Suggestion: A way to make old raid content relevant again

When the newest raid is released, the old gear is no longer useful and the content tied to it also isn't needed. There's also a lot of demand for recolored versions of the old raid gear for glamour, so here's my idea.

The newest raid gear, let's use the current levels as an example, comes out at 210. Now some of the stats on those pieces aren't good or are sometimes flat out terrible but we have very few options for gear since iLevel trumps (basically) all. So you either take a piece with better primary stats from the higher iLevel, or better secondary stats with a lower iLevel.

So my suggestion is that you get the newest raid gear from the newest raids and spiritbond it. Once the gear is spritbonded then it can be converted into an iLevel augmentation. For example, Alex Savage gear will become an「Augmentation: iLevel 210」. Now you can use this augmentation to upgrade old raid gear to that iLevel. So if you like the stats of the High Allagan armour, using the augmentation allows you to upgrade it to an equivalent i210 piece.

For example, the i210 Gordian Body for BRD has Dex-101 Vit-107 SS-94 Det-63, but let's say I would prefer more critical-hit rate. I would do the following steps:
1. Get the Gordian body from A4S (bear with me non-raiders)
2. Spiritbond it
3. Convert it to an 「Augmentation: iLevel 210 (Body)」
4. Farm turn 9 for the High Allagan Coat of Aiming
5. Trade both into an NPC where I would receive an Augmented High Allagan of Aiming (i210)

The stats on the augmented piece would follow the weightings of the original piece with its stats increased from Dex-39 Vit-46 Crit-41 SS-29 to Dex-101 Vit-107 Crit-94 SS-63 to match the main and secondary stat levels of an i210 piece.

Now people are probably saying 'What about us non-raiders?', well you could do the same with tome gear, except first you would need to upgrade it from the i200 to i210 piece with other tokens as we are now, spiritbond the upgraded piece, then augment it. You could continue to upgrade the same piece of augmented armour using the flexible-stat equipment feature that they used in Diadem, or force people to go back and get a new piece to augment every time new raids are released.

If you wanted to make it more challenging to do, or encourage more people using duty finder on old raids, you could make the content also give you a catalyst which only drops in a level-sync raid so you can’t just blow through the content with your level 60 characters. It would also keep the content challenging after the character level increases again (probably) in the next expansion.

Just as a note, I’m not sure how materia would fit into this, depends a lot on how they implement it. Maybe we’ll find out more during the live letter. In the meantime, what do you think? (Did I explain myself well enough?) And questions?

Cool idea, but if old gear could have its stats increased to match whatever the latest Ilevel cap is, why increase the Ilevel cap at all? Either way, all end game gear would be at the same Ilevel eventually, but your system would call for more work to get some of it there. It seems that if the Developers wanted all end game gear to stay practical they would just adopt a full horizontal progression.

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Originally Posted by WellFooled

why increase the Ilevel cap at all?

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If you don't increase the ilevel, people would get the one best gear and not have a need to do new content. My suggestion keeps people going back to old content but still requiring they do new content to get the highest level.

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Originally Posted by Aodh

If you don't increase the ilevel, people would get the one best gear and not have a need to do new content. My suggestion keeps people going back to old content but still requiring they do new content to get the highest level.

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An excellent point.

Still, I think I would find it less fun to do new content to keep my old gear relevant than to do new content in order to get new gear. I think it would be frustrating to have to run a new raid, get the latest and greatest chest piece (one that I might want to hold onto for glamours btw) and then be forced to destroy it to keep my outdated chestpiece's stats up to code.

This could result in a situation where I'm raiding for an entire expansion just to keep bumping up the stats on a chestpiece I've been using for years, losing out on glamours the whole way because I want to maintain BiS.

Nice basic idea, but the work would be to much for me personally.

And yet - old raid content wont get revitalised... if some needs such an item (at the moment for glamour) it goes like this right now.

Sign um 7 peeps, go in undersized, let your cat roll over the keyboard, wish for the right piece, if not, catroll again.