In 3.0, is Level 51 ItemLevel 60? Or is Level 51 ItemLevel 150?

Second option seems more likely to me. It is sad that it would kill a lot of content and also it will make our progress useless but that is how it usually go with treadmill mmos.

Somehow i smell a change in gear upgrading... i just dont know if they add it on 3.0 or later...
With the end of coil and crystal tower, they will try something new.

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Originally Posted by Atomnium

I see what you are trying there and I won't bait to the obvious "FFXI-hate" exemple :p

The main advantage of a customizable gear armory is to make them useful on the long road, it doesn't mean to have xx more different sets to gather but more likely having the possibility to be picky with your own decisions (gear wise), piece of gears that you can carry through your game playlife without discarding them every 3 months as a pure "glamour" or "desynthesize" gears trashs.

It would make the game more interesting by allowing the player to focus less on gears grind every new major patch and more on midcore / raiders contents that the game can offer to you... Trust me, it's very worthy, even more when you are able to see an unexpected 2 minutes and 30 secondes of FMV during an ending cutscene revealing to you the meaning of 2.0, the truth behind the crash of dalamud while answering many storyline questions, priceless moments.

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Sooo one set that you never replace? Random pieces that are good for only spesific fights? There's something about horizontal progression that I just can't wrap my head around. How does it even work?

These threads make me think that maybe Squenix should've just kept the ilvl hidden and a lot more people would be happier, I think.

I also would not put it past them to make all of the expansion gear to start with 200. This way is becomes very easy to tell the difference between the old gear and the new.

Im going to bet it loosely follows what WoW is doing:
LV51 gear might be somewhere around il100, so that SCoil/FCoil gear wont be immediately outdated, but will be during the leveling process.
At lv cap it can be around 150ish for normal gear.

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Originally Posted by Waliel

Sooo one set that you never replace? Random pieces that are good for only spesific fights? There's something about horizontal progression that I just can't wrap my head around. How does it even work?

These threads make me think that maybe Squenix should've just kept the ilvl hidden and a lot more people would be happier, I think.

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It seems that FFXIV is your first mmo then, all fine friend :p I'm going to explain it a bit deeper then :). There is an incredible amount of possibilities to make the gears armory working into an horizontal progression design like :

- adding partial and full set bonus on "named-gears" with skills/stats/jobs stats/etc,
- being able to improve your best equipements with specific enhancements (in this case it could be materia but why not something else too !),
- re-using your previous piece of gear into a specific craft as a base material to make it stronger or more specific (stats wise) into something you are aiming for,
- storyline achievement gears that are just "too good" to replace, like a ring or an earring (is Rajas Ring ring like a bell for everyone? xD),
- legendary weapons questline, no, I'm not talking about our current relic weapons :p, they actually missed the opportunity by making them a "catch-up weapon" before getting the last "top tier endgame weapon", it's lame, very bad design to me x.x, last coil shouldn't drop them directly, it could be mandatory to "beat the hardest boss" to improve them but nothing related to the system we have now.
- mixing endgame crafting material drops with non-tradable items in order to craft powerful equipements,
- funny armory with weird, bizzare, odd, untypical stats like enhancing your chocobo exp gain rate or your "skills" while watering your personal garden plants xD

To be honest, this is just a couple of exemples of what we could get, there is no limits to a game designer / developer creativity.
That's why the current gear treadmill is looking a bit pathetic to say the least :x, new major update : player n°9255478 will replace his full armory ilevel 110 for ilevel 130, the differences? more base stats number and that's it, see you in 3-4 months to do it again.

I doubt they will do a horizontal system as new players will find it confusing. I also personally don't want one.

I'm sure that they could add some kind of horizontal system that new players would not find confusing. The set bonus suggestion is certainly something that could add great potential to the gear system, while not adding a large amount of confusion for players. A system like this has worked in WoW for many years. No reason to think that a similar system would not work in this game as well.

Even if SE sticks with vertical progression, there's still room for more creativity than what we have now. What about a "Reduces cooldown of Hallowed Ground by 1 min" ability or "Reduces TP of Savage Blade by 10"? I know this might be hard to balance but it would make gear a lot more flavorful and interesting.

Back to OP's original question, I don't know. I'm also really curious to see what happens to our old gear with a new max level. I don't really care if the old stuff becomes obsolete. That basically happens every other patch anyway and getting new gear is part of the fun. I hope there will still be a point to relic though even if it is just a final form that makes a great vanity piece.