Quote Originally Posted by Giantbane View Post
It's more widgets to collect, which is half of the point for these types of games.
Except that you're adding a new category of widget that basically does nothing as opposed to adding new widgets to those categories that already exist that are designed to actually do something. The argument that it's new gear and therefore a good idea doesn't really work because gear is supposed to actually do something useful (barring the collectable event stuff, which the OP isn't suggesting these be) whereas all this new type of gear does is fill up a slot that's currently left empty because there's no need for it. The purpose of this suggestion isn't to fix some balance question but purely to assuage someone's obsessiveness with filling all of their slots. It's like someone complaining about not being able to be stack weapons/armor/etc in their inventory and demanding that the devs design a new aspect of the inventory system so that they can stack them while still preserving the independent identity of each item.

For instance, most classes get their full i95 level of stats from their main/offhand slot if they get an allagan weapon. However, blm and pld only have 1 hand allagan weapons, and as a result are capped at slightly lower stat points because they only have i90 offhand items available to them. If most (or all) classes had offhands, there'd be more uniformity to the loot between classes.
There's a few problems with your analysis here.

First off, current offhands afford more than just the basic stats on them because of the block rating/value so it's not like there is no benefit to using MH/OH as opposed to a 2h MH. The only class that doesn't "benefit" from this is PLD and that's only because they're built around using a shield at all times.

Secondly, the fact that PLD doesn't have an i95 offhand means that they're shorted a single point of VIT/STR/secondary out of total stat pools of several hundred, which means that the impact of the shield "penalty" is less than than of your racial selection. Choosing to be a Lalafell instead of a Roegadyn is going to do more to your tank stats than having 1/3rd of your MH budget being i90 instead of i95. If you're going to complain about the stat difference, be prepared to face the fact that you'd also need to complain about relative strength of certain races and subraces at given jobs/roles since that matters more.

Lastly, as to uniformity of loot, offhands represent a laughably minor aspect since there are only 3 classes that use them and only one of them uses them often. The bigger issue is that DoW DPS classes have a much greater chance of getting drops because there is always 1 piece of gear for each of those classes to use explicitly: for accs, there are 2 STR pieces for MNK and DRG and 1 for BRD alone and, for the rest of the gear, there's one piece for MNK, one for DRG, and one for BRD. For tanks, healers, and casters, there is a single piece of loot for each given tier, in every single slot except for MH, that is used by 2 classes. MNK, DRG, and BRD have twice the chance of getting useful gear compared to the other classes, which represents a helluva lot bigger issue to uniformity and balance of loot distribution than the altogether ignorable "penalty" associated with having to find a shield in addition to an MH (especially given that shields tend to drop earlier than actual MHs so they're easier to get). Complaining about OHs screwing up distribution of loot is just getting anal retentive.

You could also do things like removing offhands from coil entirely, only dropping offhands from certain primal fights or something.
Which simply means that you'd have those fights providing the new category of gear rather than more gear for the current categories, which reduces the options for the slots we already have. Furthermore, because the stats are so intended to be so low, the only place you'd see them would be the end game and, even then, they would have to have a lot of space between the relative upgrades because of cripplingly low itemization budget afforded to the slot. You'd be displacing options for current gear slots (which would be class/job specific, as well, instead of role specific, further increasing the glut) for items that no one is really going to see much of (because it's endgame exclusive), won't really have much choice in what to take (small itemization budget and specific class/job limitation means that there will be fewer potential stat allocations and a higher ratio of not-equippable to equippable items), and won't even have the chance to upgrade without massive increases in item level (low itemization budget; with i90 providing 3, going from 3 to 4 for whatever stat is a 25% increase in total itemization budget, which, at best, means having a 20+ ilevel gap between upgrades).