Quote Originally Posted by Jocko View Post
My primary concern is that the very system itself pigeonholes gear progression into a very boring linear path
Your suggestion doesn't really make any sense. Removing that number on the top of the item description isn't going to do anything to solve that. The ilevel is there strictly for convenience except for those cases where they screwed up itemization and accidentally made something weaker (GC Bow VS Ifrit's Bow for instance). If they design things to be a linear climb the only different that ilevel number is going to do is make it so you don't have to go pull out a community site calculator to figure things out for you...then again, you'd probably figure just from that fact that a weapon with DEX+20 and Crit+12 is probably a higher ilevel than one with DEX+17 and Crit+10.

As much as I liked the horizontal progression system in XI it's obvious they're committed to the vertical progression system for XIV. You can lobby for them to change it but I doubt you'd be particularly successful.