New items not an ilvl upgrade? Then at least they should be true sidegrade!

[jumpypuppet]

i agree completely. my hope is that the new primal weapons will retain the same weapon damage as the relics, if not the +1s, but have different stats. omnilex has mind, det and spell speed; it would be awesome, for example, if the primal book swapped one of those stats for another useful stat, like piety or crit.

i think this would open up new build paths. or just give people more ways to min/max but at least it'd be something to do.

[Teleniel]

Tower was never designed to be horizontal progression. It was designed to be pre-coil. Therefor the equipment from it was not designed to be horizontal progression. As for adding additional special features to equipment, the team has stated that they would not have that for a significant period at the start of the game (if ever) because that caused balance issues. I expect our first horizontal progression equipment will be similar to Colosseum gear which has a certain ilv and will allow you to customize which additional stats you would like with materia.

[jumpypuppet]

i realize now that TC was in fact talking about CT. i wasn't. i was talking about the extreme primal weapons, which i think should absolutely be viable alternatives to the relics

The problem with horizontal progression is people figure out the BiS and everyone flocks to it, its made even worse here because there is no option to run different specs on a class (similar to RIFT etc). It just doesnt work here, vertical progression does however and would work infinitely better.

it seems lazy to me to say that having more choices is bad because the majority of people will choose a certain thing. why have any choice at all, then?

[zdub303]

i agree completely. my hope is that the new primal weapons will retain the same weapon damage as the relics, if not the +1s, but have different stats.

The extreme primal weapons are ilvl 90, meaning they will have the same weapon damage as Relic +1 - stats are TBD but I think its pretty likely the secondary stats will be different from relic +1 stats.