Poll: Gear progression, horizontal or vertical?

[Sylve]

Left side vertical while right would be horizontal with materia slots. To get extra guaranteed materia slots we would have to do some difficult content.

Except thats Vertical + Vertical.
You do the harder content to gain ilvls for your left side .. Then you do harder content for the Materia to raise the stats on your right side. You just accomplished exactly the same thing as straight vertical but added even MORE RNG to it.

Making gear with effects everyone can acquire fixes that. There will not be "one best set" it will be trade-offs and play-styles.

If you have that-of an easy choice in picking gear then its already failed.

I don't see any balance concerns with the game, people can argue for hours for example about War/PLD but both jobs are good, both jobs can beat the game. The only job right now that isn't balanced, is for example SMN. It needs a boost. Its getting a boost.

No, It makes everything worse.
Since now you have to have a specific set for specific encounters because certain bonuses make those encounters easier.

Horizontal Please.

Gearing in this game is dreadfully dull and sets everyone into a singular path when the game should be branching out giving many people many goals instead of just the allmighty highest Ilvl set. There will always be min/maxers you can't escape that even currently, but more variaty is always nice but wether the current game structure could support that I'm unsure.

They can hardly make the jobs unique unto themselves let alone the gear.

Gearing in this game does exactly what its supposed to, give us the stats we require to defeat bosses in steadily harder content.
An ilvl 100 BLM doing a proper Fire rotation will do way more DPS than an ilvl 130 BLM spamming Fire III/Blizzard III.

The current system gives you the means (Stats/ilvl) to defeat the bosses, but its your own knowledge of the Job you're playing along with reacting to the encounter itself that clears content.