Alienation of Dedicated and Skilled players

[Reinha]

The joy of a good horizontal system is that you wouldn't have just the one weapon to pick from, but perhaps dozens of different weapons that all played slightly different. One sword's auto attack might be a small AoE, another sword's attack might occasionally apply a dot to the enemy, another sword might funnel emnity from your party to yourself with each blow, another could have a small chance to summon a friendly Beastman to help you fight for 10 seconds every time you parry, etc. It wouldn't be one weapon that lasted, but a whole collection all with different strengths,

For example, if Bismarck dropped this cool cleaving weapon, Ravana dropped a dot weapon, Thordan dropped a threat weapon, Sephirot dropped a spawn weapon and Nidhogg dropped a weapon that radiates healing to everyone. If I like the idea of being a passively cleaving melee and obtain that weapon when it comes out in the first patch, what am I supposed to do in the next patches when there are no upgrades I like for a weapon? If you make one weapon better than the others and give a reason to run the next fights, it becomes vertical progression.

The nature of horizontal progression is that less people run multiple pieces of content, because they are only aiming for one or two pieces of gear out of many options, instead of obtaining each option to continuously increase their power (vertical progression). We can't swap gear in combat and we have restricted inventory space so people would feel discouraged to run all the content for rewards and get all the different pieces if they are the same strength. This means less groups running each piece of content, unless you make it take a very long time to obtain your desired piece (the same people would run that instance/content more which would populate said instance/content).