The endgame of WoW almost primarily resolves around the acquisition of new, shinier (but not always prettier!) items.  Once a character reaches the maximum level, they can no longer gain experience or acquire new talents; they are effectively limited to a simplistic gear advancement mechanism in which sixteen equipment slots are repeatedly upgraded in order to keep pace with new content.

In with the new, flashy epics, and out with the old, obsolete gear, no matter how much time or effort was invested into acquiring them.  It’s a cycle that any experienced WoW player has become accustomed to, as each expansion brings new rewards and invalidates all of your previous gear at some point.  Those warglaives from Illidan that you raided for over a year to acquire?  Old news now.  How about that old green sword (or fish, in my case…) that you kept for so long, yet still could not bear to throw out due to the naga slaying memories?  It just sits in the bank, for nostalgic purposes.

The whole system is boring, bland and in desperate need of seasoning.  What if something could be done to make these items meaningful today, while at the same time providing players with something else to do at max level?

A Solution:  Item Experience and Levels

Every item in WoW has an item level (iLvl) already associated with it.  As new content is released, new items are created with increasingly greater item levels.  A system could be created that would allow older items with lower item levels to “catch up” to newly released raid/PVP gear.  This could be extended to allow for further item level advancement of all items, perhaps up to a certain item level cap based on the current content patch.

Items could be leveled in a couple of ways:

Re-direct experience values to increase item levels. At max level, you could apply any experience gained to an item of your choosing, at some conversion rate.  Maybe it takes 100k XP in order to gain a single item level.  So, in order to level an iLvl 230 item from an iLvl 100 item, it would require 13,000,000 XP.  That’s quite a bit, but it should take a good amount of effort.  These numbers could easily be adjusted. Since quests reward gold instead of experience at max level, player could be given a choice regarding the reward instead.

Dropped tokens that increase item levels. Level items by getting other consumable items.  This seems to be the direction that Blizzard typically takes, but I can’t say that I’m too fond of it.  It does nothing to make experience useful, and the drop tables for most monsters would need to be adjusted.  There is an advantage in that you could save up tokens over time to apply to future items.  Even still, maybe dropped tokens could just be a bonus…

Re-directed experience and token drops. There’s no reason why we can’t combine both of the above solutions.  Item level tokens become a nice bonus when grinding, while the steady flow of experience provides a constant reward for the player.  Dungeon bosses could even drop more powerful tokens in order to reward groups and raids.  Everyone wins.

When items are created by Blizzard, each item, based on its iLvl, retains a certain number of item points that are distributed by the item designers.  Once an item levels up, it is granted a certain number of additional “item points”.   It is then up to the player to spend the additional item points on stats such as attack power, spell power or crit rating.

In order to preserve the original item flavor, perhaps the base item stats and properties should not be changed.  So for example, in an iLvl 100 item, only item levels 101 and up would generate additional item points.  Special use or proc abilities could be tied to the item level in order to keep pace.  Maybe just the special abilities could be retained, but the allocated item points could be wiped.

It’s all about choice.  A player could go back and level the same gear they used at level 10, or they could acquire new gear for new unique abilities, set bonuses or looks.  In the end, both avenues can be rewarding, but one is probably a lot less time consuming.

Ultimately, it should be up to Blizzard to become less lazy and create gear that’s meaningful for reasons other than just stats.  There should be innovative gear that gives players a unique reason to acquire it.  For example, what if some new rogue armor granted the ability to use an instant heal-over-time spell (think druids) that scaled with the armor’s item level?  A tank could try to acquire damage shield abilities on as many armor pieces as possible for their new porcupine spec.  The possibilities are endless, just be creative.

Make some of the gear available only through raid drops, and some people will certainly still do it.  If that’s not enticing enough, then maybe the raid content is the problem.  If it’s not fun on its own merits, why is it in the game?  Players should be able to take different avenues for equivalent (but not necessarily equal) rewards, given equivalent effort.

This is just one way to make things a bit more exciting at max level, while allowing everyone to keep the gear that they truly love and feel attached to.  Besides, who wouldn’t want a level 500 rotting bear carcass?