Why vertical progression is poorly implemented

[Ibi]

Gear swaps are something i'd happily never see again, 3 -4 gear sets per ability was horrendous.

It was fun if you're someone who really enjoyed trying to min-max every possible aspect of your character.

Oh, and had Windower properly configured so that you could actually take advantage of that gear without having to press three different macros every time you wanted to use a job ability.

However Even when a piece of gear did completely replace another piece of gear, in most cases it was individual items and not entire sets that were replaced. I think that makes a big difference.

If you spent months or even a year gearing up your character and then got a new pair of pants that completely replaced your current pants it wasn't so bad as the rest of the gear you spent so much time building up was still valuable. so the new pair of pants is an improvement to your whole build and not a complete replacement.

Although they didn't gear that would obsolete an entire set, it certainly happened. Homam from Proto-Omega replaced the TP sets for the classes that could wear it. Usukane from Salvage did the same.

I think the biggest difference is that because the game was built around horizontal progression, gear was always incredibly difficult to actually acquire rapidly unless you were incredibly fortunate. It didn't matter so much that your current gear was obsolete over night, because it was quite possible that it was going to take you a year and a half to actually acquire the new gear.

The issue with vertical progression as it is in xiv currently is you spend months building up your gear, only for your whole build to be made obsolete a month later. it basically makes the entire time you spent building up your gear feel worthless and wasted. and this is why people are getting peeved at the endless treadmill.

Gear needs to be valuable, lasting and genuinely worth getting.

The counterpoint being that the issue with horizontal progression is that in order to make gear valuable, lasting, and genuinely worth getting, you generally have to slow the rate of acquisition to a crawl.

If Savage used an FFXI approach to loot, you'd either only get a drop one in every four or five runs, or you'd have to re-clear to A4S at a rate of one floor a week, and only that would actually provide any items.