An onerous title for what is really a minor issue and, thusly a short post.

There’s been a little problem for me personally with the explosion of new gear in Wrath since around the time Ulduar came out – though I really started to notice the effect becoming prevalent post-TotGC, which I also think may have had an effect on the prevalence of this phenomenon. Now, I’m not complaining about the breadth, depth, etc. of the badge system (though it has some issues) – I have no problem with people being able to get badge gear or that gear has stats that aren’t everyone’s cup of tea in each instance, or that clothies and non-cloth healers are running into problems with sharing.

No, my problem is thus:

“That’s ilvl 239″

An innocuous statement, perhaps, but one which causes me issues.  I know what item level is, I know how it relates to gear and I know vaguely, that Wrath raiding epics started at around the early 200s and scales into the late 200s.  I simply have an issue with the fact that people are relating to gear as numbers and not names.  They’ve become almost production line, and I can understand, partially, why.  It’s not like in Burning Crusade where saying ‘Black Temple gear’ or suchlike explained most of what you needed to know – now it’d be ‘Trial of the Grand Crusader, 25 man or emblem of Triumph level gear’ – a mouthful at the best of time. Four qualifications needed just to describe it – the instance, the heroic or not version, 10 or 25, and the equivalent vendor-bought gear.

Like an acronyms in posts, if you have not played much, not come across them before or simply have a bad memory, people using item level as a descriptor can seem to be talking gibberish. Worse, for me, is that I have honest-to-goodness issues with numbers.  Not just ‘hey, I wasn’t so good with math in school’ stuff like… I often transpose numbers in my head readily, so if I see ilvl 245 and 251, remembering them might turn out: 245, 254, 255, 241… I also have serious difficulties using numbers as a reference system.

Also, in some ways, it really breaks any thread of immersion for me.  Although ‘immersion’ may be a strong term for anything which occurs in WoW (even on an RP server it can be hard to get into the right ‘mood’ often, especially if you have trade chat on) I feel that turning gear into a number takes away from it being gear and simply pushes it towards ’stats’ which are… less interesting.  I loved donning Malorne gear – calling it ‘ilvl 120′ gear would have, to me, taken something away from the spirit of it.

I can’t really offer much of a solution here – except, perhaps, that, at least when writing posts, that bloggers at least consider that others might not know what you mean by ‘ilvl ***’ and spell it out in full – much like you would an acronym or, hell, even just use ‘tier x equivalent’.  I know it’s onerous to do it in game, but please also do not consider someone stupid because they’re not aware or which ilvl relates to which tier of gear or when they can’t tell you off-hand what ilvl a piece is.

Like I said, just a small thing, but something which effects how I perceive and enjoy things whilst playing.