Why implement useless gear?

Kiwi_

This is something I honestly never understood in any game so far.
While I think it makes perfect sense to have more and less powerful gear for the same level range, having gear that absolutely nobody wants to use has never made any sense in any game.

I thought AoCs goal was to offer a variety of builds being played, players being able to choose between different playstyles, different stats they're going for etc, I might have gotten this wrong.
But rn it just feels like any other MMO where there is just an illusion of choice with no actual variety of gear and stats

I think replacing absolutely useless gear with gear that is just weaker or has different stats would be much better and would really take some weight off of just one piece of gear being bis for most classes etc. resulting in absolutely overfarmed spots and skyrocketing prices

I mean - with more stat variety in the endgame (lvl 50), stuff like max mana might make sense at some point (maybe?) but like right now, there's so many things that are just not worth equipping even if that slot is empty still at level 10.
And even if the gear is not completely useless, the gap between the "bis" gear vs the other stuff is so huge, you can't really not go for certain gear pieces


TLDR
Having so much useless gear that nobody can make use of just makes Ashes feel like any other game that wants to give you the illusion of choice and variety without actually having any

Volgaris

The game is supposed to offer variety of builds, but as of now the limited skill tree and single "power level" stat really reduce actual builds. Even if they were to expand on the gear with random stat values (I thought they did for blues and above) it'd still just be the illusion of choice. Unless they expand the usefulness of the stats (int, str, ect) and drop the 'power level' master number it'll always be extremely limited. Overall there's a lack of gear in right now, the lack of crafting and low drop rates exasperate this. All these things really make progression feel bad, but I wouldn't worry about that too much yet. I believe there's much more to come. I just hope they get the stats right and that were not just looking for the "Gear Score" or "Power Level" on gear.