wasting 100-2000 additional stones is going to be a bigger waste of value than saving them at 2000.
and its not like you are going to suddenly need 4k of em unless you are using pvp conquest gear.
just spend what you think you’ll end up earning back.
a handful of extra levels in the lower tier of gear may help you kill things faster so you can get the next new shiny.
in a perfect world, you just get myth track everything, letting its base tier cover most the cost.
but thats not how it works for most people. you get Vet>Champion>Hero>Myth
and certain items remain at a lower tier longer than others.
use it, or loose it. Sitting at Vet 1/8 and trying to jump to hero just to skip spending 8 ranks worth of stones is less optimal than spending some on a few items so that they are at least worth 4/8 Champion when doing content and making the acquisition of hero and myth tier gear easier.
you can complain the whole time but its still better to use what you got than to let it go to waste.
The problem is that the math/ratios don’t add up to make this viable since you also require crests to make the upgrades. And because the rate you acquire valor stones vs the rate you acquire crests don’t line up at the higher item levels.
So again this whole line of trying to incentivize/force players to spend them doesn’t work out right. Not even on paper, much less in actual practice.
It’s basically this. The entire point of the cap is to make sure nobody can hoard thousands of them and then not needing to go out and get more for months at a time. It forces players to constantly re-engage with content. At worst it forces players to do content they don’t normally do to grind them. As much as some people may hate that idea, I do understand why it was designed that way.
Otherwise as you say, half the playerbase would just be afk in Dorn, never moving from the spot. Players will always try to do the least amount of work possible for the reward. So blizz has to find a way to put up barriers to prevent that.
If blizz really wanted to force people into open world content for example, they could eliminate all valorstone sources from all other forms of content. Then even mythic raiders would have no choice but to farm WQ’s and the like to upgrade their gear. The mythic raiders may not like that. But it would work.
This really only works at the beginning of the expac. Because with the gear progression system in place, particularly the catchup systems, it’s literally a waste to constantly expect people to try or even want to upgrade every slot every week or every piece as soon as they get it. The catchup gear is high enough without upgrades to get you into content with actual tier bracket upgrades that you actually NEED/WANT to upgrade. Expecting folks to upgrade 4/8 Adventurer gear fully when they are going to instantly get champ and hero drops from 8&11 Delves that day on top of knowing there’s going to be Hero pieces waiting for them next week is just silly.
And again due to the way every content type gives valor stones but not always crests combined with the lopsided ratio of crests to valorstone rewards still makes it end up swimming in stones while trying to farm the crests.
The only actual use I ever have for just pure valor stones is due to the fact that I tend to maintain speed sets (which tend to be made up of +speed greens and blues I see in the AH or get to random drop) on all of my regularly played characters to make it easier to farm old content for various mounts/mogs and Achieves I want.
Outside of that, it’s always crests that I need, not stones.
What’s actually happening is people are doing the work and their rewards are poofing into thin air because of the barrier that Blizz has set. Or players have to do additional work themselves to keep transferring valorstones at a loss back and forth between characters if they really want to keep their basic rewards coming.
Transferring valorstones should be something that’s done between characters when the player needs the “feature”, not because they’re consistently at cap and afraid to lose rewards. It’s being used to gate our progression artificially while we’re supposed to be excited about “turbo boosting” with uncapped crests and it feels bad.
Yea, I get that. But as I said, I understand why those rewards are poofing into thin air. If you think about it from a developer point of view, it makes sense. But from a player point of view, yea it sucks.