I wrote a post about hero balance and QoLs that people enjoyed reading. I figured covering other important topics in-depth would be a good idea, since hero balance is not the only aspect of Marvel Heroes being touched with the upcoming update. Items will also receive a big update shortly after the QoLs.
As the dev blog stated, there's going to be a new tier of items called omega and while we get to keep our uniques, we won't be able to collect any more. What does this change mean for the game? Collecting loot is a vital part of any ARPG. Before analyzing the change, it's important to look at the history of items within the last 2 years.
The History of Items (Fall 2014 – present)
A more accurate title would be the history of item power creep and how Gaz put themselves in a bind. Looking at history of items within the past two years is important because two years ago is right around when the item power creep started, and where it led us today.
Before the Fall of 2014, uniques didn't have a set pattern to them, unlike today where they're jam-packed with health, dps stats, and skill ranks. If you need a good example of these old uniques, look at Squirrel Girl's, because her uniques haven't been updated since her release. As you can see, aside from her slot 1, her uniques have a random smattering of (useless) stats and no individual skill ranks. Before all of the unique updates, a cosmic Slot 1, 4, or 5 could be stronger than a unique.
I'm not sure what triggered the unique updates in the first place. I don't know if it was because finding a good cosmic was ridiculously hard to find – on top of needing good stats and skill ranks, the roll ranges on stats were huge and everyone wanted a cosmic with might on it (by far the best affix). Or maybe it was because many characters (not just Squirrel Girl back then) had terrible uniques and they needed some standardization. A good example of a terrible unique pre-unique review is Scarlet Witch's slot 1 pre-52 review and post-52 review. That's right, Scarlet Witch's slot 1 was only procs pre-52 review, and needless to say, it was a horrible unique.
Anyway, the item designer back in November 2014, @Amthua , gave Juggernaut, the new character at the time, uniques with lots of stats and skill ranks, and then soon after, gave Storm a unique review. Looking at these uniques now, they're mostly outdated, but at the time these uniques were considered very powerful because they helped characters reach 50 skill ranks in important skills, and the old items were much worse (see the Scarlet Witch example above).
As time passed, hero uniques slowly became more and more powerful. Part of of the power creep was Amthua giving into community demand (he was very receptive to requests, probably too much so), and another part was no real defined item budget (people asked, they never got answers). If you compare Storm and Juggernaut's uniques to Ant-Man and Jean Grey's uniques, some of Amthua's later unique designs, there's quite a difference. During this time, powerful raid uniques such as Fragment of Twilight and Essence of Jinn (AKA a gigantic dump on the item budget) came around, which also further increased character power.
Post-Amthua came @Asros around Summer/Fall 2015. While Asros didn't necessarily make uniques more powerful than Amthua (remember that Essence of Jinn is an Amthua creation), Asros was much more generous with skill ranks on items. The previous +6 to a tree, or +1 all /+4 to a tree, gave way to uniques with +2 all/+6 to a tree, or granting ranks to a power type, like melee powers or area powers. This change not only made it easier to max power ranks, but it made it possible to equip some of the more powerful any-hero items like Fragment of Twilight or Essence of Jinn without losing too many skill ranks. Furthermore, the Skrull Hammer and Crossbones Assault Rifle came out this year, making it even easier to max skill ranks while using the most powerful gear.
The end result is that we've reached the logical conclusion of skill ranks. Now we can easily max skill ranks, when it used to be difficult back in 2014, and the gear we're using is mostly the same among characters. Almost every mental/energy character uses Jinn, and the vast majority of the roster uses X-Men Uniform. As a result, now we're just making minor stat arrangements so we can increase our dps by a % or two (or less than a percent), rather than making significant dps/ttl tradeoffs (the best gear in this game is usually best at both ttl and dps). There is no reason to use a piece of gear with meaningful changes in play-style or procs because they don't exist.
The Problem with Items
99% of the items used for end-game are pure stat sticks, meaning they don't do anything meaningful aside from give us more stats like crit, brutal, damage rating, etc. Items don't give extra functionality or have property conversions (% physical damage to fire/energy) like they do in Path of Exile and Grim Dawn. The only exception to the stat stick rule is Ziggurat of Kargul, which has a convenient teleport function.
Because items are stat sticks, and skill ranks are part of these stats. The logical conclusion is to max out the skill ranks and stack as many beneficial dps stats as possible. There's really only one optimal item combination for dps, and in a best case scenario, there's an alternate setup that sacrifices a tiny bit of dps for a semi-substantial ttl gain, like using Fragment of Twilight over Skrull Hammer. Since we can hit max skill ranks so easily, item progression has stalled and become stale.
As mentioned above, unique power is inconsistent among characters, since there has been a steep increase in item power over the last two years. Compare Storm's slot 1 to Elektra's slot 1 to see the vast increase in power. This means a character like Storm has to collect many more any-hero uniques to compensate for the lack of power in her own uniques, whereas Elektra mostly uses her own uniques, even in an optimal setup. If Gaz were to play catch-up with older uniques, it would take forever and possibly never end because of escalating standards.
Items being stat sticks isn't necessarily the worst thing. There are a lot of mmos that have progression based on minor stat stick upgrades, but marvel heroes doesn't have gear tiers outside of ilevel 66 and 69, and most long-term players bought those recipes a long time ago. The biggest benefit of stat stick items is that they're easier to balance and make meaningful progression, because it's easy to tell that something with more/higher stats. However, due to poor unique balance and better items not being liniked to more challenging content, the benefit of stat tick items doesn't apply to Marvel Heroes.
Items in new (non-event) content had to be BiS or there was no reason to play new content in the long-term because items are a big draw for content, and a stat stick is only determined by its stats. Therefore, with new content came new BiS items whether the content was harder or not, which completely screwed up any notion of progression. Good examples of this phenomenon was the skrull items appearing with hightown (not really end-game because pre-cosmic), and items such as Cyclops T-shirt and X-Men Uniform (AKA lazy Gorilla Pelt copy paste with better stats) arriving with Danger Room.
tl;dr: Since skill ranks are now maxed out for the vast majority of characters, the only way to create more enticing items for players is to give new items better stats than the old ones, because there's no other way to design attractive items. This also makes gearing stale because there is not much new about new items outside of stat upgrades, and we don't even have content to challenge us with our new upgrades.