Can year 1 gear be upgraded to the same values as Taken King gear?
Solution 1:
No
Equipment obtained in Year 1 will never be upgradeable beyond Year 1 maximums. The best you can hope for is that you might find a Year 2 version somewhere along the way.
Bungie did make Year 2 editions of some Year 1 gear, but most didn't make the cut. If you have a piece of gear from Year 1 that did fall into this category though, it still won't be able to go higher than the Year 1 caps. You'll have to find (or make) a Year 2 copy of that item if you want to upgrade.
Note that Infusing - a new mechanism by which gear and consumables can be sacrificed to boost stats on other gear - won't let you bypass this, either. There's two reasons it won't work:
- Like Reforging in HoW, Infusing requires the target item to have a specific perk. Year 1 gear won't have it.
- To perform Infusion, the sacrificed item and the target item must be of the same Year and the sacrificed item must have higher Attack/Defense stats.
Obviously, #1 is a killer on its own. But #2 also means that even if Year 1 items did have the perk, the best you could do is use Infusion to boost your gear up to Year 1 maximums anyway. After that, the highest Year 1 gear you'll have will have the same Attack/Defense as whatever you might want to combine with it for Infusion - rendering the combination ineligible.
Note that #2 also very well could imply that Year 2 gear will never be upgradeable to Year 3 stats, when that time comes. But that's a fairly long way from now in development terms, and a lot could change.