Quote Originally Posted by Shippuu View Post
Except that's not how it works and you know it. DPS jobs having their own individual gear worked at 2.0's launch partially because it was a holdover from 1.0's days.
Pre-yoshida 1.x actually had far more gear overlap than 2.0. Perhaps we could trim a fair bit of inventory bloat by moving back towards that, in fact, especially if paired with the below [job-dependent gear stats]...

That's not even touching the complication of looking at gear that shows direct hit but when worn on a tank it's actually being converted to tenacity.

This can also create terrible balancing issues if the job shares gear with a dps, as adjusting one stat for a tank can buff or nerf the dps side too much. That's not even talking about the asinine notion of a tank having to compete with dps for equipment in all content.
Complicated? What? It's an tag/index, the stats attached to which could be made dependent on the equipping class, e.g. item12312a, item12312b. You can adjust how it works for the tank equipping it without touching how it works for the DPS equipping it whatsoever. This is done frequently in other MMOs.

...Granted, just because every other MMO is capable of, say, swimming without needing a brief zone transition on every dive/surface, isn't to say that XIV's devs are likewise capable, but this too is in a few too many MMOs to call "impossible" (you know, like having glamours in PvP was theoretically "impossible" until a whole two patches later...).

Just my nit-pick, as I actually think that the benefits of such a system would already extend well beyond a single new job's use. Agreed on all other points.