What's even the point of doing savage?

[Renathras]

I don't want to trash high-enders too much, but said high-end content in XIV ranks among the absolute easiest out of nearly any other comparable game. Even the elites of this game are rather casual, considering how the devs took to the predictable "dance"-like design of fights. ... In any difficulty. It's just a cheap dopamine injection for many who either aren't interested in other games or couldn't hack it in said other games.

I will preface this by saying I've never done Savage until this tier. But I've played this game for some years now, cleared Extremes for several expansions, cleared some Savage this tier for the first time (don't have a Static, so just did the first two and was content with that), and have raided in other MMOs besides just this one.

FFIXV's raiding is comparable to most other leading MMOs right now. It's more rigid, but also more tightly tuned because of that. That is, in WoW, you have more variable mechanics, but they tend to be less deadly. FFXIV you have to memorize and remember the order of those mechanics and execute them at a higher level.

It's different between the two, but two flavors of a similar difficulty. And considering I remember Vanilla WoW raiding, where some bosses were literal tank and spank and some class "rotations" were literally "just auto-attack" (back when bosses could only have 8 debuffs and there were no/few agro resets, so classes like Hunter couldn't throw out DoTs and couldn't use direct damage abilities, thus auto-attack), we've come a looooong way since then.

[EDIT: Hell, the term "Patchwork fight", originating as "Patchwurk", I believe, was the name of one of the big fat Undead abominations, from original Naxxaramus, I believe, which was a tank and spank fight, thus originating the term of "fight where tanks pull the boss and everyone else can stand in one place working through their target dummy static rotation because there are no/few mechanics to speak of"]

FFXIV have increase player because 1/ it's a free trial for like 100hours and more and 2/ people come on expansion, farm it for 3-4 weeks, and then leave for month to wait for the next expansion. Lots of people does that.
In warhammer online, you always had something to do in endgame and you never ran out of endgame content like in here. There were countless of hours to do in endgame, without any expansion. But there were no glam, so i guess nowaday people play MMO for glam

And yet, FFXIV has consistently higher players than Warhammer. And if they were all free trials, they'd have shut down the game for making no profit to keep the servers running.

This game isn't Warhammer - which seems to be an ulterior motive of this thread? - and that's fine. Again, not a Savage raider here, but this is MMOs in general. New content, new level caps, new gear, rinse and repeat. MMOs have followed this same basic pattern since Everquest.

And for the record: I always have something to do in FFIXV, so...

[EDIT: Don't get me wrong, Warhammer did some neat things, but it also wasn't for everyone and it ultimately failed. There's reasons for that...]

Regarding some of the OP's points, Final Fantasy XIV is designed around vertical gear progression - doing new content to get numerically better gear to do new content, ad infinitum. It sounds like the OP would prefer horizontal progression - succeeding at different tasks awards you gear that provides a unique advantage for the long term. While horizontal progression can done quite well MMORPGs, neither is objectively superior, and FFXIV simply adheres to the 'vertical' school of design.

Don't forget Eureka/Bozja.

And I don't mean the Relics. I mean the Elemental+ and Judge gear.

ALSO content that isn't for everyone, but that gear is BiS for those zones. Elemental +2 is the BiS gear for Eureka itself because of the bonuses, and people do still do that content, like Baldesion Arsenal. And I THINK some of it is (or was) BiS for some BLU builds.

...which can also be considered side/horizontal content.

But I agree there's not a lot of it. One of the things I wish FFXIV had more of would be open world type content.