Armor + Bonus stats

[HakuroDK]

There are pros and cons to this.

Pros:

-People would be less willing to mix and match sets for BiS and instead opt for full gear sets of the same kind of gear.
-It could feasibly balance the casual and hardcore.

Cons:

-To get the full benefit, you would need every piece of gear, and most people get gear one piece at a time.
-It could feasibly cause a disparity in stats between casual and hardcore players.

I would personally like to see it on lower-tier sets, but not hardcore endgame sets.

[Darra]

Cons:
-To get the full benefit, you would need every piece of gear, and most people get gear one piece at a time.
-It could feasibly cause a disparity in stats between casual and hardcore players.
.

These points makes no sense. There is already a "disparity" between stats of the hardcore vs casual from the existing gear in game, after all hardcore have access to all their BIS items. Seeing as hardcore players aren't competing with casuals in any manor, it wont make any difference. Had existing Poetics and Dreadwyrm gear been of use in PVP then you might have a point, but there is separate gear for PVP and Frontlines level synchs everyone so the disparity wont exist there. If you were to put bonuses on PVP gear, again, it wont matter, hardcore players will get gear at a faster rate than casuals anyway so a disparity is going to occur regardless. It's also not like there is any competition between casuals and hardcore in PVE, and if there was, again, hardcore would "win" with existing gear.

As for "To get the full benefit, you would need every piece of gear, and most people get gear one piece at a time", so what? Other MMOs such as GW2 and WOW have set bonuses, and that gear is obtained one piece at a time. I really do not understand your point here, unless you're trying to say "bonuses are worthless unless you can get them at the very start", but then, that same argument applies to BIS, why have a BIS set when you can't get it all at once?

Lastly, I do not understand why you think there is a need to balance hardcore vs casual. I've already mentioned the fact there's no competition, and at the end of the day, bonus stats aren't going to make a bad player any better and they're not going to compensate for the fact a casual might only play 1/10th of the amount of hours of a hardcore player.