Out of curiosity, I decided to remove all of my gear and equip the starting pugilist level 1 weapon, weathered hora. I wanted to see just how much our stats rely on gear. Note that I remained a monk and did not remove my soul crystal.
HP with Gear: 11593
HP without: 2901
already we can see that gear makes up the vast majority of our health pool and the entirety of our defense. I did not test the damage done to me though.
STR with gear: 905
STR without: 289
On my monk, gear makes up roughly 68% of my main stat, and this percentage will continue to increase as new gear is implemented with higher stats throughout Heavensward.
Secondary stats: I added the totals with gear and without. Gear accounts for around 41% of my secondary stats with my current gear.
My current fist weapon has a physical damage of 70 while the weathered hora has a physical damage of 5. without gear on and the hora equipped, I was hitting enemies in Central Thanalan for 30-75 damage on the numbers I saw. Intersting to note that this is with a weapon with 5 physical damage and no strength or secondary stats. I wonder how much damage I would deal if you could not have a weapon equipped? It took me around 5 GCD attacks to kill a lv 17 tortoise.
In summation, our characters are actually very weak without our gear. This is something that kind of bothers me about RPGs. The character usually isn't that powerful, but the weapons and gear are. I always rolled my eyes at people in dark souls doing soul level 1 challenges who farm up super powerful gear, as the gear upgrades far outweigh stat growths from leveling.
I wonder how a level one character in FFXIV would play if they were able to equip i180+ gear.
At least we gain our abilities, skills, and traits through leveling. It would be kind of awkward if we learned them through our clothing and weapons, looking at you FFVII.
Maybe it's different for a monk, who you think would not need to rely on gear, but a Paladin without armour would be pretty useless.
The way I see it, the game could have gone 1 of 2 ways (that I can think of). Either it uses the familiar gear progression system or it tries something like a skill leveling system where your strength is tied directly to level of various skills you may have that get stronger over repeated use; kind of like the Elder Scrolls games.
On a different note, don't the Soulstones kind of act the same way as the Dresspheres from FFX-2?
I'm a big Souls fan but I really hate Lv 1 runs. I've never liked the idea of short changing the game and not leveling up. In the Souls series your charcter does get stronger from leveling. Remove all the your gear at soul level 130 and you'll still be able to kill many mobs in the game. I kinda wish FF 14 AAR was the same. I hated the story at the end of AAR where your charcter is tied and tossed around like some rag doll. The Hero of Light should be stronger then that.....
