WoW 12.1 Flat 20-Crest Gear Upgrade Cost Guide (Season 2)

WoW Midnight Patch 12.1 (Curse of Ula'tek) keeps gear upgrades at a flat 20 crests per rank, the same flat system Season 1 used. Six ranks per item, 120 crests for a full 6/6 upgrade, no scaling. A scaling-cost variant briefly returned on the 12.1 PTR (10/20/30/40/50 per rank = 150 crests per track), Blizzard called it a bug, and rolled it back within a week after community backlash. The fix is confirmed in the PTR development notes: "Fixed an issue where upgrading gear had scaling upgrade costs. Gear now has flat costs to upgrade each track like in Midnight Season 1."

The flat system matters more this season because Patch 12.1 buffs raid loot significantly: Heroic Great Vault now gives Myth 1/6, Mythic Vault gives Myth 6/6, and penultimate/final bosses plus Very Rare items drop at Myth 9/6. The Catalyst now preserves secondary stats and cantrip effects. Bonus Rolls stay at one coin per roll. Nebulous Voidcores arrive as a Great Vault option from week 1. This guide is the complete 12.1 gear upgrade reference: every crest cost, every track ilvl, weekly cap, alt discounts, raid Vault tiers, where crests come from, and how to actually spend yours.

12.1 Gear Upgrade At a Glance

Detail	Information
Patch	12.1 - Curse of Ula'tek (Season 2)
Cost per upgrade rank	Flat 20 crests (no scaling)
Full 6/6 upgrade cost	120 crests per item
Upgrade tracks	Adventurer, Veteran, Champion, Hero, Myth
Item level range	259 (Adventurer 1/6) - 337 (Myth 9/6)
Weekly crest cap	100 (up from 90 in The War Within)
Effective ranks per week	5 full ranks at cap
Alt discount	50% (up from 33% in TWW); 200 effective weekly crests
Bonus Roll cost	1 coin per roll (down from 2)
Crafted gear cost	80 crests to craft (4 ranks worth)
Free upgrades	Hero 1/6 - 5/6 free if you hold a higher-level Hero piece
Valorstones	Removed (replaced by crest + small gold fee)

What Happened on the PTR: Scaling Costs Briefly Returned

On the first week of the 12.1 PTR, Wowhead datamined a return of scaling crest costs: each upgrade rank costing progressively more, 10 crests for rank 1, then 20, 30, 40, and 50 for the final step. That is 150 crests per track instead of the flat 120. The Myth track was also extended with a Myth 9/6 level at item level 337, which appeared to be tuned around the new scaling costs.

The community reaction was immediate and loud. Combined with the simultaneously-announced raid loot buffs (Heroic Vault giving Myth 1/6, Mythic giving Myth 6/6, last two bosses giving Myth 9/6), scaling costs would have widened the gap between raiders and Mythic+ players significantly. A Mythic raid Vault dropping Myth 6/6 under flat costs is worth a fixed 100 crests in upgrade savings; under scaling costs, that same Vault drop would have been worth 150 crests in saved upgrades, a full week and a half of crest income.

One week into the PTR, Blizzard's development notes shipped a fix: "Fixed an issue where upgrading gear had scaling upgrade costs. Gear now has flat costs to upgrade each track like in Midnight Season 1." Whether it was a genuine relic from the Midnight beta build (where the same system was previously datamined and then dropped before going live) or a quiet test of the waters that got walked back, the result is the same: 20 crests per rank, 120 crests per item, no scaling. The Myth 9/6 ilvl 337 extension stays.

Crest Costs Per Track

Five upgrade tracks, five crest types, one cost. Track specificity is mandatory: Hero gear takes Hero Mistcrests, Champion gear takes Champion Mistcrests, and so on. Lower-track crests do not work on higher-track gear under any circumstance.

Track	Crest Type	ilvl Range	Cost per Rank	Full Upgrade (6/6)
Adventurer	Adventurer Mistcrest	259 - 276	20	120
Veteran	Veteran Mistcrest	276 - 289	20	120
Champion	Champion Mistcrest	289 - 302	20	120
Hero	Hero Mistcrest	302 - 315	20	120
Myth	Myth Mistcrest	315 - 337	20	120 (6/6); the Myth 7/6 to 9/6 levels require no further crest spend)

Valorstones are gone in 12.1. Upgrades now cost only crests plus a small gold fee, which is a major simplification compared to TWW's dual-currency system.

Full Item Level Breakdown by Rank

The complete progression from Adventurer 1/6 (ilvl 259) to Myth 9/6 (ilvl 337), with the tier overlap at the boundaries that lets you keep upgrading the same item across tracks.

Adventurer Track (ilvl 259-276)

Rank	Item Level	Crest Cost
Adventurer 1/6	259	-
Adventurer 2/6	263	20 Adventurer
Adventurer 3/6	266	20 Adventurer
Adventurer 4/6	269	20 Adventurer
Adventurer 5/6	272	20 Adventurer
Adventurer 6/6	276	20 Adventurer

Veteran Track (ilvl 276-289)

Rank	Item Level	Crest Cost
Veteran 1/6	276	-
Veteran 2/6	279	20 Veteran
Veteran 3/6	282	20 Veteran
Veteran 4/6	285	20 Veteran
Veteran 5/6	289	20 Veteran
Veteran 6/6	289	20 Veteran

Champion Track (ilvl 289-302)

Rank	Item Level	Crest Cost
Champion 1/6	289	-
Champion 2/6	292	20 Champion
Champion 3/6	295	20 Champion
Champion 4/6	298	20 Champion
Champion 5/6	302	20 Champion
Champion 6/6	302	20 Champion

Hero Track (ilvl 302-315)

Rank	Item Level	Crest Cost
Hero 1/6	302	-
Hero 2/6	305	20 Hero
Hero 3/6	308	20 Hero
Hero 4/6	311	20 Hero
Hero 5/6	315	20 Hero
Hero 6/6	315	20 Hero

Myth Track (ilvl 315-337)

Rank	Item Level	Crest Cost
Myth 1/6	315	-
Myth 2/6	318	20 Myth
Myth 3/6	321	20 Myth
Myth 4/6	324	20 Myth
Myth 5/6	328	20 Myth
Myth 6/6	331	20 Myth
Myth 7/6	334	No upgrade cost
Myth 8/6	334	No upgrade cost
Myth 9/6	337	No upgrade cost

The Myth 7/6 through 9/6 levels are reached through item-source drops (penultimate and final raid boss drops, Very Rare items, and post-week-8 Ascendant Venomstone upgrades for weapons, trinkets, and necklaces). They do not cost crests to obtain.

Weekly Crest Cap and Alt Math

The weekly cap is 100 crests, up from TWW's 90. At 20 crests per rank, that is exactly five upgrades per week per character, with nothing left over.

Time to Fully Gear a Character

Fully upgrading a single item (6/6) takes 120 crests, just over one week at the cap. Outfitting a full set of 16 slots (helm, shoulders, chest, gloves, legs, boots, cloak, bracers, belt, two rings, two trinkets, neck, weapon, off-hand) all from 1/6 to 6/6 costs 1,920 crests, or roughly 19 weeks at cap. In practice, gear comes in at higher ranks from raid/Mythic+ drops and Vault, so the real timeline is shorter.

The Alt Discount: 50%

Alts get a 50% crest discount, up from 33% in TWW. A rank that costs your main 20 crests costs your alt only 10. At the 50% discount, alts can complete 10 full upgrade ranks per week within the 100-crest cap. That is the best alt-gearing efficiency the game has ever offered.

Practical implication: in the first four weeks of the season, gear your alts as aggressively as possible. Catch-up systems later in the season are weaker than they used to be (this is a recurring 12.1 pattern), so front-loading alt progression is now the dominant strategy.

Important Upgrade Rules

Track specificity is absolute. Hero Mistcrests cannot upgrade Champion gear. Champion Mistcrests cannot upgrade Hero gear. There is no workaround. Farming the wrong track is a week wasted.
Crafted gear costs 80 crests to craft. That is four upgrade ranks worth of currency just to make the item. It is not a typo. Plan accordingly: crafted pieces should be slot-priority decisions, not casual experiments.
Hero track 1/6 to 5/6 upgrades are free if you hold a higher-level piece. If you have a Hero 4/6 helm in your bags and later get a Hero 1/6 helm of the same type, the new piece upgrades for free up to 5/6 to match. Do not skip claiming Hero drops you do not immediately want; the free upgrade path bypasses the crest economy entirely.
Valorstones are gone. 12.1 upgrades require crests plus a flat gold fee. No more juggling two upgrade currencies.

Raid Loot Changes in 12.1

The flat crest system lands alongside the biggest raid-reward buff in recent memory. Heroic raiding is significantly more rewarding than it was, Mythic Vault drops complete pieces, and the penultimate and final bosses now drop the highest-tier loot in the game.

Great Vault Reward Tiers Season 2

Difficulty	Boss Drop Track	Vault Reward Track	Bonus Roll Result
LFR	Adventurer	Champion 1/8	Champion 1/8
Normal	Champion	Hero 1/6	Hero 1/6
Heroic	Hero	Myth 1/6	Myth 1/6
Mythic	Myth	Myth 6/6	Myth 6/6

The structural change: LFR through Heroic Vaults now reward gear one track higher than boss drops. A Heroic raid that previously dropped Hero gear now gives Myth 1/6 in the Vault, which is the largest single-difficulty buff Heroic raiding has had in many seasons.

Penultimate and Final Boss Drops: Myth 9/6

The two final bosses of the Venomous Abyss raid, plus all Very Rare items, drop at Myth 9/6 (ilvl 337) regardless of source. That is three full upgrade ranks above standard Myth 6/6 and the highest item level in the game in Season 2.

Bonus Rolls: One Coin, Available from Week 1

Bonus Rolls are sticking around with two important changes:

Cost reduced from 2 coins to 1 coin per roll.
Available as a direct Vault option from week 1 of Season 2. A new NPC starts providing the standard one Bonus Roll per week from week 8 onward.
Bonus Rolls drop at Vault item level, meaning rolling on a Heroic raid gets you Myth 1/6 loot. Rolling on Mythic gets you Myth 6/6.

This makes Heroic raid bonus rolls a viable path to Myth-track loot without ever needing to clear Mythic, which is the most player-friendly Vault implementation since coins originally launched in Mists of Pandaria.

Catalyst, Voidcores, and Venomstones

Catalyst Now Keeps Secondary Stats and Cantrips

The Catalyst system gets a meaningful upgrade in 12.1: tier items now retain the secondary stat spread of the source piece, plus any cantrip effects from the original. Previously, converting an item to tier meant losing your stat distribution and praying to RNG that the new tier piece rolled the right secondaries. That is fixed.

Practical example: a crafted chest piece with optimal secondaries (Haste/Crit for most DPS specs) that gets converted to a Venomous Abyss tier set chest now keeps the Haste/Crit spread. Class set armor inherits the secondary stats from the original converted item. Ula'tek's Venomcursed armor cantrip effects also carry through the conversion.

Nebulous Voidcores from Week 1

Nebulous Voidcores were a midseason addition in Season 1; in Season 2 they are available as a Great Vault reward option from the start of the season. Decimus (the Season 1 Voidcore vendor) has retired; Orin Straylight now runs Nebulous Voidcore distribution from the Catalyst in Silvermoon. After kicking off Orin's research at season start, players wait eight weeks before he provides one Nebulous Voidcore per week.

Voidcore costs are also reduced: raid items now cost only one Voidcore (down from two in Season 1). The trade-off compared to Season 1 is fewer Voidcores midseason, but immediate Vault access from week 1 lets players target chase items from the first week instead of waiting for the unlock timing.

Ascendant Venomstones (Later in Season 2)

The Season 1 Ascendant Voidcore system returns as Ascendant Venomstones, arriving later in Season 2. The system has three changes:

Necklaces are now upgradable in addition to weapons and trinkets, to a maximum ilvl equivalent to Myth 8.
Only fully-upgraded Hero, Myth, or maximum-quality crafted gear of the equivalent ilvl can be upgraded with Venomstones (same restriction as Season 1).
10 Venomstones per upgrade. Sources: every Heroic or Mythic raid boss, Mythic+ Keystone dungeons at +10 or higher, T11 Bountiful Delves, and Nightmare Prey Hunt Champion gear boxes.

Where to Farm Crests in 12.1

The crest sources have not changed materially from Season 1. The relative efficiency has, slightly, because of the raid loot buffs.

Mythic+ dungeons. Still the fastest crest-per-hour source for most players, and the easiest to scale up. Higher key levels reward higher-tier crests on completion.
Raids. More viable in 12.1 than in TWW because Vault rewards are now significantly stronger. Heroic raiding for Myth 1/6 Vault drops is a real alternative to pure M+ grinding.
Delves T4+. Adventurer Mistcrests for solo players. Higher tiers scale up.
Open-world blue air sparks. Supplemental crest source; not a primary farm.
Weekly quests and seasonal activities. Bonus crests on top of your main farming source; check your map at reset for the current week's activities.

If your gearing is bottlenecked by content access (no raid group, no consistent M+ team, no Delve key supply), NextTier offers Keystone Master pushes and Delves services that fast-track crest accumulation and Vault progression.

How to Spend Your Crests

The 100-crest weekly cap means crest decisions are slot decisions. You will not have enough crests to upgrade everything in week 1, so prioritize by what the sim says, not by what you happen to drop.

Spending Priority Order

Identify your highest-impact slots first. For most specs, that is weapon, trinkets, and tier pieces. Run a sim on your character with current gear and look at where each slot lands on the upgrade value-per-crest curve.
Upgrade Hero track before Myth track if crests are limited. The free 1/6 to 5/6 upgrades that exist on Hero only apply if you hold a higher-level piece, so getting Hero items to 6/6 first protects your Hero drops from being wasted later.
Save Myth Mistcrests for Myth track items only. Do not spend them on Hero gear. Myth crests are scarcer than Hero crests by content access alone, so wasting them on lower-track upgrades is a strict net loss.
Let the weekly Vault give you Myth pieces before spending crests on Hero gear. The Vault is your primary source of Myth-track drops for most players. Spending 120 crests on Hero gear that you replace with a Vault Myth drop two weeks later is the most common crest waste in Season 2.
Use the 50% alt discount aggressively in weeks 1 to 4. Catch-up systems are weaker than in previous seasons. Front-loading alt gearing is the dominant strategy.

Who Benefits Most from the Flat Crest System in 12.1

The flat 20-crest system favors specific player types differently than the scaling system would have. Three groups gain the most from how 12.1 shipped.

Mythic+ players. Crest income is steady from M+, and the flat system means no penalty for focusing crests on one item at a time. Combined with the Vault Myth 1/6 drops from Heroic raid, M+ players have a stable gearing path that does not require raid attendance.
Heroic raiders. The single biggest winners from the 12.1 changes. Heroic Vault Myth 1/6 drops, combined with flat upgrade costs, mean Heroic raiders can reach Myth-track gear without ever stepping into Mythic. Bonus Rolls on Heroic kills push this further.
Alt-focused accounts. The 50% alt discount is the best it has ever been. Players running 4 to 6 alts can effectively gear them in parallel at twice the speed of TWW.

The flat system is less favorable to two groups: Mythic-only raiders who would have benefited from the larger crest-savings gap that scaling costs created on Myth 6/6 Vault drops, and pure solo Delve players who get the same flat costs as everyone else but with significantly slower crest income.

WoW 12.1 Flat Crest Upgrade FAQ

What is the crest cost per upgrade rank in WoW Midnight Season 2?

Flat 20 crests per rank, every track, no scaling. Total for a full 6/6 upgrade is 120 crests per item.

Did Blizzard remove scaling crest costs from 12.1?

Yes. Scaling costs (10/20/30/40/50 per rank, 150 per track) appeared on the 12.1 PTR Week 1, were called a bug in the Week 2 development notes, and were rolled back to the Season 1 flat system. The exact patch-notes line: "Fixed an issue where upgrading gear had scaling upgrade costs. Gear now has flat costs to upgrade each track like in Midnight Season 1."

How many crests can I earn per week in Midnight Season 2?

100 crests per week per character, up from 90 in The War Within. That is exactly five full upgrades per week at the cap. Alts get the same cap but at a 50% discount, for an effective 200-crest equivalent.

Can I use lower-track crests to upgrade higher-track gear?

No. Track specificity is absolute. Hero gear needs Hero Mistcrests, Champion gear needs Champion Mistcrests, and so on. There is no workaround.

What is the alt discount in Season 2?

50%, up from 33% in The War Within. A rank that costs your main 20 crests costs your alt 10. With the 100 crest weekly cap, that means 10 full ranks per week per alt.

How much does crafted gear cost in 12.1?

80 crests to craft a piece (four upgrade ranks worth). Then standard upgrade costs apply if you want to push the item higher.

Are Hero track items free to upgrade in Season 2?

Hero track items upgrade for free from 1/6 to 5/6 if you already hold a higher-level Hero piece of the same type. Do not skip claiming Hero drops you don't immediately want; the free upgrade path bypasses the crest economy.

What item level is Myth 6/6 in Season 2?

Myth 6/6 is ilvl 331. Myth 9/6 (the highest tier, from penultimate and final raid bosses plus Very Rare items) is ilvl 337.

How do raid changes affect crest spending in 12.1?

Heroic raiding now drops Myth 1/6 in the Vault, which means Heroic raiders save 120 crests per Vault Myth-track item they receive. Mythic Vault drops 6/6, saving the full 120 crests on day one. This makes the raid path significantly more efficient than in Season 1.

How many Bonus Rolls per week in Season 2?

Bonus Rolls cost 1 coin per roll (down from 2) and are available as a direct Vault option from week 1. A new NPC starts providing the standard weekly Bonus Roll from week 8 of the season. Bonus Rolls drop at Vault item level, so Heroic rolls give Myth 1/6 and Mythic rolls give Myth 6/6.

What changed about the Catalyst in Season 2?

Tier items now retain the secondary stat spread of the source piece, plus any cantrip effects from the original. Class set armor inherits secondaries from the converted item. Ula'tek's Venomcursed armor cantrips also carry through.

What are Ascendant Venomstones?

The Season 2 successor to Ascendant Voidcores. They upgrade fully-upgraded Hero, Myth, or max-quality crafted gear of the equivalent ilvl to higher tiers. Necklaces are now upgradable (new in Season 2), in addition to weapons and trinkets. Each upgrade costs 10 Venomstones. Sources: every Heroic or Mythic raid boss, Mythic+ at +10 or higher, T11 Bountiful Delves, and Nightmare Prey Hunt Champion gear boxes. Venomstones arrive later in Season 2.

What is the best way to spend crests on the first week of Season 2?

Identify your highest-impact slots from a sim (typically weapon, trinkets, tier pieces). Upgrade Hero track items to 6/6 first if crests are limited, save Myth Mistcrests strictly for Myth-track gear, and let the Vault provide Myth-track drops before spending crests on Hero pieces you will eventually replace.

When does Patch 12.1 (Curse of Ula'tek) go live?

Blizzard has not announced a final live date as of late June 2026. The PTR is in Week 2 of testing, with weekly development notes still landing. Expect a launch window 4 to 8 weeks from PTR Week 1 based on standard Midnight patch cadence.