Some ideas.

[Integsta]

Now i havnt seen a rough idea of when ao3 is coming out or maybe I missed it, but here are a few ideas you could implement.

When the next elite/nightmare dungeons come out instead of adding new gear, how about creating enchant stones/jewels to upgrade equipment. All mmos have some kind of equip upgrade systems and I'd think this would be the easiest to add. Let's say the only the elite dungeons drop them, and only certain lvl dungeons will drop the corresponding enchant stone for that lvl gear. Or they could even be equip class specific, this would be harder to implement but would give us hardcore farminger something to really do.

[KingFu]

the upgrading has been suggesed, but I for one don't like the idea, what's the point of having new map or expansions if people keep upgrading old gear to be not as good?

[Snakespeare]

The arguments against upgrading weapons have been made on other threads. The one I make is that it will increase the amount of data that has to be passed between client (you) and server (STS) per shot. The weapons no doubt exist on a lookup table on the server. They are represented by a tiny discrete piece of data, probably an integer. You have 50-ish items, and right now that is 50 integers. When you have one equipped and you push Attack, it sends that integer and the selected target over Wifi or 3G. If your weapon speed is 1.0, then it sends those two pieces of data once every second. If there are 1,000 players online, that's 1Mb, at least, per second. Now, how will they implement this idea? Do you want to send a list of your enhancements with every shot, since now your item is unique? If everyone does that, we would go from 1Mb of data per second being sent to the server to 4 or 5 times that, maybe even 10 times that, depending on what sort of enhancements you want. This would bog down the game.

[Arterra]

you can only enchant once, and so being able to enchant a better weapon would be better. thus you continue to get better weapons than just enchanting.