Healer/ Caster Gear design

[Anvaire]

There is currently and issue with healer / caster gear design in that not only is it nearly always a colour swap of each other, but it always follows the destinct style of being a dress. Essentially it needs much more variance. Taking a look at the healer and Caster gear of 6.1 and 6.2 highlights it. There is no deviation in style at all.

When i consider it there are a couple of branches of design square enix could go down

Heay Robe / Dresses - such as all of 6.2's gear design
light robe - SMN af3 or the thaliak robe would fit into this.
Armoured - The last armoured piece that was not just an armoured robe is well... never.
Coat, tunic, top - gearsets that do not heavily resemble robes. These suit Red mage a lot.

The issue currently is not that robes are designed but the prevelance. There is little variariance in design, resulting in most just being loosefitting robes. Individually the gear looks good. But as it is always a similair shape, a similiar design, it lacks variety and ultimately leads to feeling stale. The same issue can also be said of the colour choice with caster = black and healer = white being standard.

Yet to look at melee there are four different designs for each, a lot of which would not look out of place on a caster or healer.

[Lustre]

Feels like corner cutting to me. But I'm sure someone will chime in with an ACKTUALLY to let me know that I'm wrong.

[OgruMogru]

I would really like it if the casting/healer robes at least looked like they were from the same set. A robe look can still be achieved with a separate skirt as if it was one long robe you would not see the legs and feet anyway. There's no reason why the casting top can't be the same top part with a separate skirt. Or at the very least be the same highly tailored design with the lace lapel/collar and the little neck cowl. There are so only so many alternatives [and not many new additions that aren't...that shape again] and it's just disappointing to not be able to join in on that when these gorgeous designs are available to only *some* players.

[Alpheus]

the new crafted set looks like a redesigned reprint of the cryptlurker sets, I'm hopeful that this is due to the fact that whatever graphical overhaul they're doing for gear means that reusing these more recent gearsets as a base somehow makes it easier for them to port them over (essentially guaranteeing that they can put more of their focus and bandwidth of their efforts on the older pieces of gear that need more work done to them to bring them up to not only current par but the new post 7.0 standard).

But that is all conjecture on my part, for example I might be seeing things but if you compare the Doctore's Armored Bow and the brand new reprint of it that can be found in Brayflox (or one of the redone 2.0 ARR dungeons) the fidelity looks slightly better on the reprint version of the bow, complete with a new engraving on it's side that looks more detailed than some of the stuff added in 2.1 (like those Labyrinth of the Ancients Caster gear. Which aside from my baseless conjecture does illustrate how long healers and casters have had to deal with palette swaps of each other's gear (which holds true to the fodder leveling gear cowls and bilauds and even the tome Darklight gear back when mythology tomes were the endgame tome).

I just hope YoshiP gets over his glamour restriction insistence at some point (or at the very least instruct the designers who design gear to lay off the robes for a few patches), because no one is being served by it when you have tanks in Moonfire Faire gear, DPS in mascot gear and burly characters having to settle for a handful of looks because most of what's available in game isn't resized properly for them. Not that there's anything wrong with what I just listed but unlocking everything but combat Job AF armor (with level requirements being met for DoH/L gear as a pre-req to glamour it as a DoW/DoM class) wouldn't cause the servers to combust into flame or anything given the current landscape.