Anybody think Item Levels should only increase once per year?

[Nalien]

Since you gain Soldiery at basically the same rate as the old stones, your gear will upgrade at a decent clip.

Except new players cannot gain Soldiery at the same rate because they're stuck doing the older dungeons only due to their iLevel. Even if some of the dungeons will allow you in with a low iLevel, unless you're a DPS (and even then) you're not going to have an easy enough time to farm them regularly. That's partly the playerbases fault for being unwelcoming jerks, but I can't help but blame SE a bit... Did they even test Pharos Sirius as a party of full i48s?

10 Soldiery from Amdapor Keep is a snails pace, rather than remove Philosophy they could simply have increased the number dropped, then a new player does a couple runs of an easy dungeon and gets i70, instead of having to slog through countless runs with the aim of jumping them from i50 to i100...

There really is nothing confusing about the old tomestones; "Each tomestone is for a different iLevel, you'll want to start out getting Philosophy" is not a complex concept... Raising the number of Philosophy dropped, or lowering the cost of Darklight would have been much easier on new players than going "This is Pharos Sirius, you'll only get 15 Soldiery for this and people will probably kick you when you can't even tank the first boss". Pushing new players right in at the deep end just feels cruel, crueler when SE is removing easier grinds for the purpose of doing so...