@MilkDust
Everquest, a while back they had something like that, the gear was called defiant, and when it went live in the game, even raid gear couldnt touch it and this stuff was dropping off of trash mobs that you could solo.
The idea is over time, end game changes, everquest for level 1-65 is fairly straight forward with little need to slow down outside of gearing, but they had a system called AA/alternate advancement
level 1-65 is not easy but you can ignore most aa to that point, but from 65+ every 5 levels you have to stop and just grind a few hundred to few thousand aa points, that in the beginning can take you days-weeks of ingame time, so once the meta for a game goes from 70 to 75, they also change how aa's are gained, I think the current curve is 1000% up though 2000-4000aa, because there are about 50-100k aa's you need for every class, but the first 2000-4000 are absolutely required far more so then even new gear is needed.
Then the meta changes so most people don't play low levels, so they make the low levels less painful...
the gear grind, depending on piece, could take days per piece, so everquest let defiant drop, the logic being you never have to full stop grinding from level 1-80 maybe up to 90 now, and each expansion passed level 85 has added measures to allow people to fast track gear for grinding up, its not good gear, but it will get you by to the next expansion.
but yea, when the meta changed hard that day, so many people were pissed, but the gear got nerfed so its not raid tier, but especially for the expansions you go though with that gear, it is damn good with no reason to stop and get better.