Item level compression in Heavensward?

[Nutz]

I don't think it will be a problem for a while. Item level is just a number to quickly identify a piece of equipment's output. If they don't want the item level number to increase so much, they can simply reduce it without changing any stats. They could also make required level and item level work in tandem -- ie. required level 50/ item level 130 = a chest piece with 50 main stat, 59 VIT, etc. and required level 60/ item level 60 = a chest piece with 50 main stat, 59 VIT, etc. effectively resetting item levels.

I also would like some more horizontal progression. Currently, there is some, though it's overshadowed by how quickly the vertical progression marches on. The various ilvl 80, 90, 100, 110, and 130 sets (there's currently just 1 ilvl 120 set per job) are examples of horizontal progression with each other, but the vertical trend of 80>90>100... and the speed of the upgrades makes the horizontal progression boil down to finding BiS and working toward that again and again.

The biggest problem/ advantage to horizontal progression is that gear stays relevant for a long time. Keeping up on all the newest content provides marginal upgrades. Conversely, if you had all the newest gear and decided to take off for 6 months, your set would still be relevant when you returned (though not the best possible) and you could probably complete any of the new content.

FFXI took this idea and ran with it. If you had the best possible gear available from the first expansion then you could complete any of the content available through the middle of the fourth expansion when the started raising the level cap and adding much more powerful equipment. XI wasn't a theme park though, even leveling took a TON of time. The same mentality would definitely not work here, especially since a lot of what made it work was that it took forever to get new equipment. Never mind that people carried around 3-5 sets of gear per job (with lots of overlapping pieces) that they used in every fight.

What this game needs is simply variety in its itemization. They wanted it to be easy to comprehend...and well it's definitely that, but probably too much so. Adding a more varied stats might help to hide the vertical progression even if it's still there by making upgrades look and behave differently even if they perform uniformly better at every upgrade. For example, they could add:

proper haste stat (essentially SS that also affects auto-attack and either increases TP generation or lowers the interval between TP generation increments)

double/ triple attack

something specifically to generate TP/MP (like XI's 'store TP', but just increases the rate of generation)

critical hit power (increasing the modifier from +50% to a higher amount)

various 'job skill +' stats to modify certain skills (likely potency increases, recast reductions, additional effects, etc. but could be more interesting)

HP/MP regen +

enmity gain +/-

You get the idea. There are lots of things that they could do with gear while sticking with the ever increasing main stat numbers and more or less balance it out so upgrades are still upgrades, but they'd at least be interesting and potentially open up interesting gearing avenues.