This is datamined information on the Midnight Alpha and is subject to change.
Upgrade System Changes in Midnight
The upgrade system was added in Dragonflight and hasn't been touched too much since then. We've had changes to crest and crafting costs, the added tracks of Turbo boost, crest drop amount, but not much else. For Midnight, we've datamined some large changes to crest upgrade costs which should shake up the game and lead to some very interesting decisions from players.
Here are our datamined findings:
The Champion track (and tracks below) have been reduced to 6 ranks (was 8).
Each track only requires their respective crest in order to upgrade, even past 4/6.
Crests costs to upgrade now scale from 10 Crests (for 2/6 upgrade) to 50 Crests for the final upgrade.
Reduced Champion Track
With the current system, the Hero track is functionally useless for players who are expecting to get Myth track. Players don't want to "waste crests" on Hero 5/6 and 6/6 since it costs Gilded crests, meaning that they'd leave their pieces at Hero 4/6. Hero 4/6 is identical to Champion 8/8 and has absolutely no difference in upgrade costs or stats.
With this change, Hero track has carved out a unique place in the gearing process as Champion gear has been nerfed.
Crest Changes
There are two big changes to Crests for the upgrade system in Midnight: each track only requires their respective crest, and crest costs now scale. This means that early upgrades on a track will be quicker and more efficient crest-wise than later upgrades. You can actually get to a higher item level if you don't do end-game Mythic+ or Raiding content on the Hero track, but at a first glance, seems to take longer with the Hero Crest costs going to 40 and 50 respectively. This also means that there is no use for Myth (formerly Gilded) Crests if you don't have a Myth piece.
This leads to an interesting overlap where a 6/6 of a lower tier and a 2/6 of a higher tier meet. If you're looking to upgrade to that item level, you could pay a massive 50 Crests of the lower tier, or pay a premium 10 Crests of a higher tier.
For example, let's say that you have a Hero 5/6 piece and a Myth 1/6 piece. You could choose to pay a massive 50 Hero Crests in order to upgrade the Hero piece to 6/6 or pay 10 Myth Crests in order to upgrade to Myth piece to 2/6 to get the same item level. This leads to quite the difficult decision. 50 Hero Crests are a lot of Crests and will likely set you behind 1 or more other upgrades in the short term, but you're not sacrificing any of the long-term Myth currency. You could instead use 10 Gilded Crests now, sacrificing some of your long-term power to use your Hero Crests on something else.
These changes seem to promote a "power now" vs "power later" decision that some players may appreciate and others may despise. The increasing cost of upgrades make things more complicated but can lead to more interesting decisions.
Unknowns
It's important to note that this is currently datamined and there are a couple of unknowns to the system currently.
We don't know what the crest economy is like. It's entirely possible that the amount of crests per week could increase, decrease or even be uncapped.
Does Crest Saving even still exist? Does getting a Myth 1/6 piece save you the crests on a Hero 5/6 piece?
How much does crafting cost?
Blizzard hasn't really said much on the feature other than in a blog about Mythic tier transmog and needing Hero 6/6 to get the next tier's transmog.
Right now, this datamining can start an interesting decision, but we can't really give great feedback on it until we get the full picture. Either way, I think it's great that Blizzard is iterating on the feature and we'll have to see what else is in store.
