What happens to our iLevels?

[LineageRazor]

Can we please stop talking about WoW?

We could, but it wouldn't be a good idea. Yoshi P has admitted to drawing a lot of his inspiration from WoW. It is very appropriate to this thread to examine how things were done in WoW as a possible outcome for the expansion. Like it or not, however Yoshi P decides to implement gear progression on expansion release, WoW will probably have influenced that decision in one way or another. We can only hope that care is taken to take only the good ideas from WoW, not the bad - and WoW DID have some good ideas.

One thing I'm curious about is how gear progression will be handled for people who do NOT get the expansion. It may seem odd to consider, but Heavensward IS optional content. People without the expansion may not be able to access the new dungeons or raids, but they will very likely be interested in improving gear past ilvl 130/135 to make it easier to handle OLD content, like Coils or Ex Primals. Perhaps there will be new Tomestone gear for these people to acquire? It's also possible that new content will eventually be added for ARR Vanilla that requires more potent gear; just because we've got an expansion now doesn't mean that they'll never upgrade the base game ever again...

[Felis]

One thing I'm curious about is how gear progression will be handled for people who do NOT get the expansion. It may seem odd to consider, but Heavensward IS optional content. People without the expansion may not be able to access the new dungeons or raids, but they will very likely be interested in improving gear past ilvl 130/135 to make it easier to handle OLD content, like Coils or Ex Primals. Perhaps there will be new Tomestone gear for these people to acquire? It's also possible that new content will eventually be added for ARR Vanilla that requires more potent gear; just because we've got an expansion now doesn't mean that they'll never upgrade the base game ever again...

New crafted gears from market board, I think
To farm the new tomestones for the new tomestone gears the character will need a DoM/DoW class/job at lv 60.

[KisaiTenshi]

We could, but it wouldn't be a good idea. Yoshi P has admitted to drawing a lot of his inspiration from WoW.

I'd like to see a source for that... however...
Just because WoW did something, doesn't mean it worked well over there, or will work here.

In terms of how most RPG's scale, they have unchecked powercreep, unlike FFXIV which has levelsync to counter that. Now consider that levelsync is 110, and levelsync is presumed to be 50 for all existing 50's. Any new V3.0 gear is not going to give you any advantage in the pre V3.0 content. If you want to beat FCoB, you'd be better off with the level 50, ilevel 135 gear, not level 51 gear at ilevel 110. Get the picture? At this point in time, It's safe to assume that there would be levelsync to 50, but not ilevel sync.

Level-sync syncs the PLAYER's stats to that level. ilevel sync, affects the equipped gear's stats. It essentially "caps" the maximum values. In some cases, as the PvP people have discovered, being synced is actually worse than wearing gear that doesn't need to be synced. So whenever you have high level gear in a low level dungeon, it's your stats that have been nerfed, and by extension the gear, since you wouldn't be able to equip high level gear normally at that level.

As for upgrades to the base game... Do understand that it is a technical impossibility to NOT put the new gear into the base game. If the assets were not available, you'd not see people wearing that gear. That means that any gear acquired from V3.0 that can be sold on the market, and still be buyable by people without V3.0, and likewise with any gear crafted. Do notice that in FFXIV, most pink/green dungeon gear is not tradeable. So this means that whatever is locked behind V3.0 content wall be be things like getting those new 3 classes, picking Au Ra as a race (it's more than likely that picking Au Ra will have a starting location in the V3.0 content up to level 15 and then put the player back into the mainstream story starting at picking a GC.)