Gear Score, in my ARR?

[Zumi]

A well implemented gear system should not be algorithmically possible to determine a score...

god I would hate to see gear tiers more than anything

I want gear to be situational, maybe during this event you need to stack gear with elemental resistances, or MP regen, or "Healing spell recast time minus" or something like that.

1) it gives more total pieces of gear to strive for far beyond one overarching set of pieces that you just throw away as you upgrade and 2) it brings strategy into preparation, not just execution (like in FFVII rearranging your Materia before a boss battle, or FFXIII setting up different paradigms that might work better for a certain boss)

We don't know how gear progression is going to work in ARR, but if they want to be more like the mainstream mmo they would use a more simplistic vertical gear progression system where every piece of gear has all the stats your class needs to preform their job. Then its fairly simple for them to assign a gearscore value.

For example (just making all these numbers up,) my 200 gearscore warrior body has 200 str, 250 vit, 50 hit, 50 crit attack, while my 250 Gearscore body has 250 str, 300 vit, 75 hit, 75 crit. In addition they could throw in some ability or procs or something on the gear to add flavor to it but nothing so overpowering that would make a lower gearscore piece better then a higher one.

Basically what I am getting at is a piece of gear that has a higher gearscore will always provide stats that class needs and higher scored will always have more of the stats a job needs to be stronger or do their job more effectively .

Generic mainstream MMOs today seem to do this type of vertical gear progression system the majority of the time. So every time they release a new raid you can get new gear that will be better then what you were using before.