be noted though that Blizzard really has given us WoD-style gearing in PVE, the base item level of these items is garbage, if you intend to ever leave the city for any reason you will still want to upgrade your gear even at the elite level the PVE item level is unremarkable, if you're the kind of player who likes to jump between PVE and PVP, you'll want two completely separate sets of gear.

How to get BiS PvP Gear in WoW Dragonflight?

So now that we know how the system works and have painted a broad picture, let's get into the nitty-gritty:

1 - Crimson Combatant (Crafted Gear)

Dragonflight professions have seen a massive overhaul and are a lot more complex than previous versions. Normally this would be accompanied by 200 haste buff or something to make players look at the expensive menus but nothing like that exists. There are some nebulous bonuses that even the Raiders don't know what to make of, but everything we have seen is not usable at all in PvP. Professions are able to craft Green Quality PVP gear which behaves in the same way as the other PVP gear we've discussed. At 398 item level, it's actually very respectable, it is on par with the items that drop from the end of a level 15 keystone.

2 - Item Enhancements

In terms of enchants, Dragonflight has some old favorites with a new twist. Spell thread and armor kits are back in a slightly different form, there is an emphasis on tertiary stats on the enchants and dragon flight for bracers you have the option of either 150 speed avoidance or leech. There's typically confusion around whether these effects apply in Arena. As you can see from our beta testing, these enchant currently give their full benefit rated PVP. Beyond that, the usual suspects are all here, secondary enchants for rings and all stats enchant for your chest, a lot of weapons and chance that you'll probably ignore in favor of the raw stat proc, everything you've come to expect. 

An interesting new enhancement is the tiered Medallion setting this is similar to the Eternal belt buckle from Wrath of the Lich King, it can add a certain number of sockets to your neckpiece, the number of sockets is dependent on the quality of the setting itself, so three gold diamonds gives you three sockets. But what do you put in those three sockets? Well, gems obviously. Dragonflight introduces a bunch of new gems including the return of mixed gems, different combinations of secondary status are available with this method and these mixed gems have a total sum of 17 more stats than their equivalent pure cut. This is super interesting between this incentive to mix gems and the fact that we will be soft capped on versatility very quickly in Dragonflight we would not be surprised if players experiment with these mixed gems and explore a world Beyond mindlessly slamming versatility.

3 - Epic Crafted Gear

The crafting order system is a whole separate system similar to the Auction House, it is like Fiverr or upwork for crafting and WoW players like URI acquire the materials and can then request to have certain items crafted. There are reasons why Blizzard did this, but you don't need to care. Anyway in order to make you at least look at crafting orders, Blizzard is dangled a best in slot item in front of you. Each armor type has an item that offers an additional 5% reduction to the duration of CCFX. The profession system is very complex but almost all of the moving parts don't apply to us thanks to PVP scaling. You simply acquire these items make an order and offer a reasonable commission to incentivize a crafter and they will craft you Abyss item. But you're rightfully skeptical there's going to be a catch and it's probably in the match, so let's go through them.

Spark of Ingenuity - this thing is a bit odd, Blizzard wants them to be rare but not oppressive. You're guaranteed to get your first Spark of Ingenuity from unlocking the engine of innovation. For now this means that this spark is essentially free for performing basic housekeeping that you would do anyway.

Primal chaos is rewarded from any major activity including contenders strong boxes, so when you win an arena match and get one of these boxes there's a chance that a primal chaos will be in it. There are decent odds that by the time you're watching this you already have enough to make your item.

The final materials are just standard crafting material, in this case or these have a quality system to them which can look daunting but since the PVP item level is fixed at 424, we don't care about the quality of the item, so we can buy the cheap nasty ore that no one else wants. 

So collect your free Spark of Ingenuity passively, farm up Primal chaos by playing World of Warcraft Dragonflight, visit the auction house to buy the mats that are on clearance, and go to the crafting order guide pick the item and pay a commission to another player to put everything together. And just like that, your boots or cloth belt are sorted for the whole season. Each armor type has access to two of these infurious PVP pieces, the first is the 5 CC reduction that we've been focusing on, on the second is a proc that is unique to each armor type. These are a solid way to acquire another 424 piece but the extra effects are nowhere near as strong as the 5 CC reduction.

Crafting these will require a second spark which will be given to you for free by the engine of innovation on the 12th of December. Jewel Crafters can also craft a similar item through crafting orders, the primalist gems which are improved versions of the standard gems with a bunch of primary stat on them. The difference between the best and worst version of this gem is 40 but since we're talking about a difference of 22 intellect on a character that will have close to 10,000 in season one, you have our permission to go cheap on this thing if gold is tight.

4 - Dreakbreaker World PvP

 World content is a key theme of Dragonflight as part of this focus on World content a whole extra system has been introduced to WoD mode. In recent years, Blizzard has tried numerous times to encourage World PVP but nothing quite like this. The World PvP gear on offer is a whole separate set of PVP gear and best in slot pieces can absolutely be found in this list. Like the normal PVP gear, we just discussed, this Drakebreaker set has two tiers - there are basic blue pieces and these can be upgraded into epic pieces, these tiers are both three item level below the standard PVP gear, so in PvP the blue quality Drakebreaker gear is 408 item level and the Epic is 421 item level, only three down from the conquest gear what makes them powerful is their potential for Unique stack combinations. Using an Unholy DK as an example, if you wanted to stack mastery, the conquest vendor does not offer Master reverse plate shoulders only haste or crit, by contrast the Drakebreaker is more than happy to sell you an epic pair of Master reverse shoulders. Between tier sets and the secondary stats offered by the Drakebreaker gear, there are a lot of possible gear setups that a spec could run. For certain specs this epic Drakebreaker gear will certainly be appearing on best in slot list. 

These items are bought off of a vendor and require two currencies - bloody tokens and trophies of strike. Bloody tokens are rewards for completing PVP oriented World quests that are available only in war mode this will provide you with the ability to purchase the blue 408 gear. This gear can then be further enhanced into epic quality through trophies of strife. 

5 - The Great Vault

Shadowlands veteran will be familiar with the Great Vault. The vault is sticking around but due to the changes, we've discussed its impact will be reduced quite a bit. For the uninitiated, the grade vault is a weekly reward that is offered to players based on the group activities, they participated in the week prior. The player gets to choose a single item where the number of choices and the power of the item is dictated by the difficulty and quantity of the content. For PVP, you simply have to earn honor from rated PVP to unlock up to three choices. With the WoD style gearing, your rating does not impact the Gear's value in PvP so this is a choice of one of up to three Conquest items each week. In the past, filling the Vault could be a bit of a pain, but with solo Shuffle it's much less of a grind, this is the one gearing element of Dragonflight that is on a ticking clock, if nothing else the one goal you want to achieve each week is to earn at least some slots in your Vault.

6 - The Engine Of Innovation and Tier Sets

If you played Shadowlands at all in 2022, you will be familiar with the Creation Catalyst it was a system that allowed you to take a piece of gear and transform it into an item from a different set and viable pieces were turned into tier set pieces. The return of tier sets was a huge feature in 9.2, these bonuses were highly influential and essentially mandatory. This aggravated a lot of existing problems we've already discussed, the potency of the Great Vault, the awful grind to even feel like you could begin to PVP. The Creation Catalyst and tier sets are sticking around in Dragonflight, this is rightfully a reason to be nervous. 

In 9.2, the tier sets deliberately impacted the kinds of talents and legendaries that players used, the designers used them to stir up the sediment on an otherwise settled meta, this meant that it encouraged if not demanded that you take certain talents. But in WoW Dragonflight, the core promise of the new talent system is to offer you freedom of personal expression to let you make a build that is self-contained and is yours. Blizzard would be undermining that idea if they  put their thumb on the scales with a highly potent tier set. So the tier sets in Season 1 of Dragonflight are much less impactful. If we look at something like the Holy Paladin or Elemental Shaman bonuses, these are useful but they aren't game changing. The balance Druid 4-Piece bonus is actually really powerful and Moonkins in PVE are relying on it to fix the awkwardness that Dragonflight introduced to the Moon can play style. Survival's tier set bonus is enormous value in the context of PVP, almost all their damage in their burst window comes from mongoose bite so this bonus is insane. However the Dragonflight sets have quite varying levels of versatility, some are high others are very low. The engine of innovation is unlocked as part of a quest line that took us about seven minutes to unlock, the questline requires completion of the Dragonflight campaign. 

7 - Bringing It All Together

Bringing all this together here is our vision for what Dragonflight PvP gearing will look like.

You arrive on the Dragon Isle and get to max level, this will take between 4 to 8 hours depending on how powerful you are. If you want to have an easy time, you're going to hit up the auction house and buy a set of 398 crafted PVP gear. The most valuable honor gear to acquire early is a pair of aspirant trinkets to access the gladiator's distinction set bonus. 

Pick up your weekly World DVP quest in between games you want to work through the relevant World quests. When it comes to spending the trophies of strife, there are two approaches either consider what is best for the short term or what is best for the long term - in the short term a high-impact item like a weapon is a wise use your trophies, but if you want to think long term you will want to think about what item will stick around for the entire season. Think back to the Unholy DK example we gave before, beyond that you will want to prioritize a blue-quality PVP weapon that has no crafted equivalent. 

By this stage, you should have a full set of crafted PVP Gear supplemented with two honor Trinkets and either an honor weapon or Drakebreaker weapon, this should give you a baseline of approximately 401 item levels. With season 1 of Dragonflight underway, you will want to make sure you are filling out your great Vault slots every week.

No matter your gear an item from the great vault is the one essential thing you need to do each week, go into solo Shuffle and get beaten up you will be rewarded with this loot. 

Doing all of this will build up your supply of Primal chaos and crafting materials until you're able to place a crafting order for your first and Furious PVP piece.

After that it's a matter of getting lucky with your Vault, spending your Conquest points wisely and getting your stuff Gem and Enchanted.