What were the thoughts behind the decision to retune the Depths of Darkhollow™ items?

After Depths of Darkhollow launched, we saw a lot of feedback from players that non-raid loot rewards weren't appropriate for the difficulty of the content. Carefully evaluating the cases players brought up led us to audit the model that has been used for itemization for several expansions now.

The old itemization model was based around the top end single group gear being roughly 50% of the stats of top end raid level gear. This worked fine when it was first implemented, but as stats have increased, so too has the gap between raiders and non-raiders. Since content is tuned with player power in mind, this has caused a growing gap in the difficulty of expansion zones, in turn leading to the problems players have been reporting.