I recently got my Goblin to 120, eager to get his hertiage armor. Of course, even with all the catch-up gear from Nazjatar and the Black Empire invasions, he struggled a lot (fighting Gallywix at the end of the goblin heritage armor quest was a real pain) because his Heart of Azeroth was so profoundly far behind.
Ultimately, I do hope that Shadowlands will keep things from getting so ridiculous - the degree to which one must grind to get anywhere near caught up makes the catch-up gear kind of laughable... or so I thought.
Mind you, there's still a lot of reason to catch up. My Lightforged Draenei Paladin (yes, I have two 120 Paladins, don't judge me) also recently hit 120, and he's been carrying a 385 two-handed mace that is corrupted - it's by far his best weapon, but he's also very far away from being able to cleanse it, so the corruption is just something he has to deal with.
However, I discovered today that there's one very important catch-up: if you hit 120, make sure to do the quests to unlock Nazjatar, because doing so will grant you the quests to get the Heart Forge opened up, and thus unlock essences.
And, as it turns out, this also bumps your Heart of Azeroth up to level 50 instantly.
What this means is that the traits on all the Azerite gear you've gotten as a catch-up will suddenly be available, and in addition, the item level boost to your necklace might help you get better gear out of world quests.
I'd have appreciated it if, along with the way to buy essences that they added recently, they also made the Heart Forge unlock for free. If you hit 120, you should get a quick quest in which you just talk to MOTHER and she opens it up and boosts your HoA to level 50, rather than forcing you to go to Nazjatar, a zone that is basically irrelevant now (I do feel a little bad I never checked out the Eternal Palace raid, but I imagine queues for that are abysmal now, pun unintended.)
I'd also appreciate if the quests to unlock the Black Empire invasions and the Legendary cloak and the Horrific Visions was also streamlined - yes, you can skip parts of it, but if you're like me and you have a bunch of alts (see name of blog,) the excitement of the story of it is a little less compelling the eighth time around.
However, more than this, my hope is that in Shadowlands, catch-up gear will feel like enough to get you... you know, caught up. The whole point of this stuff, after all, is to let a new character jump into the action not far behind your main - sure, you'll still need to work to get your gear in tip-top shape (hence why I think it's fine for Black Empire gear to be about 35 item levels behind Normal Ny'alotha gear, world boss gear, and the stuff you get for a full Horrific Vision clear) but the manner in which you just don't seem functional as a character unless you do multiple long quest chains (the 8.3 stuff in particular, which I haven't done yet on my Lightforged) doesn't feel really great.
We've been told that, while mains will have to wait until level 60 to choose a Covenant and start progressing through that system, alts will get to choose while they level. That is cool, but I wonder how things will look in 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, and so forth.
I'd love to see progression systems simplified - gear is a fine progression system, and worked on its own for a long time. While Artifact Weapons were really cool, I always felt that it was the flavor of them, rather than the progression system, that made them worthwhile. If we are going to see other progression systems (like Soulbinds in Shadowlands,) let's make sure there are easy catch-up mechanisms for that as well as for gear so that players can feel like they can jump into the action if they level up an alt late in the expansion.
I'd love, for example, if I choose to level my Druid to 120 (currently, the likely retired Night Elf and the new Kul Tiran are both sitting at 110,) I could just pop over to the Heart Chamber and get all caught up and immediately go to Uldum to start working on Black Empire invasions, rather than going through three separate length quest chains to unlock essences, the cloak, and Nazjatar.
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