More Horizontal Progression please

[Welsper59]

I feel horizontal gear set only has its own problems. Such as the amount of storage space won't allow it. Rather than true horizontal, having best of both worlds would be better. I didn't really enjoy the gear progress with Heavensward though. I feel it is too much. And many of my friends were very disappointed because the hard earn gears they had had became obsolete when 3.0 came around. To me, this is very bad design. Furthermore, it makes content before the expansion pointless.

There are, indeed, MANY problems associated to horizontal gear. The grand majority of it derives from how the system is set up, rather than any form of subjective enjoyment. Inventory is certainly a huge problem in a game where we don't have a whole lot of free inventory to use for the specific way that horizontal gear sets work. Other problems include how stats, abilities, AND how combat itself is designed. Had FFXIV not been designed the way it is and was in the planning stages, it could certainly be worked in. Right now though, those things absolutely work against effective distribution of horizontal gear.

To start with, we have no means of switching gear mid-fight. This means that you are destined to either always fail because you lacked the right specific gear or you found out you don't need it at all (assuming you could beat something without it). In the case of the former, realistically speaking, it's quite a lot of BS to be expected to know ahead of time what sort of gear you need for the job and also knowing exactly where to go for it... or if it even exists. Then comes how our stats work. The variances and application of our stats would need to change, because as is, it's very cookie cutter. Our only variance is deciding between stuff like Crit, SS, or Det. We can already do that in many cases, particularly if you include crafted gear to be melded. Next is how our abilities work. They don't have some hidden complex formula behind their usage, which means gear that modifies them would not be worth our while to either use or switch out of, depending on how good of a benefit it would be. For example, if we had gear that increased a specific ability, like a BRDs Bloodletter, we probably wouldn't use anything but that unless it dropped our other stats significantly (normal gear: +100 dex, Bloodletter gear: +10 dex). As, if it didn't, there would probably be little reason to ever use something else. We'd be back to vertical progression rules, basically. Now if gear swapping mid-fight were possible, then sure... that could work, since other gear would have its time to shine. But can you imagine the inventory nightmare? We already don't have this necessity as far as used combat gear for one job is concerned, so imagine how much worse it'll be if each job needed 10+ slots to fill for gear swap needs. We still haven't even dug into server and other system related adjustments, despite having problems right now that would have to be worked out lol.