I guess it's time

[KitingGenbu]

Hey look I'd love if they made things horizontal but the reason gear is outdated so fast is bc patches come fast, which is something I do like...

I would disagree with this point. The problem with gear being outdated so fast is the lack of forethought. The difference between tome gear and savage is honestly too low, not to mention they nerf how gear acquisition is every 3 months, making it honestly not worth the effort if you just wait that 3 months. Doing content for the challenge is only worth it like once especially if the rewards are lackluster and making persistent rewards requires a lot of thought. Anyone who actually played FFXI to the fullest of its potential would understand and see how amazing the dev team was in the content they produced as well as the rewards that went with them. This notion of item levels is probably the dumbest thing to exist since there is no real way to control it unless you do what WoW has started to do and make it almost impossible to equip the wrong piece of gear; heck, even legion is dumbing it down even more that main stats on accessories will be irrelevant so you literally can't go wrong unless you're just using a completely different armor type. One could go by actual main stat like with rift which insures your class has the actual direction to do the content, besides being a dps without any accuracy at all or even worse, a dps with full vit accessories etc just to meet the ilvl requirement.