iLv needs to change

[JayCommon]

Given i130 gear is either locked in coil, requires something with a weekly cap, requires a VERY long quest, or all 3, getting above 120 at the LEAST takes time. It requires you to experience enough of the content to get a basic grasp of your class.

Please tell this to the DRG I encountered in a Duty Finder T5 that a friend and I entered for fun last night, who had full Poetic set and upgraded i130 weapon, but did less DPS than my PLD in sword oath because it spammed the 1-2-3 combo 100% of the time, hit no positionals, and had heavy delays in their combo as if they macro'ed the 1-2-3 combo.... dead serious....

It is indeed an average. Weapons get double weight if they are 2 handed (clearly..., which is btw mostly everything except PLD). You always divide by 13. Therefore the OP is incorrect; weapons already have higher weight in the average.

Yeah, they have a higher weight but I don't think it's high enough. I recently got the dread spear for my DRG. My DRG has very haphazardly put together gear set because I didn't really buy many pieces for it. It's like my 5th choice when selecting a class so it didn't have much priority. It still has the FCoB body piece (i90).

But it had the SCoB spear (115). My avg ilvl was 113. Right when I equipped the spear it jumped to i117. I believe I only have an upgraded poetic ring on him as any other i130, so I don't think that one upgrade would have made a 4 ilvl jump, even counting as double for a 2 handed weapon, if it had equal weighting. You don't normally see 2 110 -> 130 upgrades produce consecutive 2ilvl jumps until closer to end of the gearing cycle, especially considering my body piece is still i90.

I think the point the OP is trying to make, and rightly so, is that my damage ceiling actually skyrocketed by making that weapon upgrade. Much more so than 4 item levels would lead the normal player to believe. Which the "normal" player (who just plays for fun, doesn't care about examining team members etc etc.) is who I believe he is tailoring this argument towards.

[Felessan]

My main point still stands that item level does not properly reflect your character's potential, and is thus misleading.
Two people with the same item level, but one with a far smaller weapon, have extremely different potential. Even different armor slots are not equal.
Almost everyone here knows all of this already, probably because they either happened to read it or someone happened to tell them. There is no metric in the game that shows this.

And it does not really meant to be. ILVL is just an indicator. Simple indicator. For DF purposes it's specify absolute minimum of gear check, but it in no way reflects your actual power. For PF purpose it serves to prevent obviously bad geared players into your party but it does not relieve leader from his job to actually gauge party members performance.
The way ILVL structured it means just how far from current "top level gear" you are quantity-wise, not quality-wise.

Item Level is the closest people have, and is referenced everywhere as being super important.

It's not super important. Your skill to put out reasonable dps/heal/agro/sustain damage/follow mechanics/etc or ability to clear FCOB is super important, and ILVL is just important as it gives a metric to gauge your gear. Imperfect one, but still better than nothing.

Stuff like this helps brew bad blood between "good" players and "bad" players. Changing how Item Level is calculated, or providing some means for players to at least make a better-informed decision on how to upgrade their gear, is just one thing I'd like to see happen to help lessen the gap, because I'm sure there are a lot of "bad" players who are honestly trying but just don't know better.

Bad skill is what brew bad blood. Especially inability to follow mechanics.
And weapons are just a minor problem and you most likely than not will just receive advice how to improve your weapon and no offense if you play perfectly for your gear setup.

[UBERHAXED]

But it had the SCoB spear (115). My avg ilvl was 113. Right when I equipped the spear it jumped to i117. I believe I only have an upgraded poetic ring on him as any other i130, so I don't think that one upgrade would have made a 4 ilvl jump, even counting as double for a 2 handed weapon, if it had equal weighting. You don't normally see 2 110 -> 130 upgrades produce consecutive 2ilvl jumps until closer to end of the gearing cycle, especially considering my body piece is still i90.

I think the point the OP is trying to make, and rightly so, is that my damage ceiling actually skyrocketed by making that weapon upgrade. Much more so than 4 item levels would lead the normal player to believe. Which the "normal" player (who just plays for fun, doesn't care about examining team members etc etc.) is who I believe he is tailoring this argument towards.

Er... do you know how to average? If the denominator is always 13 (which is is) then every 13 point change will increase the average by 1. I didn't check whether the system used rounding or floors but given the system uses rounding (which it probably does) then from 110 to 130 twice (i.e. 20x2, increase of 40) is greater than 39, so it's possible to increase the average by 4. Even if it doesn't do rounding (also a reasonable choice) then if the average was 113.95 (which displays as 113 for floor function), then the 40 point increase will add 40/13=3.08 to bring it to 117.03. Either way the explanation holds. So rule of thumb, every increase of 13 increase average by 1; and for 2 handed weapons, every increase of 6.5 increases the average by 1.

In addition... weapons have a higher cap for secondary stats (of course if you didn't notice this then...). In fact the stat caps for the same item level works like this:]
Weapon (lets call this T1)>Body=Legs (T2) >Head=Hands=Feet (T3) >Belt=All accessories (T4).

Weapon damage is approximately a 1 to 8 translation with a primary stat (and about 1 to 30 for determination). Upgrading a weapon provides both a larger raw stat increase (due to higher cap) and effective stat increase (translating WD to a primary stat) than any other piece. For example, let's say from 110 to 115 (of course 115 non weapons are non existent but theoretical); For 1 handed weapons, (e.g for PLD) the sum of the weapon+shield is obviously exact the same stats as a 2 handed weapon:
T1 grants +5 to all primary stats (we are ignoring secondaries for a minute)
T2 grants +4 to all primary stats
T3 grants +3 to all primary stats
T2 grants +2 to all primary stats

In addition you receive 2 WD from the increase. Then the effective increase only including primaries is 8*2+5=21 for all T1 combined (i.e. if you have a shield then add it here), 8 for all T2 combined, 9 for all T3 combined, and 14 for the remaining 6 pieces combined (i.e. T4). This means that just upgrading the least costly pieces (T4 all of which is 375 tomes including belts) which is half the gear slots receive about half of just doing the weapon. Combining the 6*375 and the 2*825 gives you just 1 primary stat point more than just doing the weapon.

Now let's include secondary stats. Clearly not only are the caps less than primary stats, they are also not equal to each other (i.e. you can have more accuracy on a piece than determination). Of course when I say, "can have more", I'm clearly comparing 2 different pieces of gear because the way secondary stats are rigged (which is okay as long as we compare intra-tier, the primary reason for the segregation). Secondary stats are chosen at essentially random to be on a piece of gear, then a random again for which stat is the higher weight one (I call it the heavy stat) and which is the lower weight one (I call it the light stat). Later in the patches, healer gear has accuracy, but this always has the same weight (being less then the light stat at that) so we can ignore this. So every piece of gear gets a stats to call the heavy stat and the light stat. Without loss of generality we will compare accuracy to critical hit rate (since they have the same stat cap, rather than a lesser one like determination).

Let's say a 110 T4 gear has accuracy as the heavy stat and critical hit rate as the light stat: then you should see about (approximates due to clearly integer division used by the game) 7/10 critical hit rate on the gear (e.g. 13) than accuracy (e.g. 19). Since primary stats are capped by tier (and furthermore by level obviously) the developers chose secondary stat caps to also be segregated by tier. This means for T1 gear, you can have (using the same numbers) about 44 on the heavy stat and 31 or so on the light stat. This means that even if a stat, like critical hit rate is on 3 T4 gear, then it's still possibly less than the increase from just the weapon (randomness due to which stats were light and heavy).

That being said, You can only have 1 heavy stat on gear but you can add as many light stats as you want with materia (the cap will be the same). Furthermore... not all stats have the same cap for example determination has about .7 the stat cap as other secondaries (which piety is considered a secondary when on gear by the game), so when you have determination as a heavy stat, it's about equal (in the higher numbers it's about 1 stat point more since the ratio is slightly higher then the light/heavy ratio) to the light stat and like wise it's about half when it's the light stats (and similarly in the higher numbers it's about 1 stat point less).

Missing the point? When a T1 gear has heavy weighted determination, also account for this in the effective increase. It's possible that the gear goes from having no determination (for example) to heavy weighted determination, which is substantial in the higher levels (i.e. when they start to get above 8 determination per piece). Now when calculating what the increase should be for getting a single weapon upgrade or the awful choice of the artificial "upgrade" of gearing several lower tier pieces, you should take into account the secondary stats on the gear. Of course, even with heavy weighted determination on every single piece of T4 gear (which of course doesn't happen...) and no determination on the T1 gear, the increase still doesn't bridge upgrading just the weapon.

tl;dr:

An increase of 5 to a weapon is more then double the increase of the entire right side (all accessories) by the same amount. Item level is simple a number and the value only exist to determine the stat caps across tiers of gear and nothing more.

[Niwashi]

Er... do you know how to average? If the denominator is always 13 (which is is) ...

There are plenty of different ways to average, and it's not that people don't understand how it's currently being averaged. It's that we want it done better. The denominator is 13 because the only weighting being done to the average is for gear pieces that use multiple slots, with each piece's weight being simply the number of slots it takes up. With a more usefully weighted average, one that gives increased weight to the important pieces and less weight to the less important pieces, the denominator would be something else (what else being dependent on what weights are used).