ilvl to me means nothing if the set bonus makes up the difference. I also value skill is greater than gear as a skilled player can make up the short comings of a geared player with no skill. When heirlooms got you to current level, I replaced my gear then and not with some very random green from a quest. When The War Within launched my original 36 level 70s all had season 4 tier Dragon Flight gear and until they broke the tier sets at 80 those first few characters still used tier sets at 80. My current 38 level 80s all had season 1 tier gear by start of season 2 and 60% of those are in season 2 tier of some sort slowly upgrading as the season goes on.
What needs to be done is tier sets need to break at 71, not 80. A piece of gear that adds a few points in primary stat and loads more health doesn’t outweigh someone that knows how to play a class and learn to survive, something people don’t care about, it’s a game and I can respawn right; that’s now how I learned to play.
As it stands now, I can’t even make it out of Isle of Dorn before hitting level cap because of how easy it is to get experience just from questing. Soon as a new character hits current level max, I have full sets of war bound veteran gear waiting for that new character.