I have the feeling people are underestimating the usefulness of the Plog and Brigand Soul Shield.
Brigand are really uncommon though, unless you sit in beastbog for hours farming the slow spawning bosses. Plog is pretty easy to get some pieces I guess and is fairly solid on some slots.
That said, it's still not quite as good as running dungeons and getting up to 3-4soulshield per 15-20mins, considering most soulshields require to roll the right secondary out of 3, and the higher rolls out of 3 to be perfect/near perfect.
On the question of what to feed to upgrade, for accs you can use blue accessories, the 46+ ones, they give good progress for about 40s each or whatever it was. Just search the market for blue only, 46-50, accessories, and buy whatever's the cheapest, generally 1-5s. If you have a ton of warrior tokens you don't need(as in, you already upgraded all your gear past them), you can buy enlightned blue accs from the vendor in mushin tower, they're the same but cheaper to upgrade with, although not sure if they work well past awakened oathbreaker.
For the weapon, the best was elder dragon elements during the trove event, not sure about current prices, probably still that for a little bit. You want to compare the price of those elements versus the price of transmuting(which is basically 5soulstones and 50s). If dragon elements are cheaper, buy those, otherwise transmute. If you don't have enough transmute powders things, just buy white weapons from the vendors in silverfrost, they give like 4 each. Obviously that increases the price of the elements by a few silvers. About 1/10 of the time when transmuting you'll get a dragon element also, which if it's more expensive than a normal element, you can sell for a small profit.
