Depends on how you apply it.
It’s not a black and white case for everyone else.
I wouldn’t say XIV doesn’t focus heavily on gear. I would say gear is important in the game because, as you said so yourself, it still has hard item level requirements. That, and the fact that it is an RPG, and getting gear is one of the more fundamental parts of any RPG. I will say that it’s much more streamlined so perhaps it feels less focused with that regard, but gearing takes precedent for much of the endgame content.
DPS rotations are also really dependent on which job you’ve chosen to engage with. Black Mages? Absolutely. They require knowing where to stand and when to move, as well as what mechanics are associated with each boss fight prior to encounter. Black Mage rotations are ruthless in a game primarily based on movement.
Red Mages on the other hand, are a complete cakewalk. Same for Dark Knights.
But above all, FFXIV is friendlier to less-skilled players because said less-skilled players aren’t expected, nor required, to engage with high-end content to get high-end gear. You can do so by running your roulettes every day. It takes substantially longer, but it’s still a completely viable method of approach. Dungeons have a much lower skill ceiling than the endgame raids do, with most of it coming down to moving around the boss arena and not standing in LoS during skillchecks. Mechanics are much more accessible and deliberately obvious by design in FFXIV, whereas WoW essentially requires you to have DBM in order to be competent at a base level.
There seems to be a misunderstanding in what I’m saying. I’m not speaking so much to farming at this point more than I am saying that you can just buy the gold with real money through WoW tokens. That requires no farming at all, thus requiring the least amount of skill/participation in the game.
In the context of your original post yes they are meaningless.
However in the context that people are saying that solo players are the majority and should have bis gear given to them it’s not meaningless.
Like it or not you have people coming into your thread asking for bis gear from solo content which isn’t on topic at all.
I agree with you that the open world stuff does need improving. I think the normal raid level gear is the highest rewards it should get which we also agree on.
What? Yes they are lol. This is why I tried to remove the gear from the equation. “High-end gear” in that game isn’t comparable to WoW but you most definitely have to engage with the highest form of content to get the best gear. There is literally only one place in the game to get 605 weapons right now, and that’s Dragonsong’s Reprise. You can’t even enter that thing until you clear Savage lol.
Nope.
Even in the case of tokens. You have to earn the money to buy the token.
You then have to sell the token.
You then have to find a seller
You then have to participate in the content.
Compared to doing ZM. Solo content is by far the easiest content in the game.
And let’s be honest. Most buyers are people buying carry’s on their Alts. I had a guildy who sold carry’s just to buy them for his Alts.
Yet those statistics are always going to be contestable due to the sample sizes being conflicted.
You have no solid numbers to make an accurate claim on.
It’s all purely speculative and when you make statements like this.
You’ve given up.
No they aren’t. Armory tracks every single character in NA. When you use the achievements for every one it’s a percentage of the NA player base.
That can’t be argued my guy.
They literally have been listed. You just ignored them.
I haven’t given up at all. You just can’t handle facts.
Earning money in real life has nothing to do with the effort you put in the game, though…
By that definition, I suppose my subscription, which is fueled by the money I earn, is justification enough for me to earn the best gear in the game? That seems to be what you’re getting at here.
I have already acknowledged this by saying next best gear in previous comments. I’m sorry if this wasn’t clear.
Black Mage is the crack I can’t resist. So good watching boss HP bars visibly drop with every cast in your burn phase. 
Did you just ignore everything else you have to do after buying the token?
False.
Which is still irrelevant when talking about skill level lol.
I would describe 14’s difficult as constant or “flat.” It takes the time to walk you through your class and mechanics early on, but from that point the content is the content. Regular PUG stuff is still extremely forgiving in terms of consequences, but still has mechanics in dungeons you probably wouldn’t find until heroic or sometimes even mythic in WoW. Those mechanics simply aren’t as punishing until you get to the higher difficulties (in addition to those difficulties having their own mechanics making the difficulty climb fairly steep). Yet you still have to learn how to manage them.
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It can be. There are factors like:
When did they get that Achievement?
Are they still active?
Do they have current gear?
Are multiple toons on single accounts?
Are they from the same guild?
Are they carries?
Is raiding their prefence?
You’re making huge generalizations. You don’t know a players preference for group play by one Achievement.
As long as Blizzard withholds the actual data, everything you present is pure conjecture.
For the first time since joining this thread, yes, because this is such a bizarre reaching argument to make that I just can’t really wrap my head around how someone could possibly justify it unless they were purposely trying to be obtuse.
I’m following your logic here, dude. These are the rules that you set forth in this discussion. Real money you earn in real life that you use to spend on tokens for carries = Effort.
Therefore I can easily justify open world content getting better gear attached to it by the fact that I’ve put forth effort by using my hard-earned money for the subscription I buy every month.
I apologize if I have become a bit disengaged from this conversation, so if you could please elaborate by what you mean with this statement? Many things are being thrown at me that are a little difficult to make sense of.
Trying to conflate item level as a means of showing a game being more friendly to lesser skilled players is irrelevant because you can’t compare 14 and WoW gear wise. Going from Normal Raids to Savage in 14 is like going from LFR to Heroic or even Mythic depending on the boss. WoW has a much smoother difficulty curve, is constantly nerfing content to help players, and has much less forgiving class design.
You can’t use gear as a means to say one game is better for less skilled players because you can’t compare the gear between the two games lol.
Somehow got into the wrong thread
Considering we were talking exclusively about patch 9.2 this is irrelevant.
Again doesn’t matter as the discussion is participation in group content.
You’re not understanding the statistics doesn’t mean they are generalizations.
Using achievements isn’t conjecture. You are only saying that because they prove you wrong.
But it doesn’t tell the whole story.
That’s why your argument will fall apart every time.
This entire discussion has been centered around the fact that lesser-skilled players don’t deserve better gear. By context of the discussion, it is absolutely okay to make that argument because FFXIV does not require its players to engage with savage level content in order to get really good gear. You can run roulettes until you’ve maxed out your currency to buy gear sets that will position you to be ready for some of the hardest content available. Roulettes that contain a remarkably low skill ceiling to accomplish.
Sorry, but of course Blizzard caters to this. Boredom is LITERALLY the worst enemy Blizz fears, because with it comes unsubbing. They literally design system to keep players from getting bored as long as possible.
on a lighter note: It sure sounds like you are bored with people complaining of how bored they are lolol 
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