The ONLY thing that matters with gear is ILVL now. All stats (save for unique ones for certain items) are derived from ILVL.
If you take an UNCOMMON item and set it right next to EPIC one of the same ilvl… big surprise, they have THE SAME stats. I mean in the olde days when ilvl wasn’t a thing and every item was made BY HAND not generated automatically through system, it made sense to have item quality to note “hey, this thing is stronger than average for it’s level”.
But right now? About 98% items in the game SCALE.
You get
item name
item model
secondary stat choice
ilvl (which in turn scales primary stats, secondary stats and armor)
NOTHING ELSE is relevant these days.
Right now, if they scrapped the “uncommon->rare->epic” trio, NOTHING would change in game.
You get:
gray (vendor trash)
white (trade goods and useless items you can’t use for transmog that have no stats)
??? (uncommon->rare->epic literally the same just in 3 colors)
legendary (the previous category just harder to get with a special effect)
Its to make you feel like you got an amazing item but I do agree considering now days EPICS drop from WQ’s and can even be a reward from Quests it seems rather idiotic to even bother to keep up this pretense of rarity instead of just going with item level.
They only drop from WQs if you have a high enough ilvl already. Some of my alts that I didn’t play since the start of BfA still only get blue items from WQs and emissaries. In fact, my old epic azerite gear on them is better than the higher ilvl rare gear from WQs because of the extra azerite traits epic gives.
Remants of ye olde times before ilvl.
Doubt it’s ever going away, kind of a big staple of Blizzard games.
But ye, sparkly colours doens’t really mean anything anymore. Only numbers.