WoW: Shadowlands Renown Catch-Up System Explained

So you’ve just started the new expansion (WoW: Shadowlands) and everyone else has months of Renown and you’ve just hit max level. Maybe you’ve taken a break for awhile and your friends haven’t caught up with you yet.

It was super frustrating for me too, at the start of the expansion because it felt like I had to do everything to catch my renown up each week and it was pretty fatiguing.

Except the good news is that you don’t have to do every renown quest every week if you don’t want to and if you start later in the expansion, you’ll still be able to farm your way to everyone’s current level. It’s very simple:

How to Catch Up

To catch your renown up just do anything in the game that rewards you something. Covenant Callings, Battlegrounds, Dungeons, world bosses (once per week), various weekly quests, etc. Most of the basic things you do in the game will reward you with renown.

There is one huge catch though. This is pretty serious: the main renown quests are one per week and the catch-up renown only goes up to the previous weeks total. So if you were for instance (just to keep it simple), the max renown was 10, then you can only go up to 7 renown with the random bonuses.

Of course, once the game reaches max renown, the bonuses and main quests at the same time no longer matter.

Quick Advice on Renown

Me, personally, I found that doing the battlegrounds was the easiest way to get the extra renown on my alts. Sure, sometimes you get a gulch that runs forever, lose and get nothing, but you usually can grind them pretty fast that it adds up in a week. Plus it’s what I was doing on my alt anyway.

Looking at The Quickest Way to Get Renown

I mean, there’s a million ways to look at efficiency here. Obviously the world boss is a free renown point each week (before you do your quests). So that knocks that out really quickly. The rest of it is sort of figuring out what to do that’s the fastest for you.

I don’t really thinking farming the renown points is a really smart way to approach it, because you kind of get them playing the game anyway that you want to. If you just sat and for instance did nothing but dungeons, but needed nothing from dungeons, trying to farm renown than you might be approaching it wrong when you could do all the other things (callings, bgs, weekly quests, etc.) that would get the points plus bonuses your character needs.

Anyway, I hope this helps you with your new character in WoW and that you get to max renown quickly to enjoy all the benefits.

This only applies to the Shadowlands Expansion. Looking to gear up for raid finder? Check out our guide on gearing up for raid finder as part of the early end game in WoW.