How much gear do you need?

I did something strange this weekend, transforming 50 emblems of frost from my priest into lesser emblems, to buy heirloom gear with them. It is not as if I already had full emblem of frost gear on my priest, so why would I "waste" my frost emblems like that? Because frankly I have enough gear for what I want to do, including a bit of raiding in ICC, and the minor improvements I could buy after grinding hundreds of emblems of frost aren't really worth it for me. I'd rather concentrate on leveling up my druid before Cataclysm arrives, and as I had only bought "feral" leather heirlooms for him, and now switched to healing / boomkin dual spec, a set of caster leather heirlooms was the better investment.

This continues a trend where I already spent many of the emblems I collected on other characters to buy the heirlooms for the future characters I want to play in Cataclysm: A goblin hunter and a worgen warlock. My other characters suffer even more than the priest from not really needing any more gear, as I don't raid with them. I am a casual raider, one raid per week is enough for me, so as I have four level 80 characters, the other three don't really need raiding gear. I got them all up to the sort of gear which makes running heroics already trivial enough, so what would be the point of equipping them even better?

I like 5-man dungeons, so I'm not stopping to play these characters just because I don't need any gear for them any more. Between the level 80 priest and paladin, and the druid now at level 63 and leveling through dungeons, I have three different healers, and it is interesting to see the differences in healing styles between them. Besides heirlooms, I also spend my emblems on off-spec gear. For example my paladin has nearly the same gearscore in retribution as he has in holy, in spite of rarely ever queueing up as a dps. Having a great healing gear isn't exactly helpful when you want to solo something, except for the priest, whose shadow spec works well enough with healing gear.

But I wonder how many people simply stop playing when they have all the gear they want. I would say World of Warcraft is in a period of declining player activity right now, and not just because it is summer and people prefer the beach to a computer. How about you? Is there still any gear in World of Warcraft you are actively collecting emblems for?