Exactly, its the stat jumps that were the issue.
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Item level has nothing to do with your character level. Item level is a quick way to gauge your characters power. There is no reason it has to be the same as your character level since they aren't the same thing.
The only thing that kinda annoys me is the rapid growth of ilvl both through 51-60 and during lvl60. Previously, you'd get gear upgrades approximately every five levels or so (sometimes on odd levels like 23 and 32 and such), and every other patch increased the ilvl cap with 20 ilvls (so one brought i90, the next didn't raise the cap but just added an i80 tier, and then the next brought i110 etc).
Now... not only do we get new dungeon gear every other level, there's crafted gear in between those. So basically, new gear every level, each raising the ilvl 3-5 steps. I get that, since they started at i115 and didn't want to have people running around in their Dreadwyrm or upgraded Soldiery gear until level 60. But now... every other patch raises the ilvl cap with... 30 ilvls, I think. Which isn't really that much of an increase, but it kinda adds up ^^;
(I also think they could easily have had gear drops in ARF being pink/aetherial i150, but that's another thing altogether.)
I dare say you've answered your own question. If we wanted to play WoW, we'd play WoW. Square-Enix doesn't need to copy everything they do.
Those saying there wasn't much of a stat jump haven't been paying attention in class. A lot of my stats are essentially double that of my level 50 item level 130 set pre-Heavensward. My HP is slightly above that (from 6k to 14k). Granted it may not be quite as dramatic as WoW, but that's still a very significant increase overall in a relatively short time.
My biggest issue with the game isn't the fact that we have ever-increasing item levels, but rather that there's no point to having anything except those high item levels. Anything below is sub-par and rendered obsolete when the next patch arrives. This 'throwaway' gameplay design means no one really wants to do older dungeons and means despite the length of the game, your gameplay is confined to a narrow band.
This issue is compounded when you consider how much easier it is to get this older equipment with each major update. This means the lower item level characters catch up fast, and make the older dungeons and content obsolete that much faster. Anyone who takes off their rose-tinted glasses for more than 2 seconds can see this is a bad state of affairs for any game, and something needs to be done sooner rather than later.
I already know some of my friends who have left the game because they were bored of the same treadmill. Gameplay for an MMO should be more dynamic, not a linear experience, but they've chosen to ignore the lessons learned by FFXI (still going to this day) and focus on the other side of the pond. SE should stick to what they do best and deliver an experience with as much horizontal gameplay as there is vertical. At present, this is looking like the FF13 of MMO's. Flashy and interesting, but exceptionally linear.
So, will be increasing the max ilevel every 12 months instead of every 6 months a solution?
Wouldn't be here a complaining thread if the gears in the next alex raid have the same amount of the main stats like the last Alex raid?
I think the HP jumps were mostly, at least in the beginning, because of PvP. For some god forsaken reason Blizz had to keep all skills identical in PvP and PvE, because it would be "too confusing and weird" or something, so the players had to have huge HP pools to survive the increased damage (the good old times of Hunters killing cloth users with two hits before they could even react). It didn't also help that the leveling gear of each expansion had double the stats of the previous best gear.
The stat-squish of Draenor had an interesting side effect, though. You now have like a +10000% damage done buff in old content to keep it soloable. My friend says he did over a million on an old raid boss and then 10k on some random mobs in a leveling area with the same skill.