World of Warcraft – How Long to Fully Upgrade Artifact Weapon and Best Places to Farm Artifact Power

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I successfully made a fully upgraded relic weapon in FFXI(2 months for level 99, 2 months for 119+), and was curious how much time i was going to be investing in my artifact weapon? I am at the 16,000ish mark for my next level up.
As far as where to farm artifact power, I've just been doing the daily world quests-which seem to grant around 2500 AP? Is there a better way, or is there something else I should be doing for more power?

Best Answer

The amount of Artifact power (AP) is only limited by your play time and ability to quickly clear dungeons (especially Mythic+ dungeons).

There are a few things at work here. First of, artifact Knowledge. Artifact Knowledge increases the AP gains, and works exponentially. You can find a nice table on WoWHead.

In the future, you will be able to acquire Artifact knowledge more quickly, but details are yet unknown:

One “hidden” feature of the Artifact system is that the rate at which your Artifact Knowledge Work Orders complete speeds up over time. The system keeps track of the time that it’s been since the release of the expansion, and how long it takes to process Artifact Knowledge Work Orders and gain Artifact Knowledge will reduce as time goes on. So whether you’re just working on an alternate character or you’re not playing cutting-edge player, the system will gives you ways to “catch up” as time goes on.

Source: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-gb/news/20286674

Next, there are World Quests (WQs) that give AP, certain rare mobs, and alot of treasures. The treasures and WQs are limited, though. The first random heroic ini per day yields increased AP, but subsequent runs still yield AP.

Mythic+ dungeons also reward AP, and the AP rewards increase with the difficulty of the keystone.

WowProgress show artifact power rankings. It has the highest AP currently (17.10.2016) at 2,770,964 - since you need 5,216,130 Artifact Power to get all 34 traits of one wepon, nobody has yet done that. And after the initial 34 traits you can get 20 ranks in a "bonus trait", for a total of 60,040,200 Artifact Power (see http://www.wowhead.com/guides/legion/artifact-weapons#knowledge).

So how long will it take to finish those? Thats impossible to answer. For players that invest much time, shorter then for others. For people who start well after the launch of legion, it will take shorter then for people who do it right now.

At some point somone will finish the weapon, and when that time comes, we will have a lower bound for the time (before the catch-up kicks in significantly). Right now, it would only be wild speculation. But I'd guess it will take most people several months to max out their weapons, maybe even most of the whole expansion.

Update 30.10.2016

The first players have now unlocked all 34 artifact traits (see http://www.wowprogress.com/artifact_power/) and started unlocking bonus traits. This means that it took pretty much exactly 2 months to complete the first "stage" of the artifact weapon. Those players have done well over 600 Mythic+ dungeons, so it will take longer for most other players (but then again, there will be a catch-up).