How would you *fix* gear progression.

[BigCheez]

Other people have brought up concerns with the idea presented here, but the one I'd add is the nature of people and things like the "raid" bonuses. I could absolutely see it becoming a Catch-22 very quickly, where if you didn't get the "Raid" gear that provides bonuses in Raids right away, groups would shut you out because not having that gear means (at least in our minds) that taking you would be a disadvantage compared to someone who has it. So, you need to do the raid to get the gear, but groups won't let you into the raid without said gear...

A valid concern, but if we look at other games (like FFXI) where this is the case, that doesn't tend to happen outside of high-end circles who are pushing the hardest content, where you really should have the gear required to do the content before trying to do it.

I think this is the crux of a lot of the problems in the game at the minute. There are 2 design philosophies:

1) Allow things to be complex, interesting and powerful but risk players who are lacking in knowledge, skill or gear being excluded.
2) Remove all complexity and gear/skill gap but prevent people from being excluded for not having these things.

Option 1 allows the game to be fun and interesting. Option 2 keeps the peace but makes the game shit. Yes, it's a possibility that people could run into groups that won't accept them because they don't have a particular thing. But I'd rather have that than a shit game.

[Kirutsuki]

Yeah, if they were going to fix the problem (and they won't), they would need to do something like this

Well this on paper atleast sounds more simpler than what I suggested and probably fits better to the current structure the game already has.

[Raraka]

First I would implement that one plugin that enchances the character stats page, because info is unnecesarely obtuse in-game

The short version of what it does, is that it shows the percentages next to the stat, so you can know that 2600 crit is 20.5% Crit chance for your current class/level (not sure about the numbers, just an example)

Then I would rebalance stats on gear ever so slightly to increase how much materia do, for example, in tank gear you can reduce 2-3% defense and move it to tenacity materia, it would make prog gear consider some ten for prog, then damage melds for the higher defense/ilvl pieces

Another thing is that stats could use some tie-in with skills. Right now skills just work mainly on your offensive stats, but if tenacity made defensives slightly stronger o have shorter cooldown, and piety made lucid dreaming more effective, then, again, we could see some variety in melds

Of course, this would have some drawbacks, like unmelded gear being weaker, to help with this, I believe tomestone gear could keep their current stats but reduced to 1 meld slot, as a easier entry point for casual players

There is much more to consider, but thats what I would try to experiment with at first to tackle gearing without changing it much, if I had to do bigger sweeping changes, gear sets and set bonuses for casual content are something I always love (I had a Vanguard playlist set in D2 and even the 4 dedicated Gambit sets) but they are a bit controversial

[Chasingstars]

I kind of figured with endwalker they were experimenting with giving unique effects to gear.

As Crafters get 1.75x instead of 1.5x value from the good condition. Fishers have about a 20% chance to make their powerful and precision hooksets have a 50% cost reduction. Finally, Miners & Botanists have a 20% increased chance for intuition.

So far not seeing that with dawntrail for battle relics. And if they did have unique effects, I would rather it be a unique effect for that job that changes how the job is actually played.

The only other unique effect on an item that comes to mind is the strider boots and hermes shoes (sprint duration increase while in a capital city) and the wedding ring (teleport to the other player whose ring is connected to yours).

Which none of those three items are combat-related effects.

[Raraka]

The only other unique effect on an item that comes to mind is the strider boots and hermes shoes (sprint duration increase while in a capital city) and the wedding ring (teleport to the other player whose ring is connected to yours).

Honestly it would be amazing if they started sprinkling little effects like that on other gear

They could have added Occult crescent speed out-of-combat to all the OC boots on +1 or +2 as a nice boon

Usually the reason why people dont use Striders is because they are "lazy" to swap gearsets, wich, dont get me wrong, I understand. So if Striders was an upgrade or "enchant" you could put on boots aside from materia it would be much more popular

*Enchants would need to stick strictly to out-of-combat for it to work, or everyone would use damage/combat passives

[MetaBoi]

Yeah, if they were going to fix the problem (and they won't), they would need to do something like this to make gear less temporaryIMO.

An idea I have is to add a special stat to an expansion's max level gear. So for DT it would be LHW: +1, CW: +2, HW: +3
If the special stat is equal or higher than the content's special stat the item's stats stay as it is if it is lower ilvl is lowered to be equal to be min iLvl of the duty. Dungeon gear will always have +3 Special. Previous Armor/Accs etc's special stats can be upgraded by combining the previous and the current item together. And new armor/accs would have new stat distributions. At the end of the expansion, it would give both raiders and non-raiders multiple armor/accs to choose from. And would help with earlier content being too easy becuase of iLvl. And when we get to the next expansion, they can remove the special stat from everywhere.

And instead of adding raid bonuses/artifact bonuses etc they could add an off-hand slot items to all jobs that acts as runes. Lvl 1, iLvl 1 that gives bonuses. It could be grindy but then made easier after the expansion is over. I'm thinking something simple like AoE Thunder spells in BLM dealing equal damage to ST Thunder spells, Lowering the damage of Empyral Arrow but giving a second/third charge for BRD's etc.

[MayuAmakura]

- Make stats count
- Make that turning your back to an enemy negates all armor + defenses and you take all damage
- Make additional stats to gear. e.g. tanks get dodge, parry
- Make talents
- Make glyphs,
- Make gear that isn't already written: ''its for you, dw you can't make a mistake!".

[Chasingstars]

Honestly it would be amazing if they started sprinkling little effects like that on other gear

They could have added Occult crescent speed out-of-combat to all the OC boots on +1 or +2 as a nice boon

Usually the reason why people dont use Striders is because they are "lazy" to swap gearsets, wich, dont get me wrong, I understand. So if Striders was an upgrade or "enchant" you could put on boots aside from materia it would be much more popular

*Enchants would need to stick strictly to out-of-combat for it to work, or everyone would use damage/combat passives

Which is understandable. And also kind of weird we don't have a method to "enchant" effects onto gear pieces. Although I would personally prefer the old mmorpg method of having unique items with unique effects. Which adds incentive to go hunting/grinding for rare items in a similar way in how relics are meant to facilitate that sort of desire.

Yet with how relics currently are, they are not as interesting from what they provide in a gameplay sense, just their appearance, which while I agree everyone likes to play fashion, it does feel kind of tired there isn't something to grind beyond fashion. Even the stats like critical hit for example, each new expansion basically feels like a reset, sisyphean even, where we got push the metaphorical boulder up the hill again to get to what we had at the end of the previous expansion.

[Valence]

I don't like the idea of removing gear entirely just because it doesn't work well and is bland and uninspired. It's exactly like people slowly gnawing away at public service irl until it becomes dysfunctional enough for people to want to finally get rid of it. And SE has a serious track reword of destroying what has issues instead of actually addressing them, so don't go and cry once they have removed effectively anything and the game has even less goals to have, and gear has been one fundamental staple of every RPG in the universe and a good amount of MMOs as well. Getting stronger not only by leveling, but also by improving the build of one's characters over and over. XIV may do this poorly and sparsely because the devs think that they also have to accommodate for players wanting to catch up but it still offers at least a small amount of gearing that ultimately I wouldn't want to see gone.

I do think the OP had a good lead although I don't think this would work because of its clunkiness. And I do think it would be easy to actually make it smoother by having a base gear like we have today, the baseline backbone of stats and item level. You can even imagine a world where they make the substats (and even the main stats?) actually more interesting but that's another topic. What i'd like though is to have different perks as you mentioned (and probably more exotic or wild ones, cf lost actions and whatnot), but only added as a second layer. For instance you could perfectly chase after those and get neat unique little things that only work on the overworld areas and fates and whatnot as you said, and you could attach them to the gearset. For instance, you could also stumble across similar little perks or lost actions or whatever you want to call them, in dungeons, and by running more dungeons you'd get more of those, and they'd only work in dungeons. The trick would be that what you attach, you could detach and load up another set depending on what you do, or even just have multiple attached, and say, you boot up a dungeon, then the dungeon set of perks would activate, and next when you hop into deep dungeons, you'd get your deep dungeon set of perks turning on instead, if that makes sense?