Any chance that all raids could become relevant in some capacity in the future?

[Adrestia]

I've always remained a big advocate of the EverQuest model of raid/gear progression.

You had FOUR separate lines of progression, essentially.

Farmable
First is normal gear that you would acquire through killing rare monsters in the overworld and dungeons, as well as gear from the majority of crafting recipes, was on one level, designed to be enough to play the game effectively and break into raiding at low tier/older raid zones. Some of these items were extremely desirable despite the fact that they did not come from raids, as they were great enablers, could last for a long time, and could be traded. Absolutely anyone could acquire these, either by camping and killing the monsters that dropped them (also used as a good source of experience), or by saving up and purchasing them.
Defining Characteristics
- Strong HP/MP OR decent attributes OR decent resists: You have to pick and choose to patch holes
- Proc (on-hit) effects and passive (when worn) effects that differentiate these items from mundane pieces and provide a leg-up but don't typically alter how you play


Quests
Then you've got the tier of items that you can get with some effort, but not designed to be impossibly challenging, at least after they're not brand new. Admittedly, some are harder than others and some seem almost unfairly easy. These come from long quest chains typically, and also include each class's "epic" weapon, similar to an XIV relic. Some of these items have unique effects that, even if you didn't wear them into combat 24/7, you wanted to have around.
Defining Characteristics
- Usually 2 out of 3 strong HP/MP, attributes, and/or resists
- Unique effects that could be powerful procs, strong worn effects that you can't get from anything else, and "clicky" effects that allow you to cast a spell that you wouldn't normally have access to, or without a mana cost


Entry Raids
In the middle, we have low end raid gear. These are targets that were specifically put into the game to be stepping stones to high end raids if you needed to do some catching up, weren't capable of or interested in competing with uberguilds, or just wanted to raid with a more casual approach.
Defining Characteristics
- Fairly comparable stats to those quest rewards but without unique effects


Endgame Raids
Then we have high end raid gear. This was a lot of work to get. Depending on the era of the game, you could be looking at getting together 20-72 people to take down raid bosses, and if you wanted to kill the latest and greatest, you had to compete with other guilds hunting the same monsters, which would have typically 3-7 day respawn timers.
Defining Characteristics
- High HP/MP, High Attributes, Lots of resists
- Occasional unique effects of all varieties, sometimes so powerful they enable builds


Now what makes all this interesting? These 4 tiers (except 2 and 3 are pretty close) are VERY different from each other. One of those entry level farmable items may have a bunch of resists and you may wear it just so you don't fall flat on your face to every unavoidable AoE if you start trying to raid. But it's always lacking something. You probably wouldn't wear such a resist piece for small group leveling and farming, because you need stats more than you need to hit raw resist values for that. What happens when an expansion comes out? How does a casual/non-raiding player upgrade their gear? They get the next piece that has more stats than this one! But it STILL can't compete with raid gear. I think on average we were looking at about 4 expansions passing by the time non-raid gear had pretty much caught up.

Those quest and entry level raid items? I had those in my bags for years and years because they did unique things. I had a wand that allowed me to make enemies forget they had aggro on me. The Cleric Epic was not only a rite of passage (it was one of the harder ones) but it let you rez people for free. No mana! That was huge.

And the high end raid items are the same progression treadmill we're all in today, but you can't just skip an entire expansion's worth of content by buying a set of crafted gear and slam yourself into the latest and hardest raids. Instead, you actually PROGRESS through the backlog of content. Maybe not all the way to year 0, but all of that content is valuable to you at some point in time. It doesn't come with an expiration date due to an item level reset every other minor patch. If you didn't want to farm and farm and farm the old high end raids until you had every drop under the sun, you could augment with entry level raids from the current expansion as well as the occasional crafted or quest piece, but you were still doing those old raids to get baseline stats that let you keep progressing in the newer and newer high end raids.

"Butbutbut what if I want to play with my friends and they're already super geared and years ahead of me?"
Raids weren't restricted to such a small number of people that you couldn't be brought along for the company and the occasional benefits you'd provide even under-geared. Not that different from how normal modes and EX primals are today. You won't clear if everyone is undergeared, but if a handful of your 40 people are, you'll be just fine.

[DeaconMoore]

We already get gear for doing old content via tombstones... It's fine as is. Making the drops from the old content relevant for current content would just make it easy for SE to say hey, this stuff is still good to go, we don't need to make more. In turn well let's be honest, the fights would get old even faster and everything would just be on farm status. At that point why raid?

If FFXIV is going into maintenance mode and they aren't developing it in earnest anymore, sure. Otherwise, no.

[Vaer]

Scaling the fights and giving a different drop isn't exactly pulling away the developers focus, though. But whatever, it seems that nobody else cares about giving incentives to doing old content; which is fine, the new content is good. I'd just like to be able to properly experience the content that was before my time in this game.

The tuning is actually a lot of work when you're talking about old content that was balanced with a different set of job skills than are available now. You won't get the "pristine" experience since a lot of skills got culled/added and rotations have been changed since ARR/HW. I don't think they could do it since they can't even give us a third difficulty for current raids, which is basically just content tuning for a 3rd difficulty.

They could add like a WT book thing but require min ilvl option to complete stamps or something instead of the normal book which people faceroll unsync and put some rewards. That doesn't seem like it would be that much work in comparison and it would be completely optional.

The only thing they said they were thinking of retuning are the Ultimate fights to preserve the difficulty/status.

[Ventimus]

We already get gear for doing old content via tombstones... It's fine as is. Making the drops from the old content relevant for current content would just make it easy for SE to say hey, this stuff is still good to go, we don't need to make more. In turn well let's be honest, the fights would get old even faster and everything would just be on farm status. At that point why raid?

If FFXIV is going into maintenance mode and they aren't developing it in earnest anymore, sure. Otherwise, no.

Yeah but you don't have to raid to get tomestones. You can't really call that incentive for old content. Dungeons, perhaps. But not the raids. Also, that's insulting to the developers, and I strongly disagree. I have a bit more faith that SE would not attempt to use the old content as reason not to make new content.

The tuning is actually a lot of work when you're talking about old content that was balanced with a different set of job skills than are available now. You won't get the "pristine" experience since a lot of skills got culled/added and rotations have been changed since ARR/HW. I don't think they could do it since they can't even give us a third difficulty for current raids, which is basically just content tuning for a 3rd difficulty.

They could add like a WT book thing but require min ilvl option to complete stamps or something instead of the normal book which people faceroll unsync and put some rewards. That doesn't seem like it would be that much work in comparison and it would be completely optional.

The only thing they said they were thinking of retuning are the Ultimate fights to preserve the difficulty/status.

Sure, it'd be some work. But it'd be more of a one-time investment that if done right, could make it a more seamless transition in the future. More content providing rewards can never be a bad thing, in my opinion. As long as the hardest and newest content provide the best rewards, that is.

[Aquaslash]

You could probably fix them up into a sort of "extreme" content for midcore players to bridge the gap between easy mode and Savage. Give people more to do than whacking the primal of the patch. It would have been a better use of the odd patches than Eureka at least