Quote Originally Posted by BlueMage View Post
How did everyone not know this was going to be the way of things when they said ARR would be a vertical gear based game like WoW?
I think the point of the OP is that they're growing in scale too fast. I'm not quite sure whether it's because of XIV's stat weights vs WoW's, but comparing what we see here with what was seen in vanilla WoW:

Tier 1 sets were ilevel 66 (in a game where the level cap was lv60)
Tier 2 sets were ilevel 76
Tier 3 sets were ilevel 92
Non-tier pieces could range from item level 60-63 as far as dungeon drops went.

WoW jumped 32 item levels between the level cap and the top gear in the game at that point in time (even then, not many saw tier 3 gear because the expansion came out afterwards, and the gear from said expansion easily made tier 3 gear obsolete). By comparison FFXIV has jumped 40 item levels between launch and the first content patch. Second content patch is making that a 65 item level jump.