Instead of creating an unintuitive system for item upgrades, why not just use the existing rarities? What’s even the point of rarities currently?
Leveling > Common (white)
Explorer, Adventurer > Uncommon (green)
Veteran, Champion > Rare (blue)
Hero, Myth > Epic (purple)
Maybe we don’t need that many upgrade ranks either, imo. But that’s another topic.
Because there are 8 rarities (I guess 9 with heirlooms in the game), 2 of which are actual garbage that gets automatically sold, 1 of which is for account-wide items, and 2 of which are for unique items. That leaves 4 options, and there are more than 4 upgrade tracks.
Blue items are account-wide stuff, artifacts are special 
, legendary items used to have unique-equip. Otherwise, it’s always just been arbitrary.
Yellow/Orange/Gold feeling the legendary isolation of being left out this early in a thread.
ChatGPT pretending that these were ever more meaningful.
Colors generally reflect the difficulty of the content, not the power of the gear.
It’s usually pretty straight forward when something is or is not an upgrade.
I’d rather avoid spamming the forums with AI-generated slop.
Imagine you don’t know the upgrade system that well. A 1/8 Champion gear you just dropped will be worse than the 8/8 Veteran gear you have equipped in that slot, and it’s not made obvious that the item is better than once you have equipped once you fully upgrade it.
I’m not a fan of the upgrade system alltogether I’ll admit, feels overdesigned.
The fact that its 10 ilvl lower with 7 upgrades, all either 3-4 item levels, is a pretty big indicator to the contrary I’d say.
The fact that upgrades give several item levels each isn’t immediately obvious to someone who’s unfamilliar with the upgrade system.
One of the first quests each season is to get valorstones and talk to the two upgrade NPCs, then see how upgrades work. It’s literally impossible to not see that quest when you go to Dornogal to upgrade an item.
Someone seems upset that everyone is wearing the same color grade of gear and they cannot peacock as easily as they used to.
The thing is even in vanilla wow a lot of white items were technically better then green or blue items.
This is a problem blizzard has always had tbh with how items don’t really tell you what is actually better.
Sometimes you might get a higher ilvl drop but worse secondary stats that aren’t for you, so you keep the lower ilvl item. This type of backwards design has been a problem for a long time.
It is arguably by design, since it keeps people on the gear treadmill longer, keeps them subbed longer by forcing players to chase perfect stats.
… how are you confused by ranks and trying to equate item quality to that? 
I’m not a Classic+ Andy, but remember those times when Epic’s used to be real Epics? and when you get the item you wanted once and never have to care about upgrading it or getting a better version than yours?
I still remember the moment in BC I got the Illidan shield, I though I finished the game and I’m complete now.
Good times, they should revert back to this.
No. One of the best weapons in classic for druids was a blue staff from a mid-level dungeon.
You don’t have to upgrade them now, either. Just keep them at the level they drop at, and you get all the benefits of that without anyone else getting the downsides.
While I see your point, it’d be very hard for a white to ever be better than a green because green is the quality where items start having actual stats on them. 
True for green and up though. But these days that’s actually less common for ordinary gear, and really only applies to things like trinkets or other equipment with extra effects.
No thanks. The current system is great.
Yeah but it was vanilla, where there’d be some of the worst stat layouts of all time. Like a mage finding something with +str as a green drop on a cloth piece.
if you have an 8/8 piece you know how the upgrade system works well enough to do basic math. you’re making a big deal out of a non issue. 8/8 never drops naturally, at most a gear piece will be 3/8 on drop
Aren’t Explorer already green?
lol, no thanks. I like the new system quite a bit. Makes it easy to gear alts, and leaves quite a bit of room for people to “complete” characters.
I heavily disliked in vanilla how, if you didn’t end game raid or pvp at the highest level, you were “done” after you got dungeon gear.
It’s nice for people who love alts. But I’m a fan of slowly increasing the power of my character. I know I won’t end up with Mythic gear til very late in the season, but Hero gear 5/6 is pretty much my stopping point, and it takes a reasonable amount of time to get there. Not too fast, not too slow.