Oh, I follow it alright.

It's like Dungeon Siege 2, where you can have your Combat Mage work with Fire, Ice, or Death magic (and later on, with enough skill points, work on two of those). Some set items are good for one type of Combat Mage, others are good for another type.


The thing is - whether you are branching this way or that way, you are doing it with the intention of getting more power. That is, with the intention of eking out whatever vertical progression you can get out of those options. A horizontal progression, as described there, really only works as the start to a vertical progression spree (where each path gets stronger, more powerful upgrades) OR for gimmicks, one-off things that are never supposed to be improved upon again, and are not in and of themselves requirements further on.

The closest thing to horizontal progression that I see in FF14 is the split between Summoner and Scholar. If this was a more typical MMO, where your decisions about class were locked in as soon as you made them, Arcanists would have to choose which way to go, the more healing route or the more damaging route, but that is merely the start of a vertical progression spree, with each path vertically progressing "separately" (yes, I know they share levels, that's beside the point).

I really do not see any sort of horizontal progression as being viable with FF14 given the way the game is currently designed. There would have to be some rather dramatic, and drastic, game engine chances for horizontal progression to be implemented.

One thing more. Imagine you had a Tank Helmet that gave your tank a 50% Parry rate at 50% damage reduction. That hat would have to be held on to for quite some time, would it not, given how much damage it would reduce? At what point would such a hat be considered eligible for replacement? If that hat was level 10, do you think that any tanks at 60/i200+ would be wearing anything else in that slot, pathetic stats (other than the effect) that it has? Unique effects, special effects, are "cool" but they force you to stop upgrading that slot for a while, potentially a *very* long time. Just log into Everquest and start asking questions about how long Necromancers had their Epic 2.0, and why. The thing was only an 8% crit rate increase on Necromancers DoTs.