It took me 5 weeks to reach ilvl 666 this season. That is above maxed out full Heroic gear. I lost a full week. Vault and everything because of power and internet outages. I also play in a casual AOTC guild and don’t go crazy with M+. So I went from 636 to 666 in 5 weeks without any plan for optimizing my crests or anything like that. Now 5 weeks later I am 673 and a big part of that is easy crests/changes this week.
30 ilvls in 5 weeks (with an actual full week of that not playing) vs 7ish ilvls in 5 weeks. The point of this is just to show how crazy fast you can gear up only to then hit a wall.
First issue with this is that I was able to get AOTC at nearly the exact same time I had better gear than drops from the raid. (aotc at about 5 weeks) Without really trying I was able to out gear the raid by the time I cleared it.
From that point on my choices where wait for crafting Sparks, hope M+ vault gives me something useful, and join a Mythic raid guild. So a long time gate, weekly RNG and a massive time investment is my only way to advance my character.
The big reason for this issue is M+. It drops hero gear at low key levels and then only ever drops hero gear and there is no lockout on the drops.
I think an easy fix to smooth out gearing over a longer period of time would be to use the M0 weekly lockout system on Heroic and Mythic gear in M+. This way you would have 0-6s for 8 champ chances, 7-11 or 12s for 8 heroic chances, and then 12 or 13+ you have 8 Myth chances. Basically the exact same thing as we have for Normal, Heroic and Mythic raid.
Getting heroic track gear is so boring the way the system is now. Other than Rare items, a few BIS trinkets and a tier piece or two it all feels low value. It isn’t hard to get and it just puts you at the basic level of everyone else.
For an RPG the progression just feels weird.
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With increase in ilvl we’ll likely see more pug groups hitting 2/8M and 3/8M though I don’t see it going past that (prog past that I think will just be groups).
Gonna work on the 12s soon next work break 
. Then pray to RNG gods.
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Gear doesn’t really feels like gear anymore, it’s just another way to nerf the content over a season
It’s just a very long timegated path yet very easy to do
I personally wish gearing was faster than the current system but I understand that causes people to quit because a lot of people play for the gear, so I’m not sure how to fix it
Though I do like having the majority of it upfront because when content comes out I want to engage in it, with your solution I would just feel screwed over by time gating and have little reason to play early in a season
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The way the seasons are designed now it would make more sense to only play the end of each patch. By that point everything has been balanced/nerfed, raid has the %damage buffs rolling, crest caps are gone or far less of an issue, no waiting on crafting or tier charages, etc etc.
You could gear up and clear all content a lot faster if you just waited. You are right gear right now just feels like a way to nerf content only for it to get all replaced within a few days of the next season start.
That’s exactly how I feel, my friends and I wanted to push keys but every week the item level jump is so extreme and everything is constantly getting nerfed.
So then we think why even bother pushing something challenging we will just get some decent gear first. By the time we had the gear we wanted everyone was already so burnt out from spamming 10s we took a little break then got the news they’re extending the gear track even further and it just sort of killed the entire season.
The efficient way to play right now is in the final 3ish months of a patch and that kinda sucks
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The real issue is that 30 item level jump in the first 5 weeks. At that point, you are technically geared enough to clear every single piece of content in the game. Also, 5 weeks is considered fairly tame in terms of speed because of Mythic+. If you had ran keys, you probably would hit the same target in like 2 weeks, maybe less lol.
Gearing is beyond stupid in this game now.
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