Question: What is the point of gear sets?

[Genz]

What's the point of gear?

... that's actually an interesting question for a game designer. And what about stats, levels, experience? There are ton of things to say, some games that make good use of these and some that make less good use ; but FFXIV, since the release of A Realm Reborn, basically answers : "I don't give a ****. I just want you to grind."

[Kalise]

What's the point of gear?

Gear Treadmills give people a reason to grind (When the grind isn't itself, enjoyable. At least, to the point where people will do the grind because its fun to do it)

... that's actually a serious question for a game designer. And what about stats, levels, experience?

Stats are a means of simulating progression.

You progress by getting more stats. This links directly to Gear Treadmills.

Levels/Experience? They can also offer a limited amount of progression factor (Though, level caps hard limit their effectiveness, outside of Prestige levels)

At least in XIV.

In other games, there's more use from these things. Such as Stats being a way to customize your character and rotations (By allowing for multiple builds to be effective and have actual impact on your perfomance, more than just "Sometimes you hit harder") as well as having some other interesting effects (I remember back in WoW when Intellect was useful for characters to gain Weapon Skill. So even Warriors had a reason to get a bunch of Intellect before they went around whacking mobs to train up their new weapon they got from a Raid that was a different weapon type to what they had been using for a while)

Levels are also typically used to gate content (Something XIV does with MSQ anyway) though the notion of levels has become more and more redundant in recent times. What with more and more games focusing around "Max Level or GTFO" because of content being designed purely for max level characters. With leveling merely being a chore to do at the start of an expansion before you're allowed to play the game.

Experience... As I mentioned prior, has been used in other games for Prestige levels. To allow character advancement beyond actual levels. That said, some games still have actually leveling up to max level being a feat itself. Anarchy Online for example, has 200 levels and then 25 Shadow Levels (Each one requires more time and exp than level 1-200 did). BDO uses a "Soft Cap" system where there are like 100 levels in the game, but even hardcore 24/7 grinders have barely gotten to like level 63 (With normal people attaining only level 56-60), due to the way that exp requirements/gains scale to have essentially soft cap people at level 60-61 while levels higher than that still exist and can be worked towards (Over literally thousands of hours)

But yeah... Either way, XIV has not really utilized these things in a particularly great way. Mostly in favour of catering to idiots who'd get too confused if they had to actually think about stats and not just look at the ilevel and pick the biggest number...

[Nedkel]

They could as well delete gear entirely, remove skills and jobs, remove jumping and moving, remove camera movements. Lets make it a true cinematic scripted experience on rails, where you will log in and just watch like netflix. xD

The game is too hard for casuals you know starting and logging in nobody needs that, lets make a MP4 "gaming experience" yes yes, or just make it a GIF without sound, because you know music could be too heavy for ears and we dont want kids to become deaf. That will be 59.99 for 5 mb of GIF early access on steam, thank you.

[Kaethra]

Let's take it a step further: no more gear. You just get a basic AF appearance, and your power scales based on level. And you get more levels after max, which let's you do more damage to higher level enemies and raid bosses. Actually, let's just remove damage too, since it just goes up with level. Just make enemies take a % reduction from 100 per hit, with decimal places.

Add in a RNG variance of a few tenths of a percentage more or less for flavor.

And you literally have what we have now if you really want to think about it. As a coder for a project I'm apart of now for a game, what you said isn't terribly far from how devs balance encounters. There's a certain number of hits you need to get through a objective. That's where the term Hit Points came from. Something would have something in the neighborhood of say 40 Hit Points and require 40 hits to take down. Game systems got a little fancy and started having 'special' attacks that counted for 2 or 3 or more hits.

But now the devs in FFXIV have done something I've done similarly with Potency. Potency tells them how many actions are needed from each class should they have the gear needed for the encounter. If they lack the gear it takes more actions. If they have better gear, they're rewarded with less actions.

We as players see numbers. We try to get those numbers as high as possible. But the numbers don't come out from a vacuum. The math for each encounter on how many hits, actions, rotations, ect from each class is needed. They multiply that by the amount of time they want a fight to take, and that gives them the Hit Points they need for the encounter. Adjustments are made to potencies of abilities as needed depending on how classes are actually used (sometimes we use classes better then they expect, or cannot execute the proper actions in the right rotation due to mitigating circumstances in encounters).

[legione]

Lets make it a true cinematic scripted experience on rails, where you will log in and just watch like netflix. xD

already in game ,its called msq

[AxlStream]

It's all about secondary stats. Warriors will always want maximum crit to maximise IR window damage while having their 2.38 second GCD to fit in 5 Fell Cleaves inside the 10 seconds window while other tanks may want to go with other stats like det to have higher consistent damage as they are not as crit dependant.

[Tharne]

The result would being that they could continue to make Glamour sets. Such as having a bunch of Plate armour, Medium armour, Light armour and Robes.

Just that these Glamours wouldn't be restricted to certain jobs

This is one of the reason. They want job restrictions on gear and they will not change that, imo.
And before the "but we can already wear this... so why not that..." : exception not the rule.