Gear should grant passive abilities

[Altijacek]

Scratch my original gear idea. Materia it is. Just make all gear have options for materia, and materia can grant stat boosts, passive abilities, or even some active abilities...maybe even party passive abilities, like increasing the rate at which all allies recover health at the expensive of your rate being cut in half.

[Mikedizzy]

I think it is stupid that you cannot put materia onto "special" armor. Now you should not be a let to increase "main" stats for your job/class but you be able to add resistance type materia or alt stats for your class. I think they have really under-developed the material system in this game.

[frostmagemari]

If there's going to be any "bonuses", then it should be akin to WoW's set bonuses; Not exactly how they do it, but the same vein of thinking.

What i mean is, you got a bonus if you got 2/5 pieces of a gear set, and then 4/5 pieces of a gear set. For example, when a person got 2/5 pieces of the Cyclopean Dread set for DPS spec'd deathknights, one of their triggered abilities "Killing Spree" gave a bonus of 500 mastery or haste in addition to it's regular buffs.. While the 4/5 bonus gave you a bonus that any special attacks made while under the buff "Pillar of Frost" impaled the target on the a pillar of ice. Then when the next batch of content is released, you start augmenting your gear and perhaps forgetting about old bonuses for new ones.

Basically, what i'm saying is that SQE should never make weapon or equipment bonus that will be timeless. They need to create a progression style and weapons/armour need to be left behind when new things come out, but they need to put in some decision making.. Higher stats with this non-set piece, or a little lower stats but the proc when paired with this item can be very good.

The only thing that's wrong with this whole argument though is that there will -always- be a "best" way to spec, so there won't be any decision making at the end of the day anyway... if you don't have the min/max gear setup, you will not be as good as the other person who has that set up and can pull better damage/heals/mitigation; And no amount of "skill" will make the difference, because no matter how good you are, there will be always someone else who is just as good with the proper combination of gear.

Also.. a P.S to the devs... Choosing proper gear is not stressful, it never has been and never will be, so i don't know where you got your information from. There will always a plethora of sources out there to form a proper opinion and groups like "Blue Garter" or "Elitist Jerks" to pave the way to find the best set-up there is, or just player's intuition to try new things that work best. Be honest in admitting that you are not making bland gear upgrades for -our- benefit, but rather you're making it for your own because you do not want to take the time to balance non-stat upgrades.

[MrKupo]

Well we do have GC gear, which grants set bonuses and Sanction. People made fun of me for maximizing crit with sets and sanction at ilvl50, so I moved on to boring old darklight.

[Raezaiel]

Yes dear god. That was one of the best things about FFXI and the removal of that kind of thing in Diablo 3 made the loot suck.

[Volsung]

I would actually enjoy if normal pieces of gear, didnt just strictly raise
main stats, and secondary stat, but did other things as well.

enhances cures, enhances fire spells, double attack +1% etc

[TeganLaron]

Yes I'd love something like this! I'd love to have to think about which gear is more suited to each battle, or what which would hold up best in a particular dungeon. Instead you check ilvl and go with that.

[Gooner_iBluAirJGR]

I believe that there's an inherent problem when it comes to gear with trait-type bonuses on them. . .
if one piece of gear gives +20 Crit. and the other provides a 20% boost to Full Thrust damage, you're always going to be wrong
if you choose anything other than the 20% Full Thrust boost, which will forever be useful.

Hopefully if they do implement a bonus stat system the choices wont be so black and white.
+20% full thrust damage vs +5% blood for blood damage vs +10sec blood for blood duration
Each one has its own flavor with pros and cons.

[LioJen]

...when the next batch of content is released, you start augmenting your gear and perhaps forgetting about old bonuses for new ones.

Basically, what i'm saying is that SQE should never make weapon or equipment bonus that will be timeless. They need to create a progression style and weapons/armour need to be left behind when new things come out

The problem with this is that it completely invalidates any early game content and new players feel even more left behind and useless than they already are, which doesn't exactly encourage new people to sub when they realize they will be ignored until they hit max everything. In games like PSO, even low level or undergeared players could still be credit to team because even the low level weapons had interesting abilities (the Frozen Shooter, one of the very first unique drops, was highly useful all the way to endgame for its chance to freeze on every shot even though its damage was pitiful). They also had an elemental system on top of an affinity system on top of a status system on top of the gear. I don't recall anyone ever being frustrated by the game being complicated.

You're also assuming that the only reason anyone plays the game is to get new loot, which is not true. Many people would love to keep their gear, either because they enjoy the playstyle it allows them to use (in the case of unique equipment) or for aesthetic reasons (which a well-made vanity system would address, but let's be real... it won't be well made.) and play the new content to experience a new environment, or to know the next chapter of the story, or to face a new challenging boss, or just to have fun with their friends. A good game is one that's worth playing even when there are no "rewards" to be had. One of the most fun ways of playing PSO was to go in naked and only use what gear you found during the run, and it was completely feasible to beat the game this way.

The only thing that's wrong with this whole argument though is that there will -always- be a "best" way to spec, so there won't be any decision making at the end of the day anyway... if you don't have the min/max gear setup, you will not be as good as the other person who has that set up and can pull better damage/heals/mitigation; And no amount of "skill" will make the difference, because no matter how good you are, there will be always someone else who is just as good with the proper combination of gear.

The answer to this is to do the opposite of what they're currently doing: Make the game less accessible. Again using PSO as an example, the drop rates on the best items (orochiagito, sealed J-sword, etc) were akin to winning the Powerball while being struck by lightning. Everyone knew this, and this meant that the majority of (legit) players came to accept that they would likely never see those insanely overpowered Super Best Unparalleled Weapon over their career in the game. So there was never any pressure to bring the best gear, in fact nobody really cared WHAT gear you brought because chances were it would still do the job. The game was also made so that you didn't HAVE to have the best of anything to beat it, you just had to know what you were doing. IIRC, there was only 1 boss with an unavoidable attack that required you to have a certain amount of HP to survive it, and that was in the harder modes only.

For gear to be interesting and balanced, the rest of the game has to be built around it to accommodate horizontal progression, and that's the real reason we won't see it in ARR. This game was built strictly to be a gear treadmill and they've gone too far to go back and change it now.

[ForteXX]

This topic, I also think we need more set bonuses (anything with a name should at least give a bonus for having the full set, not just GC sets)