Item Level - How high will it go?

[ZhaneX]

So I just wanted to make a thread to discuss a curiosity I'd been having lately.

With 4.0 and Stormblood will come an increase of our Character Level to 70. But of course, item level long since surpassed character level in almost exponential values. By the time A Realm Reborn 2.X had come to an end, item level had reached 135. And now with the closing of Heavensward 3.X, that number has more than doubled to reach 275.

So, how high do you think item level will go by the time 4.X's lifespan is nearing its close? Think it'll go slightly over double again? Level 70, Item Level 555 Gear?

[Kazrah]

I doubt it would double over, but rather follow similar increments. By that rule....

....starting dungeon gear would be 260.
....fresh 70s would be close to 300.
....70s nearing 5.0 would be no higher than 520.

[Skeltal-Bons]

I think it will increase by 200 tops, so top tier armor being iLvl 470 with weapons being 475, I doubt the iLvl will be much higher than 1000 when the level cap is 99

[Kaedan]

It frankly wouldn't surprise me to see them essentially "reset" ilvl. There are multiple ways they could do it, including just dropping a digit and rounding where necessary. So top gear at the end of Heavensward would be maybe 28 or 30 ilvl max.

Or they could simply divide by some other number to reduce the ilvl.

That being said, they can continue with the pace they've been going for quite awhile before they have to consider resetting or restructuring the ilvl system. Between ARR and now, we've only gained ~140 ilvl I think. So if Heavensward ends at 280 or 300, that would still only put us at ~430 right before the next expansion after Stormblood.

[Zojha]

Well, I'd not be surprised if it doubled again. The more stats you have, the less small stat increases matter when it comes to making you feel empowered. Either that, or we'll get exponentially more stats per item level.

We'll see!

[Riardon]

Eventually they will have to stop using this system to identify gear power. The numbers keep rising and in the end we gonna end up talking about i1010, i960, etc. It doesn't look very nice. It was a nice system when it started and we had gear ilvl close to player's lvl but now it went too far off. It will not be easy to remove it as it has implications with dungeons, DF, PF etc. A way to deal with this will be to simply remove and replace the minimum ilvl requirements with minimum stat numbers like critical 800, min accuracy etc. It can also open the door for more horizontal gear progression. In other MMORPGs you judge the power of gear by the color of it (icon color) and simply the stats it gives. Here we just go for bigger ilvls overlooking stats in the process.
ofc it will not be that simple but maybe devs already thought on this.

[alimdia]

You guys have this weird notion that item level has to match character level, it doesn't, that's like saying they should reset STR or DET so it doesn't go into the far hundreds because we will be level 70, pears and apples.

You can call it "item power" or "item rank" instead of item level if you want, the point is that it's just a number that denotes item A is stronger than item B and nothing else. We could get into item level 5000 and it still wouldn't matter.

[worldofneil]

I don't think it'll double again, it'll just be another 130-135 on top (as that's how much it's gone up both times so far). So ~400 ish.

At this rate, it wouldn't be until end of 8.0/start of 9.0 (!) that we started getting into 4 digits and even if we did... does that matter? It's not related to our job level.

At 2 years per expansion, 9.0 would be around 2026, we have some time :P

[SilkaN]

Thread title is so tempting

I know I shouldn't

but I have to

[Roth_Trailfinder]

I do not expect item level to continue doubling. I would not be surprised, however, if it keeps going up, over the course of a 10 level expansion, by around 140 points or so.

And given that the item level display has 4 digits, I do not expect them to do anything regarding it (pruning it down or anything of that sort) until it is approaching the 10,000 mark. And at 140ish ilevels per expansion, I don't believe the game will have enough expansions to reach that mark.