With the upcoming changes of the feral weapon and ac itemisation relics are probably one of the greatest oddities in terms of itemisation and lootdistribution left in WoW.

In my opionion there a several issues that are partially interconnected. First of all, relics are now probably the only items that are only interesting for one or two players in a 25 man raid, at least for their main spec. This is due to the nature of most relics which boost or trigger from only one spell. Especially the old relic classes (I'm not sure about DKs) suffer from this. Furthermore there is no real progression most of the time for healers at least since they will choose a relic that compliments with the spell they use most often for the specific encounter. For DPS this is a lesser problem because most relics will trigger or boost a spell that is already part of a rotation/style priority and will be active anyway. So DPS specs generally can compare which relic provides more DPS and chose accordingly. It also makes item progression a lot easier.
Tanks seem to fall somewhere between DPS and healing, still relying on the situational use of relics. I'm not so sure about this since I haven't played a relic bearing tank class yet.

Nevertheless this creates a dilemma with two extreme possible solutions: either we are getting swamped with special relics which bloat the loot tables and end up in a lot of crystals. Or we get only a very loose if any kind of progression for this slot whichs puts relic users generally in a disadvantage to wand and ranged weapon users (though tanking guns/bows suffer from a similar dilemma), being niche items for warrior tanks only). A further possibility is to put a wide range of relics on the different token vendors. At this time blizzard has shied away from going down this way, having only one relic per spec on the badge vendor (whose value may vary) and one per spec on the Venture Coins vendor in Grizzly Hills (again, here the value differs, for example the enhancement totem is mediocre whereas the resto totem is pretty good and a definitive upgrade from pre wotlk totems).

Another problem at least from my point of view are the new arena totems. In BC we had arena relics that offered pvp specific buffs (most often resilience proccs) however the new deadly relics often end up as best in slot, at least for some specs / situations. This creates a very similar dilemma a lot of pve oriented players suffered from during S2 and S3 when most pvp weapons were very powerful (I'm not including S4 due to rather prohibitive rating requirements). I do not want to open the can of worms that is the discussion whether mixing pvp and pve is inherently good or bad, just to point out possible problems.

At least for my raid I can say that relics will be one of the first items we will or actually do already shard in Naxx or give away to offspecs who will probably never use it anyway. Altogether I feel that with pretty few touches we can see a great deal of improvement here, especially if we look at Naxx25 where 10 relics are crowding the loot tables.

Therefore my proposals would be

1. either introduce a new kind of token similar to the settoken dropping in raids which can be exchanged for a relic of any class/spec.
2. alternatively at least allow for more diversity by creating a larger pool of relics for the emblem of heroism vendor.

At least I'd think that this would benefit raids as a whole (less shards - I know how many raids cursed that protection paladin libram dropping from Sharaz for 3 weeks straight) and relic users (better item progression, less randomness and necessity to farm old content [e.g. Kara relics]) alike.

I think putting relics on a tier type item is really the way to go. especially now when you have 4 different classes who can use them. Speaking from experience I can tell you that all of the paladin's librams from Naxx25 are at best side grades and at worst down grades. As a paladin tank the only librams I actually took are the ret/holy ones while not even sniffing the prot one (And I only took the others cause the actual paladins who it designed for didn't even wanted it).

Relics need some kind of an overhaul, there should be either more options of relics overall or just make then like thrown/range/wands and get it over with. They're just lacking at this point.

Healing Plate is in a similar situation. There's only one class/spec that uses healing plate, but it needs 8 slots worth to function.

There are 12 relics that drop in Naxxramas, one for each role of each class that uses them. There are 8 pieces of healing plate. That's 33% less than relics though still a lot considering that the closest "competitors" (caster mail/leather) are useful (though not always optimal) for at least two specs.

For Relics I can easily see Blizzard either offloading them entire on badges or switching to a token system (one per class I would think), but Healing plate is trickier.

Loot distribution itself is just flawed atm. To give an example, the last two naxx 10s i did, i saw one cloth item drop in each, and from our last naxx 25, we saw 3 cloth drops the entire night. It seems, atm at least, that plate items are aobut 50-60% of loot tables.

Yea, we've been noticing a lot of Plate drops in our runs as well. I know it's the whole RNG thing, but everyone seems to be assuming that Blizz is trying to buff DKs.

Really, it's just that Plate is only wearable by three classes, and once you see the drops twice, you never need to see them again. So when Plate drops, it's ALWAYS noticed. If there's no Shammy, a Pally can take Mail gear for an offset. Leather can go to a DK or Warrior too. Anything that's not Plate will usually get picked up.

Edit: Oh, yea, Relics. I've never seen any sort of balance in iLvl on Relics...I'm not even sure how it would be calculated. I do like the effect of some of them - they're really another form of Glyphs, in a way. But there is a clear unbalance, and more often than not, the ones that drop in instances are inferior to the Badge ones anyway. Token system is definitely the way to go with this.

I agree that a token system would work best. For 25-mans, they could be class specific (could go either way here in my opinion), but I do think they should be universal relic slot tokens in 10 mans, simply because there's no guarantee at all that you'll have, for example, a DK in your raid. In 25-mans, that's less of an issue.

The option to add them to an Emblem vendor would be tricky, for a large number of reasons. Doable, but tricky. One problem that relic users have, as hybrids by definition, is a seemingly endless amount of items to spend tokens on. Adding more at each tier, even if they're cheap, just serves to confound the problem, unless you add wands/throwing weapons/whatever to give the other classes something to buy, too. (And what would you do for hunters? There's always the option of a low-dps but high-ilvl statstick for them, but I'm sure you'd hear a lot of crying.) Lots of other issues, too--better, in my opinion, to stick with a tier-style token system.

"I wish Blizzard would...." isn't a good thread right now.