"Scaling Gear" - Leveling Equipment

At this point, there needs to be some give-and-take. Levels are getting very high, and the ridiculous amount of equipment you need to level things is getting cumbersome.

I'd like to see them take the WoW idea of "heirloom gear" (maybe calling it artifact gear) and instead translate that into 3 different categories of gear. Combat / Crafting / Gathering sets. Now. For each set, unlocking them should start at level 50, at a special NPC in Mor Dhona (only appears after completing the ARR MSQ sequence) that gives you a multi-step quest to unlock a couple of pieces at a time, culminating in a final quest that unlocks their functionality. We've already seen that this is possible, as the EXP Earring does precisely the same thing, only with an EXP bonus attached. The armor won't have that function. The NPC would move through each expansion to a major location to then upgrade the set for each expansion tier. They'd go to Foundation, Doman Enclave, a new one would show up in the Crystarium, then the original would go to Radz-at-Han. And then they'd move to the next relevant location in each subsequent expansion.

By them doing this, it does 3 things.
1) It allows us to focus PURELY on leveling and not having to stop and buy/craft/spend tomestones on gear every 10 levels. It's arbitrary and, at this point, unnecessary.
2) It will allow us to clear out the gear bloat in our armory inventory, giving us more space to house things that ACTUALLY matter.
3) It will give us a way to provide each job with the necessary tools to go from start to near-finish without actually encroaching on the gear influence for the remaining 10 levels.

The artifact sets would include the following: A main-hand (that will transform to suit the class/job/discipline that is currently equipped), an off-hand (that will transform to suit the class/job/discipline that is equipped) head piece, chest piece, gloves, legs, boots, two rings and a necklace. Additionally, an earing. The earing slot will be solely be for stats, provided as an alternative in case people are coming to the game much later and therefore being unable to obtain the EXP Earring for the current expansion. If the player has the EXP Earring, as they pre-ordered, then the Artifact Earring can be used for glam, if nothing else.

It could be argued that the sets could be merged into one all-encompassing gear set that changes for everything, including crafting/gathering jobs. This would be ideal, to further reduce the gear bloat. Jobs that have no off-hand would see an item icon in the off-hand inventory as a "?" with a sign signifying that it is unable to be equipped. This would be ideal, and allow the artifact SET (singular) to be used universally from level 1 to 10-levels-below the current cap at maximum upgrade level.

Anyway, just an idea. 99.999999% sure nothing comes of it. Not like Yoshi P will ever read this and go "Hey that's a really good idea!"

I like it! You also brought up some sensible ideas how to implement it so it has a fitting flavour for the game.

Using tomestones to continuosly gain better gear post main scenario are a way of keeping players doing content like dungeons, raids and trials after the main scenario is complete, and is nothing to do with gear functionality.

Also SE are very much against gear with upgradable stats because lets face it, it results in minmaxing and everyone just goes with gives the best effect, so all SE has done is cut out that extra step and just give gear with standard stats.

Also the name 'artifact armour' is already in use, it's the proper name of your Job gear (it originated with FFXI) - hence why it's abbreviated as 'AF1/AF1+, AF2, AF3' etc).