gear that levels with us like "heirloom" gear from WoW?

[TaleraRistain]

Are you doing the Hall of the X instances? That gives Brand New gear that will help at the lower levels for a bit. And from 1 to 50, especially on a server with Road to 80 like Marilith, you can get away with trading up your gear every 10 levels or so. So if you're worrying about staying up with every single level, you're really okay not to. Those levels go by pretty fast. You can get to 30 just with your hunt log. You can get poetics with your higher level classes and bank the Augmented Ironworks for the role you're working on to use once they get to 50. Plain old vendor gear and gear from dungeons can work to fill in spots as needed if you're feeling underpowered. There's really no need to feel held hostage by needing to craft upgrades every single level.

[Rongway]

It would not be a huge problem to have a full set of scaling gear for each role that stops scaling once it reaches the previous expansion cap, especially if its IL falls 100 short of the tomestone sets like the Aetheryte Earring (290/400) and Menphina's Earring (430/530) do. The economic relevance of anything prior to the previous expansion cap is incredibly low as far as actual leveling use is concerned because of how easy it is to gear up with tomestones and unsyncked Savage raids for at least the first few cap levels; and people can still buy old crafted gear or run old duties if they want specific pieces for glamour. They'd still need to upgrade their gear for the previous expansion cap (because the scaling gear would be too low to do anything that's from the current expansion--290 isn't even enough for the Lv71 dungeon, and 430 isn't enough for the Lv81 dungeon, so it's fair to assume a full set of scaling IL 560 gear won't be enough for the Lv91 dungeon.

It is even less of a problem if you have to get one job of that role to the current expansion cap in order to unlock its role scaling gear, as all it would be, in effect, is a streamlining of the inventory management involved in leveling a first job of each role from 15 to 100 and holding on to their old gear to use on the other jobs of the same role later, an inventory management ritual that isn't that useful or meaningful of a limitation to begin with.

tl;dr: it would be okay for roles you already have one Lv100 job in to have scaling IL560 gear that stops at Lv90.

[Tahbitha]

I level up my alt jobs mainly through Duty Support and Trusts. Never had an issue with gear. The only time I have to go purchase gear is when transitioning from one expansion to the next, and usually I've gotten enough Tomestones of Poetics accumulated to purchase at least several gear pieces at that time.

[CaptainLagbeard]

You could buy normal quality from the relevant city state vendor, or high quality from the market board.

Ul'dah, Limsa or Gridania up to level 49.
Ishgard up to level 60.
Kugane up to level 70.
Crystarium up to level 80.

Normal Quality gear kind of loses all relevance after 49 though... As the level 50 Augmented Ironworks tomestone gear can actually still be slightly better than NQ level 58 gear when it comes to stats. And same repeats with the Augmented Shire gear from 60 to NQ SB armors...

You do get one set of HQ gear from the MSQ as you go, but further sets you need to craft yourself or buy off of the Market if anyone even is selling.

[Shougun]

Actually wouldn't mind crafted heirloom gear. Perhaps released late in an expansion that covers the previous 10 levels up to near the current raid release, once it's even older add the ability to upgrade it for 20 or 30 level brackets (upgrade taking substantive material / cost).

This way it doesn't remove the crafted opportunity nor replace gear abnormally.

Crafted gear, that is meant to be raid comparable, could just do this by default. Adds value to the gear and these raid gears do have an upgrade system already.

Id avoid taking out the crafted though as that would be a big hit.

The using current system gear is really resource efficient but I might suggest an alternative idea:

Anti-Artifact gear, so we have artifact gear which has been really consistent between each expansion. Crafters get to create gear that still has the theme of the job in mind (job specific) but takes the theme in a new direction. For example instead of danty paladin you get war crusader, extremely bulky dreadnaught like armor with gothic holy like art style. White mage gets battle cleric like gear, etc. These antifact gear sync up to the level they're created for, and are not easy to make.

[Avoidy]

People keep saying no on the basis that it's free or seems like too much of a handout. How is it free when you play the game to level it? How does any of this matter to begin with? It just seems like a time saving measure. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it just sounds like OP is asking for a system where you get certain leveling gear, and it levels with you so that you don't have to constantly be worrying about gear as you progress through the early levels, which can be extremely fast especially if you're on a boosted server.
To those of you saying this seems too easy or too free, do you find some exciting, engaging challenge in walking to a vendor NPC to buy gear every X amount of levels? It's like... a minor inconvenience that adds nothing. Why not remove that step? Genuinely I don't see the harm in OP's suggestion at all. It would even stop folks from getting randoms who are way undergeared, because now they have this gear that keeps pace with them while they're speeding through ARR.

None of the critics in this thread make sense to me. It's like saying "we should remove repairing because it doesn't add anything to the game except a minor annoyance to deal with every dozen or so roulettes" and people saying "uhmmm dont you wanna play the game?? clicking your gear and hitting repair is integral!" like, are you guys okay? You know even with OP's QoL suggestion, you'd still be free to just buy crappy vendor gear or overpriced marketboard crap or tome gear if you wanted, right? Like, if it's genuinely enjoyable to you to waste time/currency on stuff you're gonna use for an hour and then throw away, you'd still have that option. Everyone else would just be free of it, which would be a good thing because it sucks.

[Myrany]

the problem with just buying stuff over and over again is all the gil it costs, esp at higher levels even the normal gear gets pretty expensive to just keep buying whenever you need it
we're not rolling in gil enough for that just yet to keep buying and dumping and buying which is why this is a frustrating problem lol that and the normal gear blehh
tomestones sure but it's still kinda you know....just...resources and time spent just so you can pick up where you left off and start leveling again
the point is it'd be nice to not have to spent ~2hrs just to get a set of gear to level one job for the next 5-10 levels during the time of playing until you take a break for the next time and come back feeling frazzled again because oh no i gotta do all that nonsense for gear that i forgot how or where or what again

Also retainers do occasionally bring home the 50, 60, 70 etc tomestone gear so that is another way to get it cheap

[Jeeqbit]

People keep saying no on the basis that it's free or seems like too much of a handout. How is it free?

Because it prevents you having to progress your gear as you level.

For context, as you level up, your stats get weaker (diluted). So you need more of a given stat in order to reach the breakpoints.

This change was made in one of the 1.x patches that you can read at https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...l=1#post361386

"The impact of attributes will decrease as players rise in level; however, the benefits granted by gear will be increased."

In other words, there was no point in improving your gear as you increased in level and they changed it so that gear matters.

So the potential of this is to reverse course to how things worked in 1.0, which is something they want to stay far away from.

[Myrany]

that would prob be fine also if you werent also leveling crafters and gatherers and holding materials for planning to craft glamour amd other collectibles but since thats what im doing a lot of my retainer space is held hostage by materials and other things aha so it's not really any help in this situation, plus holding onto maps and the unique materials for upgrading your craft/gatherer tools, very space-consiming when you're doing other things too

but really half the issue isnt even just the inv space, it's also just having to stop and spend significsnt time to acquire new gear that when you lvl too quickly doesn't last as long as the time spent investing feels good for (unless you just buy it, which adds up v quickly in that case), that's generally why i'm asking for leveling gear that can last more than 5-10 lvls

Keep your crafters on your level (or higher) and craft your own gear. That is what I did until I started massively outleveling the content I was doing then I just got the 50, 60, 70, 80 sets. Seriously it doesn't matter if you are doing 55 content when you are 65 and in 60 gear. In fact most of the time I hit 70+ before I hit 60 content. You do not need the best of the best to do leveling content with how fast we outlevel the content. Tomestone gear every 10 levels is not that time consuming to do. You will likely have collected it just from roulettes.

[Ritsuka-55]

yeah, would be nice to have an aetheryte ring like item for all slots that works til you reach the level threshold, then it's back to normal, would help leveling for new players tremendously, also i would keep "the road to" buff permanently too without the need to make a character on an specific data center, and then after you reach the level threshold the buff gets removed (obviously for that class that reached it)

but then again, with a lot of things with this game, there are plenty of things they could do to improve, but then it would mean losing money from the mogstation. so i don't think they'll ever do anything meaningful, but shit, the level cap is already 100, it's a damn pain to level up a class to be honest.