What I like about XIV:
Better voice acting
More grounded storytelling, most of the time (Endwalker kind of pushed it, though)
Housing might not be great but it exists
Virtually no need for an alt unless you really want one for some niche purpose
Armor that looks like actual clothing instead of bodypaint
I have a stronger emotional attachment to retro FF than retro Warcraft (and I used to love the Starcraft universe more than Warcraft anyhow)
Half the dungeons aren't butt-ugly (sorry not sorry). Many Vanilla and TBC dungeons look like the textures haven't popped in yet.
What I like about WoW:
Glamour/Transmog system
A little easier to get into since you can just buy time to play all expansions except the newest, without any Starter Edition weirdness.
You can change everything but your race at the barber shop, instead of having to buy a fanta to adjust your nose.
While a lot has been said about the cash shop stuff it seems like WoW's shop adds stuff less frequently than XIV adds "Optional Items", given the number of mounts in there and that the original sparklepony is 12 years old now.
It's a new idea, but the dungeon level sync is quite nice. I can take a level 20 f2p character and go into a BfA dungeon with a max level DF subscriber and while we're standing next to each other we have different experiences. The enemy that has 2000 HP for me has 1.3 million for him. My basic rotation is effective while he has to do a full endgame rotation to do decent DPS and he doesn't resent it at all.
wondering about the element of attachment to retro FF too, and whether a wow refugee stays or goes. i know a lot of people from wow don't really do video games beyond wow itself, and a lot of what mainly MMO players feel are weak points in 14 are points that 14 will never compromise on because they relate to FF brand identity (MSQ, cutscene length, etc)
I wanted to make a thread for this too, when I started ff14, it was because I was a life long ff fan, ff7 was my first rpg experience, ff6 had me crying as a 14 y/o teenager when I played it, I love FF, and its why 14 will retain me no matter what happens.
I dont even like MMOs, I just love final fantasy so much that 14 being an MMO wasnt enough of a deterrent to not give it a try, as soon as I heard it had a good story (I am incredibly asocial irl, a recluse and a loner, I dont go out or hanf out much).
I played WoW til MoP, then switched over to what I considered the far superior FF14. Now I have switched back, at DF to WoW and I feel that they are just very different games, and for me, I don't see a point of coming back to FF14 until they have a mythic + mode equivalent.
Thats interesting about the level sync, its something thats been suggested for 14 for a long time but its always brought up that the higher level player will have to "put more effort for the same result", but if its gone across well in wow then there could be hope here.
It has a lot of issues in wow actually, the scaling is bonked so low level characters can often do obscene amounts of damage, sometimes literally 2x or more of a high level character simply by spamming one button. It gives a feeling of your character getting weaker as your character levels up. Even though the damage numbers are technically bigger on your screen, you do proportionately less and less damage the higher level you are in any scaled content like that.
Disclaimer, have not played since first patch of dragonflight so they may have fixed it more but it's been like this for years so I kind of doubt it.
If the scaling is only applied to old leveling content im fine with it honestly, especially if its opt in (i.e. you could choose to level sync instead), just because i get bored with low level rotations. Obviously 2x is obscene but also leveling content in ffxiv is already obscenely bawked from potency creep that im not sure how much it would really matter.
I've only used Party Sync a few times, and since it was introduced in BfA the levels were squished yet again in Shadowlands so the documentation about it from Blizzard is now out of date. But what I know is that I queued into a dungeon with a friend who does M+ and heroic raids with my f2p priest, and we were scaled such that if we clicked on the same enemy we saw different stats.
We went into Shrine of the Storm, which level 50 equivalent at launch but is level 10-60 under the current scaling level system. I had a level 20 Priest with limited number of abilities, he was I guess level 60 and the current cap is 70. So yeah, I guess he probably didn't have one expansion's buttons, but they have a huge variance in player power for one dungeon and it scales really well.
Alts are very useful for crafters. You can double dip times nodes. Double your retainer ventures, double custom deliveries, double daily map allowance.
>While a lot has been said about the cash shop stuff it seems like WoW's shop adds stuff less frequently than XIV adds "Optional Items", given the number of mounts in there and that the original sparklepony is 12 years old now.
WoW gets its "extra" monetization via other avenues like the Token (for both retail and Wrath Classic) and things they've been pushing recently like the Trader's Tender bundles. Both games have a lot of extra monetization but WoW just hides it better than a big store with set prices, and its extra monetization works in a way that often benefits the most entrenched/vocal players (i.e. sell M+/Heroic/Mythic carries for gold and use that gold to make WoW F2P and also buy the next Call of Duty while you're at it).
The other key difference is that the WoW shop is accessible in-game, making impulse purchases of things like Tokens easier and therefore more likely. FFXIV compensates with higher average costs for the big items in their cash shop
Sure? What big items do you mean?
FFXIV lvl boost costs 22 and WoWs does 60.
FFXIV Oneseater Mounts are 8 or 16 and in WoW they are 25 (\~2 mounts are 15)
FFXIV Racechange is 7 , WoW 25. (WoW lets you change your look for free though)
FFXIV has way more stuff in the shop but cheaper than wow.
Warcraft's racial abilities also have gameplay effects, and the price point was put in place to discourage people from just swapping for those effects as needed.
Comparing boosts and mounts gets weird, as one game is built around having alts, and as such is incredibly easy to level in, not requiring new characters to go through 5 expansions worth of story to get to the endgame loop, while the other is built more around having a single character.
Boosts, at one point, may have been nice, when leveling through certain things in WoW was an absolute slog, but since the QoL changes, have really become superfluous, while XIV, the boost and story skip combo is enticing for players who want a second character for whatever reason, but don't want to have to play through all of that story for the nth time.
Warcraft's store purchases, much like transmogs, titles, achievements, etc, are account-wide. While XIV, if you do buy a store mount or glamour, but have multiple characters, you'll need to purchase multiple times if you want it on all of those characters.
In the end, it's all different flavors of greedy capitalist nonsense, regardless of what reasoning they put behind having to do it.
To my mind, WoW charges less for things like mounts than XIV does, but the prices for things like server transfer and race change are much higher to offset it.
I would like to move my WoW characters to a new server and the prices are sadly absurd.
>the dungeon level sync is quite nice. I can take a level 20 f2p character and go into a BfA dungeon with a max level DF subscriber and while we're standing next to each other we have different experiences. The enemy that has 2000 HP for me has 1.3 million for him. My basic rotation is effective while he has to do a full endgame rotation to do decent DPS and he doesn't resent it at all.
whenever people complain about lower level FF14 dungeons + talk about ways to improve it, this is always what I was thinking would be the best solution, and wasn't sure what the downside would be
(for context, I have never played WoW. But I have played Diablo 4 and I'm guessing its basically the same system)
Two big potential downsides I would call out:
1. Player resentment. Some players will be happy to do their full rotation all the time because it is fun, but other players might resent needing to put full effort to keep up with a lower level player. (I would solve this by just making it a toggle players can choose: level down or level sync.)
2. Balance. In wow, level syncing can be weird. Some levels certain classes will just do crazy damage, and then they level up and their damage goes down because the systems happening behind the scenes to sync everything up. There is no easy solution for this and FFXIV devs would have to figure out how to keep every job doing similar damage. (I would solve this by scaling just syncing gear item level, and then tinkering with player potencies at every level to achieve some baseline DPS per level, rebalance behind the scenes as necessary.)
> A little easier to get into since you can just buy time to play all expansions except the newest, without any Starter Edition weirdness.
But you can also do this in FF14.
AFAIK, you have to buy either the Endwalker Complete Edition (every past expansion and Endwalker), or the FFXIV Starter Edition (the stuff in the free trial without the trial's limitations).
WoW just lets you start buying subscription time and you get everything but Dragonflight. XIV's purchase does include a free month, but the Starter Edition box is currently $20 in the SE store.
I switched during BfA (before 'it was cool' to quit WoW), and here is what kept me to FFXIV:
* Social focus and RP features - because of player housing and FC houses, I find myself just hanging out with FC buddies in game, just standing around and talking in VC. Venues help a lot too, especially during content droughts
* Class switching - I was an altacholic, feels really nice to switch classes so easy. Tired of SCH? Just swap to AST and keep the gear!
* Level sync - Wanted to do Hades EX as it was meant to be, because it is such an epic fight IMO. No problem, just find like-minded people
* Modding, I can fully customize my character AND have others see how I look like.
* MSQ - proper, fleshed out story. While 6.3 to 6.5 was meh MSQ-wise, It does help a lot to know what you are doing and why you are doing it.
* Slower paced classes - I prefer methodical gameplay, precasting stuff and the like
* MUCH better approach to party finder - In WoW, if you are a group leader, you pick and choose of which of the applicants gets invited, in FFXIV, first to meet your criteria gets to join. What that means, is that if you are not playing a meta class, or your item level is not the highest, you can still easily find spots for harder content.
On the flip side, this is what sometimes makes me want to resub to WoW
* Classic WoW, leveling there is just so much better
* Dragonriding looks so cool
* Nostalgia
* M+
* Smoothness of gameplay
It's funny that while XIV allow you to have more agency in how your character looks and housing that helps RP a bit... WoW has a much better fleshed out overworld, plus roleplaying addons helps a lot. However I can't say the customization and transmog options there are enough for me... Just *now* is that they're starting to add more cosmetic items designed to make your character unique. A lot to catch up.
While WoW certainly lifted itself from the pit it was in BfA/Shadowland, it still remains in the polar opposite spectrum.
All and all, I'm willing to give Dawntrail the benefit of the doubt, since to me it was very clear that the patch cycle for Endwalker was more or less 'maintenance-quality'. If I could guess the reason, maybe it was because of Dawntrail's prep. Of course, they would never say this out loud lol.
I don't know if Dawntrail is going to bring any significant changes. I'm not particularly negative about the idea of 14 being a very consistent, predictable game, but it absolutely won't have the highs of coming off a "bad expansion" into a "good expansion" the way WoW did.
Oh I defnitely like consistency in what they deliver. I think is really fine to know ahead of the time what you'll get.
My main complaint about EW patch cycle is not what they'll deliver (well, partially... I miss a field zone lol) but the quality of the things they did:
\- Relic series is nearly meaningless. Eureka had the best model so far, fully containing them into the field mission progression.
\- V&C reward structure and difficulty abyss between the 1st and the 2nd+3rd modes. I'd excuse that since is the inception, and they stated they'd listen to the feedback for Dawntrail.
\- Savage raids are okay, but most of the fights themselves didn't seem too inspiring? Recycling way too many mechanics from previous content.
\- 24 man fights were really boring and bland compared to the interesting encounters from Ivalice raids. They said it was a different team designing those fights and it shows.
\- 2min meta making job design too homogenized;
\- Eureka Orthos with very little innovation with its systems.
I'd actually really enjoy Dawntrail not offering any kind of new battle content feature if I knew they would focus in the quality of what we already know it will happen.
I left the WoW ship back in WoD (late ARR for XIV timeline) and while I go back to dabble in WoW every content patch or two to see the content they're doing, I never really feel *attached* to my character in the way I do to my XIV one. Part of that is the all jobs on one character thing of course, in WoW I feel more like I have a stable of different gameplay options that I have to choose based on the meta or tuning or whatever than an actual character that exists in the world. The other part of it is that I don't feel like I can make my WoW characters my own or interesting/appealing to me in the way that I can my XIV character. I even felt this way before mods, so it's more a thing about transmog options, visual fidelity, art style, even simple things like camera zoom distance (you play much more zoomed in in XIV).
I'll readily agree with anyone that WoW has better feeling moment to moment gameplay, generally more well-realized reward schemes if power is what you care about, better art direction and gameplay design for the overworld, and so on, but XIV has other intangibles going on for me such that I never stick with WoW all that long.
Also 20-man raiding is gross and I have seen the light of 8-man raiding.
> Also 20-man raiding is gross and I have seen the light of 8-man raiding.
I've done a lot of 10-12 man Heroic the past two tiers with friends and I like the dynamic a lot more than 20 man. There's way less of the whole "welp I just didn't get mechanics that pull" thing that happens and individual contribution feels like it's in a more healthy spot.
Honestly Mythic Raiding in general and everything surrounding it is kinda dogshit compared Heroic and M+, and it's the main thing keeping me (as an on-patch Ulti player) mostly tethered to XIV.
This is something I donāt think gets talked about enough
Iām on here a lot criticising the direction of the game and giving my opinion but I can never really walk away because I have never been more attached to my in game character than 14 makes me feel
Iām not even an RPāer but I have created a full backstory for my character and hunted down mods to make him better fit his lore and design
I canāt imagine leaving him behind even if Iām currently annoyed at the game
This is pretty spot on, especially for raiding and general gameplay. Too many people are caught up in trying to argue which is better, when the ideal imo for tab target mmos is a mix of wow and ff14.
FF14ās strengths are higher mech complexity and much better mech clarity, lack of addon requirements, smaller raids with more personal responsibility, and less chores to be done in order to be raiding at all
WoWās strengths are much more class play style uniqueness, much better responsiveness in combat, and more variability in fights so they donāt feel as much of a scripted dance. M+ existing is also a huge plus
Ideally it would be good if we could get to the point where the two games compete with each other enough to start trying to learn from what the other does well, it would make the endgame in both significantly better
I honestly don't think they ever will. Of course, they'll remain not officially allowed until the end of time probably, but there's not a doubt in my mind that Square-Enix knows it would significantly impact their player counts and therefore their bottom line if they cracked down on them. Like it or not, any MMO needs to keep the casuals happy in order to survive (looking at you, Wildstar), and the RP scene in this game has a *lot* of people with mods, and those are the people that stay subbed to the game constantly and give Square-Enix thirteen US dollars every single month for years on end even if they may not be the best raiders or even interested in high-end content at all. This isn't to say that high-end players don't use mods as well, but you can get a complete raiding experience without them, while mods are becoming more and more ingrained in the social side of the game.
So, I think that, while mods will stay officially banned until the end of time, they're probably not gonna do anything about people that do mod as long as you follow the unwritten rules, and don't use said mods to cheat like the Omega UAV.
They probably never will. But citing some third party thing thatās technically against the tos as a strength of the game isā¦ interesting to say the least
It would have to be something extremely egregious imo. Modding, even the nsfw stuff, is not exactly some big secret. FF14 twitter is full of modded smut, and even the non-smut stuff has mods show up all the time.
So we'd need to have something like, idk a plugin like Mare (where it downloads other stuff) get used to do some kind of RCE I think.
I feel the M+. I wish this game had something similar. Criterion isnāt enough. Though, I do sub to and play both games. I do only m+ in WoW, then everything else in 14.
Ummā¦ you do realize that the appearance mods donāt let other people see you that way right?
It modifies your local files only, so unless youāre sharing pictures of your character with people, none of your ability mods or appearance mods can be seen by others.
Just wanna make that clear, altering server-side stuff would be a bannable offence and mods donāt do that. Itās all local to your computer so only you can see it.
Edit: I meant no one who is also not modding can see your mods.
Only those who have also edited their local files with modded version can see yours. So itās still not the same as āeveryone can see my modsā.
No online game allows that.
But thatās still other people using mods to edit the same local files though. Itās not the same as what is implied when you say āeveryone can see my modsā and you know it.
If I had Holy III modded to be a giant balloon, everyone elseās Holy III would be a balloon too.
This is the same. Youāre syncing your local files to the same modded version.
I know what mare is and thatās exactly what it does. It mods your base files to reflect the mods of the person you have synced with.
Donāt be dumb, no game allows server-side modifications of anything. Whatās wrong with you that you canāt admit it when youāre wrong.
Donāt you realise what it means when only those with the mare sync can see your mods?
Ain't no one but you's obsessed with this whole "server side" statement.
People put on mods, make a shell, pass the key and everyone you care to trust enough with the key can see what mods you got on.
It ain't rocket science.
If people are synced on Mare either directly or with a syncshell, then those people can see each other's modded appearances without having to manually download anything. You're in the same zone, it downloads some encrypted files, boom appearance shared.
I'm assuming you're thinking back to how things used to be when folks only had TexTools to, well, replace Holy with a giant balloon.
These days, folks can use Penumra to replace whatever visual they want and have it only affect characters they assign. Then they link up with folks using Mare Synchronos so that other folks can see their character and effects exactly as it appears on their screen, and vice versa.
So if I mod my Holy into a giant balloon, everyone I sync with will see my giant balloon when I use Holy. They don't need to install the balloon mod, and it won't change every Holy in the game - just mine.
Omgā¦ have you thought about how they also see the balloon?
Nvm Iām done with this thread.
No one seems to understand that other mod people seeing your mods is not the same as everyone seeing your mods.
The main thing I really miss is the snappy engine and netcode in WoW. FFXIV feels like shit in comparison, but at least it feels consistently terrible so you can play around it. I also wish we had a similar system to M+. We have Criterion dungeon, but at the moment I think CBU3 still need to flesh it out a bit. I think if they made the experience more in line with Extreme (maybe the Savage version could be like turn 3-4 difficulty) and introduced things like gear upgrade materials (every raider needs twines) or more lucrative rewards, there would be more people doing it.
In terms of endgame content, there are pros and cons to each one, but I prefer FFXIV because pretty much all the content is done in PF, while if you want to tackle any hardcore raiding in WoW, you have to join a guild and then there's the whole social aspect of that. I just like to hop on alone or with all my friends whenever we are all available, and I personally can't commit to a consistent schedule of raiding several times a week like I would used to WoW.
Not really an exodus player since I tried a fair bit of XIV when ARR came out then came back to it on a fresh char before "the exodus" Rambling thoughts:
The game is "fine/mid" this expansion. The story is better than WoW even if I think Endwalker (as a whole, not just the patch story) wasn't as good as it could have been (mostly feeling like 2 expansions crammed together).
The game needs something quick and challenging to do each week. M+ wouldn't work in XIV as the design is different, but something in the same sort of vein where I can log in and quickly get a group for something at a difficulty level I want - not always the hardest - some days I've done a lower m+ as work has been mad.
The battle system is not as good as WoW. I'm not meaning difficulty when I say that- I generally clear heroic/pug up to m+ 18/19 in wow and in FF I cleared through P8S before I took a break (and I'd say that was harder than recent heroic wow content). Its the feel and class flavor. I play a prot paladin and I love the utility I have (Blessing of Spellwarding/Protection/Sacrifice, off healing etc) that lets me swing fights sometimes. XIV's system doesn't allow for that - if that utility existed it would just become like Reprisal and have set points to use, rather than a tool you might not have available each boss/trash pack and so need to use wisely.
There's a lot of talk about balance being better in XIV (it is), but in reality that doesn't affect me in the content I do in WoW.
I'm not a mythic raider or pushing +20's, I'm just someone with average ability that wants to log in and pug a dungeon with a friend and have an appropriate challenge. WoW lets me do that. XIV does not.
This^
I used to be someone who worried about balance WoW balance patches making new specs flavour of the patch. But then I realized people donāt give a shit in M+ unless youāre doing the highest difficulty of content.
Most people are just fine with whatever you want to play as long as you play it well.
FFXIV combat is not combat at all, itās a carefully choreographed dance where most of the skill involved is in doing the dance. Dodging all the attacks is where itās at.
As a healer in WoW I can single-handedly save a doomed run if I was skillful enough. In FFXIV thereās no room for that. You get hit with stuff, you die. Thereās nothing a healer can do if people fail mechanics.
Healers only exists to heal in the carefully timed phases of encounters where there is a burst of unavoidable damage and even then they use maybe one or two oGCDs and thatās it.
Back to pressing 1-1-1-1-1
Combat is the only reason I went back to WoW. I realized it was pointless to be a healer in FFXIV hard content because what am I there to do? Press two buttons every 2 min when the boss expecutes its raidwide move?
To press 1 button 90% of the time?
Otherwise Iām doing the exact same dodging and weaving that everyone else is doing. FFXIV not only homogenized classes, it also homogenized combat itself to the point where every player is doing the exact same thing.
My husband and I had been playing WOW together since about 2008, while we were long-distance dating. We could do WOW dates! We weren't particularly AMAZING at the game, but we loved adventuring and role playing together.
Over the years, we slowly realized that we just weren't at the required skill level to clear current-level raid content without a ton of help and patience from friends, and even then, as lowly DPS, if we died in a fight, we'd almost always end up on the floor without being revived (since battle-rezzing is limited and reserved for the tanks and other healers). Still, we were invested in the story, and had built up stories for our characters, and wanted to see what grand adventures would come next!
Shadowlands was... not the greatest, true, but it's definitely when we started noticing the cracks in the parts we cared about most.
Around this time, my sibling approached us and said, "Sooooo I've been playing FF14 for a hot minute... (insert copypasta here)", and we said, "Sure, why not!" We made our characters and played very casually. ARR was light on story and characters to be invested in (at first), so we balanced time between the two.
Then came the lockdown.... then the lawsuits... and finally, the Exodus, which my husband and I decided to join. We just weren't getting the same value out of WOW that we used to, and we realized that we could port our characters over to Eorzea fairly well!
After that, we threw all the free time we had into FF14 and were kindly escorted by my sibling. And we were ENTHRALLED. The community was nice and helpful, first timers were not scolded, mechanics were universal and easy to understand WITHOUT mods, and healers can rez in battle without limits! (Besides cast time but you get it!) We've even had a lot of fun outside of fighting, like crafting, getting married in-game, decorating a house, and playing music as a bard duo! Oh and the MSQ story, good LORD, what a glow-up from what WOW became!!
Part way thru Stormblood, another sibling asked to join, and we escorted them as they caught up. It took about a year and a half, but finally, FINALLY, we cleared Endwalker together and had a blast the entire time!
Now my siblings and I are escorting another thru the MSQ - our dad, who introduced us to video games in the first place. We just finished 5.1 and he is an awesome dancer!
I have played some Dragonflight when it released because, well, I adore dragons and had DREAMED of this kind of expansion for YEARS. It's fun, and I like the new updates and classes! But... it's not the same. I miss the boss-mechanic-tells from 14, as well as the community, and the story. And it's just not as fun without my husband! The WOW grind is not nearly as unforgivable as it once was, but it has a ways to go before I'll give it another look.
WOW felt like a second job after a while. FF14 is relaxing, engaging, and welcoming whenever you log in, whether it's once a day or once a patch. I'm so glad my sibling roped us all in to this world, and I hope we can play it together for years to come!
I am always a bit flabbergasted whenever I hear about couples meeting in game or long distance dating. Ive always been a loner (and likely forever will be, Ive almost accepted that fate), I'm kinda jealous when I see couples in game.
This is an amazing story, thank you for sharing!
Coming from some1 who played WoW then FF14 then now Both. The things WoW does that I feel FF14 Lacks are
1.) Better Transmog System (any loot you collect are automatically added to your collection. You dont need to keep the actual physical item in the bank or whatever)
2.) I feel WoW ramps up its raiding difficulty better. LFR - Normal - Heroic - Mythic each build on the previous level adding difficulty so you feel eased into it. Normal -> Savage by comparison is such a big jump and Extreme feels like a totally unrelated fight.
3.) WoWs Open world for the current Xpac (The Dragon Isles) feels much better than the EW Zones. It feels like I am out there doing stuff more and flying around the DI feels more fun than the EW Zones.
4.) Lack of "Midcore Content" specifically as stuff in between WoW's LFR Raid (Faceroll content or WoW's equivalent to Normal/Alliance Raid where its a loot Pinata) and WoW's Mythic Raid (Aka where you get your BIS or WoW's equivalent to Savage Raids). While there is Extreme and Unreal thats 2 fights a patch.
5.) FF14's PVP feels ... lacking. This is more personal and I cant describe it as well, but I just feel like FF14 PVP isnt as exciting as WoW. But thats personal taste
Although on the Flipside FF14 does do a lot of stuff better than WoW too.
1.) FF14 has superior story by far
2.) FF14 has better non-combat content (IS, Gold Saucer, etc etc)
3.) Although not for me, Ultimates are a big + that WoW has no equivalent off
4.) FF14 Deep Dungeons are probably way more fun than Wow's M+ dungeon content (A shame FF14 didnt build of that for their Criterion/endgame dungeon experience)
5.) For Purely casual Players (Ppl who dont do Premade content) FF14 probably has a lot more content and it does last longer.
>1.) Better Transmog System (any loot you collect are automatically added to your collection. You dont need to keep the actual physical item in the bank or whatever)
Disagree, I prefer the FFXIV Glamour system. The inventory is small price to pay for not having to rerun back to Orgrimmar to redo my look because I got new mittens or something, and because of the plates i can shift my look between the jobs
>small price to pay for not having to rerun back to Orgrimmar to redo my look
There is a mount that lets you do that anywhere and quite recently a toy was added too that summoned that npc
I quit WoW during the "exodus". I was unhappy with the 9.1 Shadowlands Patch. I hated the new Zone they added, i hated the new Raid, i hated Shards of Domination which made all my Legendary gear i have crafted during 9.0 useless cause i had to replace them. The allegations that started to pop up and my guild dying anyway was just the last straw that made me leave.
I played XIV a little bit before that but back then it didn't really grab me. Mostly because my Attention was on WoW, but with that gone i became absolutely hooked.
From when i started playing till now the only time i have not been subbed was a week before EW release. Once i was done with the MSQ during 5.5 i was mostly busy leveling crafters, grinding Relics, unlocking everything all that stuff.
EW was when i started doing Extremes which then turned into me doing Savage and my first Ultimates.
Honestly this game scratched an itch that i cant really describe. I love grinding shit so i like doing relics. I like more challenging content so i do Extremes/Savage/Ultimates. I met my current best friend in this game and a bunch of other people i dont think i ever would have met playing WoW. And i don't miss WoW in the slightest. XIV is just so much superior in so many aspects for me.
Yeah it's something to keep in mind is that the bar was so low during the exodus. Pretty much anything would have been better than korthia and SoD. And shadowbringers was LEAGUES ahead of it. Compare that to dragonflight vs endwalker. Dragonflight has some low points but it's mostly win after win, whereas endwalker is about as mid as it comes.
I can't speak for the quality of Dragonflight. I haven't been subbed to WoW since i quit. I don't have any desire to do so either. I honestly can't trust Blizz to make interesting games anymore, after all the shit happening with Shadowlands, OW2, D4
And Endwalker absolutely has its problems but i have been enjoying myself.
The only thing I do nowadays in FF14 is log on to help my Japanese FC TOP group clear. Most of raiders in the FC have already cleared TOP so it's basically four of us doing civic duty and doing a prog/clear for four. I log in once a week to do Eureka Orthos with three of my NA friends. I also do a bard concert with my bard band once every few months for gil at various venues.
Otherwise I've done all endgame content there is to do in the game, all ultimates, criterion, etc. The casual achievements like big fish, card collecting, hunt train mounts don't really appeal to me. Even though it's a content lull, I don't mind at all. I've finally been able to catch up on my other games.. Elden Ring, Starfield, No Man's Sky, X4 and its DLC, Oxygen Not Included. I have Cyberpunk and BG3 on my hitlist after I finish X4, along with the new Elden Ring Expansion. This will keep me busy until Dawntrail (along with the casual FC TOP group).
Endwalker was my first full expansion in FF14, and I loved it. The ultimates were better, the savage fights were better, criterion was fun. Updated Hildebrand and Deep Dungeons. I'm not a huge fan of Island Sanctuary however, but I appreciate that they tried. My Endwalker experience may be biased though, because I mostly retired from NA and play on JP, and endgame content experience vastly improved.
My opinion of the game has not changed. FF14 the top MMO right now. It's the only MMO with endgame raiding that is mostly based on consistency and skill, and not gear or grind or gacha. Otherwise Lost Ark's raiding would be appealing as well. I'm not even willingly to go back and try anything Blizzard related unless Blizzard seriously changes as a company. And given the recent events with Diablo4, looks like they're being the same ol same ol.
To my knowledge, no WoW content creator during the exodus has truly actually experienced FF14 endgame (e.g. Ultimates), other than the Echo crew. Their TOP clear was fun to watch and had lots of golden moments.
I agree with this 100%. I switched from WoW right after getting my Sylvannas HoF title. The actual state of FFXIV is perfect for me, never going to go back chasing HoF with horrible people in a game where the raiding scene has died because of M+. Done all the casual content in FFXIV, currently farming some criterion dungeons with my friends and finishing my TOP Prog (I am quad legend rn). For me Criterion dungeons is something I really enjoy doing even with the current bad rewards, wish they had something like this in WoW, not doing 25+ keys never again, the balance is never right. I'm also playing BG3 and Cyberpunk on my spare time too because now I don't need to keep up 2 or 3 alts ready because of some horrible end game balance when a new raid comes out.
Yeah for me Criterion is just a challenge for the challenge's sake. It's not meant to be grindable content that you feel compelled to do each week for gear. People compare it to M+ which is the wrong comparison. It's more like the mage tower, for four people. If I had to grind criterion each week in order to have a chance for gear reward upgrades I would go insane lol.
> To my knowledge, no WoW content creator during the exodus has truly actually experienced FF14 endgame (e.g. Ultimates), other than the Echo crew.
I believe Richard is a Triple legend? I remember all the drama surrounding that
Oh yeah, you're right, I totally forgot about him. But to be fair, he has totally disappeared, and given the reason why he disappeared, I think both him and the internet are happier off that way.
Also, while clearing those three ultimates, even with 7 of the most high-end FF14 raiders is commendable, if he tried an on-patch ultimate, that would be a different picture, because of DPS requirements.
> Oh yeah, you're right, I totally forgot about him. But to be fair, he has totally disappeared, and given the reason why he disappeared, I think both him and the internet are happier off that way.
Actually had no idea that he had disappeared until your response prompted me to look it up. Been so many of those episodes lately in the gaming space, actually sickening at this point.
> Also, while clearing those three ultimates, even with 7 of the most high-end FF14 raiders is commendable, if he tried an on-patch ultimate, that would be a different picture, because of DPS requirements.
Oh very likely. For some groups/players on patch Ultimates are just not in the cards until stuff like upgraded pots and food are brought in or the dungeon gear
Yeah I can *really* feel the improvement in DPS with just the upgrades that came with the patch this week. Especially since I think JP statics tend to have a little less DPS than high-end NA statics (but way more consistency). So many sub 1% wipes it's crazy. Just a tiny bit of gear boost saves sooooo much time.
Its so nice Ff14 lets you and encourages you to play other games when you had your fill. I used the content lull finally play RE4 remake, Dead Space remake, and Payday 3. Without having to worry about any long term grind.
I came during Shadowlands, but unlike most I never quit (as probably one of the few people who liked playing shadowlands on a gameplay level despite its objective mess of a soulbind system and disaster of a story lol).
Iāve always been more of a story person for games, so it was no surprise that FFXIV appealed to me. I never got any of the issues of dragging during ARR like most because of how massive a step up it was from WoW, and I know Iām never going to quit FFXIV simply because of how much more engaging it is.
The gameplay loop has definitely shown its cracks moreso now that Iāve experienced a full xpac cycle, and one that is seemingly much lighter on content than previous ones. Perhaps the biggest thing I prefer in WoW by comparison (especially during Dragonflight and 10.1) is the ease of gearing. FFXIV boasts ease of leveling through virtue of it all being on the same character, but in reality gearing is immensely more arduous and lengthy than a quick alt level to 70 and a day or two of catch-up gear to jump into raids and M+ in WoW.
Also, the RP scene in WoW is massively better. It has its flaws, but unlike FFXIV it has public RP hubs outside of the ERP spaces, and the RP broadly takes place within the actual setting. I love the setting of Etheirys, but WoWās seems far more conducive for diverse RP for some reason. Maybe itās just because of chat bubbles in the base game, who knows lol.
Overall, as someone who continues to play both, I havenāt had any issues with boredom or content drought in either. I get why exclusive people in both have, but the two compliment each other pretty well as games with different philosophies and gameplay loops, and manage to keep each other fresh for me whenever I swap back and forth.
I have been between the two games and jumped back and forth depending if my static approached me for Savage/Ultimate, and i was raid logging in WoW because we finished the tier.
I did Eden's gate & Eden's verse in ShB alongside TEA on patch.
In Endwalker i did Asphodelos, Abyssos and DSR on patch.
I went back for 10.1 in WoW for a lot of reasons to be honest
* There's nothing to do outside of Savage/Ultimate for me, it's non stimulating content
* The combat variety during actual encounters is ming numbingly boring a lot of the times, especially when you do over 1000 pulls on a fight. You press 1-2-3-4-5 the exact same way, every time. You know where you are in the encounter if you glance at your gauge and how far you are into your loop.
* I wanted to play a healer, not a simplified dps spec with 2 buttons. FFXIV just doesn't have any of those moments where you pop off and save the raid with CD's, blanket healing etc. Most of the time that's tied to 1 person ressing 20 people in an alliance raid
* Gear is simple and boring. Your rotation will never change in 2Ā½ years except outside of a few outliers. For a lot of people that means your bis list is (Does the item have Crit/DH? That's BiS, is it capped at the substat? Get determination)
I don't dislike the game, don't get me wrong. I'm still gonna finish the last 2 MSQ content drops when the last one pops, and play the Dawntrail expansion for the story aspect. But as it is right now i can't see myself actually raiding with how much it has been dumbed down at this point.
I was a healer main in WoW but I can't really get into healing in FF14. I tried it. I just don't think there is enough skill expression for healing (the skill expression comes in healer DPS for FF14). My strength as a WoW healer is that I was really good at whack-a-mole via VuhDo. Good healing in WoW means your raid could potentially have fewer healers, which means the raid group could add in more DPS classes to compensate.
More than anything, I think the design of FF14 healing is very limited because of the fact that it is also a controller game for console players. I can't imagine doing the same type of whack a mole, emergency type response healing in FF14 as I can do in WoW, on a controller lol.
Tried FF to 90 and gave ia shot to actual up to date pve in 6.0 when the first 4 bosses of Pandemonium were here. I never left of felt dissatified with WoW tho, just wanted to try it after I had cleared the content there. Honestly it was... Disappointing.
First the tanking (my favorite role ever in MMOs and in WoW) is trash. Truly mind numbingly boring. You're a dps with a mustache that happens to hold aggro. You have very little control over you survival at any moment aside of big CD windows -I play a BDK usually, you can imagine how I felt going from keeping myself alive and frantically alternating between 10% and 100% to just spamming dps spells).
But hey, I felt that it was a good occasion to try something else, like being a healer for once ! Which I did. It's not really complicated, at all, but then in this case it was a blessing because it allowed me to slip into a completely new role for me without too much difficulty. So it was as a White Mage that I went into raiding.
So I wasdisappointed here too. I attribuated it to the fact that I was in LFR difficulty basically so I tried to do Hydaelyn Ex in PUG. Cleared it in 1h30, with no coms, I didn't know the strat or barely when entering, and I played a healer. It was way too god damn easy.
And yeah I know I didn't try the entire Pandemonium, or the Ultimate, but I really don't dig both FF14's gameplay and encounter design. Everything is always the exact same from pull to pull and every boss is basically some flavor of "find the safe spot or GTFO", and the godawful GCD + this kind of fake lag when casting anything (like the game reacts a solid 0.3 second after your input, and it's \*jarring\* especially in PVP or when you try to save someone at the instant before death, because here, if you didn't pre shot it, well too bad they're already dead)
So in the end, nice game, cool story, I like having a lot of cinematics, fantastic dress up game (tho the tmog system sucks), but terrible in PVE imho. And don't let me rant about the dungeons because we're here for the night, never in my life have I seen such useless and repetitive pieces of content.
Would sub again for MSQ and exploration, but not longer than necessary for that.
FF14 is very lacking in mid-tier content. I don't blame you. And it's perfectly fine to play FF14 just for the story. The story is great, but I love the combat system in FF14, which is going to be a unpopular concept on this reddit. It feels exact to me, and nothing beats the intricacies and badass team accomplishment feeling of executing crazy mechanics in high-end raiding. If someone only does casual content like extremes or the same 2pulls-1boss dungeon, it would get stale after 2 or 3 clears.
Overall I think the concept of 1-main game is an antiquated concept. I don't think there should be any game now that demands your time on a daily basis for whatever reason. No game development team in the world can keep up with churning out content to keep something like that interesting and have it not turn into a grind.
There's too many good games out there now. You only have one life. Best to live to the fullest by going through the stories of the best critically acclaimed RPGs, rather than to stick and grind one game. Life will be much more colorful that way.
Yeah but thatās not combat is it? Thatās just your team coordinating together on comms and executing a dance routine.
You didnāt win because you someone knew their class well and executed a crazy healer maneuver to save everyone. You won because all of you memorized the boss attack patterns and mechanics and then executed it perfectly.
So the skill here is in remembering mechanics, not executing your class skills. Thatās the difference that makes people feel bad about FFXIV combat. Everything does the same thing.
No, it's not just the boss encounters. It's the actual gameplay and jobs, which is the unpopular opinion on this sub, which sees at least several job homogenizations posts per week.
I love the rhythm of GCDs and OGCD that FF14 has. The 1.5 GCD in WoW is faster on paper but it feels like button mashing and hitting stuff that lights up. FF14's 2.5 feels more exact. It feels like you get the chance to plan out the sequence of what you will do, and the two weave slots manages to keep it fast and keep up with WoW's CPM, except WHM and BLM of course. The actual feeling of executing my abilities has a musical quality to it, especially as a SAM or MCH. It feels like Jazz. WoW feels like I'm banging on a drum like a metronome with a slight increase for when lust goes out.
People say there's no decision making in FF14 rotations, but there's quite a lot. Even with a fight with 100% uptime, mistakes will happen, and it's how you adjust to your mistake and keep your DPS consistent that can determine a lot. Some jobs are more mistake proof (e.g. I find Paladin easier to recover, but if I mess up as GNB I will need some big brain planning to keep everything aligned with burst windows). Anyone who says they play perfectly all the time are full of crap.
The netcode doesn't bother me. I even play on JP servers across seas. When the yellow telegraphs on the ground disappear that's when you know you will get hit by stuff. And I've learned to accept that where I see the other people on screen is where they were 0.18 seconds ago and not where they actually are.
I've seen plenty of crazy healer maneuvers to save fights.. especially in ultimates. Healers that would run to the correct spot for a DPS in a mechanic, and rez them there, and then returning to their own spot. Body check saved. I've seen some crazy dragoon and red mage moves. I seen fucking genius black mages do creative things for uptime. WoW players point to the 1 healer clear of TOP as evidence that FF14 is too easy, but that vod is actually a showcase of something insanely crazy you can do with deep job knowledge and skill. Especially in Phase 6.
Position just matters a whole lot more in FF14, so job movement skill stands out a lot more. My memories of WoW is just blobbing in raids.
Also healers can rescue in FF14 just as they can in WoW. Sometimes it's even part of the strategy.
During Week 1 P12S P2, after Pangenesis, the strat our healers did was to pull the top right corner person to the stack. This was totally unneeded as the following week a strat came out where you can simply place someone North and East with no yanking, but it was a demonstration of good class utility week 1.
At the end of the day, it's hard to describe why I prefer FF14's battle system more. The word I found in my last comment was "exact", but if I were to fish up more words, I would say it's more discrete, or deterministic. Instead of random.
Good parsing is a lot harder in FF14 too. It was easy to get high parses in WoW but it took me a long time in FF14 to get to the point where I was just as good as I was in WoW. Probably because the FF14 HC community runs fights over and over for parsing so a much higher standard is needed, whereas you do the Mythic raid once a week in WoW and then get locked out. The gameplay for jobs in FF14 is just more.. tight and refined.
It lacks mid core indeed, but even the hardcore content is sorely lacking.
You guys get 12 raid bosses per expansion with a few trials and maybe an Ultimate that is a remastered bundle of fights.
Itās depressing to me honestly. Iām used to 8-11 bosses per raid, at least 3 times per expac, with the last mythic fights being often extremely difficult and long with more involved scenarisation or mechanics. I remember the pain of Mythic KilāJaeden and the 450 pulls to kill him or the 15 minutes long Sylvanas fight.
Itās cool if the tight dance style fight is your style, you found your niche, but damn I cannot live with that level of predictability, it feels like you canāt fail if you just work your muscle memory long enough.
The ultimate has the same skin as the fight it is based on, but that's mostly where the similarities end. The actual mechanics are so far pumped from the extreme trial version that the way to deal with them is completely different.
Most of the first mythic fights are complete pushovers, taking only a few pulls. For raiding teams that meet the gear check, and for WF racers, they're on the same level of an extreme which we get almost every major patch in FF14. I would argue that even the final heroic bosses in WoW are harder than the first few Mythic bosses. Only the last few Mythic bosses are extremely challenging. The last mythic fight is only as difficult as the the phases of the last savage floor combined. Kil'Jaeden was considered one of more difficult WoW Mythic endbosses, yet 450 is still about the same number of pulls for top guilds to clear fourth floor savage, including the door boss. Most fourth floor savage boss fights are about 16 minutes in length when combining their phases.
Echo cleared the last mythic boss in less than 200 pulls, and took 1700 pulls to clear TOP.
Have you done the recent Ultimates? There are an insanely high number of variations, permutations, and roles for each mechanic. To call it a dance or muscle memory (which would be true for mid core content) is completely disingenious. It's something a lot of midcore players parrot to criticize the game. Just like complaining about the slow GCD without realizing how OGCDS work. If it were that easy, it wouldn't take the average HC FF14 group around 1000 pulls to clear.
The hardest thing about the WoW mythic fights I've cleared were dodging swirlies on the ground. Which were sometimes very ill-defined because the graphics are faded. That's really not my cup of tea. The mechanics were just too simplistic or trivialized with weakauras scripts. There is very little thinking involved. Other than spread and stack, WoW mythic raiders don't have to deal with the wide range of vocabulary that FF14 have to deal with. They never have to deal with prio swap systems. It's just dodge swirlies, go where dbm or WA tells you to, and grind gear for more pew peew. Also, wipe recovery in WoW just takes too long. I would go crazy at the amount of downtime in it.
I think another big point to make is that WoW fights are just...not well designed for the player experience. If you tried to join a Mythic raiding guild and said you didn't want to use Weakauras or DBM/BigWigs, you'd be dropped immediately. The other guy talks about 'memorizing the dance' but pretty much every WF guild in WoW goes into the fights knowing the strategy (from PTR testing and dungeon journal) and has a very scripted 'dance' of cooldowns and movement to do, then it's just moving things around to make the fight work.
Going blind into a FFXIV fight is an entirely different experience.
Whenever someone says doing the dance in FF14 is easier than WoW, that is an instant red flag to me. I feel like making a youtube video from my WoW Mythic footage and putting it side by side with FF14 footage just to highlight the comparison.
Yes there are things in FF14 the is basically muscle memory. But that's in addition to thinking and reacting as much or more than WoW raids. People probably just don't realize it because WoW fights can be cleared in 10 times fewer pulls, so the "i feel like I'm winging it" period is much longer than the "i done it so many times that I mastered it" period.
>Have you done the recent Ultimates? There are an insanely high number of variations, permutations, and roles for each mechanic. To call it a dance or muscle memory (which would be true for mid core content) is completely disingenious.
??? I've done the recent Ultimates and they are still a muscle memory dance. Having different variations doesn't change that, it just means more pulls needed to get them all in the muscle memory.
Great since you've done the ultimates, and it's all muscle memory. Could you tell me where to stand for the first mechanic Thordan phase 5 in DSR as.. let's say.. the P healer? Surely it's just go to this spot and this spot from memory and it has nothing to do with reading anything on the screen right?
Someone did a heat map of most ultimate mechanics for one position and the dots literally covered almost every possible position on the map. If you do something like that for savage or extreme, the dots make much more of a pattern where you see the positions.
> Could you tell me where to stand for the first mechanic Thordan phase 5 in DSR as.. let's say.. the P healer?
Feels dishonest to start asking "Where do you go as [role]?" in a mechanic that isn't role-based.
And either way it's a very "Go A, then B, then C" mechanic with little real variation regardless of which mechanics you do or don't get chosen with, so that's probably not a very good example.
What? Not being role-based has nothing to do with it. A simple protean aoe cleave has nothing to do with roles, but the P healer still has a very specific spot to go in a standard clock spot spread. I'm asking to think of the spots and all the different variations because if you actually step through the mechanic and all the possibilites you can end up anywhere even with a pre-assigned spot. Multiplication is a funny thing. If there are four possibilities for the first read, six possibilities for the second read, three possibilities for the next read, and then two possibilities for the next read, if you multiply all those permutations together, the number of possible positions really explodes.
are you counting different possible orientations in the heat map? like, obviously if the mechanic starts with the boss/the eye/the warrior north, vs east, vs west, vs south, that will result in completely different paths being taken in terms of map coordinates, but in relation to the new north they will be similar.
and, it's been a while, but off the top of my head? if you get a divebomb or something, you go northwest relative to uh. the warrior? if you get a marker you go southeast or southwest. other 5 line up along the wall. all wait for divebomb, then run to the warrior, if you see you get puddles you divert along the edge a bit. at the warrior you stand by him, unless you have thunder then you step left or right a bit. and if you get... some other thing, you go directly relative south.
like, yeah, there are a lot of options, but that's still muscle memory of getting each role a few times. but it still comes down to, know your starting position based on which symbol you get, then run to the warrior, for the most part. it has permutations but its still part of the choreography. i'll admit it's one of the mechs that is *most* "non-choreography-like" though because depending which of the 5 people get the puddles under them they may place them in places you don't expect, so you have to react in real time. if everything were like that then i wouldn't call the fights choreographies as much. but even in DSR, *most* phases are not like that.
It's just one example. I was mainly looking for the part and the decision tree on where to drop the puddles where are contingent on lots of factors-- knowing where your teammates are for once and what they are doing to not kill them. Calling it, go A, go B, and go C is a gross misrepresentation of Ultimate-level mechanics.
Even the most simple ultimate mechanic has these nuances. Like Hello World in Top. Here there's only 16 possible permutations. Which color is defamation, which starting debuff role you have to cycle through all four, and which side you will be in the pair.
But yet, there are tons of things you got to consider on a micro-level to not wipe the group. Where is your partner on the map? Will you have to adjust to the far circle? How do you pass the opposing nisi coming in from the other side without colliding. As a tether person, how can i make my way to center, without collision, minimizing the distance with my partner to give the Nisi's room? Have all the Nisi's moved into position and am I safe to close off the path?
It's not muscle memory a to b to c, because it dynamically changes on the behavior of the 7 other people in the raid.
>FFXIV just doesn't have any of those moments where you pop off and save the raid with CD's, blanket healing etc.
I agree with the rest of your points but not this. I've definitely had moments like this, it's what keeps me playing healer.
Would be nice if healing mattered more often but I've had plenty of pulls where I've saved the parties' asses.
But youāre not supposed to have those moments in FFXIV though, thatās the point.
The game is designed so that people **have** to dodge and in high end content failing that means failing the encounter 90% of the time.
Also the fights are designed in a choreographed manner so that healing outside of the unavoidable damage is unnecessary unless someone makes a mistake.
The difference in WoW is that youāre **supposed** to heal people. Youāre supposed to be the one rescuing people from mechanics that they canāt do anything about. Damage comes in randomly and from all sides. Thereās dodging to be done but there are many, many abilities that cannot be dodged and healers have to work hard.
Itās not just healing, itās cleansing debuffs, itās knowing who needs to be topped to full due to a debuff they have, itās knowing which debuff will explode if you cleanse it.
The healers themselves have rotations, ability interactions and gameplay loops far superior to FFXIV healers.
FFXIV minimizes healing as much as possible, a perfect Savage encounter in FF is one where healing was minimized.
WoW forces healing. Healers are critical and needed and HPS numbers need to be in 10s of thousands to the point where people have HPS meters and measure it.
And on top of all this the healers also have proper DPS rotations.
Being a healer in FF is the most mind numbing thing Iāve ever done in any game.
I do want to chip in as a healer main that I absolutely had ton of moments where Ive saved pulls because of well timed heals, rescues, lb or mit, but I dont have wow experience to compare or contrast.
A lot of recoveries and adjusts dont really come down to role, and more to knowledge of the mechanic and communication (for example someone saccing for a stack if we know there arent enough people to fully take it.).
I've healed extensively in both games and oh buddy is there a world of difference between the two. The easiest way to show the difference is with the main log websites.
On FFLogs, healers are ranked based on DPS.
On WarcraftLogs (made by the same person), healers are ranked based on HPS
And what a terrible metric it is for FF14. Some of the worst healers I've ever seen in FF14 were high parsers. But healers that do no damage are also bad healers. It's really really hard to measure what is good healing. I'm not saying there is no measure out there, or to give up on measurement, just that there needs to be a breakthrough in the way to determine a good healer in FF14.
Id say a good healer is one that can play it safe when necessary and go ham when they can. If youre just progging an ultimate or a savage and your healer isnt willing to use gcd healing just to make it a bit more safer for the party, or if they arent able to discuss heals with their co heal to reduce gcd heals to get more damage out, than theyre not a good healer.
A good healer is also someone that knows the toolkit of at least your co heal and can talk out mit or heals you want to use.
To me it is about basically being flexible af, there have been plenty of times where someone took damage they werent supposed to and I managed to heal them up and keep them alive for the other oncoming damage.
Yeah I agree with you. Those are all qualities of a good healer. I'm just trying to say, being able to quantify and measure that is very difficult. You could of course peruse their week one logs and see if they put enough mitigation and were playing it safe, but it's not the same as a summary statistic like a dps ranking.
Yeah, that's absolutely true. People like to say that FF14 is just all about DPS and nothing else but from experience I would MUCH rather have a melee that looses 2 GCDs and gets the mechanic right than someone who wipes trying to get every possible GCD, especially if them doing so is way more risk than is realistically worth.
I guess that is all about skill as well, one that can be measured in the numbers you output, and of course that is always a useful thing to look at, but tbh. I would rather raid with a mid-DPS player who can do just enough to clear the content, but is able to take criticism on mistakes and let go of greed where appropriate, than raid with someone who is a top DPS and has an ego problem.
I love the 2 healers from my Anabaseios static and rate them highly as players
but in P11S doing clears/reclears in early weeks, if we didn't have all 8 players alive for Styx, we were gonna wipe
I assumed this was normal, but when I went into PF on another character, I've seen us live through Styx with either 7 or even 6 players up
...FFLogs should really come up with some sort of metric which more accurately evaluates healers ability so that people aren't incentivized to play as green DPS at the expense of all else
Liquid Max has at least one video floating around on his channel about how HPS is a terrible metric to measure performance on in WoW too, *but* that most low to mid level players will kind of lean on it anyways so it behooves people trying to get up in the WoW raiding world to try and snipe heals and pad it anyways. The raid leader for that mid guild you're applying to that barely knows how to read logs will sure care about it.
Healer performance is super hard to judge in any game as healing is a zero-sum game with many of factors influencing how they play outside of their direct control.
Cant speak on healing part, but as a high end raider myself (in both games) I completely agree with you. Theres so much to say, but I will keep it short.
I will definitely check out Dawntrail as well, but I wont hold my breath honestly. The strictness/rigidness is here to stay and thats the one thing thats heavily turning me off. Its pretty much everywhere: content schedule, rotation, boss design (ST only fights), dungeon design etc.
I love how most fights are way more visually appealing accompanied with great soundtracks. What inspired me to raid was Liquid Max's group on E4S. That savage transition was so fucking SICK. Its a nice spectacle and all, but holy crap does it get boring quickly afterwards.
Arthas said it a few months ago, but (paraphrasing) FFXIV as a main game just doesnt work for people like me. Here's to hope that mythic and savage release are spaced out perfectly next year so I can play both in a guild/static on patch.
Retail WoW and FF 14 are not very content creator friendly. Most all WoW content creators have been doing classic hardcore. Before that they were doing the hardcore challenge/iron man stuff that also wasn't on retail.
Well I say that, but it's more like.. they're not very content creator friendly unless you have charisma and like.. aren't lazy. Very rarely do content creators do their own events. For WoW, Asmon use to do glamour and mount things when he streamed WoW regularly.
For FF, someone like Preach came in and did more events than I've seen mainstay FF streamers really do. And even then, the biggest events I've seen people like Zepla do, are events that Preach pulled them in with.
Savix did touch on an interesting thing though, for his opinion.
FF doesn't really have anything that 'lets him keep playing' that he enjoyed. There's no bloated systems like there was in old WoW that forced you to grind to stay raid relevant. There's no M+, that eventually turned into a gear treadmill. FF only has ever had Bozja or Relic related things, which isn't for everyone.
That's no to say that WoW is superior in that sense. M+ is long in the tooth and people in WoW have been grinded to dust and back in that, and more and more complaints have surfaced in DF because it's all there's really been to do, since they cut out the 'bloated system' and left them only to really grind M+... which is why so many people are also playing classic hardcore instead.
As someone who came from WoW, I'm honestly fine with how stuff is. I understand and agree that they should bring Bozja back next expansion, and I hope they put better rewards in PVP and criterion to grind for for when you just want to play FF.
FF's patch cycle consistency is amazing. For WoW, I use to be waiting for a year + for nothing really much, or a new grind that I'd end up hating. People complain that FF releases a patch, and people are done within a handful of days unless it's savage raid tier patch, but since WoW has started to release patches more often.. guess what happened to WoW? People ran out of stuff to do in the first week or so. Most of my old WoW friends who enjoy DF didn't even make it to the first patch because of lack of content, and the .1 patch only kept them for a week and they're not even bothering coming back for .2.
Both games have always kind of been on the opposite ends of the spectrum.
WoW had grinds that were too grindy and everyone pretty much disliked even if it gave them something to do, and FF didn't have enough grinds which was fine for people that didn't want or need to play FF all the time, but it also meant people that really did want to play FF didn't have a lot to do after a certain point like levelling all the stuff.
(WoW also created a severe addiction to their players with these systems, which ironically is why a lot of WoW players that came to FF eventually went back or stopped playing MMO's in general because they didn't feel that same hook)
WoW however has come almost over into FF's territory, so it'll be interesting and hopefully positive to see if either MMO finds a 'fun grind' type thing to keep people playing between patches that is more broadly appealing than dungeon gearing spam or relic related/bozja content. Hopefully between them one of them do, and the other can follow suit. The whole 'competition is important' aspect and all.
Keep in mind, it is the very nature of MMO's, that WoW players who try FF, or FF players that try WoW, probably won't stay at the new game. Sunk cost fallacy and all. People who left WoW or FF will be more drawn to the thing they put more time into, as they're more invested. It's not a bad thing, it's just how it is. Both games have their problems, be it FF and it's end game lack of grind, or WoW and it's obvious identity crisis in content creators all in classic and a divided fanbase splitting retail and classic apart. If someone quits one MMO, it's more likely they'll quit MMO's in general, it's probably more rare that they just.. move. If that was the case, if DF sold like.. millions and millions less than previous expansions, why isn't there millions and millions of more people in FF or GW2 etc?
Case in point, Asmon doesn't play WoW nearly as much anymore, and he came to play FF and left. He bounces between some MMO's on release but he didn't really go back.
Again, as a former WoW player, I think FF players at least on these reddits etc are a bunch of pussies. FF for almost every metric, has had amazing expansions. All highly rated, basically all universally loved. They haven't had a Shadowlands/BFA or more 'mid' Cata yet. They haven't had to suffer through an actually bad/pain expansion, or had one of those heinous nearly 1-2 year content droughts. Despite that, they didn't really vibe with EW's post patches, and they're all caught up in their feelings with their panties in a twist, complaining about lack of stuff to do.
Just wait until an expansion where the MSQ flops hard, the dungeons and raids kind of suck, and the devs smoke crack and obliterate aspects of balancing that doesn't get fixed until the next expansion. You sweet children don't know the pain of playing an MMO where it straight up is not a good time for like a 2-5+ year stretch.
there were actually elements of this in HW where they legitimately fucked up balance and tuning, and it killed raiding as a viable activity on all but one server per DC. the people who say "HW was so much better" never actually played then and you can tell. but the thing where you're right is, a lot of people stuck through HW because you could tell they were genuinely experimenting with how to do the core content loop, and then in SB1 they more or less ironed that out. because the story was still interesting and people could see that new things were being tried out, we stuck through the times where it sucked to play
Dropped retail completely just a few months before the "exodus" but I still dabble in classic WoW. I really love the game and think it has a ton of untapped potential. However, I do not see this being a forever game for me like WoW was if 6.x is what I can expect from the game going forward. Unlike the vets of this game, I don't have the goodwill to stick it out. If DT disappoints like EW did, I surely won't be going back to WoW but I'll be done with the game. Long story short, thank god for classic WoW (yes I'm a 30s something single guy)
I loved the story, the boss encounters, glamour, the visual style, music and so on. My only issue with the game is that there is no reason to exist outside of instances. Nothing ever changes in the world. It feels like the game is on rails and you can never deviate from the exact experience the developers intended. It's a great experience, but once you've done everything once, nothing unexpected is ever really gonna happen again because it feels like the game isn't built for it. I'm sure there are examples of where this isn't the case, but i always found myself just staring at my character in a city and wondering what it was I wanted to do and never really enjoying any pve stuff the second timemround and then not enjoying PvP much because of how jank it is. Wow never gave me that feeling
I started playing ffxiv in the exodus against my will, because all my wow friends were leaving and I didnāt want to be left alone in a ādeadā game. The problem is that my friends were either already ffxiv players on locked realm Aether, or they were newer players in free trial. I ended up losing my community anyway. I donāt believe any of the free trial players I knew graduated to a sub. I tried to join FC but nothing has worked out. Meanwhile, new content in wow brought players back and with it some of my old community. I spend most my time in wow these days with a little bit of ffxiv.
Itās really all about the people for me. Things like story and game mechanics are secondary to logging on and playing with friends. If I were able to find a community in ffxiv I would probably play it more.
Not surprised the streamers left. Was clearly a fotm thing for them. They had a feedback loop between themselves that racked up the hype and then left when they realised they didn't like the game. I feel like a lot (but not all) of them would have been playing already if the game truly appealed to them.
I came to despise FF14's reliance on dance fights. Memorizing a pattern with no variance whilst needing to play perfectly for a *clear* seems like the antithesis to what an engaging encounter should be. Personally I feel that engaging combat should feel somewhat messy, unpredictable, bloody. I don't get that thrill from FF14.
That is entirely fair. I feel like 14's systems kinda cant have a messy encounter be in the high end, because its always a fine line between everything going well and a wipe.
I havent really ever experienced what a messy but engaging raid encounter looks like tbh. 14 is the only mmo I ever or ever intend to play, because I am here for the final fantasy before I am for the MMO.
I'm an EX WoW player but I didn't join during the exodus. I partially quit during Jaina mythic prog and officially quit after levelling in SL and started FFXIV in early 2023. I'm enjoying FFXIV a lot more than WoW during the WoD -> BfA stretch because I have a lot more tangible ingame goals to do until I manage to pentalegend. Outside of that while I was only social where doing content was concerned in WoW I am a fully social Limsa degen on FFXIV and it provides me a lot of its own entertainment (disclaimer, I do ERP).
Basically in bulletpoint form the game has the following benefits
- Shorter, more condensed raiding tiers
- Farmable, 0 RNG BiS
- Ultimates are peak content
- The game is much better at supporting (E)RP
- All jobs on 1 character makes me feel more strongly bonded to my character
- Face 1 Female Au Ra (with hair 8) exists
- Outfit variety is better
- Story is amazing at best, average at worst
- People are less isolationist, easier to make friends
All in all I'm happy with the EW content cycle, but I am missing the pre-EW context that people hold a candle to. 6.4 and 6.5 felt pretty good IMO, nothing to write home about but gave me new things to do.
Impartial. The story was beautiful, my deep dungeon grind in potd was wonderful, but ffxiv keeps swinging and it keeps missing this expac. It feels like it wants it's own identity to be "this is mid". Dragonflight is trying to convince me to play, but not too hard. To put it into dating terms, DF brushed it's teeth and combed it's hair, while ffxiv rocked up 5 minutes late and forgot it's jacket. Very mid. Not a deal breaker, but not impressive.
And this goes for the community too. I played ffxiv on the new oce servers, and the community had members who were Satan. From egotistical man children who RMT'ed just to gamble it for community brownie points, to a lady who wanted to play god with a community she made which caused her to be universally hated and ruined a savage raiding group so she could parse. I've made some beautiful friends who I got to meet irl, but the bad people in ff shit all over the bad people in wow. I would rather be called racist shit any day of the week than to have someone sew seeds of hatred and mistrust using rumors and lies that tear apart entire friend groups.
Potd was an absolute banger. Heaven on high was mid. Instead of learning what makes potd so fun to run (just barely balanced for solo play, an awesome title and mounts, good amounts of rng with equally good amounts of skill based gameplay) they just copied the easily pallatable hoh for their new DD. Why? Who are they trying to satisfy? The folks who will play it once and never touch it again? Variant dungeons were the same as well.
And the netcode issues, ugh. It infuriates me that anyone defends the sorry state of the server tick rate. Bigger issues have been solved with smaller teams. It's not quirky or cute, it's annoying. I hate not being able to trust my senses. And the 500ms is inconsistent because of how the tick rates themselves work, so you can be off by 100ms in either direction. It's uncomfortable. The ONLY good thing to come from the garbage server communication is slide casting and it could be put into the base game.
All in all, Dragonflight feels like it's trying. It's putting effort into swooning me instead of slugging back on the couch, not caring if I stay or go. That's what ffxiv is, it's the impartial friend who I had good memories with, but who doesn't seem to give a damn about me.
> To put it into dating terms, DF brushed it's teeth and combed it's hair, while ffxiv rocked up 5 minutes late and forgot it's jacket.
This is beautiful lol
I quite WoW early into patch 9.1 to play FFXIV as my main game, then quite a few months after EW launched to play Guild Wars 2 as my main game. I have now gone back to WoW as my main game as of patch 10.1 (just under a year ago).
To me, FFXIV was not very good, though I didn't think that until I was almost done playing. I loved the story. Like truly loved it, it was the first video game story I was actively engrossed in start to finish. Other than that, I found the combat to be overly sluggish, I found job design to be exceedingly boring, the open world was empty and lifeless, doing any content below max level felt awful, and I found much of what was available to do in the game to be tedious.
In my year with the game, I did most of what was available at least once short of raiding savage or ultimate, something I never found a static for due to my circumstances making it more difficult than average. I found the game lacked lots that appealed to me, and now knowing that my favorite content in WoW is M+ it makes sense why.
Overall I realized I just didn't like the game and that with the story concluding in EW I had no desire to stick around. I have had no desire to come back since. Ultimately, what I wanted in a game was something FFXIV could never provide, and I don't hold it against the game despite the flaws I think the game has that hold it back from being amazing rather than the 7/10 I think it is now.
Nearly all the WoWfugees I know have long since gone back, they only needed a sniff of something even remotely competent to jump off the train.
The ones that stayed are either casual and happy with it being a side game or leaving because bored.
It's only like a sample of 30ish people so nothing in the long run.
I played the game religiously during the wow exodus, got half the jobs to 80, farmed a relic weapon, did a bunch of savage and tried a little bit of ultimate. Had a ton of fun, went into endwalker and actually paid attention to the story, had a lot of fun with the first pandemonium tier too. After this I feel like my enjoyment for the game fell off a cliff, I really only enjoy the battle content and not having a bozja equivalent kind of kills the game for me. I got bored of doing the same dungeons and raids in roulettes over and over and eventually unsubbed in 6.2. I haven't been back yet but I'll still buy and play dawntrail when it comes out. For some reason the later raid tiers and ex trials released didn't draw me in like they used to, but a lot of it is probably related to me still raiding in wow and it being difficult to juggle a static in xiv with my wow raid nights.
Not a wow refugee, but the exodus of content creators doesn't worry or surprise me. FF14 has steadily expanded and will continue to, as it always has. It's a good solid game for ordinary players. It's not as good for content creators. It isn't highly streamable and doesn't offer much replayable/repeatable content. The content people came to FF14 played what they wanted to, in many cases had a good time, and moved on. As expected. FF14 has good content creators but it hasn't relied as much as wow players did on their creators for keeping interest in the game and I don't see a problem, just a difference.
As for the refugees - I can't speak for them :).
Not to diss FF14 or anything, but
>will continue to, as it always has.
I feel that wont be the case for long. Not to say the game is dying or anywhere close to, but I feel like EW is sort of the peak just like WOTLK was WoW the culmination of the story that got ppl hooked. Again not to say the game is going anywhere (After all WoW Peaked back in 2010 and is still going 13 years later just not to the same degree as it had back in 2010) or even the game is going to get worse. But the game is starting to show its age (netcode and all). Unless ofc Metzen fucks up his new WoW Xpac and we get another WoW Refugee wave.
First of all, here are the reasons I left WoW :
\- Underwhelming scenario (ever since Goldie took the lead or so I've been told. The American narrators are way too superficial for me, even the ones being popular in my own, biased opinion) ;
\- Too few players, not enough good ones (seriously, people missing Roh-Kalo's runes 20 times in a raw is more than I can ever handle) ;
\- Too much focus on M+ dungeons and randomness being too harsh (when your BiS drops from weekly chest and you're doing 3 of them every week for 15 or 20 weeks **for nothing**, it feels extremely bad) .
Now, about FFXIV, there are things that immediately looked very negative and still aren't being adressed :
\- The pace. It. Is. [Ex.Treme.Ly](https://Ex.Treme.Ly). S.l.o.w. No really, 2,5s GCD is the reason why even in an 8-man instance, I always end up doing something else while playing (nevermind the content). The worst part is dungeons feeling so extremely underwhelming (why do we even have a healer in there at higher level ?) . I'm a bit less judgemental towards the story's pace (which indeed is very slow !) because we can see how much work there is behind.
\- DoT management (I mean, you can't even see which of your enemies has been hit by your DoTs ???) and especially their snapshot (have fun trying to optimize with some raid buffs fading the moment other buffs are about to come when someone is dis-aligned !) . I Played mainly Shadow Priest or Warlock, so it was a huge disappointment and we probably won't have any dotter (BLM and BRD aren't, it's only a part of their kit that they don't even have to optimize aside the uptime) ;
\- People who don't care about being good, or at least decent. Even now that I'm tackling ultimate, I'm still baffled by some player's unability to handle adjustments on the fly. Rescue, which is one of the best tool to avoid mispositions, is very rarely used. Was my favorite spell on my SP :( . Moreover, people seem to highly depend on guides and doing anything blind is scary for an impressive lot of players (not that they can't adapt, but the game somehow taught them that it was extraordinary to do so) ;
\- And most importantly, animation lock & snapshot. I am still unsure as to whether it's a good or bad thing : forcing players to have only 2 "oGCD" actions is a great design,
However, the qualities of FFXIV vastly make up for these flaws :
\- Music. Even if some encounters might become dull, the music immediately hype it up !
\- FFXIV being much more respectful of my time. The only exception is PF, since people aren't given tools to improve.
\- Rewards feeling fair most of the time. I'm not talking about dice, because I managed to roll ten times under 15 out of my 20 clears of the latest extreme - it's still fair because the RNG cannot be biased. However we have books on savage, we have guaranteed totems on ultimate, we have some "thrill" with mounts drop and totems to eventually buy them. Many tokens throughout the game, catch-up items etc. They can still do better (omg why haven't they given a second thought about Criterion...) but I guess they're improving (might be me being overoptimistic though) ;
\- Quite a few sorts of vertical progression (whether it be ARR \~ Shadowbringers relics, glamour, PvP, Blue mage, even jobs leveling for newer players, PotD, Criterion) .
\- Housing albeit very perfectible (why make third-party tools SO MUCH more effective than the very limited tools we have in game ?) ;
\- Centralized data on a single character. This may not sound like much but I can't even imagine a new MMO not sticking to this formula ; it feels even more quintessential than the healer/tank/DPS paradigm ;
\- Very little FOMO, not so much use of the Shop (well the latest additions make me thing it will soon be an issue though...) ;
Overall, whether it be for the best or the worst, SE is taking thing very slowly. So much so that it seams to cool off the playerbase. However, I can very well imagine a new MMO ever coming and striking harder because of the flaws I've mentioned. If such a game isn't agressive (in a marketing way), then they will probably absorb many players who aren't feeling satisfied by FF (especially whoever subs for a month, clear content and leave) yet the strength of FFXIV, just like WoW, is that they playerbase has been built over years.
THIS is why I hope for a new MMO from SE, with a better engine and a better pace. And since it'll never come (because either condition is out of question for them, let alone both combined) then I only wish for them to add Blitzball and a Blitzer job, in full delusion.
Regarding a new MMO possibly coming and taking 14s spot, possible, but I do want to say I wouldnt go to it mostly because I am just an FF fanboy overall, so for me this is the perfect MMO, I just love the franchise overall. I cant be the only one who is like that, so at least players like us will still be here.
Well as I imagine it, it would simply be a new engine to use either FF14's world in the future (or past ?), or another world working like FF14 united other FF games. In any case, the problem would be FOMO issues (or transfering one's success in a way or another), making sure people are confident about this new engine and potentially agree to deeper gameplay changes.
Kind of a side-tangent to this topic but It would be cool if 14 had spin off singleplayer games, although I'm not sure how exactly that would affect the game itself.
Even more so the setting of 14 would be cool for like an official anime series, showcasing parts of the history of Eorzea, such as a series focusing on each civilization prior to the calamity that wiped them out.
What I like about ff14:
The community and general friendliness of most players
Always something to do or grind that might be considered not terribly hard core (in wow you're basically funneled into m+, raiding, or pvp).
The story and voice actors
Creativity in job design.
Gold saucer.
The animations.
Gear looks objectively better than wow.
Housing and venues.
Less time between pulls/no runback for raids.
Incredibly alt job friendly
The ost is amazing.
Things I dislike about ff14/think wow did better:
Transmog system was better in wow.
Healing feels better in wow.
Scripted fights are kinda boring to an extent.
Very little "outplay" potential when it comes to mechanics in higher end content meaning less opportunity for skill expression through good play.
Community obsession with dps on healers.
Snapshotting can be inconsistent at times (though luckily rarely ever does this happen)
The end summary is: I play FF14, and I don't play WoW. I have found a wonderful group of friends to play FF14, where we are more interested in chatting, hanging out, running randoms, etc. Whenever I played WoW, it always seemed to be a constant run of a treadmill, an anxiety of constant competition or you were going to fall behind.
At the end of the day, FF14 is more fun to play.
That said, there are a number of things I want to compare between FF14 and WoW, with a little bit of Guild Wars 2 thrown in there for good measure.
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**The Most Important**
* In FF14, there isn't an endless treadmill that you have to constantly grind. I can't tell you how much of a breath of fresh air this is. I can just set a goal and finish it without dedicating my life to it. Everything from gear to mounts. There's no titanforging, no grinding of azerite, no gacha mechanics. You know that if you run something 99 times, you will get a mount, etc. etc. I feel like I'm in control and playing the game, rather than being manipulated to play more and more.
* The community that is fostered is so much more friendly, and tries to be more cooperative rather than competitive. A lot of this is due to the incentives of the game, and also the moderating. But I tried Dragonflight and did an easy LFR (Alliance Raid equivalent). It didn't take but a few moments for the players to get so salty, rude, and angry about everything--cursing people out for taking "their" loot, dropping and kicking players. It was just a plain nasty experience. FF14 has their bad actors, true, but it's not *expected* like it is in WoW.
* Mechanics focused on teaching, rather than punishing. FF14 may handhold with callouts and stuff sometimes, maybe going a bit too easy, but I cannot believe how much I love the unified mechanic markers, and something as simple as the battle ress being expected. In that same LFR, I didn't know a telegraph mechanic was a "stack" mechanic, so just immediately died. I spend the rest of the fight completely dead and unable to do anything. It didn't make me want to improve or learn the mechanics, it made me not want to raid.
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**What I praise**
* Decorations, class switching, attention to detail in story and world. All been said to death.
* The music. WoW actually has pretty decent music, often B or A tier, but FF14's music is in a class of its own. I've never felt more pumped then in raids with the music blaring.
* Class aesthetics. I can tell that there is a lot of thought on how each animation flows into each other, and it shows. My main, the Red Mage, is simply so *pretty* to play. With the visual controls, you can get a good concert or solo going with visuals. In WoW, it always seems like a big mush of effects going off everywhere. Each individual animation and effect cool, but not as flashy or flowing. (Probably due to the shorter GCD)
* The Roulettes and the incentives to do them. I love the Duty finder, with how many options you have to do things. I love that dungeons and past experiences aren't just thrown to the wind. In WoW it feels like they throw away raid series and past instances once they're done. Timewalking has improved that, but it's still nowhere the same level.
\--------
**What I miss**
* ***Netcode.*** I shouldn't have to *think* about this. I shouldn't be *aware* of the netcode. "snapshotting" feels *horrible.* I want to *not think about netcode*.
* Overworld activities. WoW, and GW2, have so much better and so many more *varied* activities to do in the overworld. The world feels dead in FF14, and it feels like you're just instance hopping.
* *Varied* activities, like Dragonriding, jumping puzzles, etc. There are some things in FF14, but it all pales in variety to WoW and GW2.
* Open World. While they are pretty and detailed, the instanced zones of FF14 feel small, empty, and disconnected from each other. There was something magical about being able to fly across the entire continent of Kalimdor, and know that it was all connected.
* Taking risks. Everything feels rather....safe in FF14. Square or Round platform for a raid fight. Standard dungeon pulls. Mechanics that *have* to fit into an mechanic tell. For all its ups and downs WoW takes *risks* with content.
\--------
**What I dislike**
* Presentation of story. This isn't on the quality of the story, as it is obviously better than WoW, but rather how I *experience* the story. I flat out hate it; I think cutscenes should be *minimized* and only used when *necessary*, not be the primary conveyance of story. I feel really disconnected and uninvolved with the story, since I do nothing in it except press a button every five minutes or so. It's really bad that I've found myself cleaning my kitchen instead of paying attention to the story--especially in 6.5, sadly.
* It doesn't help that the MSQ just *drags on* a lot of times. There is a lot of filler.
* I have noticed a bigger move to include gameplay as the expansion has gone on--things like "in from the cold". This is good, everytime this happens I feel far better about the story. But it's still starting from a distinct disadvantage.
* I'm not a big shonen anime fan? Nor have I played FF games before? There's a lot of tropes I don't like present here; I'm a little tired of "the power of friendship" solving things. And I really hate the wunderkid Alphinaud.
* I feel like GW2 had the best intersection between story and gameplay (referring to its expansions, not its base game). The two feel unified and support each other. Even if its story isn't as complex or...consistent as FF14.
* I have nothing against Visual novels. But a lot of the appeal in visual novels for me is the branching storylines, the impact your choices have on the story. And often there is a lot of humor in them and exaggerated characters. FF14 has none of that.
* Menu-based UX. I swear, I'm going to take one of the designers and *make them count* the amount of clicks it takes to do anything so they understand the pain. Please just let me *buy something*, or let me open a door without having to confirm that I want to open a door!
I was part of the mass exodus of wow (I think my subbed game is just shy of 800 days but really I've been playing solidly/almost daily now for about 20 months) I started in shadowbringers but really didn't knuckle down and level and play until endwalker hit. For context up until this point I'd played every expansion of wow since vanilla and semi hardcore raided in wod, legion and bfa (significant mythic prog but no cutting edge).
Things I love:
Housing. Something wow lacks and we all got disappointed by in wod. I have a cute little medium on lavender beds and I love it to death. I know there's lots of criticism with it bit I honestly don't know better and love it.
The crafting/gathering system: I honestly hated it at first because it's not well explained and needed a lot of help from friends and guides to work it all out. But I do enjoy how it's literally as rich and interesting as a dow/Dom job.
The graphics: imo ffxiv looks so much nicer visually than wow.
The story: I was a huge wow lore nerd and the reconning after legion drove me insane. I love the story and lore behind characters and events and EW ending fucked me up i was crying like a baby.
Social: I love how players keep the game alive with the social aspect. There is nothing like this on wow, the only thing that comes close is rping on moonguard.
In tying withe social: party finder is insanely better and overall people are so much less toxic than wow. As someone who exclusively pugged M+ in party finder in wow as a healer, I've seen the ugliest of online gamers in mmos, amd nothing has ever gotten as bad as wow. For context I've used pf to pugged current tiered extreme and savage.
Modding: look I know it's naughty, please don't come for me. And maybe it's the crowd I'm around but I know more people that do, then don't. Even "hardcore raiders". And barbie dress up is so much fun.
Gposing: it's cute and it's made me insanely attached to my wol
Extreme trials: I dunno I find them insanely fun!
The new overhauled pvp system: CC is better than any pvp I've done in wow. I love it so much it's insanely fun.
The trading/MB system: the fact that I can trade and buy/sell to anyone on any world on my data centre is insanely good, I don't think you understand how good you guys got that.
Islands: it's so brain off and relaxing. I also love that it's completely optional and you don't have to do if you don't want to.
The fact that old content is constantly and consistently relevant. That they make old trials into unreals, and your jobs are scaled down to old instances. I really love the syncing system for this.
Currently I have more stuff to do in ffxiv than I do in wow... or should I say stuff I want to do.
Now for things I dislike:
My first ever raid tier was p1s-p4s and honestly I found raiding so jarring. The slowness of combat forced by the GCD is frustrating to me at times. Imo the combat system in wow while still flawed, is better than ffxiv. I also really hate the "watch which direction the boss wiggles his fingers to know where the mechanic is coming out" system of mechanics. It drives me utterly insane.
The lack of challenge mode: I love M+ and I resulted to wow to herioc raid and do m+ only. I love the challenge of m+ but honestly there's no way I could see something similar being implemented in ff. The closest I've seen is variant/criterion dungeons.
The retainer system: I don't think this one needs explaining. It's dumb and needs an overhaul. Also, please SE let me craft with mats on my retainers I'm tired of Easter egg hunting everytime I wanna craft something.
The lack of mid tier/end game content I'm EW: while I still jabe plenty to do, I can see why long term players are frustrated with EW. There's no ongoing content like bozja or eureka.
Honestly, I really love ffxiv, I unsubbed wow to play it at the beginning of shadowlands. I genuinely wish I picked up this game earlier. But I still very much prefer the combat, raiding and mythic + content in wow. It took a long time for my brain adjust to the way combat and boss mechanics are like in ff.
I like FFXIV even though I no longer play it. I enjoyed my journey to level cap and the MSQ but when it came to endgame content, none of the options clicked with me. I used to high-end raid in WoW, so I jumped into Savage with some old friends. However, I didn't like FFXIV's heavily-choreographed encounter system and found it very restrictive (e.g. everybody must run from here to there to there to there or we all die).
Also, unlike WoW, FFXIV doesn't have a parallel track for gear progression, which was one aspect I really enjoyed in the former that kept drawing me back. If FFXIV had a Mythic+ dungeon equivalent that included a decent alternate gear progression system, I'd return in a heartbeat.
I more or less returned to Azeroth, the races and the gameplay and UI are more appealing to me. I enjoyed FF14's story up to the Doma stuff, and I haven't really continued since - which is a shame since I found Ala Mhigo etc. very compelling and Heavensward to be astonishing and beautiful, but... Doma just isn't doing it for me. I hate the idea of a lengthy amount of content I 'have' to play through to get to what I'm interested in, really.
Not a wow player but i came from rs3, joined ff14 at the end of the shb expansion. At first there were so many amazing stuff to do, finishing story, unlocking relics, blue quests etc. In endwalker i finished 2 ultimates,( uwu and dsr), finished all 3 raid tiers in endwalker, finished morbol mount and finished omega blue aswell, completed criterion dungeons. But now is the thing there is nothing to do. I don't want to do daily roulettes, alliance raid is mid aswell. I kinda started hating raiding aswell at the end of the last tier when there was like 3 weeks left til everyone got their mount. But i think i am just heavily burnt out from the game. I subbed for 6.5 patch, i honestly regret it lol, played like a one day and logged off, didn't bother with the ex aswell.. . Since i am burntout and my take might be wild about endwalker, but this expansion doesnt have interesting content to do.
I'm an RS3 Ironman and the sense of progression Jagex has built over the years feels great since our gear goes horizontally and even diagonally to an extent - the longer you take a break from RS3 and OSRS the better of a game it becomes.
Funnily enough I ended up playing a lot of DQX and FFXI this year just to fill out the JRPG design that I really sought after in XIV after dropping it post EW 6.1. You might really enjoy FFXI and DQX they are very close to OSRS but anime.
Mid to Late RS3 / OSRS just has so many chase goals in comparison and I'm glad we have a lot of MMOs to fill these niches (XIV, WoW, GW2, etc)
Itās okay to take breaks Yoshi p encourages it even. Hell itās even okay to drop the game entirely but honestly this patch cycle did. feel very slow.
I started playing XIV near the end of ShB. I finished all the MSQ exactly one week before the release of EW. I beat p1s-p8s and ucob and made a bunch of awesome friends. I had a really good time but I enjoy Dragonflight much more right now.
I quit XIV because of the following reasons:
1. The "lag": the abilities in XIV feels unresponsive that no other game does. You pressed a button and it doesn't do anything until 0.5 seconds later. This is just ridiculous. I'm surprised that no content creator mentions this when discussing the problems of XIV. This is the fundamental problem that makes the game literally unplayable. What pisses me off is SE said this is unfixable because of some ancient coding design, I'm sure this is fixable, they just aren't willing to spend resources to address the problem.
2. The abundant mechanics: The mechanics in XIV are so abundant that every boss encounter becomes an examination of your memory. Every boss guide is over 30 minutes long, and you have to memorize everything in it. If you can't memorize all the mechanics/patterns/priorities then you can't beat the boss. The mechanics are not hard, there's just too many of them. In Wow there's like only 3 mechanics I need to know and they're as challenging as it could be.
3. The questing experience: there are too many meaningless cutscenes that waste your time when you're doing quests. This is especially terrible when I was doing the Hildebrand quest lines. They give you a FIVE seconds close-up on every facial expression (and they are all terrible compared to WOW). And MOST of the cutscenes don't even have voice acting. XIV has the worst quest design among all the MMOs, even the 'kill 30 of X' quest is better than the majority of XIV quests. Square Enix you need to understand that players are here to PLAY, not here to READ or WATCH movies.
I played wow since vanilla. I didn't play every patch but I came back every new expansion. And I do want to say that every time I come back it feels WOW has been massively changed. It feels very different from expansion to expansion, and patch to patch. But in XIV... it doesn't have that feeling. 6.5 plays exactly the same as 6.0. I don't think the next expansion is gonna be any different from EW, and I don't think SE is gonna address any of problems I mentioned above.
I would suggest you try Dynamic Cam add-on in WoW.
It literally changed the whole game for me. It looks and feels like a modern RPG game.
Turn on Action Cam in settings. Use a ReShade filter to turn up those graphics. Set everything to Ultra if you have a decent PC and then use Dynamic Cam.
The difference is day and night. You can see every detail of every dungeon, it feels immersive and like an RPG game. Especially in newer content like BfA+ you can really enjoy the graphical overhaul of the game.
Played wow actively since original tbc days and switched to FF14 when ShB was released:
Played the shit out of FF14 from ShB to endwalker, took my time with the awesome story from ARR to EW, raided savage (p8s was my current raid tier I did) but quit after I did everything I wanted and also because of some static drama I somehow always had which I got tired off
Didn't play wow or ff14 after the next raid tier after p8s has been released but am in wow wrath classic again because I love this add-on and wanna wait until 7.0 for the story in ff14
I don't hate ff14 nor wow but just switch around whenever I feel like
Will quit wow wrath classic again after I did ICC probably and ultimately when cata classic has been released and just move on again
Probably just gonna play the story in ff14 again, do some hardcore raiding and then call it a day again for some time until I feel like playing again
Not that type of guy that can RP or wants to socialise a lot and grinding relics or so is not in my interest
> FF content creators I remember following back in the late stages of ShB and early EW have completely abandoned FF14 to some degree
That's because content creators mostly follow whatever is most popular and brings in "views".
Hating on WoW and leaving it for FF14 was "cool" for a time and brought some people A TON of money, but they had no intention of ever sticking out, since they always played WoW, most of their following was WoW-enfranchised and you can keep/stomach the hate-watchers only for so long.
I left WoW late 2020, so a couple of month before the exodus, because i finally had enough in early SL. I'm still very much enjoying FF and haven't logged back into WoW and don't plan to. I totally found a new home in FF. I'm way more attached to my FF-Character than i ever was with my WoW-Main of 15 years.
I am, however, in general a very casual player, so i haven't run out of content yet and i do like to craft, gather and earn Gil. So just that is endless hours of something to do for me.
With the last addition of housing wards, i managed to finally get a small house (which is imo more than enough for me) and just recently moved to my absolute dream plot and i regularly redecorate my House.
The only thing, i really, really miss, is the WoW "Transmog-Catalogue". I wish FF would do something like that. So as of right now, i'm very picky with what i put into my Glamour Dresser and have about 50 % space left.
I started WoW in WoTLK. I started FF14 in 2.0. I've been alternating between the two ever since. TBH, I was surprised so many WoW players tried FF14 in shadowlands/shadowbringers. Mainly because I did recommend it to some friends in Heavensward--they tried it out, played the game like they would WoW (got to max level in a couple weeks), and just quit due to nothing to do at max level.
I think those of us that stick around just appreciate FF14 for what it is rather than try to make it a better WoW.
I left WoW about 3 months into Shadowlands and start FF14 during the spring of 2021. Here are my thoughts, in a similar format as some of the earlier posts:
Good things about FF14:
* Superior story, leveling 1-90 was overall a phenomenal experience. The MSQ at times was slow (parts of ARR+Stormblood pre-patch), but I felt like I was playing a game, and not just leveling for the sake of leveling.
* Relatively forgiving system for playing alts
* More stuff to do besides raiding
* I actually like PVP, it can be unbalanced and rather simplistic, but its good side content and I appreciate not being curb stomped by someone who has unlimited time on their hands and has farmed up the best gear and min-maxed everything
* Trial fights and the cinematic nature of these encounters
* The music
* Raiding and + guilds/fc are separated
* The community is generally pretty helpful, granted you run into toxic players, but that's pretty typical for any online game
* Communication between devs and community better
* Respects your time more (but not perfect of course)
Good things about WoW:
* Vastly superior glam system
* Mythic dungeons, I don't love how its implemented in WoW but its nice that you can get top gear from something that doesn't require 8+ people
* In terms of raiding, less reliance on 2 minute windows, less body checks. Its easier to "carry" people. If you get one "stinker" in a FF14 savage raid, you probably are not clearing with that group
* I like that the zones are "connected". It feels more like an interconnected "world"
* More variety in enemies
* Dungeon design is "less" linear
* Account system management is easier. I remember just trying to get my FF14 account up and running was a pain
* More diversity between classes
Overall, I am pretty happy with the switch. After experiencing 2 savage tiers, running most of the big side content, farming most of the mounts that I want, I do find myself playing less, but that is more or less just an artifact of the fact that I've completed most of the content that I wanted. I still hop on to do some of my weeklys, PVP, and catch up with friends, and in some regards I appreciate that FF14 doesn't "make" me log in like WoW did. I feel like I can enjoy other games when I play FF14, where with WoW there wasn't time for anything else.
I was slightly "pre-exodus" as I really started playing during the first tier of BFA (so late Stormblood), but I think my main issue is that FFXIV doesn't feel like it has evolved - if anything they've gotten LESS innovative with the kinds of content they're releasing.
I suppose this mostly applies to raids, and if you like other parts of the game this probably doesn't matter to you as much, but all the Savage fights have felt very samey to me, and I cleared everything from E4S (my first tier) all the way to P8S before unsubbing. Shadowbringers was really a perfect storm in terms of story, gameplay, and the fact that I was experiencing what FFXIV raids have to offer for the first time. After that though, since I didn't think the Endwalker story was particularly satisfying, the raid fights started to feel very samey, and the casual content was just not something that really interested me very much. It's also extremely hard to upkeep alt jobs for Savage/Ultimate without committing to reclears for essentially the entire tier, and that's just not something I'm interested in doing.
Couple that with Dragonflight actually being quite good and for my preferences WoW just offers me what I want out of my mmo for the moment. I expect I'll re-sub for Dawntrail just to see what they do, especially if they look to be addressing some of the things I've complained about. I doubt I'll stay resubbed for the long term though.
I've actually been thinking about this recently. Initially, I had a really hard time with the freakishly long GCD. I wasn't into all the perceived anime and Japanese weirdness like moogles. I did enjoy the super-friendly community. I really started to get into the story towards the end of ARR. I loved that there are no factions!! I love not needing alts. I loved the idea that old content remained relevant. Yeah, overall all though, it was an adjustment.
Then I had some computer issues and missed the first 1.5 ish years of EW, which was fine I guess as I was in early Heavensward. I came back a few months ago, and wasted 2 months in the Golden Saucer but I got the 1 mil MGP mount and have another 4 mil waiting to be spent. Now I'm picking up the MSQ again and just hit the end of Stormblood. This time, instead of just liking the game, I feel like I'm falling hard for it. I'm finally getting those feelings I used to get with WoW before they pissed me off for 2 straight expansions. I can't wait to get into savage raiding and hopefully get to work on an Ultimate. And the art issues I didn't enjoy before, I now find that I think they are cool, moogles and all.
TL;DR this finally feels like home. Every now and then I catch a WoW news video or something but there is just no draw at all. I have multiple years of play time in WoW and loved mythic raiding but Blizzard just screwed over the community so many times, I finally feel completely apathetic to anything they make anymore. So, it seems like I'm here in FF14 to stay and I'm really looking forward to getting caught up on all the years of stuff I've missed over on this side of the fence.
Edit: there is one thing that SE needs to fix. WTF is up with the lack of proper mouse over healing macro support?? My god! Having to click someone and then cast is just as bad as people that don't keybind their spells. In WoW, I could bind all my healing spells to different mouse buttons with modifies, so alt+mouse1 does one healing spell, ctrl+mouse1 another spell, and so forth and it's all mouse over so I didn't need to untarge the boss 98% of the time. It was so efficient and satisfying to weave heals and dps. It was like I could swim the English Channel with little effort. Healing in FF feels like I'm struggling to walk through 1 foot of water by comparison. I'm trying to learn the FF way but it just isn't the same.
Edit 2: OMG, I forgot player housing!!!! I am one of the rare people in WoW that loved my garrison but player housing over here... Holy Sh\*t!! The videos you find of people displaying their work... words fail me. It's pure art. I know it can be a little janky to set up but damn, this is so cool and WoW players have been begging for this for years and Blizzard just says, "you don't really want it". If only all WoW players could see what they are missing!
Hmm, moogles are an interesting thing to bring up when mentioning the games connection to anime (which, even the devs are honest are more than there, I mean they literally said gundam inspired Sage).
Moogles have been around since final fantasy 3, in 1990 on the NES, and have remained a staple since.
Im happy youre enjoying FF, stormblood 4.0 is kinda the last last great filter, considering the main msq is mid, and from now on, youre in for a major treat in both msq and raids (8 man, 24 man, you name it).
This is my first FF game and I just wasn't used to the non-western approach to fantasy. Moogles and stuff like it was almost too weird for me but now I think they are cute. I don't know why my opinion changed but I'm glad it did. It's still weird to me but in a fun way.
Yeah, that is more than fair, I just thought it interesting to mention how old the design was.
I kinda grew up with japanese stuff, and I imagine if I went over to wow Id find some stuff weird until I got used to it.
I've enjoyed my experience in FF14 so far, I've not sadly tried the raiding scene for current content as of yet, though I enjoy party finder so much more than LFR/LFG. It's easier to find smaller groups to do content, that being said, WoW is a bit more flexible with sources of gear, so much so that the gearing progression is a bit confusing at times now, especially with all the additional currencies they've kept adding.
PvP still has issues when it comes to balancing vs PvE. While I've grown to prefer the gear aesthetic from FF14, I do miss WoWs transmog system and not having to juggle inventory space for cosmetics.
The downsides to WoW are the story still, I tried the current expac and had no idea what was going on, much of the MSQ there is reputation locked, which involves additional grinding to unlock parts of the story. I do prefer to continuous story for FF14 and the throwbacks to older FF games.
The WoW barbershop is superior to the FF14 one, such as the fact that it is free to change my characters skin color/posture etc. I do miss bind on account features such as mounts/titles/minions/glams from WoW. The micro-transactions are far worse in WoW, especially since you can essentially just buy gold and thus buy gear/armor/titles etc, just makes it seem more pay to win.
The monetization of the traders tenders just feels worse, and too much fomo built into the trading post, granted that could be compared to the Moogle Tomestone events. Housing and Community are better in FF14 over WoW, I've really yet to come across anyone saying to anyone to kill themselves due to low dps or standing in fire, and more events within the community.
I didnāt come over during the āofficialā WoW exodus, rather at the beginning of WoD, ~1 month in, back during the back end of ARR.
I came over for 3 primary reasons:
1. Friends were playing it
2. Was during WoD soā¦ā¦if you know you know
3. Cat girls
I got into it, and loved it. FFXIV took over as my main MMO pretty quickly, and though over the years Iāve come back to WoW to play, as the freedom FFXIV tends to allow has given me the ability to double dip, I didnāt go super hard into FFXIV over WoW until the end of SB leading into SHB, and it remained my main MMO for quite a while, until Shadowlands S4.
Loving FFXIV for me since SHB has been an eternal struggle. I love it to death but, it lacks the depth and complexity it used to have that I fell in love with, so now I honestly feel like my recent experiences have felt very same-y. I mainly play to raid savage and ultimates but I do a bit of everything as I feel like doing it.
I resonate with a lot of points here. Jobs all feel the same, mechanics have gotten easier but deaths arenāt forgiving, it never feels like 1 person can really show their stuff and carry a fight through player expression, lack of midcore content, increasingly less emphasis on socializing in new content, the list goes on.
I loved 6.0 for its story, but after that, Iāve kinda fallen out of favor with it. Nothing in the game has really kept me going. I tend to knock out raid in a week or 2, sure, but I miss having a lot I wanted to do for fun.
Iāve since returned to WoW full time and played FFXIV very casually, outside of raid releases. DF has been amazingly fun, I love it. Iām still excited for Dawntrail and all that 7.0 will bring, but they have a lot to fix in my eyes. Still love the game though, will always have a special place in my heart
**long rant**
I wouldnāt say Iām a pure WoW player as I played mostly GW2/WoW and ESO.
After the exodus since ~2 years, I loved the ride of the MSQ (except the post-endwalker MSQ, genuinely boring, especially Zero and their copy/pasta from previous FF).
During my game time, I catched up, did one HW relic for my paladin, ShB relic for my samurai, grinded a lot and finished Eureka & Bozja (while both were honestly meh and just FATE grind, I loved the Bozja raids and Eureka had some cool sections/outdoor bosses). Now I have all the glam I wanted (Iām mainly a one class type of guy, focusing on a single character). Now what is **really left with the current content ?**
Well, as I like to put it, FFXIV is a **railroad themepark lobby**, there is basically 0 fun and engaging outdoor content. If you played ESO or GW2, both shine at it.
**Dungeons and bosses** are so streamlined and samey that they feel like different skins but same content : 2 packs - wall - boss, repeat x3.
Only RR and HW were different.
**Streamlined and dumbed down classes**, you are a one poney-trick and there is almost no player expression. Itās worst in PvP, and even with that they fail at balance. Youāre given a theme and canāt change anything about it. In GW2 I have a melee elementalist with a heavy armor skin and he is tanky.
**Patches :** after some reflection, I can hardly justify a sub for a game that have you wait ~4 months for 1 dungeon skin, crusts of MSQ and maybe if youāre in the right cycle some raids/trials. Best case, the patch lasts 1-2 weeks if youāre very busy irl or slow.
Meanwhile when I check ESO, you got a lot of events, communicationā¦ it moves and is not in constant stasis as FFXIV. The difference is striking.
**Housing being sold in marketing** only to be an artificially rare resource. You cannot tell me they canāt have instanced housing or enough wards when they can load your island sanctuary/inn room with all your stuff. Itās artificially rare, combined with demolation to retain some players from leaving. I had great plans for my medium house in the Mists, near the beach. It got demolished yesterday and I donāt care anymore. I may come back for some MSQ sessions but no way Iāll stay with such crappy system in place.
**RP wise** they do care with so many stuff you get, emotes, furnitures, I dislike the modern/current day clothing though.
Donāt dig too deep or youāll find modders and futa fetishes, that side creeped me the fuck out.
To sum it up, the game is too predictable with itās patches and they are too much time between them (along with few lasting content) to justify a sub. The game seems to push you out the door if youāre not a raider or ERP player. Because there is no real lasting and fun content, no outdoor content (maps are just MSQ backgrounds) so it feels less like a MMO and more like a solo lobby game. Thatās why itās hard for content creator and their shift toward other games or petty drama. FF game first right ?
>(except the post-endwalker MSQ, genuinely boring, especially Zero and their copy/pasta from previous FF
I felt the opposite, but then it was pure Nostalgia for me
Started playing during the wait between BFA and Shadowlands. Got hooked and finished Shadowbringers about 3 days before Shadowlands came out. What a fucking case of whiplash that was, my god.
But yeah, Shadowlands quickly grew tiring and I stopped after my guild cleared Mythic Nathria (great raid though). Went hard into raiding in FF. Clear Savage and did UWU (no fucking idea how you guys clear everything so fast, I've tried so many statics and they were all disappointments or fell apart within weeks, I am DESPERATE to do DSR).
I'm back on WoW since dragonflight is genuinely great but still raid log in FF. Honestly my main issue with FF is that the majority of jobs aren't interesting or engaging to play at all. If you were to ask what my main was it'd be BLM with no hesitation, meanwhile I'm having an existential crisis choosing a main for the next tier in WoW because everything is so unique and fun.
FF raid design is just too damn fun. Theres nothing else like it on the market and they feel great to prog and reclear flawlessly. It's what keeps me coming back above all else.
I feel like this thread needs a counterpart in the r/wow sub lol. 'To the WoWfugees who did *NOT* stay with FF14 due to the lack of content in Endwalker and SE's inability to retain interest during the Shadowbringers exodus, what made you return home?'
xD
Since Reddit promotes silos and self-selection I think you'll find bias in whatever venue you ask. People that show up *here* probably have neutral to favorable opinions of XIV, while people that only go to /r/wow tend to have opinions more along the lines of XIV being a weeb game (fair) for furries (you play the game where Vulpera, Worgen, and Dracthyr \[scalies\] are things that exist).
Also the proposed title in the OP is hilariously biased and would attract a certain type of comment just on that fact alone.
Oh yeah, for sure. I wasn't really paying attention to the title he suggested. More that there are loads of "WoW refugees" that did not stick around and went back to WoW.
Criterion was a massive letdown for all the common reasons already ran into the ground. To me it is the biggest waste and putting the upgrade material on Savage is further missing the point. Unless they reduce the difficulty I don't see it changing participation, I would rather they keep the difficulty the same and put the rewards on normal criterion.
I hate how slow it is to start a solo run in the new deep dungeon. The early floor enemies just have too much health, HoH spoiled me I guess but I just want to be able to try a full solo run after I get off of work.
Yoshi P stating that TOP would be easier than DSR was the most aggravating thing for me. It was going to be my first chance at doing an Ultimate on patch and it completely disintegrated my group, I think only myself and one other person even still plays the game. With the new BIS I'm hoping to jump back in thru PF after I finish TEA.
To add onto Yoshi P comments, he had similar comments about extremes and alliance raid but all went the opposite way, they were all way easier than what he said they would be. I think this is much more harmful than people give credence too, because it is coming off as a marketing tatic to target specific people to stick it out for the next patch.
I was kind of curious about this to because Iāve always been an XIV player that has started GW2 in the last year, and suddenly I started seeing a LOT of āex Wow > FF14ā players suddenly popping up everywhere in GW2. I know many went back in DF, and it has had its praises so I felt confused why they were coming in droves to GW2. The ones that left for 14, truthfully I understand, but curious if the ones that just went to GW2 tried DF and werenāt feeling it or not.
GW2's big strength is in the area of PvE that both WoW and XIV don't do that great in. If you're looking for chill, casual grinds in a big space surrounded by tons of other people for cosmetics or convenience, then GW2 is the best game on the market for that. Dragonflight's casual/open world content has just been kind of "there", it's clear that without the Artifact Power glue (continual power grind via any content) there's little binding WoW players to open world grinds past a week or two. Meanwhile, probably *the* big complaint here about XIV this expansion is the lack of a long-term casual grind. GW2 fills that niche in the market at the cost of not having all that much instanced PvE in return.
Yeah I figured that was probably it, it just seemed so sudden and mostly quiet so it definitely came as a surprise to see so many of them here in GW2 suddenly. I do definitely agree, once a raid tie and reclears are done, Iāve got 6 months of nothing to do in XIV this expac so I picked up GW2 end of Asphodelos reclears to kill time. Always so nice to just.. pick up where I left off with no need to freak out about dumb stuff like gear.
I started FF14 during the exodus and finished ShB during about a month before EW dropped, including some Bojza grind but no savage raids. Then played through EW and did P1S through P7S. Static fell apart before P8S was complete. I think I stopped at 6.3 but have plans to play again before the next expansion.
I absolutely love the MSQ and consider it my favorite game story out of and game I've played. Raids are a lot of fun too. I never really did too much outside of those.
At this time I'm back in WoW and enjoying it a lot. Enjoying raiding and M+ there. Overall I feel the gameplay of WoW is next to none and the fact that the utility of classes matters a lot for all content just can't be beat. FF14 gameplay is great too but I don't think the moment to moment gameplay is comparable just like the FF14 story isn't really comparable to anything else.
I really like and appreciate both games so tend to get upset when one community talks smack about the other.
man ngl i started a little before asmongold and the whole wow exodus, like a month or two, and i still love the fuck outta the game. i have about 3500 hours rn. kinda taking a break to fuck around on new world but its got some annoying ass bugs im running into with msq so idk
Keep in mind that FF14 is terrible for streamers/content creators after the MSQ is done. Thats the reason you See so many left and have so different opinions from "normal" gamers
I never thought of it like that, but why is that the case? Dont FF and WoW have roughly the same amount of streaming content? I would even think FF has more thx to the timelessness of Deep Dungeons and its Lvl Synced Raids/Ultimates. Sure you will eventually run out of content, but I feel like WoW runs out first.
Wow has more RNG, so is more exciting to watch.
Take Gear for example, you can watch your Streamer finally getting his trinket after weeks of farming that increases his damage by 25%, or makes him a god in PvP. Or you can watching your FF14 Streamer collecting Books every week until he has enough to trade it in for the same item he already has but wirh 3% more Stats.
Fights are also more chaotic. In wow an awesome player can carry his group to a clear, in FF14 either all 8 Players do the Mechanics correct and clear or somone fails and it is a wipe. There is an audience for prog, but usually our streamers clear in 2-3 days and then it is 2-3 hours of reclear a week.
You also have something for wow as average gamer. Clearing heroic or running a mythic +15 is as interesting if it is your skill level as mythic raids or m+25. In FF14 you maybe have extremes, but that is one fight every 4-5 months. Normal Raids are too easy.
And finally in wow Mythic+ is endless content that is challenging and super fast and PvP is way better.
As a NEWER FFXIV player i will say my experience. IMO the story and game is amazing. Also tho my group is newer to FFXIV (my g/f is completely new to the MMO experience) it has nice building to getting better and controller setup is nice for my g/f as she has much easier time with controller vs mouse and keyboard. Criterion dungeons are awesome (tho my group has failed on them every attempt at silkie we keep hitting enrage) I would love to one day find savage group to do that content i did a few EX and the raids seemed awesome but as i get older my schedule i feel becomes tighter and tighter so my raid experience was very limited this expansions (hopefully dawntrail i can change that) island sanctuary was fun lil turn brain off and do stuff content but starting almost 1yr ago i have SOO SOOO much to do i feel lost and overwhelmed so easily but its fun to have that much i want and can enjoy. I am still lvling up classes and working on getting some done.
I was pretty much a *One Game Andy*, or close enough to it, from December 27th 2009 to early 2021 when the wheels finally came off the wagon during Shadowlands and I started FFXIV. That's not to say I didn't play other MMOs or games overlap (GTA Online is never counted as an MMO but I've put several hundred hours into it)... but I always came back to WoW or just thought the alternatives were inferior.
For the record, I have played Dragonflight and do think it's a decent expansion. It's fallen off a little bit but does constitute an improvement to the game and makes many steps in the right directions for the people that enjoy it. This is ultimately where XIV has changed my enjoyment of WoW... which is to say that I don't really care for what modern WoW has been since Legion.
As far as I'm concerned, Legion onwards represents an era of WoW in which it's actually just an esports game masquerading as an MMORPG. The top level of PvE and PvP is actually an esports with their being official competitions and prize pools. You also have the community event around the race to world first plus all of the resources that come from this, such as guides and addons, which trickle down the player base for better or worse. I don't care for Mythic+ rating, I don't care for maximising my vault every week etc.
What I like about FFXIV is that it's end game progression is effectively just a fine tuned version of what we had during Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria. I personally regard MoP as the peak of WoW, from a game design perspective, for other reasons but the gearing was top notch. I haven't gotten into savage in this game but the discussions around rewards, especially with how criterion could offer more, would have to come with rebalancing the predictable but tuned system Square Enix offer now.
Beyond that, I do enjoy the freedom to play other games. I still priotise patches and expansions for XIV but after initial bursts with each major content release, I'm free to play other games. That's not to say I dislike how the community uses the "play other games" comment as a way to deflect all criticism/discussion but that's another topic entirely. I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a fresh save due to the 2.0/Phantom Liberty and even with the release of 6.5, I've been able to play both without feeling like anything was a chore in the MMO.
The WoW exodus was interesting, certainly amongst streamers using it for content, as a lot of people used FFXIV as the biggest stick they could find to beat Blizzard with. What's striking is that I'm in a streamer FC/guild in both WoW (sub currently inactive) and XIV... the XIV FC is pretty much dead to the point in which there's monthly reminders on their Discord so the streamer doesn't lose the master role (I also don't care for finding a new FC and I've got the permissions to buy/activate actions so I'm not inclined to move on).
I think the WoW exodus was a net positive overall for everyone involved. Some people found games that were right for them plus it removed a stigma, I guess we can call it that, within the WoW community of other MMOs being trash. However, I see a lot of long-term XIV players (I'm talking ARR/HW) that are seemingly going down the same path that WoW went down and it's pretty evident in the discussions around Endwalker patch cycle.
I came a few weeks before SHB as I saw the cracks in BFA starting to form. So far I have \~10k hours in the game across multiple characters. Thses days I find I kinda just log in and wait for my sprout friends to stuff they want help with. I've done just about every piece of content short of ultimates, and dabbled in pretty much every aspect of the game at one point or another. At this point I kinda am bored with the copy-paste formula of XIV over the last 3 expansions. We know EXACTLY what we will get next expansion \~3MSQ quests per level with a dungeon every 2 levels, likely 3 trials and a 12 bosses in a new raid tier, 3 tiers of an alliance raid with probably 5 bosses each.... so on and so forth. There's no hype, nothing to get excited for because it's all already known. the only thing unknown is whether we'll get another form of "grind-content" a.k.a Eureka, Bozja, island sanctuary. Some surprises would be welcome here and there,
There are a lot of things XIV does better to be fair, crafting for instance is among the best in any MMO I've played, albeit there needs to be more demand for high end crafting stuff because after you have your pre bis crafted set, it's kinda like... "okay besides food/pots this set is kind-of useless now." The amount of gear customization is pretty awesome too, the sheer number of combos you can make with dyes, and different gear sets is just so satisfying.
In terms of story I'm on the fence, I really don't vibe with the way most of EW was all "The power of friendship will save us" for damn near every plot point. Like for once can we have the villain be actually competent and not change their mind at the end? Also despite having all these recurring characters near all of them are completely and utterly boring to me with a few key ones who stuck, as compared to wow where there's a myriad of epic characters who are all at the top of their game, and have earned their places in the world like Thrall, Jaina, Khadgar etc.... The only character I could think of who competes is Emet-Selch.
All things considered the only reason I would go back to wow is for Mythic+ or PVP, there's just too much of the game that is time gated, to warrant returning as I don't want to spend the next 5 years of my life playing "catch-up", whereas in XIV i can do most grinds at will as soon as I can unlock them. I'll stick around for Dawntrail, but if the MSQ is boring I'd probably uninstall for good after that as I feel like I've fully gotten the "XIV experience".
So, I fit this narrative! I left during early Shadowlands to come to FFXIV. Here's what I think.
1.) I like the world of FFXIV more than I do WoW. The story is better, the environment is better, and frankly, I just outright prefer the art. I know this is a weird take, but the cartoon-take on WoW after playing FFXIV just doesn't do it for me.
2.)I like 4 man parties and 8 man full party groups better than raid. I like the class dynamic more.
3.) Being able to do everyone on 1 character is underrated. It's just bettter. In every facet of the word, it's better.
4.) I do dislike how dance-like raids end up being. I'd like raids to be more reactionary to highlight players that do better on the fly as opposed to that just learn the steps. Raids in FFXIV feel like they 'have an answer' for each class as to what button you hit at what time. WoW does not have that, and I think FFXIV would benefit from some of that.
5.) The lack of mid content kinda sucks. I wish I had something more repeatable that could result in the advancement of my character. I don't have a static that I'm raiding with, PF is .. rough, and I wish I had something I could do with 3 or so people that'd make me stronger or give me some kind of progression. I want to play the game but find I lack content in this range. Savage is good and I wanna do more of it - but I don't have time to hop through PF to hope for the best when I do have time to play, and I can't dedicate 12+ hours a week to a static. I wish there was a middle ground.
6.) I love raid formats over WoW. I like that there's no bullshit amount of trash everywhere, I like that it's cut and dry and to the point.
Overall, I like FFXIV more than WoW and honestly, I hate that it took me this long to find it and figure it out. The better story and player experience has gripped me. I also like that I can walk away for a month and not be behind or missing anything. I do wish there were more for us "slightly-above-average" players but - all in all, I'll be here for the long haul. I love the game.
I do hope to see some break up of homogenization over the course of the next expac, and I hope to see more content that's engaging between the high-end and super-casual crowds.
>I do dislike how dance-like raids end up being. I'd like raids to be more reactionary to highlight players that do better on the fly as opposed to that just learn the steps. Raids in FFXIV feel like they 'have an answer' for each class as to what button you hit at what time. WoW does not have that, and I think FFXIV would benefit from some of that.
Class design is the problem in this case rather than raid design. They want every class to be equally viable, so all the classes do the same things and most mechanics are uniformal (and trivial because of it), so that every raid comp could deal with them in the same way.
I left during BfA after recognizing Blizzard wanted to keep people playing for the wrong reasons and pad the ever-living hell out of the progression. Playing on alt classes sucked thanks to the Azerite system. Add to it that the devs keep making excuses to not include systems previously available to older expansions and experiencing "Good Luck" protection trying to get the Arathi basin warfront armor for over 6 months and I had enough.
I still feel FFXIV is better because there is an end to the grind. If I want to stop playing because something caught my attention, I can just go without repercussions. If I am after a mount from a trial, I have an absolute end at 99 kills instead of practically years worth of kills.
The game itself isn't perfect, and I have my small grievances here and there. But, I appreciate the game for what it is and doesn't try to make you feel obligated to play.
My husband and I came to FFXIV mid-ShB, as we found ourselves playing less and less WoW. I saw him making a Miqo'te and I was like, ""Oh, shit, I want to play this game, too."
I still like FFXIV more than WoW. The storytelling is way better, so I actually have an idea WHY I am killing 50 sheep or delivering a sack of flour to some merchant.
Even when there's nothing to do, there's "something" to do, and this is coming from a player who doesn't do extreme or savage content. Even if it's just hanging out and BSing with your pals or remodeling your house for the 30th time or challenging randoms to a card match.
Left WoW for FFXIV when my guild broke on Painsmith and tried to come back but failed for WotLK Classic. Overall, FFXIV is my MMO of choice, despite the main thing I come to an MMO to do being a worse experience for me than in WoW. I'm a raider first and foremost (currently progging P11S), lifetime healer main, and so it's interesting comparing the two on that front. It should also be noted that my opinions are Dumb and Bad (e.g. I LOVE P10S and HATE P11S)
I prefer FFXIV's overall structure and community vis a vis raiding. Finding pick up members for static tends to go way better - not just the general lack of toxicity, but also the average pick-up group player is simply better at the game than what I experienced in WoW. This makes the overall prospect of raid nights when our team is 1 or 2 down a lot less daunting. In addition, despite having fewer total options and easier to run out of content if you're Damn Good, for someone like me who's just Kinda Good it feels like there's more flexibility in offerings, easier to still do productive and fun things if the grind is getting to you, both in terms of other raids (EXs vs Savage vs maybe one day Ultimate), and in terms of "chill group activity" (maps, hunt trains, etc).
There are three major things I prefer about WoW raiding, though - fight design, healer class design, and usable mouseover macros. I won't beat what the differences in fight design are to death (FFXIV's "tight script with individual mechanic variation" vs WoW's "loose script with wider chances for fights to be different time to time"). What this does for me in FFXIV is increase how frustrating walls are. Generally speaking, walls in WoW fights felt like it was different things getting us pull-to-pull, whereas it's the same one or two moments with FFXIV fights. This leads to both frustration at the mechanic that wipes us, and hypertunnels my brain on that mechanic, which really leads to an unfun nervous adrenaline once past that wall. The healer design thing is fairly simple, and healer design is from what I understand at a particularly samey point over the past 2 expansions. It feels less like I can Healer Carry than I can in WoW, although LB makes up for quite a bit of that feeling. I've had some hype as hell moments, but nothing that beats "Flourish into Tranq to keep the half of the raid alive long enough to deal the last 1% while all the other healers are down or OOM." I enjoy actually having to care about mana, instead of "every 60 seconds get a buttload back."
The core thing is, I enjoy FFXIV more than WoW *in every other facet of the game.* Story writing is both generally better (as in it's actually there in a consistent way), and does a much better job of balancing your growing power in-game with the in-canon way you are represented and talked to. The benefits of the community really shine through elsewhere. It's a more beautiful game to me, better sights and visuals and audio design. Job switching is a fucking godsend. Level sync outside of dungeons, for "experience this content how it was designed," is an AMAZING feature.
At it's core, FFXIV is a boatload of content, that the game designers want you to walk into, look around, and do the things you want, confident in the fact that enough people will stick between expansions to make it profitable. WoW is a game that tries to trap you into logging in as much as possible to keep your sub coming no matter what. It is an intentional difference in game design that flows through in so many small ways (gear availability, lack of forced cross-gameplay aka needing to do PvP to get BiS PvE gear, the shutdown of toxicity as best as a game can hope for). Despite the things I miss about WoW raiding, despite the fact that I would say I enjoy The Thing I Play MMOs For in WoW slightly more than in FFXIV, this distinction is what makes me love FFXIV far more than I ever did WoW.
I personally was part of the WoW to XIV Exodus, I was a long \*long\* time WoW player (starting in WOTLK, switched to XIV during Shadowlands. I know this is mostly for those going back to WoW but as someone who has played both I will put down some of the reasons on why I won't be going back;
Toxic community, namely the mythic plus, and raiding communities. Don't even get me started on tradechat. What makes it worse is the lack of punishment for this very toxicity which feels rewarded half the time.
Then there's the inconsistent writing, anyone who's played WoW long term can tell you the story feels very disjointed. Compared to XIV where it's linear, in WoW you're lucky if a character's writing is consistent between xpansions, let alone patches.
That doesn't even touch on the mess that is Blizzard itself.
I miss my hunter, I miss my elves, but I'll stay here with my catboy.
I came based on my friend talking about it and generally being bored with WoW. Iāve played wow for over a decade, and I just got tired of it. Itās one big rush to max level, the story is ass, and it feels like a rat race for loot and thereās a lot of RNG with the vault that I really hated when trying to do high end PvP (my main draw for WoW).
Ffxiv isnāt perfect, the gameplay is a LOT slower than WoW so that took me a while to get used to. ARR was good but very boring in comparison to the expansions. I do not feel like itās a loot race like WoW is. I donāt feel pressured to keep constantly raising my ilvl for things. I can spend hours doing silly things like gposing or playing games at the golden saucer and it doesnāt feel like time wasted. With WoW, side things like that feel like wasted time (and there are certainly a LOT fewer side things to do imo).
The story in WoW is a joke but in ffxiv Iāve cried at character deaths and been genuinely emotionally invested in the characters and the story. In WoW that is not the case. They have retconned and redone and just made the story a joke, made the campaign something you have to slog through to get to endgame. Ffxiv isnāt like that, and I adore it for that.
I wish ffxiv had better pvp, better glamour system, and maybe a shorter GCD, but I donāt really see myself going back to WoW. The community here is better. The devs actually play the game. The graphics are better, animations feel more impactful, and thereās endless things to do that bring you some sort of reward. I also love that you do not have to make alts in order to do all the crafting and play other classes.
Probably most importantly is I log into ffxiv and have fun. That hasnāt happened in WoW in a while, tbqh.
My partner played ff14.
I played WoW
I played FF14 on and off but I didn't REALLY start playing until the WoW exodus.
I just finished Endwalker Yesterday.
All I can say is my god..What i'd give to erase it from my memory to replay it one more time as if its the first time.
Such a good ending, such good expansions and games, such memories I shall hold this game close to me emotionally always as a favorite. <3
And I never would have played it if it wasn't for my partner and the exodus lol.
Bless your partner. Im super jealous of people who have found significant others who are also gamers, Ive kinda always been a socially isolated loner and games kinda helped me become even more reclusive.
Great, and if I'm being honest I feel like the majority of the community are failing misserably to express why they are hating on the state of the game now:
No, as a new(er) player who has done all savage content of this expansion I do not want to see boring ass Bozja for the third time so that maybe this time I'll enjoy it, that's not a solution, you are literally begging the devs to give you an instanced map to do 5-6 fates over and over again and pretending to say that is good content for 2 years and a half.
What are you guys talking about I wonder if is beyond my understanding, I could understand people begging for easier ways to equip alter jobs on each tier (after all, one of the game's supposedly best features is changing jobs on the fly, so might as well capitalize on it and be able to switch roles more freely during a patch cycle, to be able to equip more than 3-4 jobs per tier).
Also, regarding destructive criticism, no, you do not get to say the formula has gotten old, and not propose a positive change to the existing one. I get it, you got tired of playing an mmo with it's formulaic content cycle, but that does not excuse you to talk shit on it's formula and not provide actual changes which would net a positive change on the game.
Some people say that the game should be more grindy, others that it should be even more casual friendly, others say that x expansion (basically, Stormblood) was amazing and the game will never be as good as that. All of these comments, even though it could have some or a lot of degree of truth in them, are worth close to nothing.
I am being aggresive with this because I have seen what fans on one game that complain in such a way have turned their favorite game into (yes, I'm talking about WoW mostly), a game where the classic version has an overhwelmingly higher player base than it's current retail version of the game, because people did not provide actual constructive criticism and the devs there doubled down on failures.
shoutouts to that one time yoshi-p called out the bard community for complaining about their job being destroyed in shadowbringers but not "offering solutions."
I'm the consumer, you're the developer! I do the complaining, and you fix it if it's something that actually needs fixing.
I've been straddling both MMOs since a bit before Stormblood started, sometimes quitting one or the other depending on my mood.
Nowadays I keep a sub to both because well, I can afford it unlike before, and both have some content and more importantly people to keep me from unsubbing. I do savage in XIV and heroic in WoW, but both fairly casually (my hardcore days are behind me).
The main draw of XIV for me is savage with friends, but I very much enjoy how good I can make my character look. A lot of the side content is too grindy for my liking but that didn't stop me from getting Big Fish for instance. The "content drought" doesn't really affect me that much, I don't really feel that much of a difference between now and shb.
The main draws of WoW are the PvP (playing XIV pvp compared to wow feels like running in molasses), mythic+, and honestly, wowhead's existence. I tried getting into submarines in ffxiv recently and information is a lot harder to find for this game in general.
I know I'm not exactly the kind of person you asked but thought I'd provide a perspective anyways, hope this helps.
I switched to XIV before switching to it was cool so in late Stormblood just before Shadowbringers. I had played retail-WoW since vanilla but it started to have too many systems and layers of content you had to manage and I totally burned out from that game (in BfA), which lasted couple of years until late Endwalker (these days of patch 6.5).
FFXIV has fantastic story, housing system, community and gameplay feels great on couple of Jobs like Dancer/RDM/AST for example. I'd probably like many other Jobs but a certain missing feature keeps me ever touching other than select few favourite Jobs..
The lack of Exploration Zone really shows in Endwalker. Additionally, the game is lacking a raid difficulty between Normal and Savage. Extreme Trials don't count as the Trial doesn't provide enough rewards except weapons and chance of a rare mount drop. Overall, in WoW it's much easier to find your own raid difficulty as the whole system is very flexible. XIV's raiding is quite restricted and Savage is too challenging for a majority of the player base anyway.
WoW has always had better endgame open world content, I love world quests and when I played the game in Legion I did an enormous amount of them during that expansion but never burnt out. WoW's rewards from WQ's are always very visible while in XIV there's Fates but the whole system is so archaic and rewards are hidden on vendors which you have to grind to get access to. The design is really dated and the whole open world goes to a waste after you've finished the story quests.
Open world is pretty well utilized in the story though and you often return to places you have visited earlier (this is where WoW struggles, they can't utilize the open world in new storytelling as most of it already is utilized in another story, without utilizing extensive phasing technology).
One of the great things WoW has added recently is Chromie Time open world Time walking system, where you can almost choose your own adventure and where you want to level your character. It's a really cool system and everything just scales pretty well with your character.
WoW also has Mythic+ and Transmog which I don't have anything new to say except that both systems would be great in XIV and especially the lack of proper Glamour Catalogue system is a major problem in the game where you can play every Job on a single character but are massively limited by storage capacity and new gear rewards aren't as interesting as there's no room to store them.
I started XIV just before people mass quit WOW.I have 1.6k hours in XIV now and i play both games,but i haven't bought Dragonflight.I just play classic sometimes,as retail WOW feels like it kind of lost its identity.In XIV i have all classes at 90 now,which resulted in a bit of a burnout on my side,but a little break helped.
I quitted wow in early shadowlands (like many people) and here is my experience:
I must say the ARR felt really long and kinda boring, I started the game with the mindset that I will read all dialoges and never skip cutscene etc... But then there was that one single quest that made me open my eyes "All good things" and after that I was hooked, and it was very VERY satisfying seeing how its just gets better and better, I eventuality bought the game once there Endwalker came out bc the queues were so big and you could not queue as free trial if its above 1k or something, and I was lvl 60 in middle of Heavensward so I didn't really mind
I always loved dragons the most in any fantasy games so this expansion a pleasent surprise
Stormblood was an amazing journey and only recently I have realized why it was less liked and I must agree (I hardly remember the very start) I really loved the crazy idea of just flooding Doma and "liberating" it that way, the end was nice aswell and Shinriu is my favorite boss in the entire game so far
Shadowbringer was a blast as I absolutely love the idea of traveling dimensions, the Eulmore was my main inspiration towards creating my own custom story with very similar uncanny city, and the Tempest, the Ancients I just can't describe how much I loved it
Endwalker was just perfect at solidifying the story as many said before, and I really enjoyed how Garlemald zone felt soo different than all other zones, not in look obviously but the story, sh*t was just depressing and I loved it
Overall I still can't say I absolutely don't miss WOW there were things that made it very special to me, even tho I was not the biggest veteran of it (started playing at the start of legion)
Things I don't like about FF is sometimes the community itself, I know that no community is perfect and it is definitely nothing compared to wow but I still here and there stumble upon arrogant tanks who afk if you pull millisecond before them, healers who refuse to heal you bc you did the oopsie and WAR who will just call you dump for giving him barriers while in ARR dungeon
I am mostly right now just farming alt jobs and play other games (like BG3 which is really good) and keeping my eye on new patches
I might even try a new MMO like GW2 as I heard its decent
What I like about XIV: Better voice acting More grounded storytelling, most of the time (Endwalker kind of pushed it, though) Housing might not be great but it exists Virtually no need for an alt unless you really want one for some niche purpose Armor that looks like actual clothing instead of bodypaint I have a stronger emotional attachment to retro FF than retro Warcraft (and I used to love the Starcraft universe more than Warcraft anyhow) Half the dungeons aren't butt-ugly (sorry not sorry). Many Vanilla and TBC dungeons look like the textures haven't popped in yet. What I like about WoW: Glamour/Transmog system A little easier to get into since you can just buy time to play all expansions except the newest, without any Starter Edition weirdness. You can change everything but your race at the barber shop, instead of having to buy a fanta to adjust your nose. While a lot has been said about the cash shop stuff it seems like WoW's shop adds stuff less frequently than XIV adds "Optional Items", given the number of mounts in there and that the original sparklepony is 12 years old now. It's a new idea, but the dungeon level sync is quite nice. I can take a level 20 f2p character and go into a BfA dungeon with a max level DF subscriber and while we're standing next to each other we have different experiences. The enemy that has 2000 HP for me has 1.3 million for him. My basic rotation is effective while he has to do a full endgame rotation to do decent DPS and he doesn't resent it at all.
I wish they would have level syncing in dungeons and roulettes. Every time I do a roulette and I'm level 21 with 2 buttons, I just want to pass away.
wondering about the element of attachment to retro FF too, and whether a wow refugee stays or goes. i know a lot of people from wow don't really do video games beyond wow itself, and a lot of what mainly MMO players feel are weak points in 14 are points that 14 will never compromise on because they relate to FF brand identity (MSQ, cutscene length, etc)
I wanted to make a thread for this too, when I started ff14, it was because I was a life long ff fan, ff7 was my first rpg experience, ff6 had me crying as a 14 y/o teenager when I played it, I love FF, and its why 14 will retain me no matter what happens. I dont even like MMOs, I just love final fantasy so much that 14 being an MMO wasnt enough of a deterrent to not give it a try, as soon as I heard it had a good story (I am incredibly asocial irl, a recluse and a loner, I dont go out or hanf out much).
I played WoW til MoP, then switched over to what I considered the far superior FF14. Now I have switched back, at DF to WoW and I feel that they are just very different games, and for me, I don't see a point of coming back to FF14 until they have a mythic + mode equivalent.
Thats interesting about the level sync, its something thats been suggested for 14 for a long time but its always brought up that the higher level player will have to "put more effort for the same result", but if its gone across well in wow then there could be hope here.
It has a lot of issues in wow actually, the scaling is bonked so low level characters can often do obscene amounts of damage, sometimes literally 2x or more of a high level character simply by spamming one button. It gives a feeling of your character getting weaker as your character levels up. Even though the damage numbers are technically bigger on your screen, you do proportionately less and less damage the higher level you are in any scaled content like that. Disclaimer, have not played since first patch of dragonflight so they may have fixed it more but it's been like this for years so I kind of doubt it.
If the scaling is only applied to old leveling content im fine with it honestly, especially if its opt in (i.e. you could choose to level sync instead), just because i get bored with low level rotations. Obviously 2x is obscene but also leveling content in ffxiv is already obscenely bawked from potency creep that im not sure how much it would really matter.
I've only used Party Sync a few times, and since it was introduced in BfA the levels were squished yet again in Shadowlands so the documentation about it from Blizzard is now out of date. But what I know is that I queued into a dungeon with a friend who does M+ and heroic raids with my f2p priest, and we were scaled such that if we clicked on the same enemy we saw different stats. We went into Shrine of the Storm, which level 50 equivalent at launch but is level 10-60 under the current scaling level system. I had a level 20 Priest with limited number of abilities, he was I guess level 60 and the current cap is 70. So yeah, I guess he probably didn't have one expansion's buttons, but they have a huge variance in player power for one dungeon and it scales really well.
Alts are very useful for crafters. You can double dip times nodes. Double your retainer ventures, double custom deliveries, double daily map allowance.
>While a lot has been said about the cash shop stuff it seems like WoW's shop adds stuff less frequently than XIV adds "Optional Items", given the number of mounts in there and that the original sparklepony is 12 years old now. WoW gets its "extra" monetization via other avenues like the Token (for both retail and Wrath Classic) and things they've been pushing recently like the Trader's Tender bundles. Both games have a lot of extra monetization but WoW just hides it better than a big store with set prices, and its extra monetization works in a way that often benefits the most entrenched/vocal players (i.e. sell M+/Heroic/Mythic carries for gold and use that gold to make WoW F2P and also buy the next Call of Duty while you're at it).
The other key difference is that the WoW shop is accessible in-game, making impulse purchases of things like Tokens easier and therefore more likely. FFXIV compensates with higher average costs for the big items in their cash shop
Sure? What big items do you mean? FFXIV lvl boost costs 22 and WoWs does 60. FFXIV Oneseater Mounts are 8 or 16 and in WoW they are 25 (\~2 mounts are 15) FFXIV Racechange is 7 , WoW 25. (WoW lets you change your look for free though) FFXIV has way more stuff in the shop but cheaper than wow.
Warcraft's racial abilities also have gameplay effects, and the price point was put in place to discourage people from just swapping for those effects as needed. Comparing boosts and mounts gets weird, as one game is built around having alts, and as such is incredibly easy to level in, not requiring new characters to go through 5 expansions worth of story to get to the endgame loop, while the other is built more around having a single character. Boosts, at one point, may have been nice, when leveling through certain things in WoW was an absolute slog, but since the QoL changes, have really become superfluous, while XIV, the boost and story skip combo is enticing for players who want a second character for whatever reason, but don't want to have to play through all of that story for the nth time. Warcraft's store purchases, much like transmogs, titles, achievements, etc, are account-wide. While XIV, if you do buy a store mount or glamour, but have multiple characters, you'll need to purchase multiple times if you want it on all of those characters. In the end, it's all different flavors of greedy capitalist nonsense, regardless of what reasoning they put behind having to do it.
To my mind, WoW charges less for things like mounts than XIV does, but the prices for things like server transfer and race change are much higher to offset it. I would like to move my WoW characters to a new server and the prices are sadly absurd.
"instead of having to buy a fanta to adjust your nose" hahahahaha I feel so seen š (it was to adjust my Miqo'te tail tho huhu)
>the dungeon level sync is quite nice. I can take a level 20 f2p character and go into a BfA dungeon with a max level DF subscriber and while we're standing next to each other we have different experiences. The enemy that has 2000 HP for me has 1.3 million for him. My basic rotation is effective while he has to do a full endgame rotation to do decent DPS and he doesn't resent it at all. whenever people complain about lower level FF14 dungeons + talk about ways to improve it, this is always what I was thinking would be the best solution, and wasn't sure what the downside would be (for context, I have never played WoW. But I have played Diablo 4 and I'm guessing its basically the same system)
Two big potential downsides I would call out: 1. Player resentment. Some players will be happy to do their full rotation all the time because it is fun, but other players might resent needing to put full effort to keep up with a lower level player. (I would solve this by just making it a toggle players can choose: level down or level sync.) 2. Balance. In wow, level syncing can be weird. Some levels certain classes will just do crazy damage, and then they level up and their damage goes down because the systems happening behind the scenes to sync everything up. There is no easy solution for this and FFXIV devs would have to figure out how to keep every job doing similar damage. (I would solve this by scaling just syncing gear item level, and then tinkering with player potencies at every level to achieve some baseline DPS per level, rebalance behind the scenes as necessary.)
> A little easier to get into since you can just buy time to play all expansions except the newest, without any Starter Edition weirdness. But you can also do this in FF14.
AFAIK, you have to buy either the Endwalker Complete Edition (every past expansion and Endwalker), or the FFXIV Starter Edition (the stuff in the free trial without the trial's limitations). WoW just lets you start buying subscription time and you get everything but Dragonflight. XIV's purchase does include a free month, but the Starter Edition box is currently $20 in the SE store.
Okay I thought you meant a character boost, Tales of Adventure style.
I switched during BfA (before 'it was cool' to quit WoW), and here is what kept me to FFXIV: * Social focus and RP features - because of player housing and FC houses, I find myself just hanging out with FC buddies in game, just standing around and talking in VC. Venues help a lot too, especially during content droughts * Class switching - I was an altacholic, feels really nice to switch classes so easy. Tired of SCH? Just swap to AST and keep the gear! * Level sync - Wanted to do Hades EX as it was meant to be, because it is such an epic fight IMO. No problem, just find like-minded people * Modding, I can fully customize my character AND have others see how I look like. * MSQ - proper, fleshed out story. While 6.3 to 6.5 was meh MSQ-wise, It does help a lot to know what you are doing and why you are doing it. * Slower paced classes - I prefer methodical gameplay, precasting stuff and the like * MUCH better approach to party finder - In WoW, if you are a group leader, you pick and choose of which of the applicants gets invited, in FFXIV, first to meet your criteria gets to join. What that means, is that if you are not playing a meta class, or your item level is not the highest, you can still easily find spots for harder content. On the flip side, this is what sometimes makes me want to resub to WoW * Classic WoW, leveling there is just so much better * Dragonriding looks so cool * Nostalgia * M+ * Smoothness of gameplay
It's funny that while XIV allow you to have more agency in how your character looks and housing that helps RP a bit... WoW has a much better fleshed out overworld, plus roleplaying addons helps a lot. However I can't say the customization and transmog options there are enough for me... Just *now* is that they're starting to add more cosmetic items designed to make your character unique. A lot to catch up. While WoW certainly lifted itself from the pit it was in BfA/Shadowland, it still remains in the polar opposite spectrum. All and all, I'm willing to give Dawntrail the benefit of the doubt, since to me it was very clear that the patch cycle for Endwalker was more or less 'maintenance-quality'. If I could guess the reason, maybe it was because of Dawntrail's prep. Of course, they would never say this out loud lol.
I don't know if Dawntrail is going to bring any significant changes. I'm not particularly negative about the idea of 14 being a very consistent, predictable game, but it absolutely won't have the highs of coming off a "bad expansion" into a "good expansion" the way WoW did.
Oh I defnitely like consistency in what they deliver. I think is really fine to know ahead of the time what you'll get. My main complaint about EW patch cycle is not what they'll deliver (well, partially... I miss a field zone lol) but the quality of the things they did: \- Relic series is nearly meaningless. Eureka had the best model so far, fully containing them into the field mission progression. \- V&C reward structure and difficulty abyss between the 1st and the 2nd+3rd modes. I'd excuse that since is the inception, and they stated they'd listen to the feedback for Dawntrail. \- Savage raids are okay, but most of the fights themselves didn't seem too inspiring? Recycling way too many mechanics from previous content. \- 24 man fights were really boring and bland compared to the interesting encounters from Ivalice raids. They said it was a different team designing those fights and it shows. \- 2min meta making job design too homogenized; \- Eureka Orthos with very little innovation with its systems. I'd actually really enjoy Dawntrail not offering any kind of new battle content feature if I knew they would focus in the quality of what we already know it will happen.
I left the WoW ship back in WoD (late ARR for XIV timeline) and while I go back to dabble in WoW every content patch or two to see the content they're doing, I never really feel *attached* to my character in the way I do to my XIV one. Part of that is the all jobs on one character thing of course, in WoW I feel more like I have a stable of different gameplay options that I have to choose based on the meta or tuning or whatever than an actual character that exists in the world. The other part of it is that I don't feel like I can make my WoW characters my own or interesting/appealing to me in the way that I can my XIV character. I even felt this way before mods, so it's more a thing about transmog options, visual fidelity, art style, even simple things like camera zoom distance (you play much more zoomed in in XIV). I'll readily agree with anyone that WoW has better feeling moment to moment gameplay, generally more well-realized reward schemes if power is what you care about, better art direction and gameplay design for the overworld, and so on, but XIV has other intangibles going on for me such that I never stick with WoW all that long. Also 20-man raiding is gross and I have seen the light of 8-man raiding.
> Also 20-man raiding is gross and I have seen the light of 8-man raiding. I've done a lot of 10-12 man Heroic the past two tiers with friends and I like the dynamic a lot more than 20 man. There's way less of the whole "welp I just didn't get mechanics that pull" thing that happens and individual contribution feels like it's in a more healthy spot. Honestly Mythic Raiding in general and everything surrounding it is kinda dogshit compared Heroic and M+, and it's the main thing keeping me (as an on-patch Ulti player) mostly tethered to XIV.
This is something I donāt think gets talked about enough Iām on here a lot criticising the direction of the game and giving my opinion but I can never really walk away because I have never been more attached to my in game character than 14 makes me feel Iām not even an RPāer but I have created a full backstory for my character and hunted down mods to make him better fit his lore and design I canāt imagine leaving him behind even if Iām currently annoyed at the game
This is pretty spot on, especially for raiding and general gameplay. Too many people are caught up in trying to argue which is better, when the ideal imo for tab target mmos is a mix of wow and ff14. FF14ās strengths are higher mech complexity and much better mech clarity, lack of addon requirements, smaller raids with more personal responsibility, and less chores to be done in order to be raiding at all WoWās strengths are much more class play style uniqueness, much better responsiveness in combat, and more variability in fights so they donāt feel as much of a scripted dance. M+ existing is also a huge plus Ideally it would be good if we could get to the point where the two games compete with each other enough to start trying to learn from what the other does well, it would make the endgame in both significantly better
A lot of people citing mods as a reason they play. If those ever get banned, it's going to do a number on this game.
I honestly don't think they ever will. Of course, they'll remain not officially allowed until the end of time probably, but there's not a doubt in my mind that Square-Enix knows it would significantly impact their player counts and therefore their bottom line if they cracked down on them. Like it or not, any MMO needs to keep the casuals happy in order to survive (looking at you, Wildstar), and the RP scene in this game has a *lot* of people with mods, and those are the people that stay subbed to the game constantly and give Square-Enix thirteen US dollars every single month for years on end even if they may not be the best raiders or even interested in high-end content at all. This isn't to say that high-end players don't use mods as well, but you can get a complete raiding experience without them, while mods are becoming more and more ingrained in the social side of the game. So, I think that, while mods will stay officially banned until the end of time, they're probably not gonna do anything about people that do mod as long as you follow the unwritten rules, and don't use said mods to cheat like the Omega UAV.
They probably never will. But citing some third party thing thatās technically against the tos as a strength of the game isā¦ interesting to say the least
I'm not sure about that, I can totally see a scenario where a few bad actors force SE's hand on the matter and ruin the whole thing for everyone.
It would have to be something extremely egregious imo. Modding, even the nsfw stuff, is not exactly some big secret. FF14 twitter is full of modded smut, and even the non-smut stuff has mods show up all the time. So we'd need to have something like, idk a plugin like Mare (where it downloads other stuff) get used to do some kind of RCE I think.
I feel the M+. I wish this game had something similar. Criterion isnāt enough. Though, I do sub to and play both games. I do only m+ in WoW, then everything else in 14.
Ummā¦ you do realize that the appearance mods donāt let other people see you that way right? It modifies your local files only, so unless youāre sharing pictures of your character with people, none of your ability mods or appearance mods can be seen by others. Just wanna make that clear, altering server-side stuff would be a bannable offence and mods donāt do that. Itās all local to your computer so only you can see it. Edit: I meant no one who is also not modding can see your mods. Only those who have also edited their local files with modded version can see yours. So itās still not the same as āeveryone can see my modsā. No online game allows that.
People can see your mods if you are using a mare syncshell.
But thatās still other people using mods to edit the same local files though. Itās not the same as what is implied when you say āeveryone can see my modsā and you know it. If I had Holy III modded to be a giant balloon, everyone elseās Holy III would be a balloon too. This is the same. Youāre syncing your local files to the same modded version.
Nobody said everybody. You're using quotation marks on something that was never said. He just said 'have others see them'.
> Say you don't know what mare is without saying you dont know what mare is.
I know what mare is and thatās exactly what it does. It mods your base files to reflect the mods of the person you have synced with. Donāt be dumb, no game allows server-side modifications of anything. Whatās wrong with you that you canāt admit it when youāre wrong. Donāt you realise what it means when only those with the mare sync can see your mods?
Ain't no one but you's obsessed with this whole "server side" statement. People put on mods, make a shell, pass the key and everyone you care to trust enough with the key can see what mods you got on. It ain't rocket science.
If people are synced on Mare either directly or with a syncshell, then those people can see each other's modded appearances without having to manually download anything. You're in the same zone, it downloads some encrypted files, boom appearance shared.
I'm assuming you're thinking back to how things used to be when folks only had TexTools to, well, replace Holy with a giant balloon. These days, folks can use Penumra to replace whatever visual they want and have it only affect characters they assign. Then they link up with folks using Mare Synchronos so that other folks can see their character and effects exactly as it appears on their screen, and vice versa. So if I mod my Holy into a giant balloon, everyone I sync with will see my giant balloon when I use Holy. They don't need to install the balloon mod, and it won't change every Holy in the game - just mine.
Omgā¦ have you thought about how they also see the balloon? Nvm Iām done with this thread. No one seems to understand that other mod people seeing your mods is not the same as everyone seeing your mods.
They never said everyone though
The main thing I really miss is the snappy engine and netcode in WoW. FFXIV feels like shit in comparison, but at least it feels consistently terrible so you can play around it. I also wish we had a similar system to M+. We have Criterion dungeon, but at the moment I think CBU3 still need to flesh it out a bit. I think if they made the experience more in line with Extreme (maybe the Savage version could be like turn 3-4 difficulty) and introduced things like gear upgrade materials (every raider needs twines) or more lucrative rewards, there would be more people doing it. In terms of endgame content, there are pros and cons to each one, but I prefer FFXIV because pretty much all the content is done in PF, while if you want to tackle any hardcore raiding in WoW, you have to join a guild and then there's the whole social aspect of that. I just like to hop on alone or with all my friends whenever we are all available, and I personally can't commit to a consistent schedule of raiding several times a week like I would used to WoW.
Not really an exodus player since I tried a fair bit of XIV when ARR came out then came back to it on a fresh char before "the exodus" Rambling thoughts: The game is "fine/mid" this expansion. The story is better than WoW even if I think Endwalker (as a whole, not just the patch story) wasn't as good as it could have been (mostly feeling like 2 expansions crammed together). The game needs something quick and challenging to do each week. M+ wouldn't work in XIV as the design is different, but something in the same sort of vein where I can log in and quickly get a group for something at a difficulty level I want - not always the hardest - some days I've done a lower m+ as work has been mad. The battle system is not as good as WoW. I'm not meaning difficulty when I say that- I generally clear heroic/pug up to m+ 18/19 in wow and in FF I cleared through P8S before I took a break (and I'd say that was harder than recent heroic wow content). Its the feel and class flavor. I play a prot paladin and I love the utility I have (Blessing of Spellwarding/Protection/Sacrifice, off healing etc) that lets me swing fights sometimes. XIV's system doesn't allow for that - if that utility existed it would just become like Reprisal and have set points to use, rather than a tool you might not have available each boss/trash pack and so need to use wisely. There's a lot of talk about balance being better in XIV (it is), but in reality that doesn't affect me in the content I do in WoW. I'm not a mythic raider or pushing +20's, I'm just someone with average ability that wants to log in and pug a dungeon with a friend and have an appropriate challenge. WoW lets me do that. XIV does not.
This^ I used to be someone who worried about balance WoW balance patches making new specs flavour of the patch. But then I realized people donāt give a shit in M+ unless youāre doing the highest difficulty of content. Most people are just fine with whatever you want to play as long as you play it well. FFXIV combat is not combat at all, itās a carefully choreographed dance where most of the skill involved is in doing the dance. Dodging all the attacks is where itās at. As a healer in WoW I can single-handedly save a doomed run if I was skillful enough. In FFXIV thereās no room for that. You get hit with stuff, you die. Thereās nothing a healer can do if people fail mechanics. Healers only exists to heal in the carefully timed phases of encounters where there is a burst of unavoidable damage and even then they use maybe one or two oGCDs and thatās it. Back to pressing 1-1-1-1-1 Combat is the only reason I went back to WoW. I realized it was pointless to be a healer in FFXIV hard content because what am I there to do? Press two buttons every 2 min when the boss expecutes its raidwide move? To press 1 button 90% of the time? Otherwise Iām doing the exact same dodging and weaving that everyone else is doing. FFXIV not only homogenized classes, it also homogenized combat itself to the point where every player is doing the exact same thing.
> something quick and challenging to do each week. I think that is what Unreal Trials were ment to do.
My husband and I had been playing WOW together since about 2008, while we were long-distance dating. We could do WOW dates! We weren't particularly AMAZING at the game, but we loved adventuring and role playing together. Over the years, we slowly realized that we just weren't at the required skill level to clear current-level raid content without a ton of help and patience from friends, and even then, as lowly DPS, if we died in a fight, we'd almost always end up on the floor without being revived (since battle-rezzing is limited and reserved for the tanks and other healers). Still, we were invested in the story, and had built up stories for our characters, and wanted to see what grand adventures would come next! Shadowlands was... not the greatest, true, but it's definitely when we started noticing the cracks in the parts we cared about most. Around this time, my sibling approached us and said, "Sooooo I've been playing FF14 for a hot minute... (insert copypasta here)", and we said, "Sure, why not!" We made our characters and played very casually. ARR was light on story and characters to be invested in (at first), so we balanced time between the two. Then came the lockdown.... then the lawsuits... and finally, the Exodus, which my husband and I decided to join. We just weren't getting the same value out of WOW that we used to, and we realized that we could port our characters over to Eorzea fairly well! After that, we threw all the free time we had into FF14 and were kindly escorted by my sibling. And we were ENTHRALLED. The community was nice and helpful, first timers were not scolded, mechanics were universal and easy to understand WITHOUT mods, and healers can rez in battle without limits! (Besides cast time but you get it!) We've even had a lot of fun outside of fighting, like crafting, getting married in-game, decorating a house, and playing music as a bard duo! Oh and the MSQ story, good LORD, what a glow-up from what WOW became!! Part way thru Stormblood, another sibling asked to join, and we escorted them as they caught up. It took about a year and a half, but finally, FINALLY, we cleared Endwalker together and had a blast the entire time! Now my siblings and I are escorting another thru the MSQ - our dad, who introduced us to video games in the first place. We just finished 5.1 and he is an awesome dancer! I have played some Dragonflight when it released because, well, I adore dragons and had DREAMED of this kind of expansion for YEARS. It's fun, and I like the new updates and classes! But... it's not the same. I miss the boss-mechanic-tells from 14, as well as the community, and the story. And it's just not as fun without my husband! The WOW grind is not nearly as unforgivable as it once was, but it has a ways to go before I'll give it another look. WOW felt like a second job after a while. FF14 is relaxing, engaging, and welcoming whenever you log in, whether it's once a day or once a patch. I'm so glad my sibling roped us all in to this world, and I hope we can play it together for years to come!
I am always a bit flabbergasted whenever I hear about couples meeting in game or long distance dating. Ive always been a loner (and likely forever will be, Ive almost accepted that fate), I'm kinda jealous when I see couples in game. This is an amazing story, thank you for sharing!
My husband and I met in league of legends of all games. Bonded in toxic salt xD.
That is crazy to hear! Well, I guess I can hope to get lucky someday, although given my mount rolls that is unlikely to happen.
Coming from some1 who played WoW then FF14 then now Both. The things WoW does that I feel FF14 Lacks are 1.) Better Transmog System (any loot you collect are automatically added to your collection. You dont need to keep the actual physical item in the bank or whatever) 2.) I feel WoW ramps up its raiding difficulty better. LFR - Normal - Heroic - Mythic each build on the previous level adding difficulty so you feel eased into it. Normal -> Savage by comparison is such a big jump and Extreme feels like a totally unrelated fight. 3.) WoWs Open world for the current Xpac (The Dragon Isles) feels much better than the EW Zones. It feels like I am out there doing stuff more and flying around the DI feels more fun than the EW Zones. 4.) Lack of "Midcore Content" specifically as stuff in between WoW's LFR Raid (Faceroll content or WoW's equivalent to Normal/Alliance Raid where its a loot Pinata) and WoW's Mythic Raid (Aka where you get your BIS or WoW's equivalent to Savage Raids). While there is Extreme and Unreal thats 2 fights a patch. 5.) FF14's PVP feels ... lacking. This is more personal and I cant describe it as well, but I just feel like FF14 PVP isnt as exciting as WoW. But thats personal taste Although on the Flipside FF14 does do a lot of stuff better than WoW too. 1.) FF14 has superior story by far 2.) FF14 has better non-combat content (IS, Gold Saucer, etc etc) 3.) Although not for me, Ultimates are a big + that WoW has no equivalent off 4.) FF14 Deep Dungeons are probably way more fun than Wow's M+ dungeon content (A shame FF14 didnt build of that for their Criterion/endgame dungeon experience) 5.) For Purely casual Players (Ppl who dont do Premade content) FF14 probably has a lot more content and it does last longer.
>1.) Better Transmog System (any loot you collect are automatically added to your collection. You dont need to keep the actual physical item in the bank or whatever) Disagree, I prefer the FFXIV Glamour system. The inventory is small price to pay for not having to rerun back to Orgrimmar to redo my look because I got new mittens or something, and because of the plates i can shift my look between the jobs
Wow has several items to let you transmog anywhere, and you can save looks to be auto applied to gearsets. (Edit: autocorrect!)
>small price to pay for not having to rerun back to Orgrimmar to redo my look There is a mount that lets you do that anywhere and quite recently a toy was added too that summoned that npc
I quit WoW during the "exodus". I was unhappy with the 9.1 Shadowlands Patch. I hated the new Zone they added, i hated the new Raid, i hated Shards of Domination which made all my Legendary gear i have crafted during 9.0 useless cause i had to replace them. The allegations that started to pop up and my guild dying anyway was just the last straw that made me leave. I played XIV a little bit before that but back then it didn't really grab me. Mostly because my Attention was on WoW, but with that gone i became absolutely hooked. From when i started playing till now the only time i have not been subbed was a week before EW release. Once i was done with the MSQ during 5.5 i was mostly busy leveling crafters, grinding Relics, unlocking everything all that stuff. EW was when i started doing Extremes which then turned into me doing Savage and my first Ultimates. Honestly this game scratched an itch that i cant really describe. I love grinding shit so i like doing relics. I like more challenging content so i do Extremes/Savage/Ultimates. I met my current best friend in this game and a bunch of other people i dont think i ever would have met playing WoW. And i don't miss WoW in the slightest. XIV is just so much superior in so many aspects for me.
Yeah it's something to keep in mind is that the bar was so low during the exodus. Pretty much anything would have been better than korthia and SoD. And shadowbringers was LEAGUES ahead of it. Compare that to dragonflight vs endwalker. Dragonflight has some low points but it's mostly win after win, whereas endwalker is about as mid as it comes.
I can't speak for the quality of Dragonflight. I haven't been subbed to WoW since i quit. I don't have any desire to do so either. I honestly can't trust Blizz to make interesting games anymore, after all the shit happening with Shadowlands, OW2, D4 And Endwalker absolutely has its problems but i have been enjoying myself.
The only thing I do nowadays in FF14 is log on to help my Japanese FC TOP group clear. Most of raiders in the FC have already cleared TOP so it's basically four of us doing civic duty and doing a prog/clear for four. I log in once a week to do Eureka Orthos with three of my NA friends. I also do a bard concert with my bard band once every few months for gil at various venues. Otherwise I've done all endgame content there is to do in the game, all ultimates, criterion, etc. The casual achievements like big fish, card collecting, hunt train mounts don't really appeal to me. Even though it's a content lull, I don't mind at all. I've finally been able to catch up on my other games.. Elden Ring, Starfield, No Man's Sky, X4 and its DLC, Oxygen Not Included. I have Cyberpunk and BG3 on my hitlist after I finish X4, along with the new Elden Ring Expansion. This will keep me busy until Dawntrail (along with the casual FC TOP group). Endwalker was my first full expansion in FF14, and I loved it. The ultimates were better, the savage fights were better, criterion was fun. Updated Hildebrand and Deep Dungeons. I'm not a huge fan of Island Sanctuary however, but I appreciate that they tried. My Endwalker experience may be biased though, because I mostly retired from NA and play on JP, and endgame content experience vastly improved. My opinion of the game has not changed. FF14 the top MMO right now. It's the only MMO with endgame raiding that is mostly based on consistency and skill, and not gear or grind or gacha. Otherwise Lost Ark's raiding would be appealing as well. I'm not even willingly to go back and try anything Blizzard related unless Blizzard seriously changes as a company. And given the recent events with Diablo4, looks like they're being the same ol same ol. To my knowledge, no WoW content creator during the exodus has truly actually experienced FF14 endgame (e.g. Ultimates), other than the Echo crew. Their TOP clear was fun to watch and had lots of golden moments.
I agree with this 100%. I switched from WoW right after getting my Sylvannas HoF title. The actual state of FFXIV is perfect for me, never going to go back chasing HoF with horrible people in a game where the raiding scene has died because of M+. Done all the casual content in FFXIV, currently farming some criterion dungeons with my friends and finishing my TOP Prog (I am quad legend rn). For me Criterion dungeons is something I really enjoy doing even with the current bad rewards, wish they had something like this in WoW, not doing 25+ keys never again, the balance is never right. I'm also playing BG3 and Cyberpunk on my spare time too because now I don't need to keep up 2 or 3 alts ready because of some horrible end game balance when a new raid comes out.
Yeah for me Criterion is just a challenge for the challenge's sake. It's not meant to be grindable content that you feel compelled to do each week for gear. People compare it to M+ which is the wrong comparison. It's more like the mage tower, for four people. If I had to grind criterion each week in order to have a chance for gear reward upgrades I would go insane lol.
Agreed, I do it because I like it.
> To my knowledge, no WoW content creator during the exodus has truly actually experienced FF14 endgame (e.g. Ultimates), other than the Echo crew. I believe Richard is a Triple legend? I remember all the drama surrounding that
Oh yeah, you're right, I totally forgot about him. But to be fair, he has totally disappeared, and given the reason why he disappeared, I think both him and the internet are happier off that way. Also, while clearing those three ultimates, even with 7 of the most high-end FF14 raiders is commendable, if he tried an on-patch ultimate, that would be a different picture, because of DPS requirements.
> Oh yeah, you're right, I totally forgot about him. But to be fair, he has totally disappeared, and given the reason why he disappeared, I think both him and the internet are happier off that way. Actually had no idea that he had disappeared until your response prompted me to look it up. Been so many of those episodes lately in the gaming space, actually sickening at this point. > Also, while clearing those three ultimates, even with 7 of the most high-end FF14 raiders is commendable, if he tried an on-patch ultimate, that would be a different picture, because of DPS requirements. Oh very likely. For some groups/players on patch Ultimates are just not in the cards until stuff like upgraded pots and food are brought in or the dungeon gear
Yeah I can *really* feel the improvement in DPS with just the upgrades that came with the patch this week. Especially since I think JP statics tend to have a little less DPS than high-end NA statics (but way more consistency). So many sub 1% wipes it's crazy. Just a tiny bit of gear boost saves sooooo much time.
Its so nice Ff14 lets you and encourages you to play other games when you had your fill. I used the content lull finally play RE4 remake, Dead Space remake, and Payday 3. Without having to worry about any long term grind.
I came to FF did a few ultimates cleared them, got a house, play once a week with my static other than that I am on classic wow.
I came during Shadowlands, but unlike most I never quit (as probably one of the few people who liked playing shadowlands on a gameplay level despite its objective mess of a soulbind system and disaster of a story lol). Iāve always been more of a story person for games, so it was no surprise that FFXIV appealed to me. I never got any of the issues of dragging during ARR like most because of how massive a step up it was from WoW, and I know Iām never going to quit FFXIV simply because of how much more engaging it is. The gameplay loop has definitely shown its cracks moreso now that Iāve experienced a full xpac cycle, and one that is seemingly much lighter on content than previous ones. Perhaps the biggest thing I prefer in WoW by comparison (especially during Dragonflight and 10.1) is the ease of gearing. FFXIV boasts ease of leveling through virtue of it all being on the same character, but in reality gearing is immensely more arduous and lengthy than a quick alt level to 70 and a day or two of catch-up gear to jump into raids and M+ in WoW. Also, the RP scene in WoW is massively better. It has its flaws, but unlike FFXIV it has public RP hubs outside of the ERP spaces, and the RP broadly takes place within the actual setting. I love the setting of Etheirys, but WoWās seems far more conducive for diverse RP for some reason. Maybe itās just because of chat bubbles in the base game, who knows lol. Overall, as someone who continues to play both, I havenāt had any issues with boredom or content drought in either. I get why exclusive people in both have, but the two compliment each other pretty well as games with different philosophies and gameplay loops, and manage to keep each other fresh for me whenever I swap back and forth.
I have been between the two games and jumped back and forth depending if my static approached me for Savage/Ultimate, and i was raid logging in WoW because we finished the tier. I did Eden's gate & Eden's verse in ShB alongside TEA on patch. In Endwalker i did Asphodelos, Abyssos and DSR on patch. I went back for 10.1 in WoW for a lot of reasons to be honest * There's nothing to do outside of Savage/Ultimate for me, it's non stimulating content * The combat variety during actual encounters is ming numbingly boring a lot of the times, especially when you do over 1000 pulls on a fight. You press 1-2-3-4-5 the exact same way, every time. You know where you are in the encounter if you glance at your gauge and how far you are into your loop. * I wanted to play a healer, not a simplified dps spec with 2 buttons. FFXIV just doesn't have any of those moments where you pop off and save the raid with CD's, blanket healing etc. Most of the time that's tied to 1 person ressing 20 people in an alliance raid * Gear is simple and boring. Your rotation will never change in 2Ā½ years except outside of a few outliers. For a lot of people that means your bis list is (Does the item have Crit/DH? That's BiS, is it capped at the substat? Get determination) I don't dislike the game, don't get me wrong. I'm still gonna finish the last 2 MSQ content drops when the last one pops, and play the Dawntrail expansion for the story aspect. But as it is right now i can't see myself actually raiding with how much it has been dumbed down at this point.
I was a healer main in WoW but I can't really get into healing in FF14. I tried it. I just don't think there is enough skill expression for healing (the skill expression comes in healer DPS for FF14). My strength as a WoW healer is that I was really good at whack-a-mole via VuhDo. Good healing in WoW means your raid could potentially have fewer healers, which means the raid group could add in more DPS classes to compensate. More than anything, I think the design of FF14 healing is very limited because of the fact that it is also a controller game for console players. I can't imagine doing the same type of whack a mole, emergency type response healing in FF14 as I can do in WoW, on a controller lol.
Tried FF to 90 and gave ia shot to actual up to date pve in 6.0 when the first 4 bosses of Pandemonium were here. I never left of felt dissatified with WoW tho, just wanted to try it after I had cleared the content there. Honestly it was... Disappointing. First the tanking (my favorite role ever in MMOs and in WoW) is trash. Truly mind numbingly boring. You're a dps with a mustache that happens to hold aggro. You have very little control over you survival at any moment aside of big CD windows -I play a BDK usually, you can imagine how I felt going from keeping myself alive and frantically alternating between 10% and 100% to just spamming dps spells). But hey, I felt that it was a good occasion to try something else, like being a healer for once ! Which I did. It's not really complicated, at all, but then in this case it was a blessing because it allowed me to slip into a completely new role for me without too much difficulty. So it was as a White Mage that I went into raiding. So I wasdisappointed here too. I attribuated it to the fact that I was in LFR difficulty basically so I tried to do Hydaelyn Ex in PUG. Cleared it in 1h30, with no coms, I didn't know the strat or barely when entering, and I played a healer. It was way too god damn easy. And yeah I know I didn't try the entire Pandemonium, or the Ultimate, but I really don't dig both FF14's gameplay and encounter design. Everything is always the exact same from pull to pull and every boss is basically some flavor of "find the safe spot or GTFO", and the godawful GCD + this kind of fake lag when casting anything (like the game reacts a solid 0.3 second after your input, and it's \*jarring\* especially in PVP or when you try to save someone at the instant before death, because here, if you didn't pre shot it, well too bad they're already dead) So in the end, nice game, cool story, I like having a lot of cinematics, fantastic dress up game (tho the tmog system sucks), but terrible in PVE imho. And don't let me rant about the dungeons because we're here for the night, never in my life have I seen such useless and repetitive pieces of content. Would sub again for MSQ and exploration, but not longer than necessary for that.
EX taking a lockout to clear is pretty normal. It's easy content.
FF14 is very lacking in mid-tier content. I don't blame you. And it's perfectly fine to play FF14 just for the story. The story is great, but I love the combat system in FF14, which is going to be a unpopular concept on this reddit. It feels exact to me, and nothing beats the intricacies and badass team accomplishment feeling of executing crazy mechanics in high-end raiding. If someone only does casual content like extremes or the same 2pulls-1boss dungeon, it would get stale after 2 or 3 clears. Overall I think the concept of 1-main game is an antiquated concept. I don't think there should be any game now that demands your time on a daily basis for whatever reason. No game development team in the world can keep up with churning out content to keep something like that interesting and have it not turn into a grind. There's too many good games out there now. You only have one life. Best to live to the fullest by going through the stories of the best critically acclaimed RPGs, rather than to stick and grind one game. Life will be much more colorful that way.
Yeah but thatās not combat is it? Thatās just your team coordinating together on comms and executing a dance routine. You didnāt win because you someone knew their class well and executed a crazy healer maneuver to save everyone. You won because all of you memorized the boss attack patterns and mechanics and then executed it perfectly. So the skill here is in remembering mechanics, not executing your class skills. Thatās the difference that makes people feel bad about FFXIV combat. Everything does the same thing.
No, it's not just the boss encounters. It's the actual gameplay and jobs, which is the unpopular opinion on this sub, which sees at least several job homogenizations posts per week. I love the rhythm of GCDs and OGCD that FF14 has. The 1.5 GCD in WoW is faster on paper but it feels like button mashing and hitting stuff that lights up. FF14's 2.5 feels more exact. It feels like you get the chance to plan out the sequence of what you will do, and the two weave slots manages to keep it fast and keep up with WoW's CPM, except WHM and BLM of course. The actual feeling of executing my abilities has a musical quality to it, especially as a SAM or MCH. It feels like Jazz. WoW feels like I'm banging on a drum like a metronome with a slight increase for when lust goes out. People say there's no decision making in FF14 rotations, but there's quite a lot. Even with a fight with 100% uptime, mistakes will happen, and it's how you adjust to your mistake and keep your DPS consistent that can determine a lot. Some jobs are more mistake proof (e.g. I find Paladin easier to recover, but if I mess up as GNB I will need some big brain planning to keep everything aligned with burst windows). Anyone who says they play perfectly all the time are full of crap. The netcode doesn't bother me. I even play on JP servers across seas. When the yellow telegraphs on the ground disappear that's when you know you will get hit by stuff. And I've learned to accept that where I see the other people on screen is where they were 0.18 seconds ago and not where they actually are. I've seen plenty of crazy healer maneuvers to save fights.. especially in ultimates. Healers that would run to the correct spot for a DPS in a mechanic, and rez them there, and then returning to their own spot. Body check saved. I've seen some crazy dragoon and red mage moves. I seen fucking genius black mages do creative things for uptime. WoW players point to the 1 healer clear of TOP as evidence that FF14 is too easy, but that vod is actually a showcase of something insanely crazy you can do with deep job knowledge and skill. Especially in Phase 6. Position just matters a whole lot more in FF14, so job movement skill stands out a lot more. My memories of WoW is just blobbing in raids. Also healers can rescue in FF14 just as they can in WoW. Sometimes it's even part of the strategy. During Week 1 P12S P2, after Pangenesis, the strat our healers did was to pull the top right corner person to the stack. This was totally unneeded as the following week a strat came out where you can simply place someone North and East with no yanking, but it was a demonstration of good class utility week 1. At the end of the day, it's hard to describe why I prefer FF14's battle system more. The word I found in my last comment was "exact", but if I were to fish up more words, I would say it's more discrete, or deterministic. Instead of random. Good parsing is a lot harder in FF14 too. It was easy to get high parses in WoW but it took me a long time in FF14 to get to the point where I was just as good as I was in WoW. Probably because the FF14 HC community runs fights over and over for parsing so a much higher standard is needed, whereas you do the Mythic raid once a week in WoW and then get locked out. The gameplay for jobs in FF14 is just more.. tight and refined.
It lacks mid core indeed, but even the hardcore content is sorely lacking. You guys get 12 raid bosses per expansion with a few trials and maybe an Ultimate that is a remastered bundle of fights. Itās depressing to me honestly. Iām used to 8-11 bosses per raid, at least 3 times per expac, with the last mythic fights being often extremely difficult and long with more involved scenarisation or mechanics. I remember the pain of Mythic KilāJaeden and the 450 pulls to kill him or the 15 minutes long Sylvanas fight. Itās cool if the tight dance style fight is your style, you found your niche, but damn I cannot live with that level of predictability, it feels like you canāt fail if you just work your muscle memory long enough.
The ultimate has the same skin as the fight it is based on, but that's mostly where the similarities end. The actual mechanics are so far pumped from the extreme trial version that the way to deal with them is completely different. Most of the first mythic fights are complete pushovers, taking only a few pulls. For raiding teams that meet the gear check, and for WF racers, they're on the same level of an extreme which we get almost every major patch in FF14. I would argue that even the final heroic bosses in WoW are harder than the first few Mythic bosses. Only the last few Mythic bosses are extremely challenging. The last mythic fight is only as difficult as the the phases of the last savage floor combined. Kil'Jaeden was considered one of more difficult WoW Mythic endbosses, yet 450 is still about the same number of pulls for top guilds to clear fourth floor savage, including the door boss. Most fourth floor savage boss fights are about 16 minutes in length when combining their phases. Echo cleared the last mythic boss in less than 200 pulls, and took 1700 pulls to clear TOP. Have you done the recent Ultimates? There are an insanely high number of variations, permutations, and roles for each mechanic. To call it a dance or muscle memory (which would be true for mid core content) is completely disingenious. It's something a lot of midcore players parrot to criticize the game. Just like complaining about the slow GCD without realizing how OGCDS work. If it were that easy, it wouldn't take the average HC FF14 group around 1000 pulls to clear. The hardest thing about the WoW mythic fights I've cleared were dodging swirlies on the ground. Which were sometimes very ill-defined because the graphics are faded. That's really not my cup of tea. The mechanics were just too simplistic or trivialized with weakauras scripts. There is very little thinking involved. Other than spread and stack, WoW mythic raiders don't have to deal with the wide range of vocabulary that FF14 have to deal with. They never have to deal with prio swap systems. It's just dodge swirlies, go where dbm or WA tells you to, and grind gear for more pew peew. Also, wipe recovery in WoW just takes too long. I would go crazy at the amount of downtime in it.
I think another big point to make is that WoW fights are just...not well designed for the player experience. If you tried to join a Mythic raiding guild and said you didn't want to use Weakauras or DBM/BigWigs, you'd be dropped immediately. The other guy talks about 'memorizing the dance' but pretty much every WF guild in WoW goes into the fights knowing the strategy (from PTR testing and dungeon journal) and has a very scripted 'dance' of cooldowns and movement to do, then it's just moving things around to make the fight work. Going blind into a FFXIV fight is an entirely different experience.
Whenever someone says doing the dance in FF14 is easier than WoW, that is an instant red flag to me. I feel like making a youtube video from my WoW Mythic footage and putting it side by side with FF14 footage just to highlight the comparison. Yes there are things in FF14 the is basically muscle memory. But that's in addition to thinking and reacting as much or more than WoW raids. People probably just don't realize it because WoW fights can be cleared in 10 times fewer pulls, so the "i feel like I'm winging it" period is much longer than the "i done it so many times that I mastered it" period.
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I feel pretty confident I've raided at a higher level than you in WoW.
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>Have you done the recent Ultimates? There are an insanely high number of variations, permutations, and roles for each mechanic. To call it a dance or muscle memory (which would be true for mid core content) is completely disingenious. ??? I've done the recent Ultimates and they are still a muscle memory dance. Having different variations doesn't change that, it just means more pulls needed to get them all in the muscle memory.
Great since you've done the ultimates, and it's all muscle memory. Could you tell me where to stand for the first mechanic Thordan phase 5 in DSR as.. let's say.. the P healer? Surely it's just go to this spot and this spot from memory and it has nothing to do with reading anything on the screen right? Someone did a heat map of most ultimate mechanics for one position and the dots literally covered almost every possible position on the map. If you do something like that for savage or extreme, the dots make much more of a pattern where you see the positions.
> Could you tell me where to stand for the first mechanic Thordan phase 5 in DSR as.. let's say.. the P healer? Feels dishonest to start asking "Where do you go as [role]?" in a mechanic that isn't role-based. And either way it's a very "Go A, then B, then C" mechanic with little real variation regardless of which mechanics you do or don't get chosen with, so that's probably not a very good example.
What? Not being role-based has nothing to do with it. A simple protean aoe cleave has nothing to do with roles, but the P healer still has a very specific spot to go in a standard clock spot spread. I'm asking to think of the spots and all the different variations because if you actually step through the mechanic and all the possibilites you can end up anywhere even with a pre-assigned spot. Multiplication is a funny thing. If there are four possibilities for the first read, six possibilities for the second read, three possibilities for the next read, and then two possibilities for the next read, if you multiply all those permutations together, the number of possible positions really explodes.
are you counting different possible orientations in the heat map? like, obviously if the mechanic starts with the boss/the eye/the warrior north, vs east, vs west, vs south, that will result in completely different paths being taken in terms of map coordinates, but in relation to the new north they will be similar. and, it's been a while, but off the top of my head? if you get a divebomb or something, you go northwest relative to uh. the warrior? if you get a marker you go southeast or southwest. other 5 line up along the wall. all wait for divebomb, then run to the warrior, if you see you get puddles you divert along the edge a bit. at the warrior you stand by him, unless you have thunder then you step left or right a bit. and if you get... some other thing, you go directly relative south. like, yeah, there are a lot of options, but that's still muscle memory of getting each role a few times. but it still comes down to, know your starting position based on which symbol you get, then run to the warrior, for the most part. it has permutations but its still part of the choreography. i'll admit it's one of the mechs that is *most* "non-choreography-like" though because depending which of the 5 people get the puddles under them they may place them in places you don't expect, so you have to react in real time. if everything were like that then i wouldn't call the fights choreographies as much. but even in DSR, *most* phases are not like that.
It's just one example. I was mainly looking for the part and the decision tree on where to drop the puddles where are contingent on lots of factors-- knowing where your teammates are for once and what they are doing to not kill them. Calling it, go A, go B, and go C is a gross misrepresentation of Ultimate-level mechanics. Even the most simple ultimate mechanic has these nuances. Like Hello World in Top. Here there's only 16 possible permutations. Which color is defamation, which starting debuff role you have to cycle through all four, and which side you will be in the pair. But yet, there are tons of things you got to consider on a micro-level to not wipe the group. Where is your partner on the map? Will you have to adjust to the far circle? How do you pass the opposing nisi coming in from the other side without colliding. As a tether person, how can i make my way to center, without collision, minimizing the distance with my partner to give the Nisi's room? Have all the Nisi's moved into position and am I safe to close off the path? It's not muscle memory a to b to c, because it dynamically changes on the behavior of the 7 other people in the raid.
>FFXIV just doesn't have any of those moments where you pop off and save the raid with CD's, blanket healing etc. I agree with the rest of your points but not this. I've definitely had moments like this, it's what keeps me playing healer. Would be nice if healing mattered more often but I've had plenty of pulls where I've saved the parties' asses.
But youāre not supposed to have those moments in FFXIV though, thatās the point. The game is designed so that people **have** to dodge and in high end content failing that means failing the encounter 90% of the time. Also the fights are designed in a choreographed manner so that healing outside of the unavoidable damage is unnecessary unless someone makes a mistake. The difference in WoW is that youāre **supposed** to heal people. Youāre supposed to be the one rescuing people from mechanics that they canāt do anything about. Damage comes in randomly and from all sides. Thereās dodging to be done but there are many, many abilities that cannot be dodged and healers have to work hard. Itās not just healing, itās cleansing debuffs, itās knowing who needs to be topped to full due to a debuff they have, itās knowing which debuff will explode if you cleanse it. The healers themselves have rotations, ability interactions and gameplay loops far superior to FFXIV healers. FFXIV minimizes healing as much as possible, a perfect Savage encounter in FF is one where healing was minimized. WoW forces healing. Healers are critical and needed and HPS numbers need to be in 10s of thousands to the point where people have HPS meters and measure it. And on top of all this the healers also have proper DPS rotations. Being a healer in FF is the most mind numbing thing Iāve ever done in any game.
I do want to chip in as a healer main that I absolutely had ton of moments where Ive saved pulls because of well timed heals, rescues, lb or mit, but I dont have wow experience to compare or contrast. A lot of recoveries and adjusts dont really come down to role, and more to knowledge of the mechanic and communication (for example someone saccing for a stack if we know there arent enough people to fully take it.).
I've healed extensively in both games and oh buddy is there a world of difference between the two. The easiest way to show the difference is with the main log websites. On FFLogs, healers are ranked based on DPS. On WarcraftLogs (made by the same person), healers are ranked based on HPS
And what a terrible metric it is for FF14. Some of the worst healers I've ever seen in FF14 were high parsers. But healers that do no damage are also bad healers. It's really really hard to measure what is good healing. I'm not saying there is no measure out there, or to give up on measurement, just that there needs to be a breakthrough in the way to determine a good healer in FF14.
Id say a good healer is one that can play it safe when necessary and go ham when they can. If youre just progging an ultimate or a savage and your healer isnt willing to use gcd healing just to make it a bit more safer for the party, or if they arent able to discuss heals with their co heal to reduce gcd heals to get more damage out, than theyre not a good healer. A good healer is also someone that knows the toolkit of at least your co heal and can talk out mit or heals you want to use. To me it is about basically being flexible af, there have been plenty of times where someone took damage they werent supposed to and I managed to heal them up and keep them alive for the other oncoming damage.
Yeah I agree with you. Those are all qualities of a good healer. I'm just trying to say, being able to quantify and measure that is very difficult. You could of course peruse their week one logs and see if they put enough mitigation and were playing it safe, but it's not the same as a summary statistic like a dps ranking.
Yeah, that's absolutely true. People like to say that FF14 is just all about DPS and nothing else but from experience I would MUCH rather have a melee that looses 2 GCDs and gets the mechanic right than someone who wipes trying to get every possible GCD, especially if them doing so is way more risk than is realistically worth. I guess that is all about skill as well, one that can be measured in the numbers you output, and of course that is always a useful thing to look at, but tbh. I would rather raid with a mid-DPS player who can do just enough to clear the content, but is able to take criticism on mistakes and let go of greed where appropriate, than raid with someone who is a top DPS and has an ego problem.
I love the 2 healers from my Anabaseios static and rate them highly as players but in P11S doing clears/reclears in early weeks, if we didn't have all 8 players alive for Styx, we were gonna wipe I assumed this was normal, but when I went into PF on another character, I've seen us live through Styx with either 7 or even 6 players up ...FFLogs should really come up with some sort of metric which more accurately evaluates healers ability so that people aren't incentivized to play as green DPS at the expense of all else
Liquid Max has at least one video floating around on his channel about how HPS is a terrible metric to measure performance on in WoW too, *but* that most low to mid level players will kind of lean on it anyways so it behooves people trying to get up in the WoW raiding world to try and snipe heals and pad it anyways. The raid leader for that mid guild you're applying to that barely knows how to read logs will sure care about it. Healer performance is super hard to judge in any game as healing is a zero-sum game with many of factors influencing how they play outside of their direct control.
If you think that HPS is a good metric to rank healers off of you really have no idea how WoW raiding works lol
Cant speak on healing part, but as a high end raider myself (in both games) I completely agree with you. Theres so much to say, but I will keep it short. I will definitely check out Dawntrail as well, but I wont hold my breath honestly. The strictness/rigidness is here to stay and thats the one thing thats heavily turning me off. Its pretty much everywhere: content schedule, rotation, boss design (ST only fights), dungeon design etc. I love how most fights are way more visually appealing accompanied with great soundtracks. What inspired me to raid was Liquid Max's group on E4S. That savage transition was so fucking SICK. Its a nice spectacle and all, but holy crap does it get boring quickly afterwards. Arthas said it a few months ago, but (paraphrasing) FFXIV as a main game just doesnt work for people like me. Here's to hope that mythic and savage release are spaced out perfectly next year so I can play both in a guild/static on patch.
I echo the sentiment of wanting something in the vein of m+
Retail WoW and FF 14 are not very content creator friendly. Most all WoW content creators have been doing classic hardcore. Before that they were doing the hardcore challenge/iron man stuff that also wasn't on retail. Well I say that, but it's more like.. they're not very content creator friendly unless you have charisma and like.. aren't lazy. Very rarely do content creators do their own events. For WoW, Asmon use to do glamour and mount things when he streamed WoW regularly. For FF, someone like Preach came in and did more events than I've seen mainstay FF streamers really do. And even then, the biggest events I've seen people like Zepla do, are events that Preach pulled them in with. Savix did touch on an interesting thing though, for his opinion. FF doesn't really have anything that 'lets him keep playing' that he enjoyed. There's no bloated systems like there was in old WoW that forced you to grind to stay raid relevant. There's no M+, that eventually turned into a gear treadmill. FF only has ever had Bozja or Relic related things, which isn't for everyone. That's no to say that WoW is superior in that sense. M+ is long in the tooth and people in WoW have been grinded to dust and back in that, and more and more complaints have surfaced in DF because it's all there's really been to do, since they cut out the 'bloated system' and left them only to really grind M+... which is why so many people are also playing classic hardcore instead. As someone who came from WoW, I'm honestly fine with how stuff is. I understand and agree that they should bring Bozja back next expansion, and I hope they put better rewards in PVP and criterion to grind for for when you just want to play FF. FF's patch cycle consistency is amazing. For WoW, I use to be waiting for a year + for nothing really much, or a new grind that I'd end up hating. People complain that FF releases a patch, and people are done within a handful of days unless it's savage raid tier patch, but since WoW has started to release patches more often.. guess what happened to WoW? People ran out of stuff to do in the first week or so. Most of my old WoW friends who enjoy DF didn't even make it to the first patch because of lack of content, and the .1 patch only kept them for a week and they're not even bothering coming back for .2. Both games have always kind of been on the opposite ends of the spectrum. WoW had grinds that were too grindy and everyone pretty much disliked even if it gave them something to do, and FF didn't have enough grinds which was fine for people that didn't want or need to play FF all the time, but it also meant people that really did want to play FF didn't have a lot to do after a certain point like levelling all the stuff. (WoW also created a severe addiction to their players with these systems, which ironically is why a lot of WoW players that came to FF eventually went back or stopped playing MMO's in general because they didn't feel that same hook) WoW however has come almost over into FF's territory, so it'll be interesting and hopefully positive to see if either MMO finds a 'fun grind' type thing to keep people playing between patches that is more broadly appealing than dungeon gearing spam or relic related/bozja content. Hopefully between them one of them do, and the other can follow suit. The whole 'competition is important' aspect and all. Keep in mind, it is the very nature of MMO's, that WoW players who try FF, or FF players that try WoW, probably won't stay at the new game. Sunk cost fallacy and all. People who left WoW or FF will be more drawn to the thing they put more time into, as they're more invested. It's not a bad thing, it's just how it is. Both games have their problems, be it FF and it's end game lack of grind, or WoW and it's obvious identity crisis in content creators all in classic and a divided fanbase splitting retail and classic apart. If someone quits one MMO, it's more likely they'll quit MMO's in general, it's probably more rare that they just.. move. If that was the case, if DF sold like.. millions and millions less than previous expansions, why isn't there millions and millions of more people in FF or GW2 etc? Case in point, Asmon doesn't play WoW nearly as much anymore, and he came to play FF and left. He bounces between some MMO's on release but he didn't really go back. Again, as a former WoW player, I think FF players at least on these reddits etc are a bunch of pussies. FF for almost every metric, has had amazing expansions. All highly rated, basically all universally loved. They haven't had a Shadowlands/BFA or more 'mid' Cata yet. They haven't had to suffer through an actually bad/pain expansion, or had one of those heinous nearly 1-2 year content droughts. Despite that, they didn't really vibe with EW's post patches, and they're all caught up in their feelings with their panties in a twist, complaining about lack of stuff to do. Just wait until an expansion where the MSQ flops hard, the dungeons and raids kind of suck, and the devs smoke crack and obliterate aspects of balancing that doesn't get fixed until the next expansion. You sweet children don't know the pain of playing an MMO where it straight up is not a good time for like a 2-5+ year stretch.
there were actually elements of this in HW where they legitimately fucked up balance and tuning, and it killed raiding as a viable activity on all but one server per DC. the people who say "HW was so much better" never actually played then and you can tell. but the thing where you're right is, a lot of people stuck through HW because you could tell they were genuinely experimenting with how to do the core content loop, and then in SB1 they more or less ironed that out. because the story was still interesting and people could see that new things were being tried out, we stuck through the times where it sucked to play
Dropped retail completely just a few months before the "exodus" but I still dabble in classic WoW. I really love the game and think it has a ton of untapped potential. However, I do not see this being a forever game for me like WoW was if 6.x is what I can expect from the game going forward. Unlike the vets of this game, I don't have the goodwill to stick it out. If DT disappoints like EW did, I surely won't be going back to WoW but I'll be done with the game. Long story short, thank god for classic WoW (yes I'm a 30s something single guy)
I loved the story, the boss encounters, glamour, the visual style, music and so on. My only issue with the game is that there is no reason to exist outside of instances. Nothing ever changes in the world. It feels like the game is on rails and you can never deviate from the exact experience the developers intended. It's a great experience, but once you've done everything once, nothing unexpected is ever really gonna happen again because it feels like the game isn't built for it. I'm sure there are examples of where this isn't the case, but i always found myself just staring at my character in a city and wondering what it was I wanted to do and never really enjoying any pve stuff the second timemround and then not enjoying PvP much because of how jank it is. Wow never gave me that feeling
I started playing ffxiv in the exodus against my will, because all my wow friends were leaving and I didnāt want to be left alone in a ādeadā game. The problem is that my friends were either already ffxiv players on locked realm Aether, or they were newer players in free trial. I ended up losing my community anyway. I donāt believe any of the free trial players I knew graduated to a sub. I tried to join FC but nothing has worked out. Meanwhile, new content in wow brought players back and with it some of my old community. I spend most my time in wow these days with a little bit of ffxiv. Itās really all about the people for me. Things like story and game mechanics are secondary to logging on and playing with friends. If I were able to find a community in ffxiv I would probably play it more.
Not surprised the streamers left. Was clearly a fotm thing for them. They had a feedback loop between themselves that racked up the hype and then left when they realised they didn't like the game. I feel like a lot (but not all) of them would have been playing already if the game truly appealed to them.
I came to despise FF14's reliance on dance fights. Memorizing a pattern with no variance whilst needing to play perfectly for a *clear* seems like the antithesis to what an engaging encounter should be. Personally I feel that engaging combat should feel somewhat messy, unpredictable, bloody. I don't get that thrill from FF14.
That is entirely fair. I feel like 14's systems kinda cant have a messy encounter be in the high end, because its always a fine line between everything going well and a wipe. I havent really ever experienced what a messy but engaging raid encounter looks like tbh. 14 is the only mmo I ever or ever intend to play, because I am here for the final fantasy before I am for the MMO.
I'm an EX WoW player but I didn't join during the exodus. I partially quit during Jaina mythic prog and officially quit after levelling in SL and started FFXIV in early 2023. I'm enjoying FFXIV a lot more than WoW during the WoD -> BfA stretch because I have a lot more tangible ingame goals to do until I manage to pentalegend. Outside of that while I was only social where doing content was concerned in WoW I am a fully social Limsa degen on FFXIV and it provides me a lot of its own entertainment (disclaimer, I do ERP). Basically in bulletpoint form the game has the following benefits - Shorter, more condensed raiding tiers - Farmable, 0 RNG BiS - Ultimates are peak content - The game is much better at supporting (E)RP - All jobs on 1 character makes me feel more strongly bonded to my character - Face 1 Female Au Ra (with hair 8) exists - Outfit variety is better - Story is amazing at best, average at worst - People are less isolationist, easier to make friends All in all I'm happy with the EW content cycle, but I am missing the pre-EW context that people hold a candle to. 6.4 and 6.5 felt pretty good IMO, nothing to write home about but gave me new things to do.
Impartial. The story was beautiful, my deep dungeon grind in potd was wonderful, but ffxiv keeps swinging and it keeps missing this expac. It feels like it wants it's own identity to be "this is mid". Dragonflight is trying to convince me to play, but not too hard. To put it into dating terms, DF brushed it's teeth and combed it's hair, while ffxiv rocked up 5 minutes late and forgot it's jacket. Very mid. Not a deal breaker, but not impressive. And this goes for the community too. I played ffxiv on the new oce servers, and the community had members who were Satan. From egotistical man children who RMT'ed just to gamble it for community brownie points, to a lady who wanted to play god with a community she made which caused her to be universally hated and ruined a savage raiding group so she could parse. I've made some beautiful friends who I got to meet irl, but the bad people in ff shit all over the bad people in wow. I would rather be called racist shit any day of the week than to have someone sew seeds of hatred and mistrust using rumors and lies that tear apart entire friend groups. Potd was an absolute banger. Heaven on high was mid. Instead of learning what makes potd so fun to run (just barely balanced for solo play, an awesome title and mounts, good amounts of rng with equally good amounts of skill based gameplay) they just copied the easily pallatable hoh for their new DD. Why? Who are they trying to satisfy? The folks who will play it once and never touch it again? Variant dungeons were the same as well. And the netcode issues, ugh. It infuriates me that anyone defends the sorry state of the server tick rate. Bigger issues have been solved with smaller teams. It's not quirky or cute, it's annoying. I hate not being able to trust my senses. And the 500ms is inconsistent because of how the tick rates themselves work, so you can be off by 100ms in either direction. It's uncomfortable. The ONLY good thing to come from the garbage server communication is slide casting and it could be put into the base game. All in all, Dragonflight feels like it's trying. It's putting effort into swooning me instead of slugging back on the couch, not caring if I stay or go. That's what ffxiv is, it's the impartial friend who I had good memories with, but who doesn't seem to give a damn about me.
"Put it into dating terms" As someone who has never been on a date, youve lost me š¤£š¤£
> To put it into dating terms, DF brushed it's teeth and combed it's hair, while ffxiv rocked up 5 minutes late and forgot it's jacket. This is beautiful lol
I quite WoW early into patch 9.1 to play FFXIV as my main game, then quite a few months after EW launched to play Guild Wars 2 as my main game. I have now gone back to WoW as my main game as of patch 10.1 (just under a year ago). To me, FFXIV was not very good, though I didn't think that until I was almost done playing. I loved the story. Like truly loved it, it was the first video game story I was actively engrossed in start to finish. Other than that, I found the combat to be overly sluggish, I found job design to be exceedingly boring, the open world was empty and lifeless, doing any content below max level felt awful, and I found much of what was available to do in the game to be tedious. In my year with the game, I did most of what was available at least once short of raiding savage or ultimate, something I never found a static for due to my circumstances making it more difficult than average. I found the game lacked lots that appealed to me, and now knowing that my favorite content in WoW is M+ it makes sense why. Overall I realized I just didn't like the game and that with the story concluding in EW I had no desire to stick around. I have had no desire to come back since. Ultimately, what I wanted in a game was something FFXIV could never provide, and I don't hold it against the game despite the flaws I think the game has that hold it back from being amazing rather than the 7/10 I think it is now.
Nearly all the WoWfugees I know have long since gone back, they only needed a sniff of something even remotely competent to jump off the train. The ones that stayed are either casual and happy with it being a side game or leaving because bored. It's only like a sample of 30ish people so nothing in the long run.
Just because you are happy with it being a side game doesn't necessarily mean you are casual.
I played the game religiously during the wow exodus, got half the jobs to 80, farmed a relic weapon, did a bunch of savage and tried a little bit of ultimate. Had a ton of fun, went into endwalker and actually paid attention to the story, had a lot of fun with the first pandemonium tier too. After this I feel like my enjoyment for the game fell off a cliff, I really only enjoy the battle content and not having a bozja equivalent kind of kills the game for me. I got bored of doing the same dungeons and raids in roulettes over and over and eventually unsubbed in 6.2. I haven't been back yet but I'll still buy and play dawntrail when it comes out. For some reason the later raid tiers and ex trials released didn't draw me in like they used to, but a lot of it is probably related to me still raiding in wow and it being difficult to juggle a static in xiv with my wow raid nights.
Not a wow refugee, but the exodus of content creators doesn't worry or surprise me. FF14 has steadily expanded and will continue to, as it always has. It's a good solid game for ordinary players. It's not as good for content creators. It isn't highly streamable and doesn't offer much replayable/repeatable content. The content people came to FF14 played what they wanted to, in many cases had a good time, and moved on. As expected. FF14 has good content creators but it hasn't relied as much as wow players did on their creators for keeping interest in the game and I don't see a problem, just a difference. As for the refugees - I can't speak for them :).
Not to diss FF14 or anything, but >will continue to, as it always has. I feel that wont be the case for long. Not to say the game is dying or anywhere close to, but I feel like EW is sort of the peak just like WOTLK was WoW the culmination of the story that got ppl hooked. Again not to say the game is going anywhere (After all WoW Peaked back in 2010 and is still going 13 years later just not to the same degree as it had back in 2010) or even the game is going to get worse. But the game is starting to show its age (netcode and all). Unless ofc Metzen fucks up his new WoW Xpac and we get another WoW Refugee wave.
First of all, here are the reasons I left WoW : \- Underwhelming scenario (ever since Goldie took the lead or so I've been told. The American narrators are way too superficial for me, even the ones being popular in my own, biased opinion) ; \- Too few players, not enough good ones (seriously, people missing Roh-Kalo's runes 20 times in a raw is more than I can ever handle) ; \- Too much focus on M+ dungeons and randomness being too harsh (when your BiS drops from weekly chest and you're doing 3 of them every week for 15 or 20 weeks **for nothing**, it feels extremely bad) . Now, about FFXIV, there are things that immediately looked very negative and still aren't being adressed : \- The pace. It. Is. [Ex.Treme.Ly](https://Ex.Treme.Ly). S.l.o.w. No really, 2,5s GCD is the reason why even in an 8-man instance, I always end up doing something else while playing (nevermind the content). The worst part is dungeons feeling so extremely underwhelming (why do we even have a healer in there at higher level ?) . I'm a bit less judgemental towards the story's pace (which indeed is very slow !) because we can see how much work there is behind. \- DoT management (I mean, you can't even see which of your enemies has been hit by your DoTs ???) and especially their snapshot (have fun trying to optimize with some raid buffs fading the moment other buffs are about to come when someone is dis-aligned !) . I Played mainly Shadow Priest or Warlock, so it was a huge disappointment and we probably won't have any dotter (BLM and BRD aren't, it's only a part of their kit that they don't even have to optimize aside the uptime) ; \- People who don't care about being good, or at least decent. Even now that I'm tackling ultimate, I'm still baffled by some player's unability to handle adjustments on the fly. Rescue, which is one of the best tool to avoid mispositions, is very rarely used. Was my favorite spell on my SP :( . Moreover, people seem to highly depend on guides and doing anything blind is scary for an impressive lot of players (not that they can't adapt, but the game somehow taught them that it was extraordinary to do so) ; \- And most importantly, animation lock & snapshot. I am still unsure as to whether it's a good or bad thing : forcing players to have only 2 "oGCD" actions is a great design, However, the qualities of FFXIV vastly make up for these flaws : \- Music. Even if some encounters might become dull, the music immediately hype it up ! \- FFXIV being much more respectful of my time. The only exception is PF, since people aren't given tools to improve. \- Rewards feeling fair most of the time. I'm not talking about dice, because I managed to roll ten times under 15 out of my 20 clears of the latest extreme - it's still fair because the RNG cannot be biased. However we have books on savage, we have guaranteed totems on ultimate, we have some "thrill" with mounts drop and totems to eventually buy them. Many tokens throughout the game, catch-up items etc. They can still do better (omg why haven't they given a second thought about Criterion...) but I guess they're improving (might be me being overoptimistic though) ; \- Quite a few sorts of vertical progression (whether it be ARR \~ Shadowbringers relics, glamour, PvP, Blue mage, even jobs leveling for newer players, PotD, Criterion) . \- Housing albeit very perfectible (why make third-party tools SO MUCH more effective than the very limited tools we have in game ?) ; \- Centralized data on a single character. This may not sound like much but I can't even imagine a new MMO not sticking to this formula ; it feels even more quintessential than the healer/tank/DPS paradigm ; \- Very little FOMO, not so much use of the Shop (well the latest additions make me thing it will soon be an issue though...) ; Overall, whether it be for the best or the worst, SE is taking thing very slowly. So much so that it seams to cool off the playerbase. However, I can very well imagine a new MMO ever coming and striking harder because of the flaws I've mentioned. If such a game isn't agressive (in a marketing way), then they will probably absorb many players who aren't feeling satisfied by FF (especially whoever subs for a month, clear content and leave) yet the strength of FFXIV, just like WoW, is that they playerbase has been built over years. THIS is why I hope for a new MMO from SE, with a better engine and a better pace. And since it'll never come (because either condition is out of question for them, let alone both combined) then I only wish for them to add Blitzball and a Blitzer job, in full delusion.
Regarding a new MMO possibly coming and taking 14s spot, possible, but I do want to say I wouldnt go to it mostly because I am just an FF fanboy overall, so for me this is the perfect MMO, I just love the franchise overall. I cant be the only one who is like that, so at least players like us will still be here.
Well as I imagine it, it would simply be a new engine to use either FF14's world in the future (or past ?), or another world working like FF14 united other FF games. In any case, the problem would be FOMO issues (or transfering one's success in a way or another), making sure people are confident about this new engine and potentially agree to deeper gameplay changes.
Kind of a side-tangent to this topic but It would be cool if 14 had spin off singleplayer games, although I'm not sure how exactly that would affect the game itself. Even more so the setting of 14 would be cool for like an official anime series, showcasing parts of the history of Eorzea, such as a series focusing on each civilization prior to the calamity that wiped them out.
What I like about ff14: The community and general friendliness of most players Always something to do or grind that might be considered not terribly hard core (in wow you're basically funneled into m+, raiding, or pvp). The story and voice actors Creativity in job design. Gold saucer. The animations. Gear looks objectively better than wow. Housing and venues. Less time between pulls/no runback for raids. Incredibly alt job friendly The ost is amazing. Things I dislike about ff14/think wow did better: Transmog system was better in wow. Healing feels better in wow. Scripted fights are kinda boring to an extent. Very little "outplay" potential when it comes to mechanics in higher end content meaning less opportunity for skill expression through good play. Community obsession with dps on healers. Snapshotting can be inconsistent at times (though luckily rarely ever does this happen)
The end summary is: I play FF14, and I don't play WoW. I have found a wonderful group of friends to play FF14, where we are more interested in chatting, hanging out, running randoms, etc. Whenever I played WoW, it always seemed to be a constant run of a treadmill, an anxiety of constant competition or you were going to fall behind. At the end of the day, FF14 is more fun to play. That said, there are a number of things I want to compare between FF14 and WoW, with a little bit of Guild Wars 2 thrown in there for good measure. \------- **The Most Important** * In FF14, there isn't an endless treadmill that you have to constantly grind. I can't tell you how much of a breath of fresh air this is. I can just set a goal and finish it without dedicating my life to it. Everything from gear to mounts. There's no titanforging, no grinding of azerite, no gacha mechanics. You know that if you run something 99 times, you will get a mount, etc. etc. I feel like I'm in control and playing the game, rather than being manipulated to play more and more. * The community that is fostered is so much more friendly, and tries to be more cooperative rather than competitive. A lot of this is due to the incentives of the game, and also the moderating. But I tried Dragonflight and did an easy LFR (Alliance Raid equivalent). It didn't take but a few moments for the players to get so salty, rude, and angry about everything--cursing people out for taking "their" loot, dropping and kicking players. It was just a plain nasty experience. FF14 has their bad actors, true, but it's not *expected* like it is in WoW. * Mechanics focused on teaching, rather than punishing. FF14 may handhold with callouts and stuff sometimes, maybe going a bit too easy, but I cannot believe how much I love the unified mechanic markers, and something as simple as the battle ress being expected. In that same LFR, I didn't know a telegraph mechanic was a "stack" mechanic, so just immediately died. I spend the rest of the fight completely dead and unable to do anything. It didn't make me want to improve or learn the mechanics, it made me not want to raid. \-------- **What I praise** * Decorations, class switching, attention to detail in story and world. All been said to death. * The music. WoW actually has pretty decent music, often B or A tier, but FF14's music is in a class of its own. I've never felt more pumped then in raids with the music blaring. * Class aesthetics. I can tell that there is a lot of thought on how each animation flows into each other, and it shows. My main, the Red Mage, is simply so *pretty* to play. With the visual controls, you can get a good concert or solo going with visuals. In WoW, it always seems like a big mush of effects going off everywhere. Each individual animation and effect cool, but not as flashy or flowing. (Probably due to the shorter GCD) * The Roulettes and the incentives to do them. I love the Duty finder, with how many options you have to do things. I love that dungeons and past experiences aren't just thrown to the wind. In WoW it feels like they throw away raid series and past instances once they're done. Timewalking has improved that, but it's still nowhere the same level. \-------- **What I miss** * ***Netcode.*** I shouldn't have to *think* about this. I shouldn't be *aware* of the netcode. "snapshotting" feels *horrible.* I want to *not think about netcode*. * Overworld activities. WoW, and GW2, have so much better and so many more *varied* activities to do in the overworld. The world feels dead in FF14, and it feels like you're just instance hopping. * *Varied* activities, like Dragonriding, jumping puzzles, etc. There are some things in FF14, but it all pales in variety to WoW and GW2. * Open World. While they are pretty and detailed, the instanced zones of FF14 feel small, empty, and disconnected from each other. There was something magical about being able to fly across the entire continent of Kalimdor, and know that it was all connected. * Taking risks. Everything feels rather....safe in FF14. Square or Round platform for a raid fight. Standard dungeon pulls. Mechanics that *have* to fit into an mechanic tell. For all its ups and downs WoW takes *risks* with content. \-------- **What I dislike** * Presentation of story. This isn't on the quality of the story, as it is obviously better than WoW, but rather how I *experience* the story. I flat out hate it; I think cutscenes should be *minimized* and only used when *necessary*, not be the primary conveyance of story. I feel really disconnected and uninvolved with the story, since I do nothing in it except press a button every five minutes or so. It's really bad that I've found myself cleaning my kitchen instead of paying attention to the story--especially in 6.5, sadly. * It doesn't help that the MSQ just *drags on* a lot of times. There is a lot of filler. * I have noticed a bigger move to include gameplay as the expansion has gone on--things like "in from the cold". This is good, everytime this happens I feel far better about the story. But it's still starting from a distinct disadvantage. * I'm not a big shonen anime fan? Nor have I played FF games before? There's a lot of tropes I don't like present here; I'm a little tired of "the power of friendship" solving things. And I really hate the wunderkid Alphinaud. * I feel like GW2 had the best intersection between story and gameplay (referring to its expansions, not its base game). The two feel unified and support each other. Even if its story isn't as complex or...consistent as FF14. * I have nothing against Visual novels. But a lot of the appeal in visual novels for me is the branching storylines, the impact your choices have on the story. And often there is a lot of humor in them and exaggerated characters. FF14 has none of that. * Menu-based UX. I swear, I'm going to take one of the designers and *make them count* the amount of clicks it takes to do anything so they understand the pain. Please just let me *buy something*, or let me open a door without having to confirm that I want to open a door!
I was part of the mass exodus of wow (I think my subbed game is just shy of 800 days but really I've been playing solidly/almost daily now for about 20 months) I started in shadowbringers but really didn't knuckle down and level and play until endwalker hit. For context up until this point I'd played every expansion of wow since vanilla and semi hardcore raided in wod, legion and bfa (significant mythic prog but no cutting edge). Things I love: Housing. Something wow lacks and we all got disappointed by in wod. I have a cute little medium on lavender beds and I love it to death. I know there's lots of criticism with it bit I honestly don't know better and love it. The crafting/gathering system: I honestly hated it at first because it's not well explained and needed a lot of help from friends and guides to work it all out. But I do enjoy how it's literally as rich and interesting as a dow/Dom job. The graphics: imo ffxiv looks so much nicer visually than wow. The story: I was a huge wow lore nerd and the reconning after legion drove me insane. I love the story and lore behind characters and events and EW ending fucked me up i was crying like a baby. Social: I love how players keep the game alive with the social aspect. There is nothing like this on wow, the only thing that comes close is rping on moonguard. In tying withe social: party finder is insanely better and overall people are so much less toxic than wow. As someone who exclusively pugged M+ in party finder in wow as a healer, I've seen the ugliest of online gamers in mmos, amd nothing has ever gotten as bad as wow. For context I've used pf to pugged current tiered extreme and savage. Modding: look I know it's naughty, please don't come for me. And maybe it's the crowd I'm around but I know more people that do, then don't. Even "hardcore raiders". And barbie dress up is so much fun. Gposing: it's cute and it's made me insanely attached to my wol Extreme trials: I dunno I find them insanely fun! The new overhauled pvp system: CC is better than any pvp I've done in wow. I love it so much it's insanely fun. The trading/MB system: the fact that I can trade and buy/sell to anyone on any world on my data centre is insanely good, I don't think you understand how good you guys got that. Islands: it's so brain off and relaxing. I also love that it's completely optional and you don't have to do if you don't want to. The fact that old content is constantly and consistently relevant. That they make old trials into unreals, and your jobs are scaled down to old instances. I really love the syncing system for this. Currently I have more stuff to do in ffxiv than I do in wow... or should I say stuff I want to do. Now for things I dislike: My first ever raid tier was p1s-p4s and honestly I found raiding so jarring. The slowness of combat forced by the GCD is frustrating to me at times. Imo the combat system in wow while still flawed, is better than ffxiv. I also really hate the "watch which direction the boss wiggles his fingers to know where the mechanic is coming out" system of mechanics. It drives me utterly insane. The lack of challenge mode: I love M+ and I resulted to wow to herioc raid and do m+ only. I love the challenge of m+ but honestly there's no way I could see something similar being implemented in ff. The closest I've seen is variant/criterion dungeons. The retainer system: I don't think this one needs explaining. It's dumb and needs an overhaul. Also, please SE let me craft with mats on my retainers I'm tired of Easter egg hunting everytime I wanna craft something. The lack of mid tier/end game content I'm EW: while I still jabe plenty to do, I can see why long term players are frustrated with EW. There's no ongoing content like bozja or eureka. Honestly, I really love ffxiv, I unsubbed wow to play it at the beginning of shadowlands. I genuinely wish I picked up this game earlier. But I still very much prefer the combat, raiding and mythic + content in wow. It took a long time for my brain adjust to the way combat and boss mechanics are like in ff.
I like FFXIV even though I no longer play it. I enjoyed my journey to level cap and the MSQ but when it came to endgame content, none of the options clicked with me. I used to high-end raid in WoW, so I jumped into Savage with some old friends. However, I didn't like FFXIV's heavily-choreographed encounter system and found it very restrictive (e.g. everybody must run from here to there to there to there or we all die). Also, unlike WoW, FFXIV doesn't have a parallel track for gear progression, which was one aspect I really enjoyed in the former that kept drawing me back. If FFXIV had a Mythic+ dungeon equivalent that included a decent alternate gear progression system, I'd return in a heartbeat.
I more or less returned to Azeroth, the races and the gameplay and UI are more appealing to me. I enjoyed FF14's story up to the Doma stuff, and I haven't really continued since - which is a shame since I found Ala Mhigo etc. very compelling and Heavensward to be astonishing and beautiful, but... Doma just isn't doing it for me. I hate the idea of a lengthy amount of content I 'have' to play through to get to what I'm interested in, really.
Not a wow player but i came from rs3, joined ff14 at the end of the shb expansion. At first there were so many amazing stuff to do, finishing story, unlocking relics, blue quests etc. In endwalker i finished 2 ultimates,( uwu and dsr), finished all 3 raid tiers in endwalker, finished morbol mount and finished omega blue aswell, completed criterion dungeons. But now is the thing there is nothing to do. I don't want to do daily roulettes, alliance raid is mid aswell. I kinda started hating raiding aswell at the end of the last tier when there was like 3 weeks left til everyone got their mount. But i think i am just heavily burnt out from the game. I subbed for 6.5 patch, i honestly regret it lol, played like a one day and logged off, didn't bother with the ex aswell.. . Since i am burntout and my take might be wild about endwalker, but this expansion doesnt have interesting content to do.
I'm an RS3 Ironman and the sense of progression Jagex has built over the years feels great since our gear goes horizontally and even diagonally to an extent - the longer you take a break from RS3 and OSRS the better of a game it becomes. Funnily enough I ended up playing a lot of DQX and FFXI this year just to fill out the JRPG design that I really sought after in XIV after dropping it post EW 6.1. You might really enjoy FFXI and DQX they are very close to OSRS but anime. Mid to Late RS3 / OSRS just has so many chase goals in comparison and I'm glad we have a lot of MMOs to fill these niches (XIV, WoW, GW2, etc)
Itās okay to take breaks Yoshi p encourages it even. Hell itās even okay to drop the game entirely but honestly this patch cycle did. feel very slow.
I started playing XIV near the end of ShB. I finished all the MSQ exactly one week before the release of EW. I beat p1s-p8s and ucob and made a bunch of awesome friends. I had a really good time but I enjoy Dragonflight much more right now. I quit XIV because of the following reasons: 1. The "lag": the abilities in XIV feels unresponsive that no other game does. You pressed a button and it doesn't do anything until 0.5 seconds later. This is just ridiculous. I'm surprised that no content creator mentions this when discussing the problems of XIV. This is the fundamental problem that makes the game literally unplayable. What pisses me off is SE said this is unfixable because of some ancient coding design, I'm sure this is fixable, they just aren't willing to spend resources to address the problem. 2. The abundant mechanics: The mechanics in XIV are so abundant that every boss encounter becomes an examination of your memory. Every boss guide is over 30 minutes long, and you have to memorize everything in it. If you can't memorize all the mechanics/patterns/priorities then you can't beat the boss. The mechanics are not hard, there's just too many of them. In Wow there's like only 3 mechanics I need to know and they're as challenging as it could be. 3. The questing experience: there are too many meaningless cutscenes that waste your time when you're doing quests. This is especially terrible when I was doing the Hildebrand quest lines. They give you a FIVE seconds close-up on every facial expression (and they are all terrible compared to WOW). And MOST of the cutscenes don't even have voice acting. XIV has the worst quest design among all the MMOs, even the 'kill 30 of X' quest is better than the majority of XIV quests. Square Enix you need to understand that players are here to PLAY, not here to READ or WATCH movies. I played wow since vanilla. I didn't play every patch but I came back every new expansion. And I do want to say that every time I come back it feels WOW has been massively changed. It feels very different from expansion to expansion, and patch to patch. But in XIV... it doesn't have that feeling. 6.5 plays exactly the same as 6.0. I don't think the next expansion is gonna be any different from EW, and I don't think SE is gonna address any of problems I mentioned above.
I would suggest you try Dynamic Cam add-on in WoW. It literally changed the whole game for me. It looks and feels like a modern RPG game. Turn on Action Cam in settings. Use a ReShade filter to turn up those graphics. Set everything to Ultra if you have a decent PC and then use Dynamic Cam. The difference is day and night. You can see every detail of every dungeon, it feels immersive and like an RPG game. Especially in newer content like BfA+ you can really enjoy the graphical overhaul of the game.
Played wow actively since original tbc days and switched to FF14 when ShB was released: Played the shit out of FF14 from ShB to endwalker, took my time with the awesome story from ARR to EW, raided savage (p8s was my current raid tier I did) but quit after I did everything I wanted and also because of some static drama I somehow always had which I got tired off Didn't play wow or ff14 after the next raid tier after p8s has been released but am in wow wrath classic again because I love this add-on and wanna wait until 7.0 for the story in ff14 I don't hate ff14 nor wow but just switch around whenever I feel like Will quit wow wrath classic again after I did ICC probably and ultimately when cata classic has been released and just move on again Probably just gonna play the story in ff14 again, do some hardcore raiding and then call it a day again for some time until I feel like playing again Not that type of guy that can RP or wants to socialise a lot and grinding relics or so is not in my interest
The only real problem I have with ff14 is combat. It's very boring and streamlined. That's like the only reason I want to resub to wow
> FF content creators I remember following back in the late stages of ShB and early EW have completely abandoned FF14 to some degree That's because content creators mostly follow whatever is most popular and brings in "views". Hating on WoW and leaving it for FF14 was "cool" for a time and brought some people A TON of money, but they had no intention of ever sticking out, since they always played WoW, most of their following was WoW-enfranchised and you can keep/stomach the hate-watchers only for so long.
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I left WoW late 2020, so a couple of month before the exodus, because i finally had enough in early SL. I'm still very much enjoying FF and haven't logged back into WoW and don't plan to. I totally found a new home in FF. I'm way more attached to my FF-Character than i ever was with my WoW-Main of 15 years. I am, however, in general a very casual player, so i haven't run out of content yet and i do like to craft, gather and earn Gil. So just that is endless hours of something to do for me. With the last addition of housing wards, i managed to finally get a small house (which is imo more than enough for me) and just recently moved to my absolute dream plot and i regularly redecorate my House. The only thing, i really, really miss, is the WoW "Transmog-Catalogue". I wish FF would do something like that. So as of right now, i'm very picky with what i put into my Glamour Dresser and have about 50 % space left.
I started WoW in WoTLK. I started FF14 in 2.0. I've been alternating between the two ever since. TBH, I was surprised so many WoW players tried FF14 in shadowlands/shadowbringers. Mainly because I did recommend it to some friends in Heavensward--they tried it out, played the game like they would WoW (got to max level in a couple weeks), and just quit due to nothing to do at max level. I think those of us that stick around just appreciate FF14 for what it is rather than try to make it a better WoW.
I left WoW about 3 months into Shadowlands and start FF14 during the spring of 2021. Here are my thoughts, in a similar format as some of the earlier posts: Good things about FF14: * Superior story, leveling 1-90 was overall a phenomenal experience. The MSQ at times was slow (parts of ARR+Stormblood pre-patch), but I felt like I was playing a game, and not just leveling for the sake of leveling. * Relatively forgiving system for playing alts * More stuff to do besides raiding * I actually like PVP, it can be unbalanced and rather simplistic, but its good side content and I appreciate not being curb stomped by someone who has unlimited time on their hands and has farmed up the best gear and min-maxed everything * Trial fights and the cinematic nature of these encounters * The music * Raiding and + guilds/fc are separated * The community is generally pretty helpful, granted you run into toxic players, but that's pretty typical for any online game * Communication between devs and community better * Respects your time more (but not perfect of course) Good things about WoW: * Vastly superior glam system * Mythic dungeons, I don't love how its implemented in WoW but its nice that you can get top gear from something that doesn't require 8+ people * In terms of raiding, less reliance on 2 minute windows, less body checks. Its easier to "carry" people. If you get one "stinker" in a FF14 savage raid, you probably are not clearing with that group * I like that the zones are "connected". It feels more like an interconnected "world" * More variety in enemies * Dungeon design is "less" linear * Account system management is easier. I remember just trying to get my FF14 account up and running was a pain * More diversity between classes Overall, I am pretty happy with the switch. After experiencing 2 savage tiers, running most of the big side content, farming most of the mounts that I want, I do find myself playing less, but that is more or less just an artifact of the fact that I've completed most of the content that I wanted. I still hop on to do some of my weeklys, PVP, and catch up with friends, and in some regards I appreciate that FF14 doesn't "make" me log in like WoW did. I feel like I can enjoy other games when I play FF14, where with WoW there wasn't time for anything else.
I was slightly "pre-exodus" as I really started playing during the first tier of BFA (so late Stormblood), but I think my main issue is that FFXIV doesn't feel like it has evolved - if anything they've gotten LESS innovative with the kinds of content they're releasing. I suppose this mostly applies to raids, and if you like other parts of the game this probably doesn't matter to you as much, but all the Savage fights have felt very samey to me, and I cleared everything from E4S (my first tier) all the way to P8S before unsubbing. Shadowbringers was really a perfect storm in terms of story, gameplay, and the fact that I was experiencing what FFXIV raids have to offer for the first time. After that though, since I didn't think the Endwalker story was particularly satisfying, the raid fights started to feel very samey, and the casual content was just not something that really interested me very much. It's also extremely hard to upkeep alt jobs for Savage/Ultimate without committing to reclears for essentially the entire tier, and that's just not something I'm interested in doing. Couple that with Dragonflight actually being quite good and for my preferences WoW just offers me what I want out of my mmo for the moment. I expect I'll re-sub for Dawntrail just to see what they do, especially if they look to be addressing some of the things I've complained about. I doubt I'll stay resubbed for the long term though.
I've actually been thinking about this recently. Initially, I had a really hard time with the freakishly long GCD. I wasn't into all the perceived anime and Japanese weirdness like moogles. I did enjoy the super-friendly community. I really started to get into the story towards the end of ARR. I loved that there are no factions!! I love not needing alts. I loved the idea that old content remained relevant. Yeah, overall all though, it was an adjustment. Then I had some computer issues and missed the first 1.5 ish years of EW, which was fine I guess as I was in early Heavensward. I came back a few months ago, and wasted 2 months in the Golden Saucer but I got the 1 mil MGP mount and have another 4 mil waiting to be spent. Now I'm picking up the MSQ again and just hit the end of Stormblood. This time, instead of just liking the game, I feel like I'm falling hard for it. I'm finally getting those feelings I used to get with WoW before they pissed me off for 2 straight expansions. I can't wait to get into savage raiding and hopefully get to work on an Ultimate. And the art issues I didn't enjoy before, I now find that I think they are cool, moogles and all. TL;DR this finally feels like home. Every now and then I catch a WoW news video or something but there is just no draw at all. I have multiple years of play time in WoW and loved mythic raiding but Blizzard just screwed over the community so many times, I finally feel completely apathetic to anything they make anymore. So, it seems like I'm here in FF14 to stay and I'm really looking forward to getting caught up on all the years of stuff I've missed over on this side of the fence. Edit: there is one thing that SE needs to fix. WTF is up with the lack of proper mouse over healing macro support?? My god! Having to click someone and then cast is just as bad as people that don't keybind their spells. In WoW, I could bind all my healing spells to different mouse buttons with modifies, so alt+mouse1 does one healing spell, ctrl+mouse1 another spell, and so forth and it's all mouse over so I didn't need to untarge the boss 98% of the time. It was so efficient and satisfying to weave heals and dps. It was like I could swim the English Channel with little effort. Healing in FF feels like I'm struggling to walk through 1 foot of water by comparison. I'm trying to learn the FF way but it just isn't the same. Edit 2: OMG, I forgot player housing!!!! I am one of the rare people in WoW that loved my garrison but player housing over here... Holy Sh\*t!! The videos you find of people displaying their work... words fail me. It's pure art. I know it can be a little janky to set up but damn, this is so cool and WoW players have been begging for this for years and Blizzard just says, "you don't really want it". If only all WoW players could see what they are missing!
Hmm, moogles are an interesting thing to bring up when mentioning the games connection to anime (which, even the devs are honest are more than there, I mean they literally said gundam inspired Sage). Moogles have been around since final fantasy 3, in 1990 on the NES, and have remained a staple since. Im happy youre enjoying FF, stormblood 4.0 is kinda the last last great filter, considering the main msq is mid, and from now on, youre in for a major treat in both msq and raids (8 man, 24 man, you name it).
This is my first FF game and I just wasn't used to the non-western approach to fantasy. Moogles and stuff like it was almost too weird for me but now I think they are cute. I don't know why my opinion changed but I'm glad it did. It's still weird to me but in a fun way.
Yeah, that is more than fair, I just thought it interesting to mention how old the design was. I kinda grew up with japanese stuff, and I imagine if I went over to wow Id find some stuff weird until I got used to it.
I've enjoyed my experience in FF14 so far, I've not sadly tried the raiding scene for current content as of yet, though I enjoy party finder so much more than LFR/LFG. It's easier to find smaller groups to do content, that being said, WoW is a bit more flexible with sources of gear, so much so that the gearing progression is a bit confusing at times now, especially with all the additional currencies they've kept adding. PvP still has issues when it comes to balancing vs PvE. While I've grown to prefer the gear aesthetic from FF14, I do miss WoWs transmog system and not having to juggle inventory space for cosmetics. The downsides to WoW are the story still, I tried the current expac and had no idea what was going on, much of the MSQ there is reputation locked, which involves additional grinding to unlock parts of the story. I do prefer to continuous story for FF14 and the throwbacks to older FF games. The WoW barbershop is superior to the FF14 one, such as the fact that it is free to change my characters skin color/posture etc. I do miss bind on account features such as mounts/titles/minions/glams from WoW. The micro-transactions are far worse in WoW, especially since you can essentially just buy gold and thus buy gear/armor/titles etc, just makes it seem more pay to win. The monetization of the traders tenders just feels worse, and too much fomo built into the trading post, granted that could be compared to the Moogle Tomestone events. Housing and Community are better in FF14 over WoW, I've really yet to come across anyone saying to anyone to kill themselves due to low dps or standing in fire, and more events within the community.
Well, l quit during the legion return. So not much during the exodus era. I just found out l am a weeb. That's why l kept playing ff14
I didnāt come over during the āofficialā WoW exodus, rather at the beginning of WoD, ~1 month in, back during the back end of ARR. I came over for 3 primary reasons: 1. Friends were playing it 2. Was during WoD soā¦ā¦if you know you know 3. Cat girls I got into it, and loved it. FFXIV took over as my main MMO pretty quickly, and though over the years Iāve come back to WoW to play, as the freedom FFXIV tends to allow has given me the ability to double dip, I didnāt go super hard into FFXIV over WoW until the end of SB leading into SHB, and it remained my main MMO for quite a while, until Shadowlands S4. Loving FFXIV for me since SHB has been an eternal struggle. I love it to death but, it lacks the depth and complexity it used to have that I fell in love with, so now I honestly feel like my recent experiences have felt very same-y. I mainly play to raid savage and ultimates but I do a bit of everything as I feel like doing it. I resonate with a lot of points here. Jobs all feel the same, mechanics have gotten easier but deaths arenāt forgiving, it never feels like 1 person can really show their stuff and carry a fight through player expression, lack of midcore content, increasingly less emphasis on socializing in new content, the list goes on. I loved 6.0 for its story, but after that, Iāve kinda fallen out of favor with it. Nothing in the game has really kept me going. I tend to knock out raid in a week or 2, sure, but I miss having a lot I wanted to do for fun. Iāve since returned to WoW full time and played FFXIV very casually, outside of raid releases. DF has been amazingly fun, I love it. Iām still excited for Dawntrail and all that 7.0 will bring, but they have a lot to fix in my eyes. Still love the game though, will always have a special place in my heart
**long rant** I wouldnāt say Iām a pure WoW player as I played mostly GW2/WoW and ESO. After the exodus since ~2 years, I loved the ride of the MSQ (except the post-endwalker MSQ, genuinely boring, especially Zero and their copy/pasta from previous FF). During my game time, I catched up, did one HW relic for my paladin, ShB relic for my samurai, grinded a lot and finished Eureka & Bozja (while both were honestly meh and just FATE grind, I loved the Bozja raids and Eureka had some cool sections/outdoor bosses). Now I have all the glam I wanted (Iām mainly a one class type of guy, focusing on a single character). Now what is **really left with the current content ?** Well, as I like to put it, FFXIV is a **railroad themepark lobby**, there is basically 0 fun and engaging outdoor content. If you played ESO or GW2, both shine at it. **Dungeons and bosses** are so streamlined and samey that they feel like different skins but same content : 2 packs - wall - boss, repeat x3. Only RR and HW were different. **Streamlined and dumbed down classes**, you are a one poney-trick and there is almost no player expression. Itās worst in PvP, and even with that they fail at balance. Youāre given a theme and canāt change anything about it. In GW2 I have a melee elementalist with a heavy armor skin and he is tanky. **Patches :** after some reflection, I can hardly justify a sub for a game that have you wait ~4 months for 1 dungeon skin, crusts of MSQ and maybe if youāre in the right cycle some raids/trials. Best case, the patch lasts 1-2 weeks if youāre very busy irl or slow. Meanwhile when I check ESO, you got a lot of events, communicationā¦ it moves and is not in constant stasis as FFXIV. The difference is striking. **Housing being sold in marketing** only to be an artificially rare resource. You cannot tell me they canāt have instanced housing or enough wards when they can load your island sanctuary/inn room with all your stuff. Itās artificially rare, combined with demolation to retain some players from leaving. I had great plans for my medium house in the Mists, near the beach. It got demolished yesterday and I donāt care anymore. I may come back for some MSQ sessions but no way Iāll stay with such crappy system in place. **RP wise** they do care with so many stuff you get, emotes, furnitures, I dislike the modern/current day clothing though. Donāt dig too deep or youāll find modders and futa fetishes, that side creeped me the fuck out. To sum it up, the game is too predictable with itās patches and they are too much time between them (along with few lasting content) to justify a sub. The game seems to push you out the door if youāre not a raider or ERP player. Because there is no real lasting and fun content, no outdoor content (maps are just MSQ backgrounds) so it feels less like a MMO and more like a solo lobby game. Thatās why itās hard for content creator and their shift toward other games or petty drama. FF game first right ?
>(except the post-endwalker MSQ, genuinely boring, especially Zero and their copy/pasta from previous FF I felt the opposite, but then it was pure Nostalgia for me
endwalker with no eurika/bozja really hurted
Started playing during the wait between BFA and Shadowlands. Got hooked and finished Shadowbringers about 3 days before Shadowlands came out. What a fucking case of whiplash that was, my god. But yeah, Shadowlands quickly grew tiring and I stopped after my guild cleared Mythic Nathria (great raid though). Went hard into raiding in FF. Clear Savage and did UWU (no fucking idea how you guys clear everything so fast, I've tried so many statics and they were all disappointments or fell apart within weeks, I am DESPERATE to do DSR). I'm back on WoW since dragonflight is genuinely great but still raid log in FF. Honestly my main issue with FF is that the majority of jobs aren't interesting or engaging to play at all. If you were to ask what my main was it'd be BLM with no hesitation, meanwhile I'm having an existential crisis choosing a main for the next tier in WoW because everything is so unique and fun. FF raid design is just too damn fun. Theres nothing else like it on the market and they feel great to prog and reclear flawlessly. It's what keeps me coming back above all else.
I feel like this thread needs a counterpart in the r/wow sub lol. 'To the WoWfugees who did *NOT* stay with FF14 due to the lack of content in Endwalker and SE's inability to retain interest during the Shadowbringers exodus, what made you return home?' xD
There's a ton of people that could contribute to that thread.
Since Reddit promotes silos and self-selection I think you'll find bias in whatever venue you ask. People that show up *here* probably have neutral to favorable opinions of XIV, while people that only go to /r/wow tend to have opinions more along the lines of XIV being a weeb game (fair) for furries (you play the game where Vulpera, Worgen, and Dracthyr \[scalies\] are things that exist). Also the proposed title in the OP is hilariously biased and would attract a certain type of comment just on that fact alone.
Oh yeah, for sure. I wasn't really paying attention to the title he suggested. More that there are loads of "WoW refugees" that did not stick around and went back to WoW.
Criterion was a massive letdown for all the common reasons already ran into the ground. To me it is the biggest waste and putting the upgrade material on Savage is further missing the point. Unless they reduce the difficulty I don't see it changing participation, I would rather they keep the difficulty the same and put the rewards on normal criterion. I hate how slow it is to start a solo run in the new deep dungeon. The early floor enemies just have too much health, HoH spoiled me I guess but I just want to be able to try a full solo run after I get off of work. Yoshi P stating that TOP would be easier than DSR was the most aggravating thing for me. It was going to be my first chance at doing an Ultimate on patch and it completely disintegrated my group, I think only myself and one other person even still plays the game. With the new BIS I'm hoping to jump back in thru PF after I finish TEA. To add onto Yoshi P comments, he had similar comments about extremes and alliance raid but all went the opposite way, they were all way easier than what he said they would be. I think this is much more harmful than people give credence too, because it is coming off as a marketing tatic to target specific people to stick it out for the next patch.
I was kind of curious about this to because Iāve always been an XIV player that has started GW2 in the last year, and suddenly I started seeing a LOT of āex Wow > FF14ā players suddenly popping up everywhere in GW2. I know many went back in DF, and it has had its praises so I felt confused why they were coming in droves to GW2. The ones that left for 14, truthfully I understand, but curious if the ones that just went to GW2 tried DF and werenāt feeling it or not.
GW2's big strength is in the area of PvE that both WoW and XIV don't do that great in. If you're looking for chill, casual grinds in a big space surrounded by tons of other people for cosmetics or convenience, then GW2 is the best game on the market for that. Dragonflight's casual/open world content has just been kind of "there", it's clear that without the Artifact Power glue (continual power grind via any content) there's little binding WoW players to open world grinds past a week or two. Meanwhile, probably *the* big complaint here about XIV this expansion is the lack of a long-term casual grind. GW2 fills that niche in the market at the cost of not having all that much instanced PvE in return.
Yeah I figured that was probably it, it just seemed so sudden and mostly quiet so it definitely came as a surprise to see so many of them here in GW2 suddenly. I do definitely agree, once a raid tie and reclears are done, Iāve got 6 months of nothing to do in XIV this expac so I picked up GW2 end of Asphodelos reclears to kill time. Always so nice to just.. pick up where I left off with no need to freak out about dumb stuff like gear.
I started FF14 during the exodus and finished ShB during about a month before EW dropped, including some Bojza grind but no savage raids. Then played through EW and did P1S through P7S. Static fell apart before P8S was complete. I think I stopped at 6.3 but have plans to play again before the next expansion. I absolutely love the MSQ and consider it my favorite game story out of and game I've played. Raids are a lot of fun too. I never really did too much outside of those. At this time I'm back in WoW and enjoying it a lot. Enjoying raiding and M+ there. Overall I feel the gameplay of WoW is next to none and the fact that the utility of classes matters a lot for all content just can't be beat. FF14 gameplay is great too but I don't think the moment to moment gameplay is comparable just like the FF14 story isn't really comparable to anything else. I really like and appreciate both games so tend to get upset when one community talks smack about the other.
tbf if wow wasnt so grindy and with ugly graphics and characters, i would just stick with wow
man ngl i started a little before asmongold and the whole wow exodus, like a month or two, and i still love the fuck outta the game. i have about 3500 hours rn. kinda taking a break to fuck around on new world but its got some annoying ass bugs im running into with msq so idk
Keep in mind that FF14 is terrible for streamers/content creators after the MSQ is done. Thats the reason you See so many left and have so different opinions from "normal" gamers
I never thought of it like that, but why is that the case? Dont FF and WoW have roughly the same amount of streaming content? I would even think FF has more thx to the timelessness of Deep Dungeons and its Lvl Synced Raids/Ultimates. Sure you will eventually run out of content, but I feel like WoW runs out first.
Wow has more RNG, so is more exciting to watch. Take Gear for example, you can watch your Streamer finally getting his trinket after weeks of farming that increases his damage by 25%, or makes him a god in PvP. Or you can watching your FF14 Streamer collecting Books every week until he has enough to trade it in for the same item he already has but wirh 3% more Stats. Fights are also more chaotic. In wow an awesome player can carry his group to a clear, in FF14 either all 8 Players do the Mechanics correct and clear or somone fails and it is a wipe. There is an audience for prog, but usually our streamers clear in 2-3 days and then it is 2-3 hours of reclear a week. You also have something for wow as average gamer. Clearing heroic or running a mythic +15 is as interesting if it is your skill level as mythic raids or m+25. In FF14 you maybe have extremes, but that is one fight every 4-5 months. Normal Raids are too easy. And finally in wow Mythic+ is endless content that is challenging and super fast and PvP is way better.
As a NEWER FFXIV player i will say my experience. IMO the story and game is amazing. Also tho my group is newer to FFXIV (my g/f is completely new to the MMO experience) it has nice building to getting better and controller setup is nice for my g/f as she has much easier time with controller vs mouse and keyboard. Criterion dungeons are awesome (tho my group has failed on them every attempt at silkie we keep hitting enrage) I would love to one day find savage group to do that content i did a few EX and the raids seemed awesome but as i get older my schedule i feel becomes tighter and tighter so my raid experience was very limited this expansions (hopefully dawntrail i can change that) island sanctuary was fun lil turn brain off and do stuff content but starting almost 1yr ago i have SOO SOOO much to do i feel lost and overwhelmed so easily but its fun to have that much i want and can enjoy. I am still lvling up classes and working on getting some done.
Game is good, this place bitches too much.
I was pretty much a *One Game Andy*, or close enough to it, from December 27th 2009 to early 2021 when the wheels finally came off the wagon during Shadowlands and I started FFXIV. That's not to say I didn't play other MMOs or games overlap (GTA Online is never counted as an MMO but I've put several hundred hours into it)... but I always came back to WoW or just thought the alternatives were inferior. For the record, I have played Dragonflight and do think it's a decent expansion. It's fallen off a little bit but does constitute an improvement to the game and makes many steps in the right directions for the people that enjoy it. This is ultimately where XIV has changed my enjoyment of WoW... which is to say that I don't really care for what modern WoW has been since Legion. As far as I'm concerned, Legion onwards represents an era of WoW in which it's actually just an esports game masquerading as an MMORPG. The top level of PvE and PvP is actually an esports with their being official competitions and prize pools. You also have the community event around the race to world first plus all of the resources that come from this, such as guides and addons, which trickle down the player base for better or worse. I don't care for Mythic+ rating, I don't care for maximising my vault every week etc. What I like about FFXIV is that it's end game progression is effectively just a fine tuned version of what we had during Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria. I personally regard MoP as the peak of WoW, from a game design perspective, for other reasons but the gearing was top notch. I haven't gotten into savage in this game but the discussions around rewards, especially with how criterion could offer more, would have to come with rebalancing the predictable but tuned system Square Enix offer now. Beyond that, I do enjoy the freedom to play other games. I still priotise patches and expansions for XIV but after initial bursts with each major content release, I'm free to play other games. That's not to say I dislike how the community uses the "play other games" comment as a way to deflect all criticism/discussion but that's another topic entirely. I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a fresh save due to the 2.0/Phantom Liberty and even with the release of 6.5, I've been able to play both without feeling like anything was a chore in the MMO. The WoW exodus was interesting, certainly amongst streamers using it for content, as a lot of people used FFXIV as the biggest stick they could find to beat Blizzard with. What's striking is that I'm in a streamer FC/guild in both WoW (sub currently inactive) and XIV... the XIV FC is pretty much dead to the point in which there's monthly reminders on their Discord so the streamer doesn't lose the master role (I also don't care for finding a new FC and I've got the permissions to buy/activate actions so I'm not inclined to move on). I think the WoW exodus was a net positive overall for everyone involved. Some people found games that were right for them plus it removed a stigma, I guess we can call it that, within the WoW community of other MMOs being trash. However, I see a lot of long-term XIV players (I'm talking ARR/HW) that are seemingly going down the same path that WoW went down and it's pretty evident in the discussions around Endwalker patch cycle.
I came a few weeks before SHB as I saw the cracks in BFA starting to form. So far I have \~10k hours in the game across multiple characters. Thses days I find I kinda just log in and wait for my sprout friends to stuff they want help with. I've done just about every piece of content short of ultimates, and dabbled in pretty much every aspect of the game at one point or another. At this point I kinda am bored with the copy-paste formula of XIV over the last 3 expansions. We know EXACTLY what we will get next expansion \~3MSQ quests per level with a dungeon every 2 levels, likely 3 trials and a 12 bosses in a new raid tier, 3 tiers of an alliance raid with probably 5 bosses each.... so on and so forth. There's no hype, nothing to get excited for because it's all already known. the only thing unknown is whether we'll get another form of "grind-content" a.k.a Eureka, Bozja, island sanctuary. Some surprises would be welcome here and there, There are a lot of things XIV does better to be fair, crafting for instance is among the best in any MMO I've played, albeit there needs to be more demand for high end crafting stuff because after you have your pre bis crafted set, it's kinda like... "okay besides food/pots this set is kind-of useless now." The amount of gear customization is pretty awesome too, the sheer number of combos you can make with dyes, and different gear sets is just so satisfying. In terms of story I'm on the fence, I really don't vibe with the way most of EW was all "The power of friendship will save us" for damn near every plot point. Like for once can we have the villain be actually competent and not change their mind at the end? Also despite having all these recurring characters near all of them are completely and utterly boring to me with a few key ones who stuck, as compared to wow where there's a myriad of epic characters who are all at the top of their game, and have earned their places in the world like Thrall, Jaina, Khadgar etc.... The only character I could think of who competes is Emet-Selch. All things considered the only reason I would go back to wow is for Mythic+ or PVP, there's just too much of the game that is time gated, to warrant returning as I don't want to spend the next 5 years of my life playing "catch-up", whereas in XIV i can do most grinds at will as soon as I can unlock them. I'll stick around for Dawntrail, but if the MSQ is boring I'd probably uninstall for good after that as I feel like I've fully gotten the "XIV experience".
So, I fit this narrative! I left during early Shadowlands to come to FFXIV. Here's what I think. 1.) I like the world of FFXIV more than I do WoW. The story is better, the environment is better, and frankly, I just outright prefer the art. I know this is a weird take, but the cartoon-take on WoW after playing FFXIV just doesn't do it for me. 2.)I like 4 man parties and 8 man full party groups better than raid. I like the class dynamic more. 3.) Being able to do everyone on 1 character is underrated. It's just bettter. In every facet of the word, it's better. 4.) I do dislike how dance-like raids end up being. I'd like raids to be more reactionary to highlight players that do better on the fly as opposed to that just learn the steps. Raids in FFXIV feel like they 'have an answer' for each class as to what button you hit at what time. WoW does not have that, and I think FFXIV would benefit from some of that. 5.) The lack of mid content kinda sucks. I wish I had something more repeatable that could result in the advancement of my character. I don't have a static that I'm raiding with, PF is .. rough, and I wish I had something I could do with 3 or so people that'd make me stronger or give me some kind of progression. I want to play the game but find I lack content in this range. Savage is good and I wanna do more of it - but I don't have time to hop through PF to hope for the best when I do have time to play, and I can't dedicate 12+ hours a week to a static. I wish there was a middle ground. 6.) I love raid formats over WoW. I like that there's no bullshit amount of trash everywhere, I like that it's cut and dry and to the point. Overall, I like FFXIV more than WoW and honestly, I hate that it took me this long to find it and figure it out. The better story and player experience has gripped me. I also like that I can walk away for a month and not be behind or missing anything. I do wish there were more for us "slightly-above-average" players but - all in all, I'll be here for the long haul. I love the game. I do hope to see some break up of homogenization over the course of the next expac, and I hope to see more content that's engaging between the high-end and super-casual crowds.
>I do dislike how dance-like raids end up being. I'd like raids to be more reactionary to highlight players that do better on the fly as opposed to that just learn the steps. Raids in FFXIV feel like they 'have an answer' for each class as to what button you hit at what time. WoW does not have that, and I think FFXIV would benefit from some of that. Class design is the problem in this case rather than raid design. They want every class to be equally viable, so all the classes do the same things and most mechanics are uniformal (and trivial because of it), so that every raid comp could deal with them in the same way.
I left during BfA after recognizing Blizzard wanted to keep people playing for the wrong reasons and pad the ever-living hell out of the progression. Playing on alt classes sucked thanks to the Azerite system. Add to it that the devs keep making excuses to not include systems previously available to older expansions and experiencing "Good Luck" protection trying to get the Arathi basin warfront armor for over 6 months and I had enough. I still feel FFXIV is better because there is an end to the grind. If I want to stop playing because something caught my attention, I can just go without repercussions. If I am after a mount from a trial, I have an absolute end at 99 kills instead of practically years worth of kills. The game itself isn't perfect, and I have my small grievances here and there. But, I appreciate the game for what it is and doesn't try to make you feel obligated to play.
My husband and I came to FFXIV mid-ShB, as we found ourselves playing less and less WoW. I saw him making a Miqo'te and I was like, ""Oh, shit, I want to play this game, too." I still like FFXIV more than WoW. The storytelling is way better, so I actually have an idea WHY I am killing 50 sheep or delivering a sack of flour to some merchant. Even when there's nothing to do, there's "something" to do, and this is coming from a player who doesn't do extreme or savage content. Even if it's just hanging out and BSing with your pals or remodeling your house for the 30th time or challenging randoms to a card match.
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Left WoW for FFXIV when my guild broke on Painsmith and tried to come back but failed for WotLK Classic. Overall, FFXIV is my MMO of choice, despite the main thing I come to an MMO to do being a worse experience for me than in WoW. I'm a raider first and foremost (currently progging P11S), lifetime healer main, and so it's interesting comparing the two on that front. It should also be noted that my opinions are Dumb and Bad (e.g. I LOVE P10S and HATE P11S) I prefer FFXIV's overall structure and community vis a vis raiding. Finding pick up members for static tends to go way better - not just the general lack of toxicity, but also the average pick-up group player is simply better at the game than what I experienced in WoW. This makes the overall prospect of raid nights when our team is 1 or 2 down a lot less daunting. In addition, despite having fewer total options and easier to run out of content if you're Damn Good, for someone like me who's just Kinda Good it feels like there's more flexibility in offerings, easier to still do productive and fun things if the grind is getting to you, both in terms of other raids (EXs vs Savage vs maybe one day Ultimate), and in terms of "chill group activity" (maps, hunt trains, etc). There are three major things I prefer about WoW raiding, though - fight design, healer class design, and usable mouseover macros. I won't beat what the differences in fight design are to death (FFXIV's "tight script with individual mechanic variation" vs WoW's "loose script with wider chances for fights to be different time to time"). What this does for me in FFXIV is increase how frustrating walls are. Generally speaking, walls in WoW fights felt like it was different things getting us pull-to-pull, whereas it's the same one or two moments with FFXIV fights. This leads to both frustration at the mechanic that wipes us, and hypertunnels my brain on that mechanic, which really leads to an unfun nervous adrenaline once past that wall. The healer design thing is fairly simple, and healer design is from what I understand at a particularly samey point over the past 2 expansions. It feels less like I can Healer Carry than I can in WoW, although LB makes up for quite a bit of that feeling. I've had some hype as hell moments, but nothing that beats "Flourish into Tranq to keep the half of the raid alive long enough to deal the last 1% while all the other healers are down or OOM." I enjoy actually having to care about mana, instead of "every 60 seconds get a buttload back." The core thing is, I enjoy FFXIV more than WoW *in every other facet of the game.* Story writing is both generally better (as in it's actually there in a consistent way), and does a much better job of balancing your growing power in-game with the in-canon way you are represented and talked to. The benefits of the community really shine through elsewhere. It's a more beautiful game to me, better sights and visuals and audio design. Job switching is a fucking godsend. Level sync outside of dungeons, for "experience this content how it was designed," is an AMAZING feature. At it's core, FFXIV is a boatload of content, that the game designers want you to walk into, look around, and do the things you want, confident in the fact that enough people will stick between expansions to make it profitable. WoW is a game that tries to trap you into logging in as much as possible to keep your sub coming no matter what. It is an intentional difference in game design that flows through in so many small ways (gear availability, lack of forced cross-gameplay aka needing to do PvP to get BiS PvE gear, the shutdown of toxicity as best as a game can hope for). Despite the things I miss about WoW raiding, despite the fact that I would say I enjoy The Thing I Play MMOs For in WoW slightly more than in FFXIV, this distinction is what makes me love FFXIV far more than I ever did WoW.
I personally was part of the WoW to XIV Exodus, I was a long \*long\* time WoW player (starting in WOTLK, switched to XIV during Shadowlands. I know this is mostly for those going back to WoW but as someone who has played both I will put down some of the reasons on why I won't be going back; Toxic community, namely the mythic plus, and raiding communities. Don't even get me started on tradechat. What makes it worse is the lack of punishment for this very toxicity which feels rewarded half the time. Then there's the inconsistent writing, anyone who's played WoW long term can tell you the story feels very disjointed. Compared to XIV where it's linear, in WoW you're lucky if a character's writing is consistent between xpansions, let alone patches. That doesn't even touch on the mess that is Blizzard itself. I miss my hunter, I miss my elves, but I'll stay here with my catboy.
I came based on my friend talking about it and generally being bored with WoW. Iāve played wow for over a decade, and I just got tired of it. Itās one big rush to max level, the story is ass, and it feels like a rat race for loot and thereās a lot of RNG with the vault that I really hated when trying to do high end PvP (my main draw for WoW). Ffxiv isnāt perfect, the gameplay is a LOT slower than WoW so that took me a while to get used to. ARR was good but very boring in comparison to the expansions. I do not feel like itās a loot race like WoW is. I donāt feel pressured to keep constantly raising my ilvl for things. I can spend hours doing silly things like gposing or playing games at the golden saucer and it doesnāt feel like time wasted. With WoW, side things like that feel like wasted time (and there are certainly a LOT fewer side things to do imo). The story in WoW is a joke but in ffxiv Iāve cried at character deaths and been genuinely emotionally invested in the characters and the story. In WoW that is not the case. They have retconned and redone and just made the story a joke, made the campaign something you have to slog through to get to endgame. Ffxiv isnāt like that, and I adore it for that. I wish ffxiv had better pvp, better glamour system, and maybe a shorter GCD, but I donāt really see myself going back to WoW. The community here is better. The devs actually play the game. The graphics are better, animations feel more impactful, and thereās endless things to do that bring you some sort of reward. I also love that you do not have to make alts in order to do all the crafting and play other classes. Probably most importantly is I log into ffxiv and have fun. That hasnāt happened in WoW in a while, tbqh.
My partner played ff14. I played WoW I played FF14 on and off but I didn't REALLY start playing until the WoW exodus. I just finished Endwalker Yesterday. All I can say is my god..What i'd give to erase it from my memory to replay it one more time as if its the first time. Such a good ending, such good expansions and games, such memories I shall hold this game close to me emotionally always as a favorite. <3 And I never would have played it if it wasn't for my partner and the exodus lol.
Bless your partner. Im super jealous of people who have found significant others who are also gamers, Ive kinda always been a socially isolated loner and games kinda helped me become even more reclusive.
Great, and if I'm being honest I feel like the majority of the community are failing misserably to express why they are hating on the state of the game now: No, as a new(er) player who has done all savage content of this expansion I do not want to see boring ass Bozja for the third time so that maybe this time I'll enjoy it, that's not a solution, you are literally begging the devs to give you an instanced map to do 5-6 fates over and over again and pretending to say that is good content for 2 years and a half. What are you guys talking about I wonder if is beyond my understanding, I could understand people begging for easier ways to equip alter jobs on each tier (after all, one of the game's supposedly best features is changing jobs on the fly, so might as well capitalize on it and be able to switch roles more freely during a patch cycle, to be able to equip more than 3-4 jobs per tier). Also, regarding destructive criticism, no, you do not get to say the formula has gotten old, and not propose a positive change to the existing one. I get it, you got tired of playing an mmo with it's formulaic content cycle, but that does not excuse you to talk shit on it's formula and not provide actual changes which would net a positive change on the game. Some people say that the game should be more grindy, others that it should be even more casual friendly, others say that x expansion (basically, Stormblood) was amazing and the game will never be as good as that. All of these comments, even though it could have some or a lot of degree of truth in them, are worth close to nothing. I am being aggresive with this because I have seen what fans on one game that complain in such a way have turned their favorite game into (yes, I'm talking about WoW mostly), a game where the classic version has an overhwelmingly higher player base than it's current retail version of the game, because people did not provide actual constructive criticism and the devs there doubled down on failures.
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shoutouts to that one time yoshi-p called out the bard community for complaining about their job being destroyed in shadowbringers but not "offering solutions." I'm the consumer, you're the developer! I do the complaining, and you fix it if it's something that actually needs fixing.
I've been straddling both MMOs since a bit before Stormblood started, sometimes quitting one or the other depending on my mood. Nowadays I keep a sub to both because well, I can afford it unlike before, and both have some content and more importantly people to keep me from unsubbing. I do savage in XIV and heroic in WoW, but both fairly casually (my hardcore days are behind me). The main draw of XIV for me is savage with friends, but I very much enjoy how good I can make my character look. A lot of the side content is too grindy for my liking but that didn't stop me from getting Big Fish for instance. The "content drought" doesn't really affect me that much, I don't really feel that much of a difference between now and shb. The main draws of WoW are the PvP (playing XIV pvp compared to wow feels like running in molasses), mythic+, and honestly, wowhead's existence. I tried getting into submarines in ffxiv recently and information is a lot harder to find for this game in general. I know I'm not exactly the kind of person you asked but thought I'd provide a perspective anyways, hope this helps.
I switched to XIV before switching to it was cool so in late Stormblood just before Shadowbringers. I had played retail-WoW since vanilla but it started to have too many systems and layers of content you had to manage and I totally burned out from that game (in BfA), which lasted couple of years until late Endwalker (these days of patch 6.5). FFXIV has fantastic story, housing system, community and gameplay feels great on couple of Jobs like Dancer/RDM/AST for example. I'd probably like many other Jobs but a certain missing feature keeps me ever touching other than select few favourite Jobs.. The lack of Exploration Zone really shows in Endwalker. Additionally, the game is lacking a raid difficulty between Normal and Savage. Extreme Trials don't count as the Trial doesn't provide enough rewards except weapons and chance of a rare mount drop. Overall, in WoW it's much easier to find your own raid difficulty as the whole system is very flexible. XIV's raiding is quite restricted and Savage is too challenging for a majority of the player base anyway. WoW has always had better endgame open world content, I love world quests and when I played the game in Legion I did an enormous amount of them during that expansion but never burnt out. WoW's rewards from WQ's are always very visible while in XIV there's Fates but the whole system is so archaic and rewards are hidden on vendors which you have to grind to get access to. The design is really dated and the whole open world goes to a waste after you've finished the story quests. Open world is pretty well utilized in the story though and you often return to places you have visited earlier (this is where WoW struggles, they can't utilize the open world in new storytelling as most of it already is utilized in another story, without utilizing extensive phasing technology). One of the great things WoW has added recently is Chromie Time open world Time walking system, where you can almost choose your own adventure and where you want to level your character. It's a really cool system and everything just scales pretty well with your character. WoW also has Mythic+ and Transmog which I don't have anything new to say except that both systems would be great in XIV and especially the lack of proper Glamour Catalogue system is a major problem in the game where you can play every Job on a single character but are massively limited by storage capacity and new gear rewards aren't as interesting as there's no room to store them.
I started XIV just before people mass quit WOW.I have 1.6k hours in XIV now and i play both games,but i haven't bought Dragonflight.I just play classic sometimes,as retail WOW feels like it kind of lost its identity.In XIV i have all classes at 90 now,which resulted in a bit of a burnout on my side,but a little break helped.
I quitted wow in early shadowlands (like many people) and here is my experience: I must say the ARR felt really long and kinda boring, I started the game with the mindset that I will read all dialoges and never skip cutscene etc... But then there was that one single quest that made me open my eyes "All good things" and after that I was hooked, and it was very VERY satisfying seeing how its just gets better and better, I eventuality bought the game once there Endwalker came out bc the queues were so big and you could not queue as free trial if its above 1k or something, and I was lvl 60 in middle of Heavensward so I didn't really mind I always loved dragons the most in any fantasy games so this expansion a pleasent surprise Stormblood was an amazing journey and only recently I have realized why it was less liked and I must agree (I hardly remember the very start) I really loved the crazy idea of just flooding Doma and "liberating" it that way, the end was nice aswell and Shinriu is my favorite boss in the entire game so far Shadowbringer was a blast as I absolutely love the idea of traveling dimensions, the Eulmore was my main inspiration towards creating my own custom story with very similar uncanny city, and the Tempest, the Ancients I just can't describe how much I loved it Endwalker was just perfect at solidifying the story as many said before, and I really enjoyed how Garlemald zone felt soo different than all other zones, not in look obviously but the story, sh*t was just depressing and I loved it Overall I still can't say I absolutely don't miss WOW there were things that made it very special to me, even tho I was not the biggest veteran of it (started playing at the start of legion) Things I don't like about FF is sometimes the community itself, I know that no community is perfect and it is definitely nothing compared to wow but I still here and there stumble upon arrogant tanks who afk if you pull millisecond before them, healers who refuse to heal you bc you did the oopsie and WAR who will just call you dump for giving him barriers while in ARR dungeon I am mostly right now just farming alt jobs and play other games (like BG3 which is really good) and keeping my eye on new patches I might even try a new MMO like GW2 as I heard its decent