Horizontal progression? In MY theme park?!

[Remedi]

At this point you could just create a rune system for skills like D3 instead of relying on materias.

That said while I would agree that materias could be better, this doesn't really adds to gear variety.
Unless we start making materias slots color based and more complex.
More like FF7 perhaps at that point some pieces of gear could have some more interesting effects.

Maybe like linked materias slots where by taking your examples you could link avenger's shield, heavy shield and shield lob together

However as some have said we lack the variety on job skills to make it really work

[Dzian]

The funny thing is 1.23 actually had a good degree of horizontal progression even without endless gear swaps or macros.

The 1.23 whom for example had a multitude of options available. You could spec for mind and focus on your direct heals. Or you spec into vitality and have stronger enhancing magic. Stronger stoneskins and regen even stronger protect.

DPS as well where against some bosses they'd want to stack more attack potency to break through high defece. On others they could go full int raw damage.

And tanks. Could have low up high offence for some bosses. High hp for others. Or maximum enmity.

All of these things helped make gear feel valuable and important. A big difference to xiv where gear is worthless and trash

[Remedi]

I insist we need the inventory issue fixed first before we can have serious talks about horizzontal progression

[Shurrikhan]

I insist we need the inventory issue fixed first before we can have serious talks about horizontal progression

That depends on how it's handled. In 1.x, for instance, all classes used -- to some extent -- every primary stat, and gear was locked only based on armor class, with all armor classes beneath one's own class's also available to your class. (Thaumaturge and Conjurers (who were both healers and casters back then, and the entirety of either "role") got cloth; Pugilists/Archers got cloth and leather; Lancers - cloth, leather, and mail; Marauders and Gladiators - all.)

If we were to go with a flexibly-allocated primary stat system, we could essentially collapse the number of sets needed to level everything to roughly half its current amount even while offering far more options to each job. And with certain sets being useful to multiple jobs each -- a piece's Dexterity+Intelligence being usable for either Direct Hit or Spell Speed, for instance, depending on the player-chosen direction of combination -- you could support more niche special stats without bloating inventory space beyond what we currently face.

[Ilyrian]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but why the need for it? Unless they fundamentally change how they make the high-end content there is nothing in this game that relies on being geared to the max.
The UwU bleeding edge didn't have to farm split runs for a couple of lockouts (as the Mythic raiders do WoW) to kill it within the first few days. Gear is used to balance the player base skill level over time, not to soft-lock bosses with DPS checks.
So unless the raid philosophy changes and starts emulating the WoW model with hard gear checks, DPS checks, set-bonuses etc - why create a division of the player base unnecessarily?
I believe one of the strengths of this game is the egalitarian approach to gear - nobody is left out because it really doesn't have too much of an effect on the content.
That said, having more stuff to do is never a bad thing - and I do love a gear grind.

[Dzian]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but why the need for it? Unless they fundamentally change how they make the high-end content there is nothing in this game that relies on being geared to the max.

That's part of the problem though. As It only serves to make gear feel even more worthless and even less rewarding.

[Maeka]

But yet some newbies might not want to run old raids.

I mean if you're a newbie, the MSQ will already take you 100-200 hours of play, at least. But not only that, but you also want to dump the old raids on them too and make them required as well, to add another who knows how many hours onto that?

The newbies want to get to Max Level and participate in all this new content that's out, they don't want to be forced to slough through old stuff. Now, some newbies may CHOOSE to go through old raids out of curiosity of the sights and sounds, but I doubt very many of them want to have to grind that stuff for gear.

[Lambdafish]

The newbies want to get to Max Level and participate in all this new content that's out, they don't want to be forced to slough through old stuff. Now, some newbies may CHOOSE to go through old raids out of curiosity of the sights and sounds, but I doubt very many of them want to have to grind that stuff for gear.

I don't think you understand horizontal progression. Nobody is being forced, but in the current state of the game, you barely get a choice because content is being made intentionally worthless.

[Zojha]

I don't think you understand horizontal progression.

Truth be told, most people don't seem to. Heck, I constantly see people confusing it with special effects.

Ultimately, all progression is progression. It's a one-way street on which you can only progress, stagnate, or regress in a single direction and only the first of those three is deemed motivating. In computer terms, progression typically means two things:
a) A checkmark is cleared (Raid, Story progression)
b) A number goes up (Combat stats, e.g. DPS).

So called "horizontal" progression doesn't get rid of that, because it wouldn't be progression at all otherwise. All it does is to take the generic "combat" progression line and feathers it into multiple sub-purposes that each progress "vertically" individually.
By nature, given equal gear acquisition rates, that's going to mean more grinding, because you no longer have one "best" set, but multiple, one for each purpose, which may or may not overlap. And it also relies on there actually being multiple relevant purposes in the combat system itself to work. Which... is probably the biggest issue when trying to expand it in FFXIV.

Special effects on gear are entirely separate from that and can be either "vertical", i.e. represent an upgrade in performance or "horizontal", i.e. represent a different purpose. "Randomly spawns 3 Voidlings to deal damage" is a different purpose than "Randomly erects a barrier that blocks 15% of your max HP", thus they are "horizontal". They are also "vertical", because it's a clear improvement of combat performance over "nothing at all" or a weaker version of the same effect (like 1 Voidling/5% max HP). Same goes for less fancy stats like +15 Survival Stat vs +15 Damage Stat, it's just less smoke and mirrors there.

Neither of the two has much to do with how long content remains relevant. Barring plain enjoyment, a piece of content is relevant for as long as it represents progression. For gear, that means the rewards need to be better than something you already have. And in the "horizontal" model, being better in general is simply replaced with being better at some (ideally relevant) purpose. Since "horizontal" progression ceteris paribus requires more grinding, it naturally boosts longevity of content as well. How much depends on the degree of difference between the different "best" sets.
However, ultimately longevity is mostly decided by the rate at which gear (or any other progression metric) is acquired. That's obvious: Since the relevancy of the content is tied to the progression it provides, the sooner you get that progression, the sooner it becomes irrelevant.

A good example here is leveling content: If you level multiple jobs, XP remains a relevant reward for longer than if you only level one. Thus, the content remains relevant longer, i.e. has a higher longevity. Since leveling multiple jobs is not mandatory however, this is entirely optional and that's a good thing. But it matters little if you can just boost yourself to max easily. Gear follows the same principle. You can have a million different gear purposes and item slots, if you can get all items for free at a vendor in the starting area, the longevity of that is as long as it takes to navigate the menus.

Personally? I'd loath to try and support more "horizontal" progression within the individual jobs while the overarching job progression is still such a PITA to participate in. Most of the time, you can barely gear up your basic trinity roles before the gear becomes obsolete due to caps and other pacing measures. Adding more progression on the job level would increase that issue exponentially.

[Maeka]

-snip-

That's because everybody cites FFXI Pre-Abyssea as the poster child of Horizontal Progression and that's what HP *was* in FFXI.

You'd reach Level 75 and there's a million activities all to grind on, and your reward was gear that you'd wear for 2 seconds at a time constantly swapping gear for every little action you take. Blue Mage was rather egregious so I'll use it as an example. You'd have 50+ pieces of equipment (even though you can only wear 16).

Meleeing/Building TP? Wear Accuracy gear.
Wanna do a WS? Swap to str+ gear, use WS, swap back to Accuracy.
Wanna cast a spell? Swap to the gear that buffs that specific spell. Swap back.

etc etc etc.

It's just so ludicrous and ridiculous.

OR, how WoW did "Horizontal" Progression back during Vanilla: Wanna do Naxxramas? I hope you went back and farmed Cold Resist gear or you'd get smeared by one of the bosses in there. You'd have a suit of armor you'd wear for normal bosses, but then you'd have this alternate Cold Resist gear that you'd swap in for THAT boss and ONLY that boss. Blizz promptly dumped this system in their very first expansion, because it was universally hated, nobody liked having to lug around a whole suit of gear for one boss.

Not sure how else you'd do Horizontal Progression unless you're suggesting we do a bunch of things like Eureka or PotD that have their alternate progression... but then, try asking most players what their opinions of PotD and Eureka is and I'm pretty sure most hate it. Only reason why most people do PotD these days is to level their classes up (this should point out a flaw in the leveling system TBH).