I spent some time yesterday analyzing AWC and murlock (io website) to check what are gearing trends and came up with the sad conclusion. If you don’t want to be behind you have to play M+.
Some might say “How? I play Shadow Priest. It doesn’t benefit from the rings or weapon. I don’t have to.” Theoretically yes but in practice no. Why is that? Conquest gear has too much versatility on it and for example as Shadow Priest who indeed doesn’t benefit from these PvE rings (because of no fire damage source) you still would like to cut Versatility and improve Haste in order to optimize your damage in corelation with survivability. There are two options to do it. One is PvE - do some M+ 8 and drop some off pieces or ring that has more Haste than versa or craft your items. A
nd here is the problem. Blizzard indeed tried to help us with the shorter season. We have more conquest points and even bullions to target certain raid pieces but they forgot about crafts. Many specs used to use 2 set for example and then use as many crafts as possible to compensate and then they became truely viable and competitive. Good example is R Shaman. And here comes the main source of it. While we get more PvP gear and even Raid gear easily Spark distribution is similar to regular season (half a Spark per week). You can take half from the Vault but it’s still too slow. Looking at SP again. Wizk on AWC plays crafted Chest, Bracer, Belt, Boots and one M+ ring with 70/30 ration of Haste toward Versa. Technically you can play crafted Neck and two Rings to achieve the same result but… it’s 7 crafts. When will you have it from now? In 9 weeks. While others bought 3 useful bullion items and are technically fully bis geared with optimized stats you’re waiting for Sparks. You can buy conquest pieces in a meanwhile but then you’ll have to buy enchants again. So what can you do. Play M+ of course. There is nice one hand and offhand for bullions for SP with more Haste so you have some compensation here. Maybe you will make some 8+ dungs and drop some other offpieces from the Vault. Sadly then it’s RNG.
So what do I thing should happen? Blizzard should speed up the Spark distribution. They should drop 2 per week from now or even more. I would go even further and uncap them when the boxes will be released. Then we have it easier and kinda problem solved.
Before someone says it. I know that there are players who are so good on their specs that they can probably be top in the ladder even with only conquest gear not giving a precog about it (probably you Veetea) but I still would love it addressed. You would probably enjoy having more crafted pieces available atm as well. So please guys plus this up and maybe something happens.