Quote Originally Posted by Ughmahedhurtz View Post
If I'm reading things right, entry level 78-80 greens will be roughly equivalent to i232 badge gear, minus the bonuses.
I saw that level 78 blue items were sporting an iLevel of 279, or just slightly above that of heroic 25-man ICC drops. It's hard to say just how close/far they really are, since the Cata items show the new way they are itemizing, and I am sure that they will re-itemize current gear when they put in patch 4.0.

Based on what Zarhym posted in the General forum, I suspect that they want to compress 10 levels worth of gear upgrades into 5 levels. And since there is also a whole new philosophy on itemization and whole new changes to many class mechanics (and the way they want PVE and PVP to work) I guess they decided to start the reset early.

It seems as if, unless you're at the very leading edge of raid content and gear, you'll be upgrading your items right from the start.