How to Get Anima in Shadowlands: Farming Guide

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Reviewed by Benjamin Barr

Anima, the very lifeblood of the Shadowlands and the main resource that you must collect to empower and unlock your covenant’s features. Unfortunately, we are in a literal drought of anima.

Since Shadowlands launched, players have been slaving away to scrounge up as much of the precious resource as possible. Unless you’ve been single-mindedly dedicating yourself to farming anima on a single toon, it’s been difficult to garner enough to upgrade your sanctum and obtain all the covenant-specific collectibles.

Today, we’ll be going over the best ways on how to get anima in Shadowlands, what you should keep an eye out for, and what to do to maximize your anima gain.

Without further ado, let’s get to our Shadowlands anima guide!

Boosting Your Anima Gains

Thankfully, Blizzard has heard the players’ pleas for anima to rain down from the heavens and has decided to grace us with a bit of relief. However, they’re making us work for it.

As of two weeks ago, Blizzard introduced three new achievements tied to your sanctum upgrades. These achievements require you to upgrade all four features of your covenant to the same rank, ranging up to tier three.

We Can Rebuild: upgrade all features to Rank 1
Denying the Drought: upgrade all features to Rank 2
Sanctum Superior: upgrade all features to Rank 3

Jeffrey Hsu / Image: Blizzard Entertainment via HGG

Each tier set increases the amount of anima you earn by an additional vessel. For example, a world quest that would normally award you one rare anima vessel (35 anima) would reward you with two (70 anima) just by unlocking the first achievement. Each following rank would increase your anima reward by an additional 35 anima.

The increased reward applies to rewards from world quests, Mythic+ dungeons, raid bosses, PvP, mission tables, rares, and treasure chests. Unfortunately, it does not apply to static rewards like your weekly dungeon quests or epic anima vessels (the ones worth 250 that you usually get for killing the world boss).

However, these anima boosts are character-specific. If you want extra anima on all your toons, you’re going to have to upgrade your sanctum to the same rank on those toons as well.

While the new system may not seem like a large boost, you’ll find the rewards begin to stack up rapidly, culminating in earning anima four times faster at the final tier. At max rank, you might even find yourself overflowing on anima!

Sanctum Upgrade Order

Due to the new anima boost system, we strongly recommend upgrading all features in your sanctum to the same rank instead of focusing solely on one feature. However, due to the time it takes to accumulate enough of WoW’s anima currency to upgrade your sanctum, we’ll be going over what order you should upgrade.

Rank 1: Mission Table -> Anima Conductor -> Transport Network -> Unique Feature

You’ll want to get your Mission Table off the ground first and start leveling your companions. The trick is to over-level them in relation to the missions’ difficulty so you can complete the missions with a single companion and just enough generic troops to keep the anima cost low.

Additionally, you can focus on missions that reward anima. Just make sure the reward outweighs the cost! We recommend not progressing your Mission Table’s adventure progression beyond Level 48, as the difficulty ramps up exponentially while the rewards increase linearly.

Afterward, get your Anima Conductor up and running. Each day spends a small amount of anima to channel to a location and unlock an event that rewards you a good chunk of anima. Either location at this rank provides the same reward. After channeling ten times, you can permanently reinforce a location of your choice to keep that event available every day, granting you more chances at anima.

The Transport Network allows you to get around faster and save time, which means more efficient anima farming. For the Night Fae specifically, it unlocks an additional reputation faction that offers a daily quest with a chance at anima as well.

The Unique Feature of each covenant does not ever offer additional anima, so it’s always the lowest priority.

Rank 2: Anima Conductor -> Mission Table -> Transport Network -> Unique Feature

For the Rank 2 upgrades, get your Anima Conductor upgraded first. The two new channels that open up offer either two daily quests or one world quest that grants you anima. You’ll want to reinforce the channel to the location that offers you the two daily quests as soon as possible to put more anima options on the board permanently.

Afterward, rank up your Mission Table to allow your companions to naturally heal quicker, reducing the wait time between missions and letting you send them on more.

Once again, the Transport Network allows you to get around quickly to even more spots, with the Night Fae getting access to another daily quest.

Rank 3: Mission Table -> Transport Network -> Anima Conductor -> Unique Feature

Finally, for the Rank 3 upgrades, get the Mission Table taken care of first. It reduces the time spent on all missions by 20%, which can be a massive time saver on hour-long missions.

The Transport Network at Rank 3 places a portal back to Oribos in your sanctum, allowing you to get to the other regions much faster as well. Once again, Night Fae unlock another daily quest.

Unfortunately, the Anima Conductor isn’t very beneficial at Rank 3. Two new channels are unlocked, one providing a daily zone-wide buff (no anima boost) and the other summoning a powerful boss encounter that does drop multiple rare anima vessels. However, the boss rare typically requires multiple people to kill and heading to the most dangerous part of the zone. You’re not likely to get a group together for this, so we can’t really recommend it unless you’re a Necrolord, as their boss spawn is in the dead center of the zone at the Theater of Pain.

Weekly Quests

Your weekly quests are probably the easiest and best ways to get going on anima farming in WoW.

Once you hit Level 60, head to the eastern end of Oribos. The innkeeper there should grant you a breadcrumb quest leading to the basement of the inn. The NPC down there will offer you two quests every week to kill and loot the end boss of two random dungeons on any difficulty. This will grant you a total of 500 easy anima.

Check the weekly event quest given by the NPC standing in front of the Great Vault (next to the bank in Oribos). Occasionally, it will offer you a large chunk of anima as a reward.

Make sure to always complete your weekly Rescue Souls From the Maw quest from your covenant. If you have 100 souls stockpiled as an available resource, completing the quest will instead award you 500 anima.

If you’re into PvP, the NPC standing next to the PvP vendor in Oribos offers two weekly quests, one for unrated and one for rated PvP events. Each one offers 250 anima as a reward. Additionally, if you play Alliance with War Mode on, keep an eye out at the start of each week to see if the NPC offers Against Overwhelming Odds (due to faction imbalance) for another easy 250 anima. Sorry Horde, the chances of you ever getting this quest is next to zero.

Raiding and Mythic+ Dungeons

Fittingly, Castle Nathria is rich with anima. Each boss you kill will drop four rare anima vessels, with the last two bosses dropping six instead. Remember, the amount of vessels increases by one with each anima boost achievement unlocked. A complete run with all three achievements will grant you a total of 2240 anima.

However, Blizzard is stingy with raid farming and has made it so that you can loot anima off a boss only once per week across all difficulties. For example, if you kill Shriekwing on Normal difficulty and loot the anima off her, you can not loot anima off her again on Heroic difficulty that week.

As for Mythic+ dungeons, completing any mythic dungeon (regardless of timing it or not) from Difficulty 0–6 will award you one rare anima vessel. Difficulties 7–9 will award you two rare anima vessels. Difficulties 10+ will award you three rare anima vessels. Thankfully, the anima boost from achievements affects these rewards as well, so running mythic dungeons back-to-back will get you a decent amount of anima as a bonus and is one of the few methods on how to farm currency in Shadowlands after exhausting all other options for anima farming.

World Quests and You

Naturally, world quest placement will determine your go-to daily anima farming routes as your main source. If you have the stomach for PvP, turn on War Mode, as each world quest completed will grant you 1–6 Conflict of Strife anima vessels. These vessels are only worth three anima each, but once again, the anima boost achievements affect the amount you receive. If you run through multiple world quests, this can add up rather quickly.

If you plan on doing world quest frequently for anima and are not a tank, I cannot stress enough how much you should obtain a Comfortable Rider’s Barding for your mount equipment. Given there’s no in-game flying yet, you’ll be running through many hostile mobs. This equipment prevents you from being dazed and knocked off your mount. If you’re a tank, you already have daze prevention and can run any other options.

Treasure Chests and Rare Hunting

Typically, each daily reset will designate two zones at random to have treasure chests scattered about the map. You can only see the chests if you’re in the zone and open up the map. Do note that on occasion, there will be no chests in any zone — this appears to be random.

Each chest will usually contain a decent amount of anima and various other goodies. The Elite Chests are designated with a larger symbol and badge border, and can contain rare anima vessels. Once more, the anima boost achievements affect these.

Before we get into rares, get the SilverDragon add-on. It’ll mark spots on your map with rare spawn locations — if you hover over the minimap icon, it displays all the rares in the area that you’ve killed for the day.

Each rare mob you kill and loot will drop anima daily, making them basically another world quest to complete for anima farming if you’re strong enough to take them out. It’ll be up to you to plot out a path on which ones you’re willing to put effort into the killing. If there’s a rare/treasure you can’t figure out how to summon or obtain, we strongly recommend looking it up on WoWHead and checking out the comment section.

As a general rule of thumb, we recommend focusing on killing rares along your path between world quests for your anima farming routes. If you’re going out of your way to kill a rare, we suggest doing it with War Mode off so factions can share the tag. More people are likely to join up for the harder rares with War Mode off.

Bastion

Silver Strongbox chests require placing a Ripe Purian on the offering plate to summon a steward who gives you a key to the box. You can obtain Ripe Purians as a clickable item around various settlements in Bastion or by searching the area down by Baedos (giant turtle rare), just north of the Hero’s Rest in the center of the zone.

Steward of the Day involves talking to the NPC by the chest in Hero’s Rest to figure out which named steward you must give a Ripe Purian to for a key. A small red flag will mark the spot on your map for about eight minutes. Some of them are in caves or require killing a couple nearby mobs to speak to.

Maldraxxus

Rune-bound chests require finding and clicking on three sigils in the area around the chest to open them up. Unfortunately, they tend to be surrounded by copious amounts of mobs, so we don’t recommend going for them unless you have excellent AoE damage or are stealthier. You’ll also probably end up having to look up the sigils’ locations on WoWHead, as some of them are incredibly unintuitive.

Sprouting Growth chests for anima farming are tiny mushrooms growing on top of the giant canopy fungus in Maldraxxus. You’ll see various hook points that you can grapple to make your way up to them, indicated by greyed-out circles on your minimap. It may seem impossible, but there’s always an angle/spot to stand at to reach the first grapple point.

Ardenweald

Lunarlight Pod chests require you to run through and activate five small Lunarlight Buds nearby before you can loot them.

Faerie Troves often require you to step on a nearby Bounding Shroom to launch you into the air and slow fall onto the tree holding them.

Revendreth

Stoneborn Satchels chests are scattered about on ledges that require you to usually drop down from a higher ledge and stick the landing. Make sure to bring some way to negate fall damage, and make sure you aim carefully.

Secret Treasure chests appear occasionally and usually do not give anima. If you insist on checking, they usually have some odd condition for accessing them, like finding a hidden lever or using a tucked away nearby item to open them up.

Party Anima(l)

And that’s it for our Shadowlands anima guide! We hope it helps you to end the anima drought in the Shadowlands. As always, stay tuned for the next guide by subscribing to our newsletter and social media.

Happy gaming!

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