Quote Originally Posted by dspguy View Post
They could drop all substats, but then what would be different about gear when gear of the same iLvl has the same vit/main-stat all the time, every time.
Nothing, but I'd go a step further.

All you do collecting gear of tier X is prepare your character to challenge tier X+1. Functionally this is no different than requiring a certain number of clears of tier X before allowing you to do tier X+1. In other words, you could actually check for some achievement and having that raises your innate character stats. It's a reward from say, the "kill boss XYZ 5 times" (or 10 times, or whatever).

All gear would then be entirely statless and be just for glamouring, which, if we're being honest, is what most gear gets acquired for anyways, empirically speaking.

Yes this would not be a clean replacement of course, but it's to illustrate how little the actual gear progression we do matters. It could be removed in favor of a trait from an achievement, and you could balance that, with quite little change even I'd assume. Even ignoring that though, you could just have all gear have the same stats in each tier. They look different, and that's what ultimately matters to people far more. The stats are just something you get from a guide anyways.