Opening the Great Vault is supposed to be one of World of Warcraft's better Tuesday rituals.
You do your content. Blizzard presents several shiny pieces of equipment. You stare at them for eleven minutes while Raidbots quietly judges your life choices.
Midnight Season 2 may introduce a different strategy.
Take none of them.
Once Nebulous Voidcores become available as a Great Vault option, some players are planning to select the Bonus Roll currency almost every week instead of taking an actual piece of gear.
And annoyingly, the maths makes quite a bit of sense.
Why Would You Skip an Actual Great Vault Upgrade?
The problem — or opportunity, depending on how much you enjoy spreadsheets — comes from how Season 2 Bonus Rolls work.
A Nebulous Voidcore taken from the Great Vault can be saved for later.
Its eventual item level is not determined by the content you completed to unlock the Vault option.
That means a player could unlock the required Vault panes through relatively easy content, bank the Voidcore, and later spend it after completing significantly harder content.
The reward then follows the Great Vault-equivalent item level of the activity where the Bonus Roll is actually used.
So instead of taking a decent item today, you can potentially save the currency and turn it into a much stronger targeted item tomorrow.
WoW has somehow transformed delayed gratification into a gearing strategy.
Parents everywhere are delighted.
The Knockout System Makes It Even Stranger
There is another reason Bonus Rolls may be unusually valuable.
They use a knockout system.
Once you receive an eligible item through a Bonus Roll, that item is removed from future Bonus Roll possibilities for that activity.
But items obtained through other sources — including the Great Vault — do not currently remove themselves from that Bonus Roll pool.
Imagine your Great Vault offers the tier gloves you want.
You take them.
Later, you Bonus Roll the relevant raid boss.
Those same gloves can still appear.
Congratulations.
You have successfully used two major weekly reward systems to obtain the same trousers-with-hands slot twice.
This creates a weird incentive to take the Voidcore first and let the Bonus Roll system gradually eliminate unwanted possibilities.
Season 2 Makes Bonus Rolls Much More Powerful
Blizzard has already made several changes that increase their value.
Raid Bonus Rolls now cost only
one Nebulous Voidcore instead of two, something we recently covered when Blizzard finalized the Season 2 gearing rules.
Bonus-rolled raid gear also follows the equivalent Great Vault reward level.
That matters because Heroic raid Vault rewards now jump into the Myth track, while Mythic raid Vault rewards can reach Myth 6/6.
So a player who clears Heroic one week could potentially decline a Myth 1/6 Vault item, save the Voidcore and later spend it after killing a Mythic boss for a much stronger Myth 6/6 reward.
That is not automatically the correct decision.
But for a player expecting to progress into harder content shortly afterward, it can be extraordinarily efficient.
You Should Not Literally Ignore Every Great Vault Item
There are obvious exceptions.
If the Vault gives you your final best-in-slot trinket, take the trinket.
If it offers a gigantic weapon upgrade that helps your guild kill the boss you're currently stuck on, taking immediate power may be far more valuable than theoretically optimal power three weeks later.
And players who don't intend to progress into higher difficulties have much less reason to hoard Voidcores.
This is not “never choose gear again.”
It is “the threshold for choosing gear just became much higher.”
The First Season 2 Vault Is Different
There is also one important timing detail.
Despite earlier plans to make Voidcores available immediately, Blizzard later clarified that
Bonus Rolls will not be offered in the first Season 2 Great Vault.
The first Season 2 rewards arrive on August 18.
The Voidcore option begins with the following Vault on
August 25, provided the player has unlocked at least three reward panes.
So Blizzard has at least spared us one week of deciding whether the exciting new sword is mathematically worse than a small purple currency icon.
After that?
Open spreadsheet.
The Great Vault Could Become a Currency Dispenser
This is the slightly absurd consequence.
Blizzard created Nebulous Voidcores partly to make bad Great Vault weeks feel less punishing. If none of the equipment is useful, you can take something that helps target the item you actually want.
That is a good idea.
But once the fallback reward becomes more strategically valuable than many of the actual prizes, the relationship gets strange.
The Great Vault stops being:
“Which piece of gear should I take?”
And starts becoming:
“Is any of this gear good enough to convince me not to take another Bonus Roll?”
For many serious players, the answer may frequently be no.
Blizzard wanted to make disappointing Great Vaults less painful.
It may accidentally have invented the ultimate Great Vault strategy:
Be disappointed on purpose.
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