Guild Wars 2

The Problem
The amount of items that builds up on a character with different setups is ridiculous. If one setup was adequate for all then it would be fine because I would only have the armour and jewellery that I am wearing. In practice though, we likely have more than one set of gear for different purposes, and this becomes a burden on storage and limits creativity.

Think about dyes, unlike many other dye systems where you have to buy the dye each time you want to change the colour of a piece of gear, here we only need to unlock the dye for the character. This system allows so much experimentation with your characters looks because you are not gated by a purchase or a grind each time you want to try something out. In our gearing, we are limited by these gates.

The solution
My proposal would be to employ a system similar to dyes with our gear. This means for example, instead of hoarding berserker gear, knights gear etc… in your characters inventory, you only need to unlock each piece and it becomes available for equipping. Imagine something like http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/ and what was available to you was what you had unlocked on that character. It would allows so much more experimentation and reduce the stress of locking into a certain build to avoid excess junk.

Obviously one of the benefits of the current system is that it drives people to buy storage space. A dye-like gearing system would largely negate that drive. But there are ways to tie gems to such a system. With dyes we just click on them to add them to our locker. You could make it so that a gem-based item is needed to add gear to the locker.

Example
Joe finally gets legendary Twilight after much hard work. His Twilight is berserker stats and he uses this for PvE. Joe plays WvW where he uses soldiers gear and would like to have Twilight in WvW too but he does not want to grind another Twilight to get soldier stats. Transmutating his Twilight to soldier stats means he no longer has a Twilight berserker for PvE.

Joe uses gem-bought item X to add the Twilight skin to his characters locker. He can now simply select the skin in his character menu to override the skin of what he is wielding.