Darn it, Stompa. You made fair points and then, as well, made me sad for the loss of your friend!

Quote Originally Posted by Stompa View Post
Its not just that a new player just needs to get a full 119 set and capped skills, to engage in high tier battles.

If they are melee, they need to get a really serious Accuracy set, with expensive random augments. My Jobmaster War has some really nice accuracy armors, and routinely misses hard mobs.

They also need to get a heavy DT set, and spend the rest of their life toggling their Accuracy Set / DT set macros in order to hit mobs and survive catastrophic attacks.
To be fair, there is a practical ascension of gear and the JSE weapons go a long way towards bridging acc gaps, especiallya for dual-wilders. But yeah, they also need -dt gear and the reason a lot of melee die is because they simply refuse to accept this. I was killing an NM in Escha - Ru'Aun and a certain DD told me "I can handle adds", he died to the very first one. He thought he was just going to beat them down before they beat him down.

With ilvl, 99% of Vana'diel becomes Too Weak, the remaining 1% becomes just a numbers game.
So true, the old world feels made out of paper. Mostly because the mobs weren't meant to handle 15k WSs (from a pld!) or more.

I have said before that I liked the 75 game better, but that I was willing to accept the move to 99, as it opened up the rest of Vana'diel to solo / lowman groups. 119 was the opposite, as it effectively killed the rest of Vana'diel, making all pre-2013 areas basically unexciting one-shot-kills, and making any new content just a number crunch of Accuracy/DT.
I like 99 better, I like the gear options at 99. At 75, most dt/pdt/mdt gear (darksteel set, anyone?) was trash or obscenely hard to get. Now we have gear that has -dt and refresh or accuracy or all kinds of stats. I don't care for ilvl though, I would rather the progression to 119 be real. Now we're in this crazy place where the original WKR drops 119 gear, but so does ilvl 135 content.

That was never what FFXI was about, it was about experimenting with unorthodox party builds, maverick play strategies, having fun as a group of different jobs, using skills not gear to overcome challenges. The change from skills to gear as a requirement, as seen in 2013, has driven away a lot of veteran FFXI fans, including most of my LS friends. HP Scaling and other measures are just an inevitable knock-on effect of this ilvl shift from game skills and novel strategies, to gear number-crunching.
A lot of it wasn't though. For a long long time, content was about zerging for all you had. It was silly that we needed to do bard rotations (but practical that players realized it was necessary). Most fights were not a "controlled-burn" and didn't really use unorthodox strategies. I've done some lowman things that were unorthodox, but real endgame has been pretty consistent per era. Paladins and ninjas tanked pre-aby. Monks tanked Aby, Paladins and RUN tank now. You still don't bring a warrior to tank or a blm or bard to main heal.

I built a Xaddi Set, from Delve, and auged it for PDT/MDT, to make life easier for WHMs. It is now obsolete armor set. Also much of Skirmish 2 etc. gear is the same. This is just one example of ilvl "built-in obsolescence."

New gear replacing gear you spent ages farming a half a year ago, is not why I played FFXI. I loved spending ages farming an item, and then using that item for years. It became my favourite piece of gear, that I enjoyed using. It also has many memories, of farming the NMs with my friends.
Most veteran players know the feeling too well.

My best friend in FFXI, Pasajet, died of a health disorder in 2011. We had partied together every day, for seven years. We had farmed a lot of nice lvl 75-99 gear together.

I simply insist on using my favourite level 75-99 pieces from the pre-2013 game. I farmed these with my best FFXI friend, who is no longer with us. Those pieces are loaded with happy memories of our adventures together. I wear that gear as a tribute to my best friend in Vana'diel.

I won't be told to toss/replace old/new gear every few months just to hit a mob that my capped-skills level 99 Jobmaster character in HQ level 99 gear, eating accuracy food, can't hit the mobs anyway.
You sound like an intelligent player. You know what's required, even if you have your own reasons for avoiding it.

Noone can tell you to toss old gear (I still have so much that has sentimental value). But yeah, they can ask you to replace it in combat.

It's a tragedy when someone has a touching story like this when still two things would happen: Your recognize yourself that without ilvl armor, and good stuff, you don't belong at hard content. You wouldn't be able to contribute anything notable as any job but say brd. You have your reasons for wanting to stay in old gear, and that's fine, but it's all off-topic from the OP's point about wanting to get the good gear.