Originally Posted by
Chillside
ahmm, you mentioned Cata and i can't help but go there, i was #1 on my realm during dragon soul and i remember everything very clearly, noone had any disadvantages, except the limitations of their own, everyone had 95% the same gear, including offpieces, because there was no such thing as titanforging, everyone in the top had a legendary staff, everyone had cunning and everyone had insignia, obviously with 4 set bonus ( which entire SP was based on in that particular raid tier ) and as i said 95% similar offpieces. You weren't in top 10? or 20 or whatever, it simply meant that you weren't good enough
Now, we have completely different situation, azerite pieces are more or less the same for everybody, but one guy SP has 7 gem slots in his gear, 2nd one has none, 1st guy has TF conch, 2nd guy has BoD mythic trinkets, which are good.. but Incandescent Sliver is kinda pointless and loses all its value in most fights, so what you end up with is one sp randomly getting his conch proc ( just ignore chorus stacks for a second ), gets a crit on his next sw:void, he stays on vf much longer because most of us use whispers of the damned, you add those conch proc aftermaths at the end and 1st guy ends up having much more vb cast count, that's not a quickest way to check anything, that's literally 1st guy being lucky enough with his shrine farm prior to all of it.
Gear was not always the most important thing, because as i already said after certain point everybody had the same endgame gear and it was impossible for your character to get any stronger untill next expansion