While I do appreciate catchup mechanics so I can get my alts into content that I want to do, I feel like this does make the rewards from the content I want to do feel less important and special.
I don’t think this would be as big of a problem if rewards from challenging content had something that differentiated itself from the casual content. We don’t have set bonuses from raid gear anymore, and PVP gear isn’t any different from PvE gear… so why?
Ion has said over and over that 15 ilvls is the point at which an upgrade feels meaningful. But with these bumps in power, heroic raiding and +10 Mythic dungeons have a 5 ilvl increase over casual content, and nothing else that makes them special. Just an unnoticeable stat bump.
The special effects in CoS is a good start to correcting these problems, but there is such limited gear from it, and almost all of it has some sort of negative side-effect that it doesn’t make it appropriate for general use.