The Great Vault

The Great Vault is a chest that fills up while you play and opens once a week, at reset. It is not loot you win — it is a choice you earn. When it opens you are shown several items and you keep exactly one.

You fill it by doing content. Each type of content has its own row, and each row has three slots that unlock as you complete more of that content. Fill more slots and you get more options to choose between, not more items.

These are this season's thresholds. The numbers are cumulative — the third slot needs that many runs in total, not that many more.

Nine slots across the three rows, and still only one reward. The first slot in each row is cheap and the third is not, so a short week is best spent filling the first slot of two or three different rows — that is three picks for far less time than grinding one row to its third slot.

The World row is the one most people underuse. It accepts a mix of activities rather than demanding 8 of any one thing, which makes it the cheapest row to fill for a solo player, and it pays well: this season it spans 279 (Veteran 1/6) to 305 (Hero 1/6) depending on the difficulty you ran.

Your vault reward is set by the level of the keys you completed, and the row pays out based on your best runs — so a single high key is worth more to the vault than several low ones, even though the low ones fill slots just as well.

Notice where the numbers stop climbing. Past that point a higher key pays the same into the vault, and you are pushing for score or for currency rather than for the reward at the end of the week.

The raid row scales with the difficulty you killed on and how far into the raid the boss sits. Later bosses pay better than early ones on the same difficulty, so the three kills that fill your first slot are worth choosing rather than taking in order.

Early in a season some rows are deliberately held below their eventual ceiling, so a slot you filled in week one can pay less than the same slot later.

It is not a reason to skip the vault — a capped reward is still a free item. It is a reason not to burn a limited weekly source chasing a ceiling that is not open yet.

When the vault opens you will usually be picking between a high item level in a slot you have already covered, and a lower one in a slot you have not. Two things to weigh:

• An empty slot beats a marginal upgrade. Replacing a piece for +3 item levels is worth very little.

Filling a slot that is badly behind is worth a lot.

• Count the ranks, not the number. A lower item on a

higher track can finish above the shinier option once you have spent crests on it, and it will cost you the same crests either way.

If nothing in the vault is an upgrade, take the highest item level anyway. It is currency for the catalyst, a candidate for a future upgrade, or simply the piece you hand to an alt.

The planner tracks your vault progress and tells you the cheapest remaining thing that unlocks another slot — usually a single extra run rather than the run you were about to do.

It also values vault progress differently from loot, because the vault is one pick out of several and you cannot count on getting the item you want. A vault reward is scored by how much it would actually move your character, discounted by the odds of it being the one you take.