The lack of new gear during the questing from 50-60 kind of sucks, but almost all the gear I see is purposefully lacking the items my DK would want.
For example, a lot of gear will be like -20 Mastery and -30 Critical Strike if I replace my BFA gear I am wearing into the expansion. Do I have to wait until I choose my Covenant until I get half ways decent gear? It feels like my DK is going backwards in power.
You went backwards in power the very second you stepped into SL simply because of how potent the Essences and Azerite powers were. The same thing happened in BFA when our Legion Artifact weapons and Legendaries were disabled.
I went from doing ~2400dps at lv 50 to like 1500 at BEST at level 51. I think at one point I bursted 1900 even with Army of the Dead. Compared to level 50 and that same strategy would have gotten me ~4500.
Even now at lv 60 and 25ilvls higher, I do less damage than I did at 50.
That will change once we start getting some actual gear. Heroic Dungeons at like lv170 and I’m betting once people are normal raid geared, they’ll be doing closer to 5k sustained.
Also if you spent any time in heroic nyalothia or past mythic +7 or 9 your not going to see much better gear from quest rewards. Atleast thats been my experience. Once every like 30 or so quests ill get one of those upgraded reward drops that get close to my current gears stats. Atleast thats been my experience so far.
I’m just finishing up the vampire zone.
I leveled with war mode on so I hit 60 before I was done the main story.
I’ve only had two quest items so far that were an ilvl upgrade but not worth equipping because of gem sockets.
On the upside mythic 0 is quite easy even at 135ish ilvl. If you have a group of people just jump straight into that and avoid normal/heroic.
I didn’t start replacing my BfA gear until Revendreth. We lost Azerite and everything associated with it the moment we stepped into the Maw. Its fine, the game isnt tuned around you having it, dont worry about it, and it’s not a downgrade after you consider what the enemies are scaled for.
Pick your Cov ASAP, because you actually cant do endgame without it.