3.0 & Weapons / Armor.

[Zumi]

Can someone tell me what the difference is between horizontal and vertical progression?

First of all horizontal progression is an oxymoron. It doesn't exist. But its what people call what they did in FFXI. In FFXI they released a ton of gear sets over time from various different events, and because of the way FFXI worked you could swap gear at any time, so you could swap in a bunch of haste gear when you were trying to get tp then you could swap in a bunch of str for your weapon skill, if you had to cast like utsusemi you swap in your fast cast gear, using berserk swap to your enhance berserk gear, using warcry swap to warcry gear ect . FFXI often would release gear from a new event they had a cap on how good the stats could be and often there would be so many pieces of gear that were worthless because gear you could get form sky from 5 years ago was still better. Then SE comes along and releases something that is about 1% better then what currently is available but puts it behind a huge grind, for example salvage, this is in fact vertical progression because its like very slightly better, and not all the pieces of gear are better.

If you didn't care about that 1% better dps you could get then you could just ignore the content and still use your 7 year old gear.

Basically what people liked in FFXI was vertical progression that offered very very small upgrades.