I generally support this, though I doubt it will happen.

If it doesn't happen though, SE needs to let us upgrade more equipment to ilevel. Preferably at least 117 so our choices aren't "get one shot" and "wear hideous sparks gear that has no job specific/role specific boosts"

Frankly I'm ticked off that sparks gear was made to be a higher item level than so many better sets that took more effort to obtain. I'm also ticked off that SE has done such a terrible job at ensuring all jobs scale equally and have proper gear to wear. Take my BRD. The best overall set for it, hands down, is still AF3. Out of all of the items I mainly use for it only 2 or 3 are ilevel. None of the sparks gear has anything useful for bard on it. None of the bayld gear has stats useful to the core purpose of bard. For crikes sake, I'm often sporting a level 72 shirt so that my songs don't take 10 ages to cast. In the olden days without stat vomit, that wasn't such a big deal. Now I am one-shot bait. And lol @ relic and AF - in bard's case the majority of it is completely pointless. It's like SE doesn't even know what stats a bard is looking for. Yeah -PDT is nice, but it's not going to be the first thing I'm seeking for.

I know the reality - and it's this - there is no way the devs are going to be able to provide enough situational gear to replace all the gear we have been using for years, in some cases more than a decade. The result is, jobs with non-standard needs get totally shafted by ilevel. This has been entirely clear with pets. Frankly these jobs have always had a hard time, it took a decade for the array of gear choices we have to get put together - and now using that gear is a huge disadvantage mechanically, and we have nothing with ilevel to replace it.

Also I just can't express enough how much I hate my pet spawning being based on ilevel. I'd much prefer we get more gear with affinity on it, and then be able to remove it after spawning to use whatever weapon we want without dropping the HP of our pet.