Poll: Gear progression, horizontal or vertical?

[Sylve]

Words.

The Jobs themselves have trade offs.

Monks have the best continuous DPS, but it takes a lot of time to get that DPS flowing, any mistakes cause a restart to the whole rotation.
Dragoons deal damage in larger chunks than Monks but have a spikier output.
Bards are incredibly mobile, able to DPS at range while moving while providing TP/MP regens at the cost of personal damage (mitigated through proper use of cooldowns)
Black Mages deal the largest chunks of damage in single blows but they suffer from either HUGE damage or NO damage.
Ninja DPS strong all round, but suffers from a bit of a setup time, falling somewhere between the Monk and Dragoon.
Summoners can maintain almost full DPS on multiple targets at once, but suffers in shorter fights where the DoTs can't do their work (like adds and trash mobs).

Theres your tradeoffs.

I only had 1 set of gear for everything.

Congratulations on successfully ignoring the greater majority of the games you played then.
MMOs are about loot. Even the much vaunted FFXI. Hell, moreso there. No one did NMs because the fights were fun. They did them because of that 1% chance to drop something they needed to finish out a set.

So you're happy to get 1 set and never upgrade again? Congrats, theres games out there just for you. Why don't you go play them if you hate XIVs gear so much?

PS, Error processing your request: Examples cannot be given because your hypothetical sets and bonuses do not exist, thus a very general example was given.

The bold part is the whole problem...

Maybe you are okay with never having any progression in the gear, but I'm sure at least 90% of the community wouldn't be okay with it... And I know that many people have said they want Horizontal progression, but trust me, most don't know what it really entails and/or just don't know how it will play like once it's a real thing. People might even like it for a while, but then suddenly everyone will grow bored and leave, and I predict FFXIV would've been Free-to-play and nearly dead by now if it had horizontal progression.

I would maybe okay with gear staying relevant forever, IF you have to upgrade it somehow, by doing new raids... That way you keep your gear and special effects, but still have something to play for, and not just glamour.

Except that in your example the gear is NOT relevant forever, as you would be going into newer, harder content to raise the item levels. Which is what we do right now .. But without set bonuses to anchor us to old gear.
In such a world gear would be even more bland than it is now, because everyone would have one set, and one set only that just got a number buff every other patch.