changes to the game that would go hard

[BigCheez]

Pretty sure it's to deliberately slow gear progression and optimise subscription retention for as long as possible.

IDK, do you think gear progression is slow? I think it's fast compared to other MMOs that I've played.

It's also largely irrelevant. The crafted gear that you can buy within 10 minutes of a raid patch going live is enough to clear the hardest content that the majority of the playerbase even play. You don't even need tome/savage gear unless you're logging or running ultimate on release, which the majority aren't.

I think what makes gear progression feel the most hollow and pointless to me is the fact that the only real progression is savage > ultimate, with there being no real reward in terms of power progression for clearing ultimate. Maybe it would feel better if we needed gear from extreme to clear savage and then took our savage/tome gear to ultimate, for example?

I think I would prefer if crafted gear was the same ilvl as the previous BiS set, so it could be used to catch up when a new patch released if someone had taken a break and needed to get up to speed, then you had to farm extreme for a few pieces to be ready for savage, then you farm savage/tomes to gear up for ultimate. Some unique effects like WoW's tier bonuses would also make things a bit more interesting.