at 49, you still do not enjoy the 5% armor bonus from using full leather gears so if you are balance or resto you can use cloth as well (suffering a little armor loss) 49 is the last bracket before you start using gem base items, which many players can get. so if you can find the rarest item at 49, you will feel pretty OP .. IF you go balance/resto spec which uses intel, you can mix leather and cloth, but if you are going guardian, you cant cos there are no agil cloth base item. at lvl49, some of the rarest items that you might never see on your AH (and dont bother farming as they are sometimes 0.0 something % drop rate) are either lvl46, 47 or 48 but having ilvl58. they are epics purple and their stats are different (they are higher) from the lvl49 gears. so dont keep looking at lvl49 gears only. many of these items are not listed in wowhead when you do a search, and those shown on wowhead displayed an inaccurate figure. if you have the actual name of the item, wowhead will display all and its various lvl/ilvl version.