I read on the wiki that "[v]ery little of your gear in AoC will be soulbound. Very little."
The post goes on to talk about how the point is not to grind a dungeon (or, I presume, a raid dungeon) over and over or repeat quests. The point is to experience new and varied content and, it would seem, bring everyone on board as a participating member of the world.
To me, this would seem to make it very easy to bring alts up to speed, and also make gear flow easily through markets, trades, or node governance to bring more casual players along. The best players will still be at the bleeding edge, getting the best drops from the top tier PvE bosses or other sorts of elite rewards (and I do hope that they have crafted gear, obtained with patience and organization, available at a level near the highest level boss drops). But, as those players continue to get sidegrades or incremental improvements, it would seem that their gear can then go to other players and act as a sort of natural nerf. Even if the gear drops at a much lower pace than current WoW (say, Vanilla WoW), the long-term trend will be towards more players getting better gear to attempt content as the best keep on clearing.
I like this!
Am I on the right track with this reasoning, though? I'm assuming, of course, that gear is
repairable, that it won't just wear out permanently and require that the boss be farmed again. That would seem to go against the developers' vision of avoiding daily grinds and upkeep in favor of pushing all energy towards maintenance of the dynamic world and its player-to-player alliances / rivalries.
