Would you raid if there was no ilvl?

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

If the game was designed a bit more like FFXI in which lower level gear was useful for certain stats or boosts I would likely raid. Like for example, back in the early days of FFXI it was not uncommon to see folks swapping a lvl 15 subligar on because it had attack+15 for boosting their weapon skill damage. Sadly this is not at all how FFXIV was designed. It was designed to be 100% vertical progression, no thought process necessary in gear choosing. You just go for the next ilvl up and wallah your done. The most you can do to customize is materia.

However, I havent done savage raids since Final coil days because of toxicity rather than ilvl and I never will again because I'm so sick of the whole "meta" and "parsing". Even if I was the best player in the whole raid I'd still hate parsing. It puts unnecessary pressure to perform on folks, and I'm here to have fun, Not treat XIV like a damn job.

I can't exactly speak for your datacenter, but here on chaos I never had such meta enforcement (started raiding in 4.0) going on apart from people having obvious preferences (holmgang for shared busters, crit buffs on various jobs, etc) and avoid triple melee or zero melee mostly.

Anecdotal as it may, my static runs DRK-PLD, WHM-SCH, SAM-SAM-BRD-BLM and we are perfectly fine with it; we are practically off-meta in almost every way and we're all okay with it.

Putting anecdotal exp aside, it really isn't as gloomy or toxic as you make the raiding scene to be, at very least not on Chaos. My condolences if this is in fact your active, up-to-date experience.