Protecting Our Casuals: Gear

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You could have diagonal progression and built balancing off of that. You get marginal vertical growth in gear stats when you go up in tiers, but the horizontal stats on gear change from set to set, and you develop bosses/mobs according to that gear's acquisition.

Say you have a stun-protecting set at tier 2. And it has 100 m/p def/mitigation. And you have classes with stuns get most of their stuns at the lvl of gear tier 2 farming, so they're not OP out of the gate. And you have mobs with stuns on this tier.

Then a tier 3 set is a fire-protective one. It has 120 m/p def/mitigation. Classes that got their fire before this would be now weaker, once the majority of people acquires this set. Mobs at this lvl tier would run around lava locations or would just be more fire-based. And bosses would have both stuns and fire, so, depending on your party composition, you'd choose what set is better to go against that particular boss (depending on his atk, elemental attribute or stun frequency).

Tier 4 could be anti-ice with 140 stats and tier 5 anti-dark (corruption) with 160 stats.

Either way, I think you get the idea. You can still have gear that doesn't vary too much in its stats (which keeps pvp somewhat fairer), while you still have gear-dependent difficulty in pve and RPS counters to classes with different sets. Diagonal design

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I meaaan, I'd hope top lvl bois don't go nuking newbie casuals left and right. And in a big fight you'll have a wide variety of gear across tiers and resistances, so there's a fairly high chance that some lower lvl dude might have a skill that's strong against a higher lvl dude exactly because higher lvl dude has t2 gear on because it's his favorite and it matches his party's composition perfectly. And now you have a situation where the weaker player has a higher chance at defeating a stronger player. Wider RPS working as intended.

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Forbid gear changing while in combat and you got yourself a locked in boi. And unless both sides of the conflict perfectly know each other's gear/augments/abilities - you won't be able to perfectly fit your gear to their attacks.

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Make sets have better benefits than randomly thrown on shit, which would lead to the party itself mixing and matching their gear sets in order to have resistances to more stuff, so that they all don't get nuked by some lucky aoe crit.

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People will be forced into different gear either way. Be it just purely through tiers of power lvls or through horizontal stats. But if some of your horizontal gear is low on the vertical power lvl, you might get bonked because of that.

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You just have the base gear give you particular stats/benefits and you then use dials to shift those stats a bit or maybe add some additional stuff on top.