Are melds and super gear really necessary?

[tachi]

We all use the ifrit/moogle baseline for DPS and the worthiness of gear, we should remember that although DH was a run-n-gun situation the next 2 instances most likely won't have that option. And if you remember DH was chock full of r50-55 lvl mobs in swarms, the returns on gear is scaled by dlvl so that as the higher the mob the less return you see on your gear. When you look at the returns on a nice double melded fully pimped out set vs equal rank mobs the argument that gear has little effect is no longer valid.

I expect the 2 new instances to promote larger impacts from gear then we are used to now. Also this impact of gear on the tank is a monster difference when the mob rank is much closer, talking about going from taking 200/hit in trash gear to taking 75/hit in pro gear. Yes I'm sure ppl will eventually be clearing with raindeer suits at some point but the first few groups through most likely will have very top notch gear.