Quote Originally Posted by CyrilLucifer View Post
That's not what horizontal progression is at all. Horizontal progression as most of us want it would have gearsets that are variable based on the situation. The whole point of it is that there isn't one ideal BiS slot. What is BiS changes based upon the encounter or party makeup.
That proposition adds a whole slew of new problems, though. With gear being limited based on class, having different optimal pieces depending on the encounter or party makeup is just going to clog up inventories.

Let's take a look at Shiva, for example. She probably deals a lot of ice damage (is there a way to see what type of damage you're taking?). Now, they could make a lot of ice-resist gear necessary to defeat her - but how to go about obtaining it? Well, they would make it drop from Snowcloak, or buyable with [X] tomestones, or craftable. If you make it limited to Snowcloak, it's going to be up to chance whether you get [X] piece you need for your class that will let you take on Shiva. This can be mitigated by making equal or superior items obtainable through tomestones, but it'll still take grinding to progress. Making them craftable shafts people who haven't done crafting and/or aren't in a nice Free Company, since they'll have to wait longer and/or pay exorbitant amounts of money to do the fight, and more likely than not you'll need new materials released in the same patch that have to be farmed to craft the pieces anyway. It's also going to further clog up inventory space; for instance, needing 6 sets of gear to take on all the 2.x primals (one set to resist each of their elements), on one job, will mean you need 6x the inventory space and I'm already clogged up with just a few redundant pieces I carry for glamour.

... of course, they could always limit this horizontal progression to the EX Primal / Raiding scene, but said raiders would likely have similar complaints - they can't gear up replacements because it takes forever and if someone drops out of their static group they have to wait forever before they can even try to progress again.