Quote Originally Posted by SDaemon View Post
To be fair that was an issue with stats and power creep and not item levels (just making a point, not saying that was what you were implying). When WoW squished their numbers at WoD launch it didn't impact the item levels of the gear, just the stats on the gear and how character power scaled upward. WoW's item levels are over 730 in their 5th expansion, but now character stats are much more reasonable than before.
The inflated numbers are also partly because of how they handled gear progression from early-new-expansion questing versus previous-expansion's highest tier. I clarified it a bit back in my post via edit.