No one would deny that modern MMOs aren't grindy. What I will say is that modern MMOs are better at hiding the grind because they give you context and objectives for the grind instead of throwing you out there and having you kill the same mob over and over ad nauseam to get anything done.
So you're hailing something that has no context with a tendency to drive a normal person to tears as better than something that has context and an objective built in with clear labels for progression and a reward at the end that more often than not is reasonable for the time spent (Atma grinds notwithstanding). And then you say you don't have rose-colored goggles on.
Ignoring the fact that gear swaps broke too many things about FFXI to count, would you rather we have extra stats that will eventually have to be removed to keep class performance balanced and because item budgets were getting too big for the amount of power the devs wanted players to have? It ain't much better.
Elemental resistances in WoW are not any more useful than ours. The only difference was that at one point you had classes with abilities that could enhance elemental resistances (paladins with their auras, shaman with their resistance totems), and even then that was only useful on specific bosses.
WoW at one point had: Spell Hit (accuracy), Spell Crit, Spell Haste, Expertise (decreased mob's chances of parrying and dodging your attacks), Ranged Crit, Hit Rating (AkA accuracy), and Healing Spellpower. ALL of those are gone, either blended into main stats or simply removed from the game.
Blizzard has fumbled around with additional stats before, and what they're doing with WoD is no different (I have a feeling stuff like multistrike will come back and bite them in the ass in the future).



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