Quote Originally Posted by Ametrine View Post
I much prefer the staircase of growth in FFXIV. Every step opens up new things to do to make the next step and keeps the old steps mostly relevant.
Everyone is allowed to have their own preferences when it comes to gearing style, so pardon me for clipping the first bit your message. :X The quoted part above is where I'd have to disagree. For me personally, one of my larger complaints with XIV is that things become obsolete so fast. We have to replace full gear sets every major patch and old dungeons/raids are typically left in the dust (outside of roulettes) because the reward is just not worth it to most outside of glamour.

The grind in XIV is far more painful to me than XI ever was because you are generally doing the same 2-3 dungeons for months with the added bonus that you are treated like an NPC by most DF groups and are rarely spoken to. While XI's grind could be bad, the events were incredibly social and made things less painful (IMO). If they could somehow fix the social aspect of XIV, I think it would do wonders.