you know what really grinds my gears? savage gear

[Packetdancer]

so once again just cause people like one side of something the other side of it has to be perfectly fine as is right? if you enjoy raiding then why does it matter if the savage gear is slightly above the min requirement or at the min requirement? if you do happen to enjoy both but find a problem with the gear progression you should just overlook it clearly.

Truthfully, the only reason I care is that we already see people making, like, P2S parties that have an i598 gear requirement in PF or whatever. When Endsinger EX came out, parties were already saying "usual PF strats, watch a video" within 4 hours of the patch landing, and Twelve help you if you wanted to find a blind prog party after that point.

The community that consumes high-end content right out of the gate in this game is not always as patient as we could be.

So my only reason for feeling "starting on equal footing" is important is that if folks can have a meaningful bump above the entry-level ilevel right away, the raiding scene may not be as friendly to folks who want to start raiding, and for whom it's their first tier. Not because the entry-level gear wouldn't be sufficient, but because parties that wanted to set a minimum gear ilevel to ensure faster progression might exclude them immediately, right out of the gate, until they had ground enough of the weekly capped tomestones to get the unaugmented tomestone gear.

But save that one point, about making the tier not accessible to newcomers? I don't really care much; as you say, I'm going to be hopping into the tier immediately anyway.

That said, my point about "ask yourself if you really enjoy raiding" is not facetious or meant as some sort of "gotcha" statement; I genuinely mean it. You are coming across actively angry about being denied some sort of "rightful payment" for raiding -- whether or not that's the intention -- and I know that I've let myself get wound up into hobbies that eventually filled me with anger/annoyance/resentment instead of, y'know, fun. And just been oblivious to the fact that I wasn't actually enjoying it any more until I was forced to step back and look at it.

And maybe if you ask yourself that, your answer is that you do still also enjoy raiding for the sake of raiding, and that's cool! But if your answer is that you raid almost resentfully and only to have a numeric gear advantage, but don't actually enjoy raiding itself anymore? I mean, you do you, but that is genuinely when I'd probably walk away.