We've been asking for means of horizontal gear progression for years, be in the the form of alternative ways to earn augment materials (twines, shines), or in alternative ways to acquire BiS other than weekly grinding of tomes and lockout riddled savage raids that stretch for way longer than they should.
The live letter last night announced that Cloud of Darkness Chaotic will reward players with ilvl 730 gear, which is the same ilvl as current BiS. Win, right? Not quite.
The issue here is that they've chosen to introduce horizontal gear progression long after it would be helpful or meaningful in any way. Chaotic Alliance Raid will be releasing on Christmas Eve(yikes), bookending the final piece of battle content until the next patch's delivery of the second tier of Savage. This will also be coming many months after Savage, and shortly after the newest Ultimate, arguably the only two places where gear actually matters.
Now, it would have been really great to get this kind of horizontal progression if it were releasing as originally promoted, before Future's Rewritten Ultimate. It would have served as a fantastic way for raiders to gear any alt jobs for FRU that they wanted to play around with, or for players who have to switch off of their Savage jobs onto something else to fit their comps. Obviously, Chaotic gear won't be BiS across the board, but it would have been useful to get people the ilvl they need to prog well.
Apart from maybe replacing the normal raid and crafted BiS for Healers at the moment, Chaotic gear will be completely useless. The next patch will bring crafted gear that will render it nothing but glamour.
It's upsetting that their first attempt to implement something that the community has been begging for for years is done in such a pointless and frustrating way. Feels a bit offensive even. Glams are fire though, so that's cool I suppose.
We'll see what future iterations of Chaotic, and Criterion, bring in terms of opportunities for horizontal progression; but I hope that more care and thought is put into when these kinds of rewards are implemented, so that they can help what is a friction point in the experience of this game, and not just be concession rewards devoid of practical use.