Poll: Gear progression, horizontal or vertical?

[kyuven]

I don't really get this "multiple sets" debate, few horizontal mmo's i played, had stat caps, so all you had to do was build a template that capped all the relevant stats you needed, even though it was very difficult sometimes to find out what pieces you needed, it was very feasible to max out all stat bonuses and resistances relevant to your class.

Those aren't true horizontal progression, though. That's vertical progression with more useless pieces of gear. If you have 12 gear slots and 144 pieces of gear to choose from that are all the "same level" and specific stat caps to reach, you're still only going to pick 12 of those 144 items every time, and the other 132 are either going to hit the floor or take up space in your inventory.
True horizontal progression has situational gear, such as DPS sets for tanks, healers, and support, resist sets for everyone, damage type sets, different emphases for different resists, etc.
XI is the crowning example of how horizontal progression works, and also how it's a horrible idea for games that aren't FFXI.
For endgame gear, there are currently about 5-6 different sets of iLevel 119 gear in the game: Relic, AF, Empy, and 2-3 more I'm not up on, plus tons of jewelry.
Many of those pieces augment specific stats or skills, and you can change equipment in combat so people will actually macro gear changes to coincide with specific attacks (and since your character briefly blinks out as the equipment is applied, this means endgame raiding looks like a strobe effect).
Unfortunately this ALSO means each job uses up an absolutely absurd amount of equipment slots, and since this is one of the few games where your worn equipment takes up inventory space, you're already limited. Now, if this were a single class structured game it'd be fine, but XI uses the Job system similar to XIV's, with the addition of subjobs. So without a lot of inventory finagling and mules (that you have to pay more per month to have access to) the idea of having more than one job "maxed" means it takes about 5 full minutes to swap jobs as you need to completely change your inventory loadout. Certain mods help this but they're...kinda gray market.
If you go horizontal, you NEED multiple sets to justify going horizontal. Otherwise it's just vertical with more useless inventory garbage.
The only other game I can remember that did horizontal progression was EverQuest 1 (and probably other games of that era), and that was completely nullified in recent years with the introduction of Defiant gear that was used to streamline the leveling process. Other than that, most "horizontal progression" left in the game is getting random knick-knacks to help with the latest set of raids.
And glamour is not a reason for horizontal progression and shouldn't even be considered as an excuse.

Not really, just make horizontal progression gear with different playstyles but that can make up for it with other playstyles.

That is why I like Horizontal Vertical. It is as you described (above me!) however it is less punishing. You can tank end game raids for example with the DPS set of tank gear. As long as you have full Healing gear healers to make up for it. However if you go Full tank, that means for example now healers can hybrid as dps as well. So you just have to have a balance.

Ummm...that exact situation already plays out currently, except healers don't really NEED extra gear options to go DPS since crit and det are used for both and Cleric Stance trades MND with INT.
Which is part of the issue with adding horizontal to this game: We have consolidated stats. We don't have "Cure Potency" or "X skill increase," we have the main stats, det, crit, parry, block, accuracy, skill speed, and spell speed. With the exception of Parry, Skill Speed, and Spell Speed, the skills are all universal against all jobs, which makes making diverse gear problematic.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

Not really, just make horizontal progression gear with different playstyles but that can make up for it with other playstyles.

That is why I like Horizontal Vertical. It is as you described (above me!) however it is less punishing. You can tank end game raids for example with the DPS set of tank gear. As long as you have full Healing gear healers to make up for it. However if you go Full tank, that means for example now healers can hybrid as dps as well. So you just have to have a balance.

[Gralna]

snip

I beg to differ, DAoC was about as horizontal as you could get, they refused to even raise the lvl cap for fear of power creep. There was no true BiS due to utility that pretty much all endgame gear had, there were a few pieces that majority of people coveted after, but they were carefully balanced to never be overpowered. Procs from gear were so weak, only impact they had was in solo content, anything raid worthy was so powerful that your procs were all but useless, /use abilities generally had 10-30 min re-use timers, making them fairly impractical for any kind of strategy, and even then were insignificant in their impact on endgame.

Carrying around extra gear just for it's /use was useless also, since equipping it reset it's re-use timer.

A fine example of how horizontal progression can be implemented, without requiring cheap gear swapping tactics, or requiring people to carry multiple sets of gear for each raid.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

Well. You shouldn't have to carry around an extra set of gear to beat content. The gear is simply more of a play-style choice.

Defensive Gear offers more threat+tankyness.
DPS Gear for tanks offered more dps, but less threat.

The downsides are obvious. However, they both had the same amount of health and armor. However the defensive gear had more threat and parry/block and accuracy.

They have the Same Resists, they have the same vitality, they have the same base armor.

[Ultimatecalibur]

...
True horizontal progression has situational gear, such as DPS sets for tanks, healers, and support, resist sets for everyone, damage type sets, different emphases for different resists, etc.
...
If you go horizontal, you NEED multiple sets to justify going horizontal.
...

I agree with you, kyuven, but feel that these particular sentences need to be expanded upon.

Having a thousand different specialty gear sets each with different benefits does nothing if you do not have content where each set is advantageous over the baseline BiS. Resist and damage type sets are useless if there is no content where having them is advantageous. For example if the Primals were easier to take down with elemental Melded i110 crafted gear then people farming Primals would regularly gear up in that stuff.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

In Every Horizontal Game I had, I always had one set to my character, and I just grouped with people to balance out MY playstyle and my set. I had their effects and gear stack well with mine. None of us switched gear.

Since we played with OUR gear so much, we were much more skillful with that play-style.

[Ultimatecalibur]

In Every Horizontal Game I had, I always had one set to my character, and I just grouped with people to balance out MY playstyle and my set. I had their effects and gear stack well with mine. None of us switched gear.

Since we played with OUR gear so much, we were much more skillful with that play-style.

That is build specialization, not horizontal progression. Horizontal Progression is needing a dark resist set to tank undead bosses, a holy set to tank angelic bosses, various elemental sets to handle elemental damage enemies in addition to a baseline neutral set.

[Muchmidget]

I'd have to say 90% vertical with 10% horizontal (though I'll throw out here very quickly that I think they could have done fine with smaller jumps in iLvl/power creep). Take vertical progression with different classes/jobs/profession...etc. and you've got enough play-style differentiation for me.

With strict horizontal growth for gear, I find myself getting bored with my own character very quickly because I can build one set that will work everywhere, forever. Sure, I could go after new pieces for vanity or to deal with gimmicky content (I'm looking at you, resist sets), but those don't really increase the character "strength."

The horizontal progression change I'd love to see in FFXIV, however, would be to add small special effects of your choice (special materia slot or something) to weapons/chest pieces. Just enough for one offensive and one defensive boost, but not enough to upset game balance.

[kyuven]

snip.

Important to ask the question, though: If it was so great, WHY has no other game managed to even attempt to come close to it?
horizontal progression systems get very, very murky and impenetrable, since in order to be viable for all those situations, you need a different set for each one, which means grinding out those sets. And that increases the impenetrable nature down the line when they *MUST* introduce new content and gear. DAOC ran into this problem head long, and so has every other MMO with horizontal progression.

[Songi]

Important to ask the question, though: If it was so great, WHY has no other game managed to even attempt to come close to it?
horizontal progression systems get very, very murky and impenetrable, since in order to be viable for all those situations, you need a different set for each one, which means grinding out those sets. And that increases the impenetrable nature down the line when they *MUST* introduce new content and gear. DAOC ran into this problem head long, and so has every other MMO with horizontal progression.

It's a very casual unfriendly system.