How gear works: the Great Vault

Updated 11/20 with the Blizzard dev interview information

In Shadowlands, loot will be rewarded less often, but we will get more control over the items. The main vehicle for these changes is the Great Vault (the new weekly cache).

Bonus rolls are gone
You no longer get a weekly cache reward for both Mythic Dungeons and PvP activities. Those are combined into the Great Vault.
Completing group activities (raiding, M+, PvP) puts items into The Great Vault (from which you can choose 1 item from up to 9 options)
Honor (not Conquest Points) will earn Great Vault rewards (news as of 11/20/20, Blizzard blue post)
Weapon tokens should be on the Great Vault loot table (Ion Hazzikostas interview)
End bosses and higher tier content loot won’t show up in the Great Vault until you’ve killed them at least once (Ion Hazzikostas interview)

Blizzard posted the reasoning behind these changes:

While outdoor world gameplay and professions offer a range of epic gear, the very strongest loot in WoW comes from the three organized multiplayer endgame progression paths: Rated PvP, Mythic Keystone dungeons, and raiding. The design intent is for all three paths to provide parallel progression over the course of a tier, while providing players who engage in multiple paths at a comparable level a faster advancement experience.
Kaivax, World of Warcraft Community Manager, Sept 22, 2020

Table of contents

How the Great Vault works
Raiding
Mythic dungeons
PvP
Anima rewards
How to pick the best item from your weekly cache

How the Great Vault works in Shadowlands

Raiding, Mythic+, and PvP each add up to 3 items to your weekly cache, for a total of 9 item choices. You only get to choose 1 item a week.

Weekly cache rewards for Shadowlands — The screenshot shows Conquest Points for PvP, but as of 11/20 it has been changed to Honor

The Great Vault: Raids

Item level rules

To fill up the three raid slots in the weekly cache you need to kill all 10 raid bosses in Castle Nathria. The item level rewards in your cache are based on the highest level raid completed for each goal. The three goals are the defeat 3 / 7 / 10 raid bosses.

Let’s say you killed the following bosses:

Normal: cleared the raid and killed all 10 bosses
Heroic: killed 4 bosses

You would have one reward based on Heroic item levels, because you met the goal to kill 3 raid bosses by killing 4 bosses on Heroic. You would then get two more item choices at Normal iLevels because you met the 7 and 10 goals on Normal.

But there’s one interesting piece we don’t have answered yet. The last 2 bosses of Castle Nathria drop gear that is 7 item levels higher than the first 8 bosses. We don’t know if you get that higher item level when meeting the goal of killing all 10 bosses, but we are pretty sure you do.

Boss-specific rules

There are two boss-specific rules that affect the loot in your weekly cache.

When you meet the first or second goal (killing 3 or 7 bosses), the Great Vault loot table can pull any relevant item from the first 8 bosses. Even if you kill just 3 bosses, you can get an item from any of the first 8 bosses. This is meant to prevent players from only killing specific bosses to try and target a specific piece of loot. (And we all know how that would turn into a min/max nightmare if it was allowed).

The second rule exists because the last 2 bosses of Castle Nathria drop higher level gear. The loot from those bosses wont show up in your Great Vault until you’ve killed them at least once. The purpose here is to prevent players from getting great loot without killing those harder end bosses. This applies to other higher-tier content too.

Weapon tokens

Castle Nathria bosses drop weapon tokens and those tokens should very, very likely be able to show up in your weekly Great Vault cache. This came from a Nov 19 interview with Ion Hazzikostas.

Mythic Dungeons

Mythic dungeons add reward choices to your cache for completing 1, 4, and 10 dungeons in a week. The item levels are based off your x best key (insert the goal for x).

For example, if your best key was a +10, your first reward would be based on the iLevel for a +10. If your 4th best key was a +8, then your second cache item (rewarded for completing 4 dungeons) would be based on the +8.

The Mythic Keystone item levels for The Great Vault are as follows:

+2: iLevel 200
+3: iLevel 203
+4: iLevel 207
+5: iLevel 210
+6: iLevel 210
+7: iLevel 213
+8: iLevel 216
+9: iLevel 216
+10: iLevel 220
+11: iLevel 220
+12: iLevel 223
+13: iLevel 223
+14: iLevel 226
+15: iLevel 226

Mythic 0 does not generate Great Vault rewards.

PvP

Competing in PvP also earns rewards. Honor earns rewards (during the Beta it was Conquest Points, but that has been changed). Read the Blue Post on this topic.

For item levels, Blizzard said the following, “Currently in the Shadowlands Beta / first tier of the expansion, PvP loot for top ratings caps out at item level 226.”

The Great Vault: Anima instead of gear

If you don’t like any of your gear options for the weekly Great Vault, you can choose to get Anima instead of a worthless item. This is a pretty good alternative because Anima is a currency for your Covenant. It can be used to buy pets, mounts, gear, and do covenant related activities.

Ranked vault rewards

Mr. Robot’s Upgrade Finder now has an option to rank your Great Vault rewards each week. The items get imported from the addon and you get a ranked list in seconds.

For a full tutorial, see How to pick the item from your Great Vault.