The horizontal gear progression of the Chaotic Alliance raid is near useless.

[SacraAnima]

This is why the release schedule bothers me. Yes, horizontal gear progression and more options are nice, we've been asking for it for a long time, unfortunately it releases after the Ultimate, the one content where it would be very useful.
Especially on healers, whose current BiS involves 710 gloves and boots because piety is just that terrible, it would've been nice to have access to the alternative gear before the content that requires 730.

Yup, exactly. There was a window of time where this gear would have been exactly what we've been asking for, they've just decided to monkey paw the heck out of this long standing request. The worst part is that they had originally promoted Chaotic as being released before FRU, but here we are for whatever reason, intentional cucking, not enough developers, bug fixing, who knows. They'll never tell us.

[Jeeqbit]

This thread was made to discuss how gear progression is implemented.

The reason it's such an issue is because there is a disconnect between players and SE over what "progression" is.

Thus, I was explaining to people why the gear progression is an afterthought. It's an afterthought because SE evidently sees the "progression" as mounts and glamour (which is made evident by the rewards we've had for years including from criterion), and if a person aligns their thought process with SE, then they have less problem with the game usually.

if your sense of progression is tied to getting glams and mounts, then you're eating every single patch and your sense of progression is guaranteed and well supported. Rather than attempting to diminish other avenues of progression, you could advocate for healthy progression in general, of which gear is struggling.

Right, and I'm not saying gear and power can't be or shouldn't be supported as a form of progression. I even think there is an opportunity for them to create more power progression in 8.0 because they are considering things like talents, skill trees and abilities points, so they could make certain aspects of a skill tree be obtained from duties (such as ability points). Plus they even have demonstrated being able to do things like this with Blue Mage which gains abilities from killing certain things.

But until then, I thought that some players might find themselves happier aligning their thought process with SE's. I think people are coming from other games thinking power progression is the only way, and probably haven't thought about seeing progression in a different way other than power, that's all.

they had originally promoted Chaotic as being released before FRU, but here we are for whatever reason

It should be noted that they often say "7.1" when referring to things that will release in 7.11, 7.15, etc. So my guess is they just said "7.1" but meant a sub-patch of that.

I doubt they are just finishing it at the last minute. I remember when Shadowbringers was about to release they said "5.1 is already done", so they are most likely staggering it on purpose to spread out the content.

Although I believe they take whatever extra time they have to fix hundreds of little bugs (according to development panels I've watched). Any remaining bugs of note (that they are aware of) they list at the bottom of the patch notes and fix in a subsequent patch.

[Valence]

Jeuno Alliance Raid will be released, which gives access to shines and twines for non-savage players to start to upgrade their tome gear. You're also right that Chaotic will help non-savage players get that gear as well (depending on the stats of the Chaotic gear, it could be trash), but we'll have to see how much that demographic engages with Chaotic, since it's essentially marketed as the same difficulty as a second tier Savage fight. Also, if they do happen to go in there and farm it for gear, what's the gear for? What purpose does it serve if it will be replaced by crafted gear and the next tome tier before the next battle content is released? Aside from the player-generated sense of earning something, there's no benefit to this gear within the game itself. That's poor MMO design, really.

That's what makes this release date so irritating. It could have actually made a difference for people going into Ultimate, or for those who are still progging Savage. But no, it's released after all use for it is overwritten by other means.

The main fallacy I read when people argue that this is to help non savage players gear up and have alternatives is that people are essentially expecting players to run chaotic alliance raids, that are on a savage level, when they haven't progged savaged of the same patch tier? If they haven't progged Arcadion, why would they prog chaotic if it's the same difficulty and type of content?

This isn't aimed at non savage players at all.

[SacraAnima]

The main fallacy I read when people argue that this is to help non savage players gear up and have alternatives is that people are essentially expecting players to run chaotic alliance raids, that are on a savage level, when they haven't progged savaged of the same patch tier? If they haven't progged Arcadion, why would they prog chaotic if it's the same difficulty and type of content?

This isn't aimed at non savage players at all.

Yup, exactly. It renders that point pretty null. I think that the devs are hoping that it will be interesting and incentivizing enough to pull in some of the non-raiders, but honestly I can't imagine that many who are uninterested or uncomfortable with Savage will be willing to join the servers and discord voice chats that'll be needed for this kind of content, let alone do a second floor savage with 23 other people. Which renders this gear only slightly useful to people still progging Savage by the time it rolls around. Poorly thought out choice on the release date.