One of the issues that has to be handled is the upper potential characters can achieve with the most powerful gear attainable.
Some current solutions (and their known issues) out there are as follow:
1) Solution: Create upper standards for gear, and just make sure all your monsters are adjusted appropriately.
Problems: New zones to come in and to add motivation to players, ultimately will require making gear more and more powerful
2) Solution: No stat stacking on gear, i.e. only can have one item that will increase strength, all other ‘strength-increasing’ items will be ignored
Problems: Players will all end up with the same stats, a lot less gear hunting will occur
The initial vision of Luminari with gear was as follows:
1) Enforce level limits on gear, that way lower level zones do not lose their appeal and help reduce power leveling
2) Hard caps on gear stats to not be crossed, to help reign in too much power
3) Crafted and Discovered gear should be relatively equal in stats and effort/time to acquire
4) Absolute top-end gear cannot be acquire by normal means, only via epic quests or epic boss fights
All this info is subject to change, and open for discussion