Prey System Guide for Midnight

Prey System Guide for Midnight Quick Summary:

• Unlock Prey by visiting Astalor Bloodsworn in Silvermoon City, then follow his questline until the Hunt Table in Astalor’s Sanctum is active.
• Prey Hunts are fueled by Anguish, which you farm through open-world stuff like world quests, treasures, rares, traps, and Coalescing Anguish spawns.
• Do four Hunts per week for the maximum rewards achievable, then your progress slows down significantly.
• You get a lot of Coffer Key Shards from Prey, which you can use in Delves later to open Bountiful Coffers.

At Skycoach, our PROs can help you complete Prey Hunts at any difficulty level to get the best rewards and maximum Preyseeker’s Journey progress. Skip the grind and enjoy the results right away.

 

 

 

How to Access Prey in Midnight

To unlock Prey in Midnight, head to Silvermoon City and find Astalor Bloodsworn (/way 2393 55.0 63.4 Astalor Bloodsworn) there. He’s going to give you the first quest that introduces you to this activity and how the whole Prey Hunt thing works. Nothing dangerous at this point. Keep progressing until you complete the final step called To the Sanctum! After that, you’ll have access to Normal difficulty Hunts.

As for how to get to Astalor's Sanctum, you can use multiple entrances here:

• Murder Row
• Wayfarer’s Rest

The first path is to go through Murder Row since it leads you directly into the main chamber. But you can go through another entrance in Wayfarer’s Rest, where you go left through a doorway and follow it down until you reach the same room. Or you can use a translocation orb above the Murder Row entrance that takes you directly to Astalor's Sanctum as well. If you’re coming back from a hunt, that orb is basically the fastest way to get back inside and grab your next target.

How Prey Hunts Work

You’ve done the introductory quest, learned the basics, and now what? Get back to Astalor's Sanctum and interact with the Hunt Table. The latter serves as a sort of control panel. You’ll see what Hunts are currently available, what difficulty each one has, and what you’re going to get paid when you finish them. Once the system is unlocked, you’ll automatically get a follow-up quest that tells you complete a Hunt. Do that, and you’re good to go on your own at this point.

The core idea is simple: you pick a Hunt, you go to the zone, and you “charge up” your hunt by collecting Anguish until your crystal is full. You’ll literally see that crystal sitting in the middle of your screen while you’re out there doing stuff. And the best part is you’re not locked into one boring chore to fill it. You’re just farming Anguish through outdoor content you were probably doing anyway.

What I like about such activities as Prey and Delves is their simplicity. When you get tired of sweaty M+ dungeons and non-stop raiding, this is what saves my life. I appreciate a lot that the developers understand how important it is to have activities like these to escape burnout syndrome when playing WoW.

Okay, let’s get back to what feeds your Hunt progress. I’ve prepared this quick table to cover all the details necessary:

Anguish Source	What You’re Doing
World Quests	Big progress bumps while you clear your usual weekly stuff
Prey World Quests	Same idea, but directly tied to the hunt zone
Traps on the Ground	Disarm for Anguish, plus you can get traps to use later
Treasures	Quick progress while you’re already looting the zone
Rares	Kill them and keep the crystal moving
Coalescing Anguish	Interact, spawn a mob, kill it for extra Anguish

The whole Hunt cycle doesn’t look too complicated, and doing it on Normal difficulty won’t cause any problems. Even if you’re only leveling to 90, you can still do Hunts. I would sum up the whole process into this:

1. Pick a target at the Hunt Table in Astalor's Sanctum 
2. Go to that zone and start filling your Anguish crystal
3. Collect Anguish by doing outdoor activities (World Quests, treasures, rares, traps)
4. Deal with ambushes when your prey target jumps you mid-route
5. When the crystal glows red, open the map and go to your target’s location
6. Kill the target to instantly get rewards, then return to the Sanctum to choose another hunt

Yeah, you’ll not only be the one who is hunting in the zone. You’ll occasionally have to deal with ambushes set by your prey.

Ambushes Explained

You should be fully ready when doing objectives, as your target can randomly ambush you. This only gets more dangerous once you climb difficulties. They use their main abilities, and you’ll have to try hard, or they’ll easily finish you off. I’m serious here. If something important is being cast and you ignore it, you can die fast.

When it hits about half health, it retreats and drops a glob of Anguish. You kinda win the moment, but don’t get the final reward just yet. Then there’s a bonus trick that’s easy to miss if you’re autopiloting: right after the target flees, look around for a red mist nearby. If you find it, you can run over and hit your prey one more time to get extra hunt progress. It’s a tiny detail, but over a week it can shorten Hunts a lot.

Once you’ve collected enough Anguish, your crystal glows red, and Astalor tells you it’s time to go find your target. You open your map, head to the marked location, and this is the fight you’ve been preparing for this whole time. Most targets have unique abilities that matter more on higher difficulties, so this is the spot where you want cooldowns ready, not on cooldown because you just face-tanked three rares in a row.

Prey Hunts Weekly Limit

Prey system in WoW Midnight has a weekly structure, but it’s not the one that kinda hard-stops you. Instead, you get one Prey target per difficulty you’ve unlocked, per zone, per week. As you get access to higher difficulties, your weekly menu will grow as well. And you can pick what you want based on speed, comfort, or whatever zone you already planned to be in. I sometimes don’t mind doing Normal runs just to get to know the location better, and I find it totally fine.

In total, you can have up to 12 active Hunts at once. This is more than enough to turn Prey into a full-time job, trust me. You’ll never finish them all if you don’t focus on this activity only. You remember about M+, Raids, Delves, and other stuff waiting for you as well, right?

Note: You’re not strictly capped at those 12 Hunts. You can always ask Astalor to send you on a random Hunt that pays out extra currency and resources. But you’ll rarely have to get to this in practice because the number of Hunts to do is high enough on its own. Going through these guaranteed options throughout a week would be enough for most players for sure.

 

Rewards from Each Difficulty

Your rewards in Prey are directly tied to only one thing, and that is the difficulty you’re hunting on. Normal is your basic start, Hard is the step up, and Nightmare can be a true challenge for you. You keep doing the same style of Hunt, but the crests and the gear boxes scale up depending on what difficulty you’re on.

Also, every difficulty feeds the same “ecosystem” of progression. You’re getting Preyseeker’s Journey progress, you’re getting Coffer Key Shards for Delves, and you’re getting crests plus a gear box that matches the difficulty. Here’s a list of rewards you get from each difficulty in Midnight Prey:

Prey Difficulty	What You Get
Normal	Preyseeker’s Journey progress, Coffer Key Shards, Adventurer Dawncrests, a box of Adventurer gear, plus extra supplies
Hard	Preyseeker’s Journey progress, Coffer Key Shards, Veteran crests, a box of Veteran gear
Nightmare	Preyseeker’s Journey progress, Coffer Key Shards, Champion crests, a box of Champion gear

This is how I suggest you remember the system:

• Normal = Adventurer track rewards
• Hard = Veteran track rewards
• Nightmare = Champion track rewards

And that’s the ceiling right now for the repeatable side. Nightmare is the highest difficulty available, and Prey’s repeatable rewards cap out at Champion crests and Champion gear.

Weekly Vault Rewards

Every hunt you finish counts toward your World Row vault progress on reset, and the difficulty you choose is what decides the track of the vault item you’re fishing for.

• Normal Prey Hunts give you Veteran-track gear in the Weekly Vault
• Hard mode bumps that up to Champion-track gear
• Nightmare Hunts can earn you Heroic-track gear from the Weekly Vault

If you’re a solo or open-world focused player, Nightmare is the big deal. You can do a handful of hard hunts for solid Champion vault shots, or you go Nightmare and suddenly you’re rolling for Heroic gear once per week without needing a dungeon group.

How to Unlock Hard and Nightmare Mode in Prey

Unlocking the higher Prey difficulties in Midnight is actually way simpler than it sounds, and the game basically walks you into it if you just keep following Astalor’s chain. After you finish the initial unlock and do that first “go complete a Hunt” quest, you’ll get another quest from Astalor that opens up Hard mode more or less right away.

As for Nightmare mode, this is the one you have to earn. You unlock it through the Prey seasonal track in your Journeys tab. Open your Journeys, find Prey just below Reputation or Renown, click Prey, and that’s your progression page. As you earn Preyseeker’s Journey, you climb that track and start unlocking extra stuff like new hunt types and quality-of-life perks.

Note: Nightmare mode specifically opens at Renown Rank 4, and you’ll need to finish more than a few Hunts to unlock it.

How to Farm Preyseeker's Journey

The first four WoW Prey Hunts you complete each week are the most beneficial ones. Each of those first four gives you 1,000 Preyseeker’s Journey, and that’s the cleanest, fastest way to push your seasonal track forward without burning your brain out. After those four, the progress drops off hard, to the point where it’s usually not worth spam-running every hunt on the board. Unless you genuinely want the extra cosmetics, currency, or you just enjoy the activity so much.

Do at least four Hunts, preferably on the highest difficulty you can comfortably clear, and then bounce. That alone gives you strong track progress and also lines up nicely with your Weekly Vault world row, since those first four hunts are doing double duty for you.

Prey Affixes Explained

Affixes in Prey system work in the same way as in M+ keys, for example. They’re created to make your runs more challenging. And the number of affixes active in Prey is tied to what difficulty you’re on. When you decide to go on a Hunt on the highest, Nightmare difficulty, you’ll have them all active at the same time. Check out a list of all affixes you’ll encounter in Prey and the difficulty they’re tied to:

• Ambush - Normal
• Torment - Hard
• Hunter's Momentum - Hard
• Seeping Gore - Hard
• Echo of Predation - Nightmare
• Bloody Command - Nightmare

The annoying part for me is that some affixes don’t just punish you in the final fight, they punish you during the whole hunt. You can lose hunt progress if you die in the zone. Bloody Spirits can spawn and chase you down to harass you while you’re trying to do objectives.

You can get hit with random effects you have to dodge. And then you’ve got the one where Astalor basically tells you to kill something, and if you ignore it or can’t do it fast enough, you take a chunk of damage for it. That’s the most challenging one for me personally.

 

 

Prey Rewards

Prey rewards are honestly the whole reason this system is going to stay relevant all season, even after you’ve geared up a bit. You’re getting a repeatable source of Champion-track gear, a weekly shot at Heroic-track gear, and a steady flow of Coffer Key Shards to keep feeding Delves. Even if you’re not “maining” Prey as content, it slots into your weekly routine really cleanly because it pays you in the stuff you actually care about.

When participating in Prey Hunts, you get three types of Anguish Runes to exchange for other currencies later at Construct V'anore located in Astalor's Sanctum:

• Anguish-Scribed Rune
• Anguish-Infused Rune
• Anguish-Permeated Rune

Basically, all the stuff you buy from this vendor requires you to pay Remnant of Anguish. I’m now talking about professions recipes, transmogs, mounts, pets, and toys. Specific rewards like Famed Preyseeker's Knapsack also require you to reach a specific rank in your Preyseeker's Journey.

Check out this table containing several examples of different reward types you can get from Prey vendor:

Reward	Cost in Remnant of Anguish
Ensemble: Preyseeker's Refined Armor	1600
Ensemble: Preyseeker's Rugged Armor	1600
Formula: Enchant Shoulders - Nature's Embrace	500
Technique: Restful Bronze Bench	500
Voldy	800
Preyseeker's Hubris	2000
Preyseeker's Hearthstone	2000

The professions recipes you can get from this vendor require you to pay not only Remnant of Anguish, but also a bunch of Artisan Enchanter's Moxie or Artisan Scribe's Moxie, depending on the type you buy.

Pairing Prey and Delves

Prey in Midnight hands you a lot of Coffer Key Shards, which turn into Restored Coffer Keys, and those keys are what make Bountiful Delves actually pay out. I honestly don’t see any reason not to combine Prey and Delves activities together. They’re literally meant for each other. This is what I do for the maximum value here:

1. Pick up a Prey Hunt before heading into the open world
2. Do world quests and events in that Hunt’s zone and farm Anguish
3. Kill my Prey target to claim rewards and stack up Coffer Key Shards
4. Go back to the sanctum, grab another target, repeat until I’ve done my four valuable Hunts
5. Convert those shards into keys and spend them in Delves for even more rewards

The big weekly goal is four hunts per week, because that’s where the Preyseeker’s Journey value is the highest. After that, you’re mostly doing extra hunts for fun, currency, and cosmetics. Then you plug Delves in right after, because the top-end Delve rewards are limited and you’ll eventually want to clear at least three Tier 11 Delves to get the maximum out of what that system can give you.

Read our other WoW guides:

• Gold Farming Guide
• Leveling Guide
• PvP Tier List
• Best Professions in WoW

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