How is ilvl an issue while leveling?

[Rongway]

Item levels are something you worry about once you hit max level.

Tanks whose gear is not current will have lower HP and lower defense. Healers whose gear is not current will have weaker heals. If both the tank and the healer are undergeared, the tank might have a three-hit KO threshold and the healer might only restore 1/3 health with a tier II heal. In such a scenario, the tank will die, because the mobs will hit faster than the healer can heal.

DDs who are undergeared can turn a 15 minute run into a 25 minute run -- a 67% increase.

This is not just an issue at cap, and in actuality it is much less of an issue at cap because cap dungeons have minimum iLv requirements, and the other party members can often make up for a minimally-geared party member by being obscenely overgeared themselves. However, during leveling dungeons, which don't have a minimum iLv requirement, the party members are capped fairly low as well, so there is less room for them to make up for someone whose gear is outdated.


An extreme example for my own personal experience, I once had to heal a Sastasha run with a tank who had an average iLv somewhere between 1 and 2. He had one accessory, and his gear totaled only 24 item levels. One hit from a single trash mob would take him down to--no hyperbole--one third health. Despite my gear being syncked to the max, and my pre-casting heals, the only way we could keep him alive was to pull the things off him so that he wasn't tanking. This type of workaround, which should be avoided anyway because it doesn't give a tank the chance to learn to tank, does not work in later leveling dungeons, as trash mobs hit too hard for a healer or a DD to survive.