I've got a few classes to Lv70 now - while playing Stormblood MSQ I was leveling both summoner and white mage, so I tended to be a bit haphazard with upgrading gear via quest rewards because you generally have to pick between casting OR healing gear. (Healing usually got priority for gear upgrades, but I tended to go into new dungeons as summoner because there's less pressure if you don't know what's going on.)

So then I'd collected all that healing gear, and leveling astrologian to 70 seemed the next obvious choice, and I didn't need to get any new gear because I had enough from leveling and dungeon drops, right? So I never paid much attention beyond equipping the recommended gear when I leveled up, and it somehow slipped my mind that I did need to upgrade my star globe as well.... and so I got into Castrum Abania still with my Shire Astrometer.


Down the other end of the scale, I'm realising it can be a problem in ARR because a surprising number of the later game dungeons (and thus gear drops for people who don't buy them) are optional. Story dungeons are at 15/16/17, 24, 28, 32 but then not until 41 and 50. Though on the other side of that, i-level can be quite wonky - eg. dungeon gear does have stats equivalent to higher-level vendor gear (eg. Lv15 i17 Novice gear has same stats as Lv23 vendor), and currently my alt-character dragoon is apparently undergeared because 'upgrading' from Lv32ish scale mail armour to other DPS gear is a defence loss.


I feel part of the issue of keeping up with gear in this game is that there are, firstly, so many places you can get gear, and no easy way of checking if all your classes are up to date. In a standard RPG you'd just go to the item shop in the highest-level town you've reached, compare their items to your party's items, buy your upgrades, off you go. Here the vendor equipment is rarely what you actually need, and you can only compare to your currently equipped class.