Gear design

[Belhi]

If people need to be incentivized to do a content then this content is a failure and should as well disappear.

You say this and then complain about the incentive that raiders get?

Design opinion is subjective. I think a lot of the PvP sets look rubbish while raiding has had some of the best sets in the game.

As for giving crafters the dyeable versions of previous sets, I think that is their way of throwing crafters a bone. They need to give crafters something of value and while it would be nice to have every craftable set be a unique design, that isn't really feasible from a resource perspective.

GW2 unlocks things skin by skin and I can't recall any cases where there's 2 variants that dye (or don't) differently for a skin.
For armour at least. Weapon skins do have clones.

GW2 releases sets at a much slower pace. We get multiple sets for each class every 3.5 months. GW2 is lucky to get that in 6 months. I think HoT only had like 3 new sets.

[Daralii]

GW2 releases sets at a much slower pace. We get multiple sets for each class every 3.5 months. GW2 is lucky to get that in 6 months. I think HoT only had like 3 new sets.

I think it got one more in the 2ish years of Heart of Thorns. Everything else was cash shop.

There's a reason I'm not buying Path of Fire until its honeymoon phase is over.

[Belhi]

I think it got one more in the 2ish years of Heart of Thorns. Everything else was cash shop.

There's a reason I'm not buying Path of Fire until its honeymoon phase is over.

To be fair, the cash shop is their primary source of income, however it doesn't really change the fact that things like gearsets get released at a very slow pace in that game.

[Kalocin]

To be fair, the cash shop is their primary source of income, however it doesn't really change the fact that things like gearsets get released at a very slow pace in that game.

I think there was a lot of reshuffling that happened from the launch of HoT and after the math. It's tough to tell but they more or less said that gear sets are only going to be released with expansions from now on and the next one is "content heavy" while the former was "feature focused". The game focuses more on releasing new open world maps every couple to three months so a lot of the comparison falls short as a result. I guess we'll see how the new expansion goes but regardless, at least we don't have to worry about trench coats or buttcapes.

To OP:
Exclusivity isn't a bad thing but they should also focus on more exclusive items for the hardest PvE content, maybe an achievement clear locked from unsynced too for future use. The problem here is that there's no "challenge mode" clears for it, which ends up in a situation where eventually people will gear up heavily, reducing the challenge compared to launch time. Also I think the other problem is that the current raid gear doesn't look bad, it just looks out of place.