Quote Originally Posted by Fuddy View Post
You're missing my point.

iLvL 70 gear is NOT obsolete right now to somebody who JUST turned 50. They need to do dungeons to get iLvL70 stuff so they can move onto the more difficult dungeons and get better gear to advance onto next content. This is called a progression. In WoW they release a new patch and suddenly you skip nearly 10 levels of content and you don't even have to think about any of the gear or content in those 10 levels. It is more like a leapfrog in the progression. Basically ignore 99% of the content of an expansion. There should remain a progression that keeps this content and these items at least somewhat relevant to the progression.
The reason this happens in WoW is because when they (Blizzard) release an expac with new levels, they basically hand every player raid level gear from previous content (through new quests or vendors); there's no real transition or overlap, old lower-level content just gets phased out. Even if you consider making old raid level gear viable as entry level dungeon gear for new level-cap content, it's still very hard to make old content viable because of other options of gear progression (crafted gear comes to mind).