Heirlooms is the way to go, or at the very least get weapons.
To be honest?
They should just get rid of the int version of melee weapons, and make them all the same.
That tiny bit of DPS difference doesn’t mean jack, because auto-attack damage never matters when it comes to casters.
The solution is in front of you. Also able to craft your own gear
Some gear. Not all gear.
Like, my blacksmith can make 2 pieces of plate armor. Or was it 3? But certainly not the whole set.
My Jewelcrafter? The ring is, of course, Unique-Equipped and there’s only 1 ring and it’s only 306. That might be better than a 200 from Korthia but once you get up around the mid to high 60s, it’s going to start falling behind too.
This is one of the points I made earlier: I wish they’d stop with only allowing you to make half a suit of armor at any given tier.
I like the model from TBC and Wrath where you could craft a full set of Greens and Blues that had tiny set bonuses. Nothing drastic, just:
2pc - +3 Main stat
4pc - +5 Stam
6pc - +2 Spellpower (obviously Spellpower on gear isn’t really a thing anymore, but you get the idea)
Something that made crafting during leveling feel useful instead of mostly being ignored until you hit max level.
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I just did this, I had a 63 that I leveled to 70.
They just dinged.
First, it was old enough for the “gear refresh” thing. Where they wipe you quest log, port you to SW, and gave him a set of 343 gear. My bags were empty as well (I assume that’s all in my mailbox, I haven’t looked).
I then got them on the boat to Dragon Isles, quested up to the “check the map and pick a zone”, and then I when to Ohn’nara.
There, I did campaign quests. No side quests, very little other things (opened a couple of chests, I think I did one or two “bonus areas”).
It was a mage, I do not know how to play a mage, and I find mages squishy. I used a rotation helper, and killed things. I never had a real problem killing things, though it did not take too many to overwhelm me, so I died a few times. I conjured food and ate it. (I NEVER eat on my other toons, guess its a mage thing.)
Almost all of my gear was replaced by quests greens, some blues, and 1 epic (via those spontaneous upgrades). I swapped my weapon out twice. His current iLevel is 353. Heck, I think I still have tokens from FR that could boost him.
As for the questing, I got as far into the campaign as working with the Green Dragons. It went really smoothly, to be honest. I wasn’t blazing through it, I was reading stuff, watching RP, rode the caravans (I like the caravans).
Oh, and I was in Warmode, 10% buff. “Why are these other toons in red?..Oh!”
That was never an issue. Nobody batted an eye.
I honestly don’t know if there’s a cheap “gear your alt” path right now for fresh 60s, I’m sure the gear refresh thing helped.
I have more toons to level, I’ll just start working them, and eventually, maybe, get back to this guy and run him through the expansion event for new gear. Maybe.
Yeah, all of your stuff is sitting in the mailbox.
I covered the reasons why I didn’t use Gear Upgrade above.
It’s simply too annoying to have to dig all that crap out of the mailbox and clean everything up, it just makes a giant mess.
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You can still do that, sans the bonuses. Even in chromie time you can craft at any level and use the item to convert to a variety of different levels.
It’s just massively overshadowed by heirlooms.
Or, at least, was. Since heirlooms are not worth the ludicrous price, maybe they should look into expanding on that crafting system… they should just give us items to bump any crafted piece of gear up to level 60/i320.
Make it so that it can only be purchased by a rep vendor in dragon isles or something so that you can’t do it on your first character to 70 or something I dunno.
I’m thinking this is mostly a temporary problem, as I expect the pre-patch event drops will scale like previous events.
For this week, I’ve leveled one 60+ lowbie by questing the Waking Shores campaign unlocking Skyriding, then picking up the Azure Span campaign since it is the current Dreamsurge zone (25% XP buff).
I didn’t feel the pinch from gearing - I had a mix of DF pre-patch gear (252) and heirlooms.
The heirlooms currently don’t scale very well - they fall behind quest drops at your level and max out at 337. Many WQs were offering me Titan Matrix 1’s - which I guess could be used to craft 343+ blues for 64+. The whole process goes so fast that it really doesn’t seem worth the effort, though.
At 70, you can buy dreambound tokens for 454 explorer gear which should make you strong enough to be able to spam the open world content for Caches (Dreams/Embers/Storms) that give catalyzable 480 pieces, flightstones and Drake crests.
Duplicates from the caches is unfortunately still an issue. 
The three World Bosses drop caches and have a chance of dropping 499 gear.
The Last Hurrah weekly now gives you a Champion piece, flightstones, and 2 Bullion which can be used to fill in gearing gaps for weapon/trinket/rings.
I use TW badges and heirlooms, there’s overlap on some items and they work just fine for the hours it takes to level up
I also level in TWing.
Yeah, but I think they stop at 59, iirc? So anything above 60 you have to kind of figure out what Dragon Isle stuff you can craft and wear. Unless they added a new Relics of the Past?
Nah.
The problem will be significantly worse once TWW proper launches and the event goes away.
You’ll still have the fast leveling up to 70 but gear drops but you will still out-level gear acquisition.
Then you’ll arrive in TWW with subpar gear because most of the current endgame events probably won’t be there or viable.
And yeah once you get 70, gearing is easy… it’s just not very pleasant trying to get from 65 to 70.
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Not everyone finds it entertaining to camp the AH while you run a bot-like program to help you push up prices. Gear is not free.
I have been saying all expansion that quest gear scales very poorly right from level 1. People in quest gear never catch up. Even leveling in dungeons you level so fast that your gear ilvl falls behind world scaling, unless you stop your character’s xp periodically. There are numerous videos on youtube on people who did this, sometimes helping friends who ended up quitting because those last few levels were not fun.
Chances are you started DF with gear that was already seriously low in ilvl.
The problem with TWing is it’s only one whole week out of an entire month.
Now, if TWing was always a thing that lasted one entire month and then they swapped to a different era for the next month, then yeah sure, absolutely that’d be awesome.
Yeah, timewalking was a great time to do it, but the badge vendor was gone almost right after the servers finally came up this week, and the new scaling that came in with the pre-patch is really the issue that OP was complaining about.
they go to 70 now.
need a 70 to buy them.
Heirlooms don’t scale nearly as well in the pre-patch as they did before. They fall behind quest greens, and cap out at 337 at level 70.
They are also way too expensive. like 30k per piece which is kind of ridiculous.
By the time you kit your character out in them, it’s like 250k+.
Yea, I get that, I only mentioned it to give a baseline for what gear I was using vs whatever “fresh 60” stuff I had, and that may have made a difference in what you were experiencing in terms of the gear challenge.