What happens to our iLevels?

[KisaiTenshi]

pretty much the same with any other MMO level 51 gear > all 50 gear. All ilvl 130/135 will be beaten by standard 51 gear.

That's not how it works. Go look at the Green and Pink gears. Their ilevel is higher than the level. All "ilvl" does is allow power-creep on the gear without power-creep on the character.

What will most likely happen is that Level 51,55 and 60 crafted gear will beat the current ilevel 70/80/90, 100/110 and 120/130 "tome purchase" gear. The current gear you get from WoD is max ilevel 120. And the result of this? Everyone who isn't playing FCoB is wearing the exact same Poetics gear, not crafted gear, as none of the crafted gear beats it.

Most other games have extreme problems with power-creep, which is off-putting to new players, because what one player spent two years on, another player who just started the game looks at the 2 years ahead and goes "no thanks, forget that grind"

The Relic weapon is already one uber-grind I doubt most players have more than two they actually want to put in the time for, let along every class/job. The Tome gear ~should~ only ever match the top-tier crafted gear without materia (so HQ crafted gear with Materia is better, and less affected by levelsync nerfing,) otherwise nobody would bother with the crafting jobs in the first place.

On the other hand, some (admittedly freemium) power-creep comes from features that are meant to make BiS gear though RNG, which I hate entirely (look up "reforge".) This is currently seen in some stages of the Relic Weapons. These are designed to be gold-sink/time-sinks, and utterly waste the players time and money, especially when newer content makes it obsolete.