Question: What is the point of gear sets?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Let's take it a step further: no more gear. You just get a basic AF appearance, and your power scales based on level. And you get more levels after max, which let's you do more damage to higher level enemies and raid bosses. Actually, let's just remove damage too, since it just goes up with level. Just make enemies take a % reduction from 100 per hit, with decimal places.



But for real, the sets all have varying secondary stats. Main Stat melding never had a point unless you were a tank for str, and then only in 4.x, or if you had nq gear, which you should never have had anyway.

[Edax]

Let's take it a step further: no more gear.

For real through, that would be an excellent way of removing that awful gear treadmill in-between expansions.

[Kalise]

But for real, the sets all have varying secondary stats.

But, outside of Tenacity (On Fending gear), Piety (On Healing gear) and Direct Hit (Absent from Fending/Healing gear) that's not really a reason to have different sets.

Especially when all jobs have the same stat priorities based around Crit/DH/Det/SkS/SpS with Tenacity and Piety not being wanted...

If you simply just had items with different secondary stats. People would then just pick the items with the optimal secondary stats.

Essentially, meaning that they wouldn't end up having to design say, several different Fending helmets all with different secondary stats to make getting BiS gear require getting items from multiple different sources (I.e. Raids, Tomes, Eureka, Crafting) to try and get secondary stats to align (With then mathing out whether the Primary Stat gain from a higher ilevel item is worth the loss of several hundred of a optimal stat in favour of a less optimal stat)

Someone could more easily gear up with their optimal stats via a single route. By just choosing the higher level item with stats they want on it.

While I do agree that some accessories could potentially be adjusted if there's no primary stat on them except for Fending ones, having primary stats on armor provides a more visible way for the player to increase the power of their character without always having to resort to some arcane theorycrafting min/maxing guide.

Note that I've not actually said to remove Primary Stats altogether. Just to remove the 4 different ones.

I.e. Consolidate them all down to a singular Primary Stat. Since that is essentially what they are given that they're all identical and all maxxed out with the only thing that was in any way relevant to them being different (Materia) being removed.

Alternatively, you can remove sets by simply doing an Aetheryte Earring and having items swap Primary Stat based on what job you are.

The result would being that they could continue to make Glamour sets. Such as having a bunch of Plate armour, Medium armour, Light armour and Robes.

Just that these Glamours wouldn't be restricted to certain jobs with the items themselves merely being differentiated by the secondary stats they have on them (I.e. They could still make it so that Tenacity is still found on the heavy Plate armour glamour sets and Piety is found on the Robes. Just, Tanks/Healers won't be forced to wear these items if they want an ilevel increase but don't want those stats, in favour of items that have say, Crit or Det on)

[Tharne]

The result would being that they could continue to make Glamour sets. Such as having a bunch of Plate armour, Medium armour, Light armour and Robes.

Just that these Glamours wouldn't be restricted to certain jobs

This is one of the reason. They want job restrictions on gear and they will not change that, imo.
And before the "but we can already wear this... so why not that..." : exception not the rule.

[Kaethra]

Let's take it a step further: no more gear. You just get a basic AF appearance, and your power scales based on level. And you get more levels after max, which let's you do more damage to higher level enemies and raid bosses. Actually, let's just remove damage too, since it just goes up with level. Just make enemies take a % reduction from 100 per hit, with decimal places.

Add in a RNG variance of a few tenths of a percentage more or less for flavor.

And you literally have what we have now if you really want to think about it. As a coder for a project I'm apart of now for a game, what you said isn't terribly far from how devs balance encounters. There's a certain number of hits you need to get through a objective. That's where the term Hit Points came from. Something would have something in the neighborhood of say 40 Hit Points and require 40 hits to take down. Game systems got a little fancy and started having 'special' attacks that counted for 2 or 3 or more hits.

But now the devs in FFXIV have done something I've done similarly with Potency. Potency tells them how many actions are needed from each class should they have the gear needed for the encounter. If they lack the gear it takes more actions. If they have better gear, they're rewarded with less actions.

We as players see numbers. We try to get those numbers as high as possible. But the numbers don't come out from a vacuum. The math for each encounter on how many hits, actions, rotations, ect from each class is needed. They multiply that by the amount of time they want a fight to take, and that gives them the Hit Points they need for the encounter. Adjustments are made to potencies of abilities as needed depending on how classes are actually used (sometimes we use classes better then they expect, or cannot execute the proper actions in the right rotation due to mitigating circumstances in encounters).