Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
I've had tiers where I couldn't raid, either before I started raiding but was still interested in playing my job to the best I could, or either between some savage tiers where life didn't agree with raiding much. I never wanted to actually have access to BiS as much as savage players do get access to it immediately, or at least not as fast or within the same savage patch drop than them, but I sure would have appreciated alternatives to tome gear, instead of dealing with really shitty tome gear giving me speed when I definitely didn't want any for example. Even when you actually are interested into going deeper into playing your job properly and optimizing, the game itemization tells you a big fat nope because you're not running savage, which is frankly ludicrous. But I guess that'd be asking for the moon in a game with one of the worst itemization systems on the market...

Tome gear isn't even augmentable until the patch after savage patches for casual players so I'm not even sure why savage players would have to feel threatened by some other alternatives to basic tome gear during savage patches. Or by anything that drops in odd patches, after savage is done for most.
I am someone who personally wants tomes and savage unlocked on the odd patches, so as for getting different options for max ilvl gear in the patch after savage I am for it. However, playing devils advocate here, the simple answer to your issue is max ilvl doesn't matter. As a non-raider, the odd patch you have access to alliance raid gear, tome/augmented tome gear, crafted/augmented crafted gear, and normal raid gear that is all at the minimum ilvl or better for the current 4th turn. So you already have multiple options for your issue without needing anything else.