New and unique individual pieces of gear per expansion (as of 7.50)

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Due to the glamour unlock, I decided to change my approach from the last time I made one of these graphs. Instead, I counted each unique individual item of gear (e.g headpiece, legpiece, armpiece etc.), which I believe gives a much better picture of what we have to work with anyway - there are a couple of scouting gearsets that have a unique hat but the rest of the set is identical to the aiming gearset, etc. Per popular request I decided to make seasonal gear its own category as, apart from a very few early game exceptions, those pieces get absorbed into the store anyway. By 'new and unique', I mean that the item of gear has to have a different model from other pieces in their set - not just containing different dye channels, or, if undyeable, a different colour scheme. If the models for the tank set and the maiming set in a raid tier were identical, then only one set was counted as being unique. This also goes for gear that is a recolour of older expansion/path pieces. For example, for the purposes of this data, the Ala Mhigan Coat of Casting, the Ovim Wool Coat of Healing, and the Snow Cotton Coat of Casting are all identical, and only counted in the Stormblood data, as that was where the model first appeared. Accessories (as in jewelry, not fashion accessories) aren't included, but I did have a quick look over everything and would say unique accessory pieces have actually steadily increased per expansion pack. Weapons also aren't included - if there's interest I might collect data on them as well. External purchase here refers to anything that requires purchasing something with real money - primarily the cash store, but there were a few collaboration and promotional pieces that were also included. Some commentary: The Mogstation truly was at its most egregious during Stormblood - not just for gear as shown here, but mounts and emotes as well. Heavensward had a large amount of non-gear purchases as well that aren't displayed here. Did the cash shop really slow down in Endwalker? Yes, and no. Emotes and mounts were more prevalent on the cash shop during Endwalker, and, famously, many Endwalker cosmetic sets only included one piece of body gear pear set (e.g. the much maligned Gaia set). This was widely complained about and is probably why the majority of DT sets break costumes down into at least 3 pieces of gear (aside from the most recent Queen Sphene set). Endwalker also saw quite a significant decline in unique gear items, but some of that can be attributed to the sheer volume of old sets that were re-released to test the upcoming graphical update. The majority of unique gear in Endwalker is attainable through Island Sanctuary. We can expect more gear from Dawntrail still as Occult Crescent, Cosmic Exploration, and Beastmaster will all have new gear associated with their progression/unlock. I inevitably made mistakes, so I apologise for those, but as there is quite a significant difference between most figures on this graph there is hopefully room for some error. Also, I genuinely have no agenda in posting this - I do have a general distaste for the cash store and don't buy from it, but I was more interested in observing trends over time. In the future, I would like to further split this data into method of acquisition (e.g dungeon, crafted, raids etc.) as I think I observed a few interesting changes across expansions. submitted by /u/loopdaploop [link] [comments]

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