Currently you can buy gear for certain slots at special vendors in your factions’ capital city in Ashran. They cost Apexis crystals and are upgradable for another huge crystal cost. You didn’t know about them? No problem, they are way overpriced and you will probably never farm the crystals to buy one.
Let’s look at an example, the head slot:
Base item: Item Level 630 – 5000 Apexis crystals
First upgrade: Item Level 645 – 11500 Apexis crystals
Second upgrade: Item Level 655 – 20000 Apexis crystals
Third upgrade: Item Level 670 – 20000 Apexis crystals
So we are looking at 56500 Apexis crystals for one (1!) item at item level 670. That is insane.
Now if we assume that you do the Apexis daily every day, which gets you either 800 or 1000 crystals and one follower mission that grants 600 Apexis per day, it takes you around 35 days for ONE (1!) item.
My suggestion is to just drop one of the upgrade steps and cut down the Apexis cost substantially. Also add a new item to the vendors that let’s you reroll the secondary stats of those items because currently they all have suboptimal stats for almost every spec. I know a lot of people in World of Warcraft and none of them even considered ever buying one of those items, be it for their main characters or just lousy alts.
Those suggested changes should make gear from Apexis crystals a valuable choice when gearing up new characters, so you can fill up slots that you were just unlucky to get loot for, as it was probably planned to be. Also they would be a valuable choice compared to crafted gear.
