Honestly, just remove gear and make weapons and armour purely aesthetic. It's completely meaningless in modern hamster wheel MMOs. All of your progress is deleted every 8 months. All your old gear goes in the trash, you buy another set of crafted gear, and do the same tome/savage grind for a few weeks to get back to the exact same place that you already were before.

Nothing has any unique effects. Nothing is worth keeping for more than a few months. Everyone who played FFXI still remembers the Krakken Club from 2004 but I doubt most people who play FFXIV could even name a single piece of gear that they currently have equipped.