I’ve geared up 2 alts over the past 2 months to ilvl 400. In both cases I was able to hit ilvl 400 in around 10 days.
Contrary to @Synsha’s claim that you can just run WQs to gear up that was the absolutely worst way I had to get equipment. The best ways I geared up was being carried into Raids. On my first character, due to gear funneling, I received 9 upgrades in a single night at ilvl 400. On the second character I received 8 upgrades in a single night through heroic raiding. The second way I got gear was through M+10 runs which are easily as hard, if not harder, than Heroic raiding. I got maybe 1 legit upgrade through WQs or emissary caches.
The bottom line is WQ Titanforges are measurably the worst possible way you could ever try to gear and someone gearing up in this fashion will take months, well past the point content is relevant, to reach the levels of even a heroic raider. This also addresses @Lumino’s point about Titanforging being a form of “gear progression.” That’s a laughable claim for anyone who can do math. Titanforging is a tax on people who can’t do math and you pay with your wasted time and energy.
A big push was made back in Emerald Nightmare to quantify the drops in the Titanforging system and what came out of that was an approximation of 1/3rd chance to +5/Tertiary/Socket on an initial drop and a 1/2 chance on each additional +5 or rolling your first Tertiary or socket after that. Meaning, if your target is an ilvl 400 drop off an ilvl 370 WQ, you have a 1/96 chance of that happening if none of the winning rolls are either tertiary or socket. In practice your odds are actually worse than 1/192 because the forging system appears to heavily favor sockets. Oh and by the way, that’s counting post-buff to WQ drops after the progression race was well over. This extraordinarily inefficient method of gearing was even worse during the progression race.
So what’s the complaint? Once or twice a week someone has a 1/3rd chance to get a ilvl 400 out of a cache (assuming only that their ilvl is already high enough for the emissary to even roll 395)? That’s another thing never mentioned. You actually have to have ilvl for the emissaries and WQ to be high enough to have these awful 1/192 chances at an ilvl 400.
Seriously, if you think Titanforging has rendered your Mythic or Heroic raiding experience or loot progression pointless you are just bad at math. And if you’re honestly grinding out WQs in the hopes that a ilvl 400 or (lmao) a 425 drops I just consider that a stupidity tax.