This is a pretty cool, brief, guide to what the Timless Isle is all about. Nabbed in its entirety from Reddit, I think it’s worth spreading around. Kudos to the author. I stuck it here so that I could find it again, given that it’s likely to scroll of that reddit page very quickly.
And so the guide begins:
Welp. Tomorrow’s 5.4. If your guild is anything like mine, then you’re chomping at the bit to get this party started, and if you’re anything like me, you’re hoping to help your guild as much as possible.
But even if you don’t have a current raid – this is a great chance to gear yourself up and apply to a raid, or even just kick your character’s power level up a notch. I’ve read a lot of different guides on the Timeless Isle, but none of them worked as a good ‘one stop shop’ for what I wanted and what my guild needed to know. So this guide is somewhat for my own benefit – even if it gets 0 upvotes and doesn’t help anybody else, it will have put all of the information my friends might need in one place.
I hope you find it equally useful, though.
The Timeless Island is basically a free-roaming area full of optional non-quested things to do. Lots of rare spawn monsters, tons of chests that can be looted daily, weekly, or once per character. The Timeless Isle comes with several new currencies, but we only really care about three things: armor tokens, Burdens of Eternity, and Timeless Coins.
Armor tokens are very straightforward. They come in a few different types (I.E. “Timless Leather Chest”, “Timeless Plate Shoulders”), and each type, when used, will create a piece of spec-appropriate gear with random secondary stats, at ilevel 496. When I say random secondary stats, think of heroic scenario gear. A few of these pieces have sockets – I believe the helm as a meta + normal, and both the chest and legs have a normal socket.
These tokens come from all over the island: Many of the chests drop them, and many monsters can also drop them. Basically, you’ll get tons of armor tokens just doing all the shit the island offers. However, it’s important to note that ‘armor tokens’ really isn’t a good name – these tokens aren’t just armor, they’re also rings and amulets, and I believe even a cloak slot. So really, you could build yourself a full set of gear if you wanted to, just using the Timeless Isle
Of course, you’re a normal raider. 496 gear is pretty stinkin’ useless. Especially with only one gem socket – ick! Why on earth would you want to farm a whole set of 496 Timeless Isle gear?
And here, my friends, is where shit gets cool.
Burdens of Eternity are rare drops from several places on the island. There is a chest on the Island called the Blazing Chest which is guaranteed to drop one. It’s also a guaranteed reward from this quest which requires you to farm some monsters to get to Honored with the Emperor before you can do it – this is something you could easily in a day though. You can also spend 50,000 Timeless Coins to get one, but you should NEVER do this. Burdens can also be a random drop from lots of rare bosses around the island and many other chests on the island (especially the weekly/once ever chests have a better shot than the daily ones, but again, the three sources I listed first are the only guaranteed ways to get Burdens).
When you use a Burden of Eternity on a token (NOT a piece of armor from the Timeless Isle), you upgrade that token so that it gives a piece of 535 gear for the slot, again, with random stats.
Of course, using a Burden of Eternity doesn’t guarantee you’ll get the perfect stats – there’s no guarantee that my Prot paladin is going to get a piece of Haste/Mastery gear. I could get Crit/Expertise or whatever. Yuck. But even a poorly statted 535 piece is probably better than any 502 LFR gear you still have, and a good piece of 535 is probably better than your 522 even if it has one less gem socket.
So at this point, my readers probably fall into three categories: Some of you are heroic raiders who have already realized that Timeless Isle gear doesn’t do shit for them. Some of you are normal raiders, who have realized that this is a great chance to replace their poorly itemized 522 pieces or that last piece of LFR gear they couldn’t get rid of – and some of you are people just starting raiding or in a guild that didn’t finish normal ToT, and you’ve just realized that if someone gave you 15 Burdens of Eternity, you could replace most of your gear with awesome upgrades and be way more useful to your guild/apply to a raiding guild comfortably.
- To those of you in the first category: Stop being so well geared, dammit. 🙁
- To those of you in the second category: Get the Blazing Chest first thing when the Timeless Isle opens, and then grind enough to get that quest chain finished to get a second Burden. Replace your last couple pieces of bad gear. Profit!
- To those of you in the third category: Okay. You need more than 2 Burdens. Now what? After all, I just told you not to buy more Burdens. Do you just have to endlessly grind elites and pray to the RNG gods? No! Because there’s a better, kinder RNG god! One who loves you, and wants you to be in all 535 gear.
Master Kukuru sells keys for 500 Timeless Coins each. These keys open chests that are all around where Master Kukuru hangs out. Assuming you read that link, you know the deal – but if you’re lazy, basically, people have done a bunch of testing and the conclusion as of now on the PTR was this: 50,000 Timeless Coins will return you about 35,000 Timeless Coins, ~10 armor tokens, and 2-4 Burdens of Eternity.
So basically you buy 10 armor tokens and ~3 Burdens for about 15k Timeless Coins. Those of you who are awesome at math will note that that sucks way less dick than 50k Timeless Coins for 1 Burden.
How long will it take you to get 50k Timeless Coins? Hell if I know. More than an hour, less than a week. But you don’t need to wait for 50k to start buying keys – there’s no bulk discount!
There is one other thing you can do with Timeless Coins: You can buy a 535 trinket with them, for 50,000 Coins. These trinkets aren’t great, but they ARE probably better than LFR trinkets.
Now, my personal opinion here is that if you have lots of LFR gear, you’ll get a better return on investment buying keys with your Coins, and replacing all your LFR gear with 535 gear. But if you’re really just sitting on 1-2 502 items, and one of them is a trinket, it might be worthwhile to consider saving up the 50k coins to replace that trinket – especially if you got lucky with some of the other chests and got an extra Burden while exploring the island, for example.
Remember – going into a new tier in the best gear you can get helps you, helps your guild, and feels fucking awesome to boot. Even if your guild is just doing Flex – why not be the best character you can be?
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Personally, I really like the idea of exploring the place. That there are real rewards to be had is nice, too. Hopefully it works as well as we all imagine it will. See you there.
