Quote Originally Posted by Reinha View Post
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).
No one in favor of horizontal progression has answered this yet. What to do when all you get every patch are just sidegrades instead of upgrades and you are already happy with what you have? A change that supposedly makes pve interesting actually gives us less reason to do content and leaves us nothing but vanity to chase.