Quote:
"I'll collect the ultimate weapon and gear and skills to one shot the (usually) easy final boss but not use them against super bosses that actually requires them to stand even the slightest chance, for example Ozma, Shinryu, Yazmat (though this can be hax'd thanks to gambits), FFXII's version of Divine Might etc."
Here's the difference though.
The reality is that in traditional Final Fantasy games, I can beat all of those super bosses because it's completely dependent upon me. I can learn when I want and how I want. If one of seven other people doesn't show up, then my entire play session isn't wasted.
In FFXIV, that's simply not the reality. These big raids are difficult, yes... but a large part of the difficulty is simply finding seven other people who can be on the exact same page as you. For me, that's way harder than actually playing the game.
As Hyrist said, the main reason I chase carrots now is to be ready for the next challenge. Personally, I'd be fine if the best iLevel gear I could get was like i210 while raiders could get like i215 or i220. I seriously don't care. My RL doesn't allow me the time to grind away in statics, which is what's needed to make raiding not a colossal waste of time (in my opinion). So I'm not going to stress over gear I can't have.
That said... if there is an alternate way to gear up and get raid that's better than what I'd get just grinding dungeons (or even if it's equal), then BAM! Sign me up. I'd love to be able to have some kind of endgame progression in this game that allows more casual participation like FFXI did (dynamis, sky, limbus, salvage, etc.).
And a final note, so what if a person only wanted to collect the ultimate gear and not fight the toughest super bosses? To me, people should be able to do what allows them to have fun, and some people just like grinding and gearing up (I know I do). This is a video game, after all... and a Final Fantasy game, at that. Really, it's not like we're doing anything important here.
EDIT:
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if it's tuned to where you need raid progression gear to be ready for it, that would be amazing.
See, I think this would be crazy on SE's part. Considering the small percentage of the playerbase that has the time to build statics and progress through raids (and the even smaller percentage of those who just gut it out in the DF and PF), they'd be launching this awesome new content that virtually no one would be able to play. If that happened, people wouldn't just pause their subscriptions until the next patch... they'd flat-out quit. That would simply go against the core concepts of FFXIV's rebuild.
Edited, Sep 21st 2015 9:51am by Thayos