I retired from raiding in FFXIV after the first tier in Endwalker. Since then, the gear treadmill completely broke on me. I'd resub for a random month in 6.3 or whatever, do a couple Expert roulettes to get my tomes, then immediately come to a halt like, "why am I doing this?"
I'd been off the treadmill and unsubbed from the game for long enough that I forgot what the treadmill was even like anymore, and with a new expansion comes a new drive to play the game. I've spent the past month and change capping my silly little tomes and collecting my silly little normal raid tokens. I finally went to spend them all on just one job. I watch as my average ilvl goes up from 705 to 713. The illusion of gear mattering at all shattered once more. I'm a simple man— I like it when the number goes up, but to see weeks of daily effort amount to what feels like a rounding error is demoralizing; exponentially multiplied knowing that this was just for one job.
The gearing in XIV is so direly uninteresting. None of it matters. At best its an avenue for people to debate about miniscule gains on substats when syncing down to old content. At worst it locks you into doing content on just one job because it takes too long to gear a second, in a game that everyone proudly claims is good because you can play every job on one character.
I'm just going to go back to buying my gear off the market board and making my own party finders. Gear doesn't matter in any of the content I like to do, anyway.
