Gear Ilvl's idea moving forward.

Yoshi P spoke in the recent live letter about Ilvl's being a bit messed up, and how the raid doesn't reward the playerbase correctly. First of all I wholeheartedly agree that the Raid should reward the best gear, it should only be a 10 ilvl gap (else the raid becomes difficult to balance) but it should always be the best gear, the biggest drawback with that though is suddenly the best in slot becomes purely raid gear and there is no horizontal options to mix and match.

I wanted to put forward my idea to make raiding be the only way to obtain the best gear of each patch cycle but give a higher allotment of choice without the creation of new content.

Please note I haven't gone through this idea properly and from a different perspective it might just sound ridiculous so apologies if that is the case.

So onto the idea I shall use current Ilvls as examples. First up I believe the gear levels should be set up as;

165 x.0 Dungeons

180 Diadem (random stats)

190 / Base Tome Gear / x.1 dungeons / Alex Normal

200 24 man gear / Upgraded Tome Gear / Upgraded Alex Normal

210 Raid Gear

215 Raid Weapon

Now to create the element of choice and a more horizontal method of gearing my idea would have all these items be given the ability to get to 210. This would be achieved by the content dropping or handing out (weekly) upgrade items for the tier below.

So by running diadem you can upgrade your dungeon gear to 180, then that same gear can be upgraded to 190 by running the Alex Normal. Basically every item from the patch can become bis, but to get the best items you have to complete the raid, as that would be only way to access the ability to upgrade items from 200 to 210. This would make all content relevant even to raiders and should create different methods of gearing up.

The gear appearence wouldn't have to change but all stats would improve as it was upgrade so as it hit's 210 it is on par with the raid gear. Weapons would be none improvable or would need a lot more tokens to upgrade, and every x.2 patch the cycle would start a new, so you can't just keep one piece of gear throughout your entire ffxiv career.

The upgraded gear is keeping in line with current gearing, these items the appearance changes as you upgrade them (or the ability to dye) and use different tokens. The unupgraded version would only be able to be upgraded with the standard tokens rather than the ones I'm proposing.

Any feedback on this? Am I just talking out of my arse or does this have credibility as an idea. The numbers provided were just a rough idea and looking back I realise they aren't great but it's more the basic idea I'm trying to get across.