Basically, with ShB, Tanks are getting not trash accessories so all items will now have capped Primary Stats on and Primary Stat materia are being removed.

This leads to the thought... What is the actual point of gear sets? Like, already they're of limited actual relevance due to 99.99% of items being Primary Stat capped anyway *Cough*Fending Accessories*Cough*

But... With the complete removal of Primary Stats from the equation, there's no point in actually having the 4 different Primary stats (Outside of gimping Physick on Summoner) making there be little point to have the different sets.

Literally the only thing about the sets that will actually matter is that Fending/Maiming stuff will have slightly higher Defence on and Fending/Healing stuff doesn't naturally have Direct Hit on (While being able to have Tenacity/Piety instead)

But honestly... Couldn't that be adjusted in alternate ways too? Such as tying the extra Defence to the Tank Trait (Which is where they're getting their extra HP from instead of extra VIT) or even just scaling items based on the job you're on (Kind of like how the Aetheryte Earrings change what stats they give based on your jobs role)

Like... The only thing I can think of to actually keep gear sets around instead of just you know... Removing the different Primary Stats and simply letting people figure out what items they want based on their secondary stats... Is that comment about "Wanting players to be able to easily tell what job you're playing" via locked Glamour options (Which is a really weak excuse when you remember that you can literally Glamour any job into wearing regular clothes/bikinis/chocobo suits etc. With job identification literally only coming down to weapon usage (Outside of SCH/SMN because outside of relics their weapons are identical))

I don't know. It just seems like they're needlessly complicating things by having to add so many different types of gear in each category to have different secondary stats on when there's little actual point of doing so. Since you can simply just reduce things down given that Primary Stats are essentially non-existent (While also then freeing up people to have more freedom to glamour )