We are not talking about quests here. You mentioned EVERY ITEM EVER DROPPED. Also Accounts does not equal characters. Also they would have to be tracking that since 2004 for US, 2005 for EU. I sincerely doubt they were caching that info somewhere all those years. Especially with new items added in each expansion. So even your thought/speculation was ridiculous.
With the new system they are going to be tracking APPEARANCES. They will store ONE appearance of a multitude of items with it. Not the whole bunch of items dropped since 2004-2005. Vastly less space.
if you pay attention to the news, you'll know ahead of time whether or not they will be removed before it goes live, so hold onto them for now and then if they are staying, pop them once legion goes live or do it before if they are nerfed. Simple
"Ever touched"? No, the system will apply only to bound items. It's easy to keep track of every item that a character (or account) is bound to, going forward, as well as all past quest rewards (because all quest completion is tracked). There are audit logs that might go back 30-90 days or perhaps even longer. The "undelete" feature requires some of that.
But it's no harder to keep track of every item that a character has ever touched.
We don't actually know what is in place now. However, "we" probably underestimate Blizzard's ability to construct a history of soulbound items. They could have been collecting that data through all of WoD and even MoP, for example, anticipating that a "wardrobe" system was coming, or just generally wanting to have that data available for some unspecified future use.
I've personally waffled on this one, but I think given the fact that they HAVE been fairly open about the garrison changes that they've made, I'm comfortable for now holding them in inventory until Legion. Or until they announce some major change where it makes more sense to open them immediately.
I can teach you how to play, but I can't fix stupid.
You can open them, vendor follower items, rings/trinkets/necks and duplicates sell materials, and group 12 items and mail them to on of your alts, this way you can open boxes, sell useful stuff and still keep gear "grouped".
I was opening about 1500 crates when I started to encounter more and more duplicates, where in 60 items i've received i got 10 new ones.
The latest talk on that suggests not.
The original statement on that was incomplete, as it missed out the relevance of the proficiency.
Any "relevant" items that the quest rewarded will be unlocked, when completed on a given character.
if you want to unlock the plate rewards from a quest, do it again with a plate-wearer.
Not really any different from what you must do now actually.
If you want to use a BoP quest reward for transmog you must get it on that character.
The primary difference is most items will then be available to other characters of the same proficiency instead of having to repeat it on every single one.
What I recall so far is that gold missions will be rewarding garrison resources instead of gold.
And that the legendary questline initially planned for removal could remain intact for the story, but obviously would not be rewarding the legendary ring any longer.
I have seen no information yet on what will happen to salvaging.
In the whole spirit of making Garrisons unprofitable, so people will continue to Legion, i speculate the amount and/or quality of items in the salvage yard boxes will be altered in the pre-patch event. Since loot is created when a container is opened, i also speculate that any salvage crate obtained before the pre-patch will also produce the new content, if opened after. I'd open them all before the prepatch, send all items with mail to an alt and open the mail after the prepatch launch, so to obtain the skins of the items from crates.
"In addition, you may now discover player items in Salvage." has been removed from the Salvage Yard tooltip.
I don't think we'll be getting any sort of weapons/armor anymore once the pre-patch hits. If this is true and not just a tooltip error/bug, then it looks like people who are hoarding crates will have to open them up before the pre-patch/xpac and stock them if they want to keep all of the appearances in Legion.
That makes sense--I mean, just because they're tinkering with the alpha version doesn't mean there wont be a little advanced warning before the pre-patch is suddenly sprung on us, especially since it wont even be a factor for months.
Since we're discussing transmog stuff anyway, I think this is a good time for a PSA. Theres a blue-quality world drop cape from Cata mobs called "Ritssyn's Ruminous Drape." that has a chance of coming from salvage crates. In the 'wild' it has a very low drop rate, and a pretty unique color/design that is red/orangy gold and very luxurious and royal looking. according to comments about it, back in the day it used to sell for 20k on the ah because it was a pretty good intel cloak. I managed to find a copy for my transmog for just like 800g, and a few days later another appeared on the AH.
My point is, unless you're comfortable with paying Far out the ass for it when it becomes ultra rare again, or love grinding cata mobs, I Really suggest if you find it, you hang onto one of those suckers. Link for convenience so you can see what it looks like.
http://www.wowhead.com/item=67131/ri...ruminous-drape
(and dont miss one of the craziest things about it is that the mob with the highest drop rate (4%) is POSIEDUS. Yes, the one people never see lol)
It's not worth saving crates. Just make a bank toon to hang onto any blue or purple BOEs and vendor all the green junk.
step 1 : save boxes
step 2 : wait till pre-patch hits PTR
step 3 : check PTR and see what changed
step 4 : profit
Now is the time to start saving the full set of 610 blues for each class, for transmog purposes.