Item Levels and Upgrade Tracks

Every piece of endgame gear carries two numbers. The first is its item level — how strong it is right now. The second is written underneath as something like *Champion 1/6*, and that is its upgrade track: how far this particular item can still go.

The track matters more than the item level. A piece at the bottom of a high track will end up stronger than a piece already sitting at the top of a low one, and it costs you the same currency to get there. When you are choosing between two drops, you are really choosing between two ceilings.

Each track has 6 ranks. Rank 1 is where the item drops; rank 6 is its ceiling. You move between ranks by spending upgrade currency at the upgrade vendor — that is the crest system, and it is the next page to read.

These are the tracks this season runs, from the gear you find first to the gear that ends your season. Every number here is read from the live season data, so it is what the game is handing out today.

Read a row left to right and you have the whole life of an item: it drops at the left-hand number and finishes at the right-hand one. Gear runs from 266 at the very bottom to 334 at the top of the last track.

The last column is the crest that moves that track, named by its tier — the full currency is "Myth Mistcrest" and so on. A track is only upgraded by its own crest: nothing else will move a Myth item.

This is the part that catches people out, including people who have played for years.

Tracks do not run end to end. The top of one track and the bottom of the next describe the same item levels. This season, Adventurer and Veteran share their last and first 2 ranks: item level 279 is both *Adventurer 5/6* and *Veteran 1/6*.

Two items at the same item level can therefore have completely different futures. The Veteran one still has 5 ranks in it; the Adventurer one has just one. If you are deciding which to spend currency on, the item level on the tooltip tells you nothing — the track line underneath tells you everything.

The practical version: upgrade the highest track you own, not the lowest item level you own. Currency spent at the top of a low track buys you a few item levels and then stops. The same currency spent at the bottom of a high track keeps paying.

Look along any row in that table and the gaps are not the same size. Most ranks are +3 item levels apart, and one in every few is +4.

That is not a mistake in our data — it is how the game's item levels are laid out. They sit on a fixed grid, and gear can only exist on the grid's rungs. A track is a fixed number of steps along that grid, so where a track happens to start decides which of its steps are the wide ones.

Why you should care: it means you cannot work out what a rank is worth by dividing a track's range evenly, and you cannot add a flat number to last season's values to predict this one. Both shortcuts produce a ladder that looks completely consistent and is quietly wrong by a rank or two. We compute every number on this site from the grid itself for exactly that reason.

A few item levels sit above the last rank of the last track, and crests cannot buy them. They come from specific late-season sources instead.

These are a ceiling to be aware of rather than a plan to build around. They arrive late, in small numbers, and on specific slots — worth taking when the game offers one, never worth reorganising your week for.

Tracks are the reason the planner does not simply tell you to chase the biggest number. When it ranks your week, it works out what each activity is worth in overall item level per hour — and an item's worth includes the ranks it still has left, not just the number it drops at.

The same logic drives upgrade advice. Currency spent on a piece with ranks remaining moves your character; currency spent on a piece already at its ceiling moves nothing, so the planner values it at nothing.