Please remove iLevel

[Kincard]

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.

[Alpheus]

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^
What he said, clearly the ARR Dev team has decided on which path to take which is a bit disheartening but I wish they could so something like the Higher your ilvl the more Job Specific bonuses you get.

Like take your combined ilvl for AF Armor and have that be the baseline, you now have bonuses conferred to various abilities and spells and it won't punish you for moving ahead of AF armor because as long as you're ilvl is above the ilvl of AF armor then you have those traits still activated. It will allow for more subtler job specific bonuses without necessitating people to stick with a piece of ilvl gear that is lower than ilvl because it enhances Defiance to have X amount of Damage Reduction added (as a random example) maybe have the Af2 gear set be another threshold for even more bonuses thus allowing even Af2 and Allagan to intermingle. Allow specific items to give a bonus trait ahead of its ilvl but have that trait be offered with a higher ilvl.