War resources

Writing yesterday's post I realised I had been vastly underestimating the value of the mission table and was led to the conclusion I should be running it more.

But how to feed it?

The table uses War Resources as fuel and, without really planning it, I realised that my main character never runs out. This is because there are several parts of his routine that are improved over the baseline new 120 experience.

So what do you need to do to get your alts WR-efficient?

The first thing is the war quests that lead to giving you Lilian Voss as a 5th follower. This means that a full set of missions is crewed by 5 followers + one troop instead of 4 followers and 2 troops. More she reduces mission duration and she's another place to put Follower Equipment once she's leveled up which will take quite some time. So sooner we get started the better.

Next is the mission table advancement Azerothian Diplomat. This gives 50 war resources per emissary turn-in which is basically 50/day. Running missions from the table costs 40-300 WR per day depending how active you are. So reducing that sink by 50 is a big improvement.

Advancements will cost you a lot of WR and will require a few Island Expeditions and Warfronts to unlock everything. Sinking that WR will pay off over time, 50/day pays off the 1215 WR it costs to fully upgrade in  25 days.

The World Quest bonus event comes along as a weekly quest about once a month and rewards 1000WR for doing 20 world quests, activity you'd be doing anyway if you're actively farming mission tables so always take this quest. I missed out for months because I simply didn't know about it.

Emissary rewards sometimes pay 200 WR which is another useful source. It's effectively passive for us as we're running all our emissary quests.

Paragon reward bags give 500 WR for every 10k rep over Exalted with the 6 BFA factions your character is aligned with. For a new 120 with no rep it takes 42k to hit exalted then you get paid off at the end of grinding out another 10k. Emissary quests give a lot of rep though - hypothetically a 120 character with 0 rep just getting 1500 from an emissary turn' in once every 6 days would get a paragon bag from that faction after 208 days. In practice rep from world quests, pre-existing rep from leveling, contracts and other rep sources will shorten that even on an alt that just does mission tables and emissary quests.

So passively we're getting about 50/day plus 200/week plus 1000/month plus (eventually) 500 every paragon bag.  That's good but it's not quite enough, especially when we're progressing new alts through the advancements tree. Note too that you can buy an item from the faction vendor that lets you send WR to another character on your account so it's very worth doing if, like me, you have some alts levelling up.

That brings us to world quests, the main active method of gathering WR. Note that there can be a hidden WR world quest - the new Naga world quest shows up as a pearl but can pay either WR or gold. It pays out more than the base world quests so very worth doing when it's up. The WR quests in Darkshore also pay above average and there's a repeatable kill 12 bosses quest there that pays 200 WR every time you finish it.

Otherwise world quests are the on-demand way you get more WR once you're low. It doesn't feel terribly efficient to fly off, kill 10 mobs and just get 40 WR and a tiny amount of rep for it. We can at least minimise this by valuing WR quests as mid-high priority when doing our emissaries.

Update: I've also discovered/remembered that world bosses can be a pretty good source. This morning I have a random world boss in Voldun for 250 WR and also the Lion's Roar world boss in the Arathi Highlands for 250 WR. (22nd May 2019).