Is anyone else worried SE has backed themselves into a corner?

[Dark-Saviour]

Eh... I've always thought of iLvl as an additional means of progression as rather dull (and somewhat convoluted) personally. If you need to stretch progression out further, just let items fall where they may and extend normal levels (or add alternative ways to boost stats). If you want to go with an official system of item levels, then make skills unlock via quests and get rid of the standard leveling bit entirely. I'm not a huge fan of the latter, but eh; it would keep things somewhat sensible...

ilvl has always and will always exist as long as there are stats on gear of any kind. It hasn't always been visible, but it has always been present. Even if you couldn't see it, and they added new fun and exciting stats to gear, each piece of equipment would still have an item level dictating how it is budgeted.

If you mean an intrinsically-defined (though possibly hidden) iLvl, that hasn't always been the case, nor does it need to be.
Items can have stats specifically associated with them on a one-by-one basis; you don't need to have them divied up into defined tiers which all balance to an exact standard within.

[Skies]

If you mean an intrinsically-defined (though possibly hidden) iLvl, that hasn't always been the case, nor does it need to be.
Items can have stats specifically associated with them on a one-by-one basis; you don't need to have them divied up into defined tiers which all balance to an exact standard within.

One item is comparable to another in some manner.
One item will be better than another. One item will be as good as another. One item will be worse than another.
There are certain guidelines the devteam has to follow to ensure where an item is in relation to another, such as "10 Crit is as good as 20 Skill Speed".

Item Level itself might have not existed mechanically at any point, but the development guidelines do. Thus Item Level exists at it's most base form, the guidelines on how to compare an item to another.
Sometimes the developers fumble, yes, and make an item horrendously overpowered or underpowered by misjudging the intricacies of their own game, so a system of hard-locked formulae that dictates how much of something an item can have has been created, and it was named Item Level

[Dark-Saviour]

One item is comparable to another in some manner.
One item will be better than another. One item will be as good as another. One item will be worse than another.
There are certain guidelines the devteam has to follow to ensure where an item is in relation to another, such as "10 Crit is as good as 20 Skill Speed".

Hence why I said intrinsically-defined. A general, "thiis item is stronger than that one" is distinctly different to everything falling into a defined 'tier' that dictates its stats.


And even then, items don't have to be universally comparable. Look at PSO:
Bringer's Rifle - Special Attack fourths HP.
Anti-Android Rifle - Special Attack paralyzes enemies.
Heaven Punisher - For half of the day (based on internet beat-time), the special attack rains giant purple death lasers on up to (IIRC) 12 enemies.
Frozen Shooter - Freezes Things.
Yasminkov 9000v - Strong raw attack, but shotgun-level range.

To compare the weapons in terms of raw stats would be folly. The item level there was essentially "SPECIAL WEAPON" vs. "Not". There were some exceptions to the rule and there were some special weapons that were clearly more useful than other, but it wasn't a clear-cut X = Y > Z or anything like that.

And it. was. good.