What happened to the AF gear?

[Estellios]

It isn't variety and choice if one piece of gear clearly outclasses anything that comes after it, it's just bad design. It was a huge problem where FF11 got new content that was harder or more involving than old content, and 95% of the drops in said event were useless right out of the gate at best. Not to mention the even worse situation of stuff like Leaping Boots and Emperor Hairpin which literally had no equals for 50 levels or so.

There should be more variety in what to equip, yes, but it should be due to having a variety of content to get gear from rather than making low level gear overpowered which not only screws up game balance but invalidates doing content later on.

[Kyriea]

Snip

The thing about FFXI is that every piece of gear that was remotely difficult to obtain had potential. Of course Emperor hairpin and Leaping boots were better for 50 levels because the rest of the gear in that level range was incredibly easy to obtain - the equivalent of white classed items in this game. It worked when levelling and stuff like the hairpin and boots only gave a slight bonus to levelling, I made it to 75 on countless jobs without even attempting to get any of them.

At the moment in XIV it seems to be going the way of "set B is better than set A in every single way and so everyone should be using the whole set of B" whereas XI was more of "set A body is better than set B body so you should use that however set B legs and hands are better therefore..." and so on so forth.

I believe personally this is because everything is incredibly generalised into simple stats. There are no actual bonuses. There is nothing class specific, only that you want to be using VIT as a tank, DEX as ranged, MND as a healer etc. If they added effects back that enhance certain abilities it would give a lot more meaning to other sets and not just the highest level set which would give you a lot more variety and to make a set that works for you and your intentions. Obviously XI is not a great example because you had gear swaps in combat and they are different games however it is the only example I can think of and seeing as it was SE's creation it is possible they can replicate it slightly, like they did in 1.0.

TL: DR - When SE expand this game with upcoming expansions and set a definitive cap they should focus on keeping everything the same sort of level but with different stat choices and different bonuses to allow us the choice of which set is more appropriately placed where, like they did in XI and instead of following the typical modern MMO stereotype of outclassing every gear set with new updates. This way you would get more choice with what to wear and will result in a lot less people looking identical.