Quote Originally Posted by Catmato View Post
How do you justify to them spending all that time, gil, and copper vouchers on Yorcia gear, just to throw it away for zi'tah gear?
Quite easily. "If you can't hit the mob for more than 10 damage, assuming you can hit it at all, I'm not going to carry you into the next part." If all you do is carry people, they don't learn content strategies, and they don't improve. Yorcia teaches them self-reliability in soloing mobs and improving combat speed to ensure that they get enough puissance to keep monsters spawning, meaning that they learn ways to improve their gear and dps to speed through those mobs faster.

Additionally, not all cases have Zi'tah gear replacing Skirmish gear. Let's look at Taeon -> Rawhide. Taeon head vs. Rawhide head fully augmented leaves Rawhide with about 15 acc and 18 atk (before stat vomit) versus Taeon which can get up to 20 (total 30 accuracy) of each, as well as Triple Attack and extra STR/DEX to pull it ahead. Rawhide legs are mostly a casting-type piece, and as a result Taeon legs with melee augments is far, far better.

Let's look at Helios -> Psycloth next, with nuking in mind. Psycloth head? Not a hint of MAB, not even in the augments. Good Macc for debuffs, but certainly not a nuke piece like an INT+/MAB+/Occult Acumen Helios would be. Hands can go either way; better Macc, but far less MAB than modest Helios augments. Legs once more have no nuke value, and are an enfeebling piece (though if you're using Helios you're not doing much better here; Hagondes is the best for a good while), and the feet, again, lack in any form of nuking viability.

Zi'tah gear doesn't automatically invalidate older gear; as with many pieces of gear in FFXI, they serve different roles. Yorcia gear is fantastic for several jobs compared to their Zi'tah complements, and serves as a way to get into proper content without having someone hold your hand while you watch YouTube or something. It lets you start to participate when you get to Zi'tah, and in doing so, learn ways to improve upon your character. "Huh, I can't hit at this level content, how am I going to handle higher-level stuff?" You'll see people trying to figure out how to get past Vidala's leveling up by bringing along a nuker to spam wind and level her down, or going splat against Gestalt's Dread Spikes until they think to bring a dispeller. You'll see people take a few losses from Lydia until they bring a stunner, including going /DNC to stun her Bad Breath and proc her. Learning things like these can't be gained by simply having someone else do the fight while you flail about ineffectively or sit back with a video.

Additionally, gil is easy these days. >.> Make 600k+ a day doing Arrapago Remnants II once per day, at least on my server's Alexandrite costs. Throw in some other runs in BR2 and you can easily make more than a million for day even for a low-geared individual, so that there's no "spending all that gil." It's quite easy to get. Copper Vouchers... most people let them just sit. I can't think of the last time I made use of mine, I'm probably in the 100s from idly getting them and turning them in, so it's good they're being used for -something-. The only thing spent here that's really of value is time, and if you value time all that much, then I don't think grinding the high-end bosses for gear just to complain about nothing to do afterwards is much of a better investment.