Which expansion was the first to introduce item level to the game or which patch of the game?
WotLK, patch 3.2
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I remember people using add ons to determine and show the item level of gear back in wotlk.
When it was made an actual feature in game that wasn’t through an add on? I think the first time that it was shown in game by itself was MoP.
I remember ilvl being on gear because the throne of thunder had thunderforged gear that was five or ten ilvl higher (the predecessor to Titan forging that legion made so famous)
I don’t remember it being in cata.
Item level has been in the game since vanilla, it just wasn’t displayed in-game without addons (something like AtlasLoot, for example). But it was widely known about in theorycrafting and tools like Rawr.
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I remember it first becoming a thing that players went for in WOTLK, it actually broke our guild up, half of the team liked the gearscore addon and were getting really judgmental about item level and using it as a measuring tool/epeen flexing thing, the other half of us thought it was a step in the wrong direction. The friendly/casual peeps went off one way and the gearscore types went their own way lol
I guess we can see what camp the devs were in, seeing as they thought it was a great thing to bake into the gameplay experience.
A lot of things were baked into the game that came from popular addons.
The whole thing of arrows on our compass showing quest objectives, and the blue-shaded areas of the map showing where to go, all came from the QuestHelper addon that was popular in the Wrath era.
Absolutely, some of these additions are great, others not so much lol
I miss when item stats were a cross-tab of ilvl AND item quality.
THOSE were the days. 
The old stats page was amazing too.
You can still get it with the dejacharacterstats addon. All the good stuff like movement speed, global cooldown, etc.
For a long while there i was constantly downloading addons to undo changes or keep things how i liked them, eventually i got sick of getting so many errors and having to screw around with updating them that i just caved in and use things the way the game currently wants me to.
Late part of wotLk. If I remember right.
people seem to be confusing Gear Score with Item Level.
items had an item level since vanilla.
“Gear Score” became a thing in Wrath.
the GearScore addon turned Gear Score into some sort of cult.
I remember when GearScore exploded in general use.
You couldn’t do anything without gearscore after a certain point. Was crazy.
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