Quote Originally Posted by WindyGamer View Post
RANT ON

I'm not clear why we can't have a simple rule.

"Larger Item Level Means Better Gear."

Why is this not the case?
Why is it not the case that the "Recommended Gear" button on the Character panel should just be able to choose the gear with the higher item level.

So, apparently, now White gear can have a higher item level, but lower stats and therefore not be as useful as "yellow" [is that what it is? Higher Quality? From quests?] gear. So item level 285 White gear from a vendor is CRAP compared to IL 279 gear from quests that has a yellow shading across the top. I don't mind that the 279 gear is better, only that it has a lower Item Level. Shouldn't it be IL 290? Why is it not IL 290?

Let's just have a future patch where we fix this so that higher item level means "Better" and the "Recommended" button agrees. How about we do that?
  1. Is there some other religion around "Item Level" that I am not aware of that prevents this?
  2. Is there some dependency around Item Level that would prevent this change from occurring?

RANT OFF
Generally while leveling, higher item level gear is better. What you’re experiencing here is the discrepancy between High Quality white gear and Normal Quality white gear. High Quality will always beat out Normal Quality, sometimes even for gear that is a higher item level. For example: normal quality weapons from Stormblood (e.g., i350, i380 weapons) were worse than a high quality weapon of a lower item level to them (e.g., an HQ i350 weapon was actually better than an NQ i380 weapon because its stats were capped, where as the NQ i380 weapon’s stats were not capped).

However, once you start getting into level capped gear (so, in this case, level 80 gear), things actually get a bit more fuzzy, and higher item level may not always be best for you. Sometimes gear of a lower item level is better than gear of a higher item level depend on the stats on each piece of gear and the job you are playing. For example, my i430 weathered gloves on DNC are better than the i440 Goetia gloves because the i440 gloves have undesirable substats for the job (mainly, skill speed). Last expansion, tanks used pentamelded crafted accessories over the accessories that dropped from Savage (20 item levels higher) because they could meld them and they would turn out to be better (albeit, by a small margin, but still better).

So, higher item level does not necessarily equate to better gear. There are a lot of caveats to consider such as Quality and, at level cap, substats. Of course, Recommended Gear has a funky algorithm to it, but for the most part it gets things right while one is leveling with a few exceptions (e.g., as someone mentioned, the Ala Mhigan earrings versus the Aetheryte earrings on sub-level 50 jobs).