You know, to date I never understood the level of elitism on the issue of gearing, at all.

Everyone should have an option of obtaining better gears and new items down the line. You cannot deny that getting new bling bling and toys are a large part of fun for quite a majority of the players, regardless they are casual gamers or hardcores.

The hardcore and the top corp of players are already rewarded with early access to the highest ilvl gear in game, while the masses play catch up during the catch up patch (ie 2.1, 2.3 and in future, 2.5).

The hardcore and the top corp of players have access to both Soldiery and HA gear set and allow them to mix and match to obtain the BiS gear set. Non raiders only have Soldiery gear - with the exception of a one or two job, majority of them are either non-BiS or completely junk on secondary stats.

At the same time, the hardcore and the top corp of players would have been on coil farm for some time as of now, and with Hunts they are gearing on multiple jobs already. Casuals who are playing catch up are probably only able to gear on their main job, and maybeeeee one sub job. Tomes of Soldiery are still limited - even if these so called casuals can dump 100 hrs in hunts and gathered over 10k seals excluding logs, they are just not enough ToS for them to gear up unlike raiders who have another option of gearing which is ilvl 110 right off the bat.

And the top ilvl weapon are only available to raiders.

So... with all these benefits for raiding, why do you feel so hurt that casual, non raiding gamers have access to ilvl 110 soldiery gears which you people consider it junk stats for almost 50% of the pieces? Are you that upset that they have full i110 non BiS gearset (while you don some HA bling blings and goes "hey I cleared coil, okay?")

Does casuals having ilvl 110 avg affect your game play in anyway? Elite end games have their own circle and community and they probably talked about who's good and who's bad as hell. They probably scrutinize their lodestone profile and achievements and trail them holistically to see if they'd accept them. With all these it is not like ilvl110 soldiery will make them instantly good or confuse you that they are good and end up wiping you and wasting your time. You'd probably be able to tell who's good and bad with experience. So.... why so much anger that they have ilvl 110 gear?

Unless the possession of ilvl 110 gear defines your achievement and happiness as a raider, which then I'm not sure what to comment on. Most of the end game raiders pride themselves in their skill. World/Server first players observe the fight and figure out the mechanics themselves and they pride themselves on this. They pride themselves having the skills to push through contents which 99% of the player base could not yet to do it. Priding yourself over gear is just, superficial. Because eventually, every tom, dick or harry can get gear.

And the funniest thing of them all, is quite a handful of these QQ-ers only cleared T9 recently, or haven't even cleared them yet. Most of the people who cleared it earlier, within patch 2.2 doesn't even get bothered with this.