Quote Originally Posted by Ephremjlm View Post
No worries, I had my own gear, I was just looking to help others and realized there was an arbitrary barrier with dungeon gear. I know we kinda got away from that point because you take criticism towards the game personally, but if you have any real rebuttals to the points I made, i'll be here waiting.
It's not an "arbitrary" barrier - it's set based on the strength of the enemies in the particular dungeon/raid/etc. so that some people aren't simply getting one-shot by everything while contributing nothing and relying on others to just carry them through.

It's SUCH a waste of time, and I thought this game was supposed to be friendly to those who take breaks.
Compared to other MMO's out there, FFXIV is extremely friendly to returning players. Catch-up crafted gear is updated every couple patches, and previous high-level tomestone gear that is still sufficient for doing the latest content is moved to the "middle" tier of tomestone that has no weekly farming cap. Compare that to other games where you have to do things like run the previous tier raid over and over as the only real source of gear needed to do the current content.

Other suggestion - if you've got all that dungeon gear lying around from just runs you've done...encourage your mates to just do a few dungeon runs of their own, and they should likewise get plenty of sufficient gear.

FFXIV is much easier than most games for "catching up" after taking a break, but you still need to catch up. It doesn't mean you can expect to come back and immediately hit the new level of content after a long break with absolutely no preparation whatsoever. You still need to put in a little time to catch up - it's just much easier and quicker to do here compared to other MMO's.