Please read about Physical Levels and Removing them.

[darkstarpoet1]

I bought a lvl 22 armor on my Conj the day b4 servers went offline and it seemed to degrade pretty fast even though I was 7 lvls shy of optimal. I went from 15-18 and it went from 100-66% weapon went 100-23% both same lvl.

yeah some items deteriorate very fast. my fire brand even though i am only 3 lvls below the optimal i just started using it when i hit 40 and even though it's a 43 i can run 2 leves and then i gotta repair it. some items seem to never get damaged no matter what ya do to it. i was just saying some items are exceptions and those should be fixed.