How long before long vertical gear progression stops?

[Kuwagami]

That's true, in terms of Alexander they did fix a lot of the drop issues. My group had 5 axe drops in a row back in T9. There's still plenty of RNG in the game, though, outside of Alex, that's mentioned in that thread.

Healer cane, tank chest, 9 times in a row. Feels so sad to throw them away

[TheUltimate3]

Vertical progression can go for as long as possible really, up until you reach a point where the base numbers themselves are so high that you can effectively gut everything and leave the relative power of characters the same. To use WoW for an example, I think it was in WoD that they did an Items Crunch to bring numbers back down to reason, so that by the end of WoD you didn't have a sword with +10000 Strength or something, you could drop it back down to like +100 and the damage output itself wasn't far off from what it was before.

Now because the true meaning of this post was gauge if SE should stop vertical progression and add in horizontal progression, it's not really that simple. A bunch of crap would have to change and it's much harder to turn a vertical progression game into a horizontal one than vice versa. Because the way a vertical game is structured, if one were to add something of a side upgrade for horizontal growth and that side upgrade is so good it'll be awesome for years to come, then congratulations you've succeeded in making any future content completely pointless. Make it something for glamour or something, and congratulations you've successfully made the horizontal path completely pointless because nobody (save glamour hunters) are going to spend x amount of months and years for an item that's sole purpose is to make something better look pretty.