For those of you who do not know who Maat is, I will give you a brief summary.

Maat is an elderly NPC from FFXI who resides in Ru'Lude Gardens in the City if Jeuno.
His sole purpose was to limit your level cap, starting at 50 and then every 5 levels afterwards. In order to break this cap, you would have to fight him in a solo fight.
Winning granted you a higher level cap, 50 to 55, and so on.



FFXIV Version.

Enter stage right, Momodi of The Quicksand.
As a new player who starts their adventuring in Ul'dah you will come across this sharp tongued Lalafell who will no doubt help you on your path to greatness. Once you reach level 50, you will be given several choices of gear. Starting from item level 50.

Currently, the items go all the way up to item level 115. At this point in the game, any player could potentially farm for higher item level gear for their subjobs and never have to farm WP/AK for Darklight or anything less than the best. This makes running old content obsolete.

My conclusion is that, perhaps players should have to perform a solo task to break their item level cap, (starting at ilvl 50) per class. So that they may wear better gear. This keeps players from farming the best gear and putting it on their fresh faced level 50 class.

The quests could be three fold, requiring you to run every level 50 dungeon (item level 50-55 req) for the first cap and so on for the next ones. Then doing a solo fight with Momodi or her chosen champion (as homage to FFXI's Maat fight) Winning this fight would net you an increased cap on your ilvl and maybe even vanity of sorts. (Maat's Cap?)

TL;DR - Implement a system of quests that are required before players can wear higher item level gear.