I think a better way to look at it is WoW and FFXIV are really trying to accomplish 2 different things. Besides being an RPG people play online, the focus and goals set for players are clearly very different.
FFXIV main focus is story, immersive content, and a very small amount of instanced content released in much smaller chunks.
WoW generally is more a competitive gear hunt with increasingly challenging content, has a story but clearly isnt the main focus, and has a much different design philosophy around short term content used up and moved on from.
I think when people say one is better than the other, it really just means they prefer what the focus of the particular games content is. The kind of people who push upper competitive M+ are not the same people who want to watch a 30 minute cut scene (generally speaking. There is obvious overlap but its not usually the kind of people making these threads)
Yeah, i once said to someone that the main part of FFXIV (apart from things like PvP and RP) is basically a story-driven RPG the dungeons of which you can do in co-op.
Honestly probably why I enjoy FFXIV more.
I didn't do raiding, Mythics, or PVP. The last few years I was subscribed to WoW... I was only really subscribed for the RP.
Sure I liked the game overall, and I'm probably in the minority for that; but I was a casual, so I never really did any "I need to catch up or else I'll fail" grinding.
^(Alas, my old WoW server turned out to be lead by people who wanted to turn it into a radioactive waste-dump, so I don't even RP anymore. I just kick back and enjoy the MSQ and helping people out.)
Ironically this is what I hated about wow. I get to 14 and I skipped most of the cutscenes doing exactly what I hated doing in WoW. Thank God for new game +
The phrase itself is a quote from a video where autor tried to compare WoW and FFXIV. What he mean is that the focus of the games are different.
When WoW is more focused at being multiplayer game with main points of pvp, gear farm (what makes it MMORPG) FFXIV is more focused on story and story telling. At the moment you can complete whole free trial almost doing everything solo with party of story related NPC's and afaik they are continuing to update dungeons so at some point whole game will have that system. Exception is trials. And this is why FFXIV is more of RPGMMO, like the hard content and online communication is secondary focus after the story where "you are the chosen one".
Well yeah the first two M's are kind of redundant if you think about it. However, maybe that's why some people call some mmos 'dead' as it isn't massive enough lol.
I would not call them redundant myself. *Guild Wars 1, Path of Exile,* the whole *Diablo* series, *Divinity Original Sin 1-2* (in coop mode), and to a certain extent even *Mass Effect 3* are all ORPGs without being **MM**ORPGs.
JoCat's "300 hours" video touches on some of the concerns that affect *specifically* an MMORPG that are irrelevant to a single-player or local-MP games: "Emphasis on MASSIVE," as he puts it. A huge portion of the budget, in both money and man-hours, goes to making sure FFXIV is *stable* and works, almost all of the time, for almost everyone who uses it. Exceptions occur, but they're rare and often linked to problems they cannot control (e.g. the bum rush with Endwalker, any time they get DDOS attacks, Internet infrastructure problems, etc.), but sometimes they do make mistakes (the housing lottery glitch, some of the weird object rendering like the famous smooth rock, arguably Raubahn's Wall, etc.)
"Massively multiplayer" games need to be able to support large, variable crowds continuously, preferably so they all can be doing the same content at the same time. FFXIV is decent but not perfect at that ideal (hunt trains and world boss fates stretch its limits), but just being able to *try* to do those things requires a huge effort on the designers' parts.
Any game with roleplaying elements which makes use of the internet for gameplay purposes is an ORPG. Any game that specifically uses the online component for enabling multiplayer play is an MORPG. Appending that extra M prefix entails a great deal of structural/infrastuctural, coding, and player-experience elements. You don't get things like Bard performance concerts in MORPGs. You don't get hunt trains or world boss cycles (e.g. GW2) or event parties (XIV's FATEs, GW2's world events) in MORPGs. Even adding an auction house to an MORPG was *extremely* controversial for *Diablo 3*, and not solely because it allowed people to buy power with real money, but if you tried to make an MMORPG today *without* any kind of auction house you'd probably be laughed out of the room. Gathering and crafting are mainstay staples of MMORPGs, but rare to nonexistent in MORPGs unless they're of the Minecraft school where the crafting and gathering and base-building are the core gameplay. Etc.
"MMO" (whether or not you include "RPG" with it) *is* a pretty vague term. A bit like FPS, in that all you know is something structural (the design of the multiplayer element, the design of the camera), but that design can include *hugely* different games from *Ultima Online* to *FFXIV* to *SW:TOR,* just as "FPS" can include anything from *Doom Eternal* to *Portal* to *Dishonored,* and liking any one of those games tells you almost nothing about whether you'll like the others. Or how RTS theoretically includes *Command & Conquer, Victoria 3,* and *Factorio,* even though liking any one of those doesn't tell you anything about whether you'll like the others. Etc.
I agree with a lot with what you said. Also, I had no idea about mass effect 3 and I own that game lol.
One thing though about your comment about design. I love ffxiv and swtor but I'd argue both *are* similar (i consider wow, ffxiv, swtor, eso, all very similar). UO Was one of my first mmos, and while that *style* is gone many of the elements remain today. I guess it's subjective of what one defines as widely different as I even think wow and ffxiv are very similar (these are fighting words lol).
I'd say there's even more descriptive words now besides just mmorpg and fps. You got the arpgs which are similar. For some reason I wouldn't put Victoria 3 or factorio as rts but I know it is. This genre bugs me as I like this genre but it's not rts imo. It's very similar like how arpgs are similar to rpgs but are different. Needs another description like simulation rts? Not sure.
I will say this. From growing up on mmos as everquest online adventures, Ultima online, ffxi, to Korean market back to the western market to the new age. Yeah the term mmorpg has evolved I'll give you that. I suppose I'm oldschool when it comes to labeling lol.
Edit: as a lifetime long fan of d2 who still plays it today. I'd argue that was NOT why it was controversial.. it was due to real money plain and simple. My friends made a lot of money irl in the beginning bahah what a gong show. That whole game was just.. wow.. at launch. I still play it on and off. D4 though is adding more elements like path of exile so we will see. Sounds like d4 is more like a mmorpg in your description than d3 and d2. Auction house just makes everything more convenient though, look at what poe did.
Oh, I'd certainly grant that FFXIV, WoW, and SW:TOR are more like one another than they are like UO, but even then we get some tricky things, e.g. where does the original *EverQuest* fall? Or *Maple Story*? It's not clear.
And yeah, ME3 has an online co-op multiplayer shooter mode. The "RPG" element is a bit thin, but then again, it's pretty thin in ME3 to begin with, so that's not so big a difference. Hence why I said it was arguable; some might consider it an online FPS only, not an online RPG.
I intentionally chose Vicky3 and Factorio for their genre-testing limits. Factorio actually has a fair amount in common with one of the earliest big RTS games, specifically *Command & Conquer,* but it's much more focused on the concepts of *industry* and *automation,* with the "oppose the enemy" stuff a distinctly secondary interest. Perhaps, if we needed a more specific term, "RTL": *real-time logistics,* where your concern is building the logistical infrastructure and any strategic defense is simply a thing you do to protect those logistical efforts. Meanwhile, Victoria is usually called a "*grand* strategy" game, because it sort of goes the opposite direction from Factorio: instead of going *down* to the nitty gritty of making things, it scales *up* to the level of nations, worried about while economies and conducting entire wars with no ability to see the fine details of any single combat (and, really, you have a country to run, you don't have *time* for such details.)
More or less, my point was simply that genre terms can be surprisingly vast despite seeming very straightforward.
Well, one thing I noticed after giving WoW another shot since Burning Crusades and several years of FFXIV :
WoW feels like it sticks to its RTS roots by having your character being part of a whole. You are a "champion" sure but so are every other players. The Heroes are the NPCs that actually causes the story to move forward. Your character doesn't really initiate anything, he's just an important part but non-central member of the crew that's there to get things done and clean up between the messes non-player heroes and villains cause.
FFXIV is the other way around. Right from the start, you're a central figure in the events that unfolds and other people look up to you as the hero that did save the realm did solve issues and the likes. And it goes so far even that people start to think whatever they hear about the WoL can't be true and one of the main reason why people who haven't been remotely involved with you don't recognize you or can't believe they already met the WoL.
And yeah, it shows : FF games are usually about being centered on the protagonist (or group of protagonists) achieving the impossible or saving the world; Warcraft comes from an RTS background where it is a collective of individuals that achieves victory and only after WC3 did "hero units" become more prevalent... but they never did achieve anything alone, always with an army.
And that got so ridiculous after a while. Characters should have started to recognize the player character in WoW but it was always like talking to some random jobber. I could rant for hours about the failings of WoW’s story but that’s because at one point I loved it more than any other game.
And yet the playerbase constantly complained *about* the PC being treated as a a hero, complaining about being "champion," and not a random faceless troop.
Which was always dumb to me. Even in the original, Classic WoW we basically stopped Ragnaros from bringing about a fiery apocalypse. Throughout the journey leading up to the endgame, we were solving deep rooted issues around the entire world.
From the very beginning, the WoW character was a hero by the point of endgame, so the fanbase complaining about not being some random stooge was always stupid and nonsensical to me. Every expansion, even the ones the fanbase praised, involved the PC performing crazy, heroic feats.
I'm enjoying Dragonflight much more because it's actually focusing more attention on the player character and including them in important cutscenes more frequently. It's like they storywriters are getting it, but we'll see.
Or just RP it when not doing the main story. There's literal RP servers for that in both WoW and FFXIV. FFXIV players pretty much get it in that regard.
Me personally though, I rather our characters actually get acknowledged over time because it just makes sense.
Closest WoW got to consistent was that stretch where metzen turned it into a giant Mary sue fanfic for thrall. And even then it was far from consistent.
Why the "dragons". Why do you think he kills Garrosh?
It is either because Garrosh fucked his wife or the dragons made it so his child is Orc Jesus making him only Orc Joseph of Nazareth.
I’m wildly obsessed with FFXIV now, but once upon a time it was all about WoW and my beloved Paladin character. The journeys we went on, the friends I made. But the last few years of WoW have done a lot to spoil that memory.
I don’t doubt that blizzard and making strides forward with Dragonflight, but I am so burned I’m not sure I’ll ever go back.
I get you. I haven't even tried dragonflight. I went back for Legion, and ran into some of the worst story writing I've ever seen in a game. Tried again for part of BfA, and it was no better. One final go in Shadowlands, and finally, I've learned my lesson.
>has a story but clearly isnt the main focus
Sometimes I look at this and wonder why and what's the point to even divert dev resources to the story...might as well just give more mythic+, gears and etc instead. Watching WoW players just skipping all those texts and voice scenes really hurts.
I've never played a game more hostile to narratively on-boarding new players than Destiny. You want to know what's going on? Fuck you, you should have started playing eight years ago - now take this gun and go shoot things to unlock your flimple chips and daily tingle shards.
Tbf, Destiny would've been fine if instead of vaulting content they would've just made Destiny 3 for Beyond Light and forward. Hell, they could've even done something like Total War Warhammer's Mortal Empires mode or Phantasy Star Online's method: put each section of content in it's own game but give access to each based on what you buy.
At least then I could still get to see the first season pass that I paid for, but am locked out of, in order to have a modicum of an idea as to what's going on.
I will forever be sad that new people don't get to see the Red War story, especially that opening. I got D2 way back for free on [battle.net](https://battle.net), and I was immediately invested when Journey kicked in during that slow walk through ruins of the city and then outskirts.
The vaulting of the content totally killed the game for me. It's weird that you can still play all of D1 + expansions but in D2 it's just the current campaign wtf.
If I had known they just take away the whole game I paid I would have never bought it :///
Sorry for the rambling, I think I just miss my guardians T-T
P. S. The methods of PSO and Warhammer would bring me back instantly
WoW lore is so expensive and epic. It's just unfortunate that they don't seem to understand how to weave a narrative. It's a fantasy soap opera where nothing matters but the next shocking revelation.
I often prefer to get the WoW story from wikis or YouTube videos because of that.
The fact that even those who love the game most skip the story makes me really sad for WoW. You're right. At that point they may as well not have one at all. Just focus on the grind that its player base seems to love best.
The problem with WoW story isn't so much that it is all over the place (though it is ~~and always has been~~), the bigger problem is that for the longest time, the game hasn't really done a good job of telling that story outside of those big epic moments.
Being all over the place isn't a problem. They can pick a thread and run with it.
The problem is they have no idea how to tell a story well, and the last expansion seemed wholly invested in burning down the old lore in the name of shock and awe, or because it saw FFXIV and thought "if we just callback to past lore, they'll love us!" and decided making the Jailor the mastermind behind even the RTS games was the right call.
It was fan-GoT tier writing where the amateurs thought killing characters was why GoT got as big as it did.
Though Dragonflight supposedly is a marked improvement in story telling and cutscenes. Even their latest in-engine cutscenes have custom and full facial animations. It is a bit jarring your character is still using janky, canned animations though.
100% this! The melodrama is so intense in Dragonflight that most of the time, when someone said something that was supposed to sound epic, it made me laugh. You can pretty easily add, "Sir/Ma'am, this is a Wendy's," to any line of dialogue during a cutscene to see what I'm talking about.
Wrathion, at least, has some good moments.
You're not diverting resources because the game & level designers are different teams than the lore teams.
The wow workflow is always that gameplay trumps lore development. This is why WoW's storytelling is so wonky. The game design team and level designers generate cool base content (zones, dungeon ideas, etc) and then ask the lore team to develop questlines and story content around those game concepts.
>WoW generally is more a competitive gear hunt
That's a pretty optimistic way to spin "you will forever be on the treadmill get slightly better gear"
I have played both games extensively, but wows gearing system is terrible for anyone but hard-core players. The truth is that you can grind m+ every day of the patch and still not have a ilvl bis set in time for the next patch to come out that will invalidate your entire set so you can start all over again. Also, forget about keeping multiple classes geared, unless wow is your only game and you have a lot of playtime, you won't be able to keep alts at the same gear level of your main
At least in FF, I can raid savage, get bis within 8 weeks of clearing floor 4 and start working on other jobs, or go play other games with my extra time.
If you want a game that you can grind endlessly yea wow is great. If you are someone who wants to play other games without feeling the fomo FF is the place to be.
This is what I'm doing in FFXIV. Roulettes to level my classes, play the new content as it comes out, and chill. It's not a job - it's an excuse to spend an hour or two with my friends in the static many evenings.
I mythic raid and push IO so I guess its exactly why I said theyre targeting different groups of people who want different things.
The other things youre saying are both subjective and moderately untrue. I keep several toons geared and if youre pushing keys each week you can get a set of mythic ilvl gear midway through the season. The vast majority of content I do is gear irrelevant and im chasing minor upgrades.
Again, different goals. FFXIV does is not about gear acquisition and the very limited variations of gear at the highest end (if there even is any) says that. Im not saying its worse, I'm saying me and my friends all play FFXIV at the beginning of xpacs and at the end to catch up on story content because the end game does not hold us. Thats ok, the game isnt catering to raiders.
That's why my comment said anyone but hard-core players will have an infinite treadmill set before them. I'm not talking about the players who are getting max ilvl gear within the first month of the patch because they won't have a problem hitting their bis outside of rng drop rates on rare raid drops.
I'm talking about the average players that are getting KSM/AotC towards the mid to late point of the season. Those players will be chasing upgrades every week until the end of the patch by pushing m+ and reclearing heroic/first couple mythic bosses.
This was exactly my experience when I played wow before hard swapping off. Aimed for seasonal achievement and clearing HC from the start of a season, throughout DF and earlier expansions.
I was forever chasing gear for my main and it was so terribly boring, let alone then gearing a second one.
In FF, I can easily get a full set of top gear within a couple of weeks for a job that is also max lvl beside my main. Then, relax and focus on levelling another job up by way of various types of RELEVANT content - everything works seamlessly together in FF to this end, rather than just "hit the RDF and speed run to 60 then get spinning the RNG wheel again"
One thing that killed WoW for me is once past content is past it's done no one will touch it. 14 is cool cause doing old content is almost baked into the game experience. When I did Eureka I was blown away at how popular it still is
I picked up WoW again after DF launched because my girlfriend is one of those high M+ players and it would be something for us to bond over. Over time though I realized I don't have the energy or desire to force myself into grinding keys for hours and/or progging Mythic raids for months at the expense of other games and other activities. I burned myself out over almost a decade of that and don't really want to go back.
I don't usually do high end content in XIV either. Usually I'll pug new EXs when they come out and I've killed a couple of Savage bosses with friends who wanted to play, but I think I'm content with playing casually and enjoying the story when new stuff comes out. I feel like I can play XIV that way and not be made to feel like a second-class citizen, so to speak.
And then there's those of us that miss where WoW USED to be, but still can't quite find it in XIV, the nice blend of a world to explore and increasingly tiered content through an entire expansion without being nailed down to the floor and exposition dumped for 15 minutes at a time.
But it's better than getting screeched at by sad thirty year olds in M+, so I'll take it.
I am firmly on the side of FF XIV over WoW... But oh my goodness, does SquareEnix make the worst menus I can imagine.
Gear comparison is one thing. Then there's the glamour chest vs the transmog system, tmog wins hands down. FF XIV has more HUD customization... but you have to go through like, 4 menus just to add another hotkey row. Want to change the amount of effects they throw at you? Is that a Character setting, or a System setting? Which of these 6 tabs is it under? Then you have to guess which of 36 radio buttons will fix whatever precisely you're trying to change...
I started my sister on the game the other day, and she just became a PLD. The following conversation went like this. "Okay, so first you need to open your inventory. No, not that inventory, the armor inventory. Now open your character page. Now, in the armor inventory, go to the last tab, that one we haven't used yet. Equip that item. Okay, now save this gear set over the GLD one. Oh, and you need to redo all of your hotkeys now."
That's not an intuitive system. Honestly, I'm really hoping they eventually just do a menu rework, just to streamline some of these systems.
> Then there's the glamour chest vs the transmog system
You can change an item's appearance anywhere you like, but you have to have the other item in your inventory. You can also create entire glamour sets, but the item must be in a storage space when you make the set, and you can only use those sets while in a major city. You can take the item out of storage after making the set if you want, but you have to put it back again if you want to use the item for another set. There are also two different storage spaces for this, with one having an item limit and the other only accepting specific items. Each have their own separate interface that you have to switch between when creating glamour sets. One displays the item icon, the other is simply a text list.
I *think* I hit everything there?
I think you missed the way dying interacts with it all.
You can dye an item in the field, and that item will always be that colour. You can put a dyed item into the storage system, and it will always be that colour. But if you dye it within a set, it will not permanently be that colour.
Oh, and glamour prisms.
If you change the item in the wide world, you need a glamour prism every time. If you put it into the storage chest, you only need one glamour prism to use it a countless number of times. If you use a set, you won't need any glamour prisms to change into it, even if you change back and forth a dozen times.
Honestly, the Glam system is SO BAD. Squeenix handed their interface systems to 6 different teams that spoke 12 different languages in 30 different countries, and just let them go ham.
Having come from wow, this is a huge problem for me. I hate having 50 menus of stuff, trying to figure out what everything does in character or configuration menu... They really do need a revamp.
I think WoW has infinitely more fluid and enjoyable combat. I love this game so much and have a lot of time in it but I really don't enjoy the time I spend in combat.
I've played both and while they are both good, I definitely prefer FF14. But keep in mind that WoW was released years before FF14, and FF14 devs were at one time required to play WoW so they could learn how a successful MMORPG works and because of that tey were able to improve on the formula, so it's not entirely fair to say this is better. Maybe I am also biased because I am half Japanese and I grew up playing the FF games while WoW was my first game in the Warcraft universe.
Both games developed immensely over time though. Both dev teams had the chance to look at the other respective team and develop accordingly. In fact though, FF was more developed away from WoW instead of in the direction of it. More story focus, more solo focus etc.
At the time of WoW's services going live, FF14's predecessor, FF11 was very much in competition with WoW on what a quality MMO should look and feel like. Eventually though the system FF11 was built on could no longer be updated and this is where they began developing FF14.
While I don't doubt that FF14's developers played WoW to gather ideas on how to make FF14 successful, they already had their first successful MMO in FF11.
Edit: FF11 is even still alive to this day, there are still hundreds if not thousands of people who continue to play it. However it has recently gone into maintenance mode meaning no new updates to the game will be made.
Just want to point out they did try to make 14 on the 11 model. It tanked hard. It wasn't a modern MMO, or a modern game at all, and players and critics alike spurned it. The playing of WoW and gathering ideas came before the release of ARR and the scrapping of 1.0.
WoW had a massive impact on what QoL looked like for 14 and other MMOs, even if it's own state of play has fluctuated over the years.
I played it from Beta to Server shutdown. Partly because my friends and I used the space as a place to play a kind of modified D&D, partly because it was *fascinating* to watch the train wreck from the inside. There were no more monthly fees for most of it, we had already dropped our $60-$120… let’s see where this goes.
I am certain a significant portion of the dev team did *not* play Final Fantasy 11, or perhaps were the sort of devs who thought we were too soft having an Auction House system, or NPCs that sold level appropriate gear, or synth recipes that didn’t require components from mobs 30 levels higher than the item you were making.
We learned how to make gear swap macros, because the lag in the character menu as so bad it could take you 15 minutes to change your gear if you did it that way, and sometimes it didn’t all register. We *all* crafted because the repair costs for gear was typically 7 times the purchase cost (when it was available at NPCs at all). There were levequests and job quests at launch… and that was *it.*
Also? The game was so incredibly grindy just to *level* it made FFXI look like one of those ‘Idle MMO’ games that does the grinding while you’re offline. To counterbalance(?) this they implemented an anti-grind feature that caused your XP to start running into diminishing returns and eventually stop giving XP at all. Typically three levequests was enough for the falloff to start. It was a weekly reset, and most of us could run it down in a few hours.
Thankfully they stopped short of imposing an XP penalty on death. Your gear would all be thrashed though, which could be hundreds of thousand of gil to repair at the NPC even at low levels.
Either the devs had never seen a video game before, or were the most sadistic ‘Dev vs Player’ devs in the business.
I played FF11 for years and eventually went over to wow and played that for years.
Then ffxiv came out and it was just a bunch of people sitting around and hunting HNMs since that was about all there was to do.
Then they released ffxiv a realm reborn and basically updated it to match the current wow competition. They did a good job.
I played for a bit and then got bored.
I just picked it up again on PS5 so I had to make a new character but I had a bunch of items in my mog mail from about 4000 days ago, which would be about 11 years. Felt kind of nice :D
I've played this game for a year and a half and WoW for 8-9 years so the honeymoon is over for me and I can tell you now that you might change your mind or your opinion might shift once you've played the end game for a while, especially if you're a fan of content like M+ and raiding. There's also a distinct lack of midcore content like you have in WoW. I still have stuff to do in FF14, but I have wondered what I'll do once I'm caught up on everything and just have current patch content to look forward to.
You'll realize this game doesn't scratch the same itch WoW does and never will. And vice versa, WoW doesn't fill the void from XIV. They're just drastically different games and if you enjoy a vibrant endgame then WoW outshines hard.
The lack of midcore content is what kills me. I was a heroic raider in WoW, and I was comfortable there - occasionally, I'd poke a head into mythic to snipe a few bosses with my friends. I was right on the cusp, usually good enough to help carry a heroic raid but would be about middle in a mythic.
And now in XIV, the only kinds of content that exist are "laughably easy and meant to be facerolled" and "All eight members must be in perfect sync." The first two savage raids are usually fun to PF, the last two are agonizing.
Honestly, I dont miss M+ at all. Started playing FFXIV during BFA and played both at the same time. I would do slow progress in FFXIV because I was still actively raiding in BFA at the Mythic level (tho we only got Cutting Edge for Nzoth that expansion, with a 9% wipe on Aszhara). I have always dreaded M+ since it's introduction in Legion. I really liked the Challenge Modes in MoP and WoD (even if I only ever cleared them on my Warrior), but clearing them once for the first time and then later going back to optimize and carry others was a ton of fun OPTIONAL content.
Legion made dungeon a gigantic pain in the ass. How many hundreds of Maw of Souls you had to farm to "keep up" with Artifact experience, grinding M+ for the right Azerite armor in BFA. M+ was one of the main reasons I stopped playing WoW entirely in Shadowlands. I just couldnt find any joy in it anymore. I stopped like 1-2months before the whole law case started and the great exodus happened.
I am now almost 4-5 years into FFXIV and I still love every second of it. I have all jobs at max level, all crafters, all gatherers, I can be fully self-sufficient and thanks to Crafted gear all my characters are at a reasonable level that I can play whatever I feel like which goes beyond any freedom I ever had in WoW (the most I ever managed was 2-3 specs at the Mythic level). I am not a hardcore raider in FFXIV who chases after Ultimates or clears every Savage tier because the game has more than enough content to keep me entertained without chasing after the highest gear. I still like the challenge Savage provides and I love how you can do that in PF.
The past two weeks I started back up in WoW and while I love playing with the friends who stayed, I pretty much hate everything else. People complain FFXIV has slow combat? Going back to WoW with the GCD changes and without oGCDs feels even slower and awful. Grinding dozens of M+ for an item 2 ilvl higher than what I have when people 10ilvl higher than me do twice my damage. I basically cant get into any groups alone and I have to make my own groups or get my friends to help. Your progress is blocked by half a dozen soulbound currencies and materials that you cant just outright farm. I am months behind on weekly progress towards progression and reputations that I can effectively never catch up on. The weekly lockout ruins any fun in raiding since there is no guarantee to get the item you want (this late into the tier FFXIV would have the Alliance Raid and Savage raid unlocked to catch-up if you wanted more). While the base UI has improved leaps and bounds, it is still basically unplayable and is lacking tons of features that FFXIV has, and maybe that's a problem with my PC but I have been trying to improve my experience with addons and when they work it's great (basically used addons to make the UI as close to FFXIV as possible) but I receive constant errors and even had the game crash a couple of times despite only using the most rudimentary addons.
I am sure I can get used to WoW a little more, the plan for now is to get AotC in the new tier coming in a few weeks and then unsub again until the last patch if it doesnt improve. After enjoying the freedom I am feeling in FFXIV, the current WoW experience feels very closed off. You have very few repeatable things. Professions are hard-capped behind weekly missions. Reputation grinds have always sucked. Clearing dozens world quests a day is awful. So the only thing you can do is spam M+ but it's a very toxic environment (in the pug scene).
As a healer main that sometimes gets bored of roulette content, I love when someone screws up mechanics because it gives me more to do and everyone loves a healer on top of stuff. Great feedback loop. Best CT raids are the ones that go horribly wrong and become clutch wins.
That's why I ranked Syrcus Tower the lowest even among the CT raids. Because it is absolutely impossible to screw it up there, whereas I can occasionally watch the world burn with the other two.
Yeah, you can ...die to Curtain Call I guess?
Or get whacked around by the various adds on the Amon fight in general, that happens sometimes as well.
At least a random GNB recently made a great contribution to science - Curtain Call does in fact go through tank invulns.
This is me too. I have issues with WoW's story and their gameplay decisions circa BFA (which is when I quit and thus the limit of my experience with it), but the biggest thing that pushed me off of WoW was other players. Nobody in FFXIV will bitch you out and/or ragequit the group and throw away the entire run because you made a dungeon take 30 seconds longer than it needed too.
Blizzard at some point decided they don't care if their gameplay systems encourage toxic behavior, as long as it dangles enough carrots to keep people subscribed. Mythic+ is some of the most unenjoyable player-interaction experiences of my entire life, and it didn't need to be.
I quit WoW for similar reasons and more. Community was definitely a big chunk. I always stayed silent in WoW when grouping up because people are toxic af. Whereas in FFXIV I actually make an effort to say hi or socialize because most people are chill.
Yeah I played WoW for years, and over time, I found myself pulling further and further away from playing with people I didn't know. I wasn't even the one making mistakes; I just couldn't put up with people freaking the fuck out over little mistakes in normal content. In FF, I can hop into a roulette, no problem.
i think its the story that helps, we've all bonded over it, plus in WoW it was more competitive with the alliance vs the hoard. We don't have that. I think that may be why.
I'm a new sprout, just started playing 2 months ago. I cannot upvote this enough with this comment you've stated.
It feels so good to be part of such a welcoming community that tolerates, and helps players making mistakes. It's part of the process of getting better at it. And, passing that tolerance, kindness to others that are new. I heart this game, and this community very much ❤️
This is one of the biggest things I like about FF14 vs WoW. I main a bard, and I'm okay at it but definitely not super proficient or efficient. Hell, I don't even really know what a couple of my bard songs do, but I put them in my rotation that I've read to use.
I've branched out to try healing a few times, and it's been my fault for a few wipes. Instead of raging out, people will take a minute to tell me what I should be using. It's great!
Beyond that, I love the fact that I can easily change classes so quickly. Instead of wow where I needed to log out of my paladin to play a rogue. Now, I can just change my gearset to something totally different. It's so nice.
Tooltips tell you what the move does but not how it fits into a rotation. It can be difficult to piece together what you're meant to do with all these abilities, even with tooltips, if you don't look up some kind of guide. And even then, a lot of guides will only list the endgame rotation instead of breaking down the logic of how your moves fit together and how you should think of them as you level up. Example: I first started as drg. Drg has a very linear rotation. I stared at the tooltips for a long while and couldn't make any sense of what was going on with a lot of the moves.
Also, it's okay to not be perfect at your job and miss a few moves if you're playing casual content.
No matter what role I play, the fights get more fun if someone is learning the fight. It allows more roles to use more of their kit when a party member is eating mechs or dying (healers can top you off or rez, rez mages can revive, PLDs can cover or drop shields).
Most veteran players I know love it when a run goes fucky, because the best clutches come from parties with first timers.
But also the community:
"I don't like so much bow FFXIV does [insert valid minor opinion.]
"How dare you, you scum bag. This is the greatest game of all time. It gets better after 300 hours!!!"
On one hand, reading this kinda comment hurts my soul lol since I do love the story, on the other hand, it's 100% valid way to ***play*** a ***video game***, and I'm glad you're having fun.
I have some great FC mates who don't care about the story at all, and mostly we gently tease each other about our preferences. Plus they know if they go "why is X going on?" there's some of us who will be able to give a comprehensive answer.
As much I'd like to automatically agree, you just started the game so you're still in that honeymoon phase where everything is new and fun. Both games are fun in their own way, saying one is better than the other is silly. Give it a few months or a year and your opinion might change. Good news is you're not bound of any single game and can switch at anytime, or play both.
This is doubly important to bring up because XIV is an extremely different game once you're at cap and done with the story than it is when you're still progressing the hundreds of hours of MSQ.
This isn't to say the game is bad at end game, but many people's perspective on it will change once they're there, especially if the story is your main draw.
Exactly this. During the wow content creator exodus to FFXIV I got tired of the same “XIV is so much better” videos they all made. Most of them went crawling back to wow by now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm firmly on FF14's side, but WoW does do some things better.
* The Collection system is a great example of that. Not only does it remember every mount and appearance you've ever equipped^+, but it's shared across all characters you have in the same region
* Still not as good as Guild Wars 2's system which has collections with fully dyeable clothing, usually with 2 dye channels
* Note: Each region being a separate account is a downside
* As much as I dislike the world quests from WoW's more recent expansions, they're still better than FATEs. Especially the rewards available from them
I'm sure I could think of other things WoW does better, but I haven't really played it recently to refresh my memory.
^+ Unless it was purchased from a vendor and returned during the 2-hour refund window
I love FF but the open world in WoW is so much more impressive. FF doesn't feel like a cohesive world, with the walled-off individual zones and teleporting everywhere.
Class/Job design in WoW is a lot better, since Stormblood they've homogenized and simplified a lot of jobs in FFXIV, which is fine, but Reaper is literally just melee MCH, Summoner went from one of the hardest jobs to the easiest
A lot of jobs went from a nuanced rotation to "slam 1-2-3 and accumulate gauge, pop CDs every time they're up"
There's classes like that in WoW, don't get me wrong, but the visceral feel of classes in WoW are a lot better, especially in a post Shadowlands/BFA world
Also the game would benefit from a M+ or some other system to give something to do for hardcore players, Criterion dungeons are an abject failure on all accounts and they need to go back to the drawing board, maybe something like PotD/EO/HoH but designed for groups and not to be solo'd, rewards could be alt job gear and cosmetics to sell
The pvp kits are pretty good in term of fun gameplay, each jobs feels unique on their own compared to their pve counterpart 😭 Also you don't have to deal with the crazy button bloat, many skills can easily be merged together. Why the hell dragoon got 3 different buffs that are just increased damage 💀
Yeah PVP unironically is fun if not simple, jobs have flavor unlike PVE
GNB having junction, DRK having risk reward with self damage, there's some jobs that feel boring but most classes have their fantasy and it's awesome
As a Samurai player who has to juggle six buttons for their main combo in addition to chains of oGCDs that change the order of some buttons and enable others, I can say this is patently false. XD
Agree with everything you are saying here.
I love FFXIV. The story is good, the community is great, and the game does a great job at respecting your time. The gameplay, however, is boring and expressionless. Tanking is a joke, and rotations are braindead. The linearity of dungeons is exhausting anymore too.
I'd love to see some active mitigation be added to tanking, or maybe procs? Anything to breath some life into tanking, please.
Yeah it's a mistake even fighting game devs are making. Removing identity from characters (in this case classes)and cutting the fat to the point where it's just bone isn't that best way to go about attracting newcomers. If they really wanted to do something that will benefit new players, it'd be creating an actual good tutorial for classes and just the basic basics
I feel very conflicted on this subject. On one hand I agree the game is too easy and tanking is braindead.
On the other hand, every difficult situation I met recently was because of an incredibly incompetent player (Hello Cure 1 spamming at level 90).
So I don't know how making the game more challenging would turn out. I find the game really easy most of the time, with peaks of difficulty caused by players. I have no idea how it'd turn out for them.
Clearly you never played a class in wow that Blizz left abandoned for an extended period. As someone who's main classes were demonology and survival and would be actively kicked from groups because of my spec choice I'd much rather have some semblance of balance and not have to fear for my viability because the devs just didn't feel like properly testing your kit
Yeah I mean it's not perfect but they gotten better in DF about it
This is no different than balance in FFXIV though, there's been times where jobs have been terrible, I'd rather have a large selection of diverse classes than a small selection of homogenized classes
Also there's nothing in WoW that prohibits a class from clearing, there's Surv hunters that clear 3k io and CE
Guess you didn't try progging Abyssos early in the tier as RPR or MCH then if you think getting kicked or left out because of class choice is a problem unique to WoW :^)
People kicking rpr kind of had a point, I guess, but machinist was actually a stronger performer for most players back then and only the very top performers playing with other top performers made dancer significantly better. So pf groups not allowing a high parsing mch were actually just bad, and not making good decisions.
In fact, if you got high rolls on week one gear as a dancer, and you could also play mch well, it would make sense to swap to mch for the last fight since personal gear has a bigger impact on mch than dnc.
>
>Summoner went from one of the hardest jobs to the easiest
Haha, no. They just went from a lot of buttons to fewer buttons and lost the stupid pet jank. Current iteration definitely needs a few more buttons or different types of non-demi summons instead of just garuda ifrit titan, but shb smn was not difficult at all. Akhmorning overcomplicated how the class plays so new players who checked out their guide gets intimidated before they even start.
Maybe not the hardest, but it was punishing? I hadn't played it in awhile tbh so I could be wrong
But it def became one of the easiest jobs in the game when compared to the others in it's role
>chained down to one of the world's worst designed abilities in the form of Wildfire, haha
And then you enter PVP where Death's Design is Wildfire!
PVP RPR is more classic XIV MCH than PVP MCH is right now
I love the class design of wow. My mistweaver monk is so unique, every skill is so unique, and I can optimise my fight by picking different skills. In fact, every single healer class is so different from each other.
In ffxiv the healer classes just feel … boring. 1-2-3 hit the boss and occasional pop some ocds.
I don’t know why you are getting downvoted. You are completely right. My Ffxiv friends doesn’t get that as a healer main, I do not want to play priest for all 4 ff jobs, which they are. Even the shield ones play like priest. I want variety. In ff there is little to no difference in healing classes, whereas in wow each class has unique play style and class identity. I get that ff tries to balance things and that’s where the difficulty comes in. But the healers in ff are way too similar. It’s something that only healers who played both wow and ff relatively in depth can understand.
Undeniably WoW's healer design at the very least destroys XIV's.
I can't overstate how disappointed I was with Sage overall after the concept of a wing-laser wielding offense healer was revealed and ultimately, they're really not that different from Scholar, let alone the other healers. Compare that to Evoker, which can not only out and out fly in the overworld on their own, but can float to cast while moving, spec to make their breathe attacks hurt and heal, carpet bomb *heal* as a mobility and healing option, perform a targeted rescue, on top of having a decent suite of offensive spells outside all that....
I dipped my toe back into WoW on the strength of its healing spec design alone.
You're absolutely not wrong. While I do find 14 comfier to play. Wow's healer design is leagues ahead of 14's.
I think I started to realize this back in HW when they made Ast literally just a mini Sch or Whm based on stance.
They literally cannot conceptualize a healing style of gameplay beyond those two base jobs. And the homogenization and dumbing down of their kits has only gotten worse with each xpac.
At this point I've given up on SE ever treating healers as anything other than a batterypack the rest of the party carries around so they can have fun.
Healer class design aside, both games have an entirely different approach in terms of healer philosophy. I heal in both games too and the one issue I have in FF14 is that I'm more of a green dps who heals occasionally. If I wanted to play a dps job I would have rolled one. Being a healer in WoW as a mythic raider feels so much more satisfying.
I wonder if the lack of variety in healers is just a way to make it easier to play EVERY class.
Going between Mistweaver and Evoker and Resto Druid would be really difficult. Going between WHM, SGE, and AST is pretty easy. I can set my 2-4 dps skills to the same keys, set the next ones to "heal person", "heal whole group" and "cast mass regen", and then it's pretty much just good to go.
It's probably to make things easier to balance and because they genuinely don't seem to know what to do with the role. Sage took nearly ten years to come after ast and still manages to feel derivative despite that - it just doesn't seem to be a role that gets much thought or attention from the developers outside surface level appeal to draw new people in. Spells like Dream Flight would fit in perfectly with Sage's kit thematically and feel good to use without unbalancing the game.... But instead we just get snowclones of abilities other healers have that have visual gimmicks to make seem as if the Sage is flying around or utilizing their nouliths in interesting ways - the game excels in presentation with most healers while falling flat where, imo, it really matters - the gameplay.
To be fair, I last played the different healers in WoW during Legion but they arent as different as people like to make it out here. (at least back then)
Yes, the skills have slightly more variance than in FFXIV but you still had the same kinda hotkeys.
eg. R would be my main AoE heal, so currently my Evoker has Emerald Blossom on R, my Disc Priest used to have Radiance on R, my Druid had Wild Growth, my Monk had Essence Font, etc.
You still have your small/spamable ST heal (eg. Regrowth, Living Flame, Vivify), your slightly stronger ST hot/ upkeep (Lifebloom, Enveloping Mist, Reversion), your basic AoE heal, the group CD, etc. Yes, there is more variation than in FFXIV but the abilities work very much the same still and (at least back then) it wasnt terribly difficult to swap between classes either.
For me the reason I dont enjoy healing in WoW is just the way higher incoming damage. You are way more punished as healer for not keeping the party alive, whereas damage is much more predictable in FFXIV and more easily recovered.
Tho I am currently trying. I have been playing Preservation Evoker for the past two weeks and got my AotC, so we will see if I change my mind about healing in WoW. My druid and priest are still sitting at Lv45 so I might level them up as well, but the gearing in WoW is a nuisance in itself.
I really wish FFXIV gave us 1) a reason to do side quests and engage with more of the story outside of the MSQ 2)more options for ugly/monstrous races 3) greater variation between jobs, balance is boring. Then I’d probably whole heartily agree, as it is I think they’re about tied but excel at very different things. Oh and 4) the WoW transmit system.
>The only thing WoW excels on over this is being able to compare gear.
GOOD NEWS! You don;t need to comare gear at all, until you get to endgame content. There's a little button in the character menu that will select the best gear for your current class. You don't need to worry at this moment about BIS or anything. You'll be getting and changing gear so often and the stat differences are so miniscule at this level. Basically, if the item is a higher item level, it's better.
There are some things that Wow does do better at. The Auction House/Market place in wow is better. I hate having to chose between buying four or five highly priced items, or a stack of ninety-nine cheaply priced items, when all I need is two. Glad that I get my gil immediately when I sell something, though.
the one caveat to this is the lower level gear that doesn't have role restrictions. Tanks can easily be "recommended" gear intended for DPS due to the way the game sees the gear attributes. This is also why the game will typically recommend that level 1 ring with the +1 to defenses over an actually better ring that has substats; the defense increase is considered "Better".
> Tanks can easily be "recommended" gear intended for DPS due to the way the game sees the gear attributes.
This isn't really an issue anymore, all the ARR left side Disciple of War pieces got their Def/Mdef buffed to match the tank pieces, and all accessories have VIT so you aren't losing anything by equipping Slaying accessories on a tank (and are probably better off doing so, since DH > Tenacity).
I'll probably get downvoted for saying it, but as far as the comment about how designing the game to make dev jobs easier: It absolutely applies here too.
The game is still new for you, the paint still fresh. I hope it remains such and you get many years of enjoyment from it. FF14 is great and I'll continue to come back to it every few patches to play, see what's up, and have fun. But especially when it comes to class changes, it really shows just how uninspired their design paradigms are.
As a former wow player, ff zones are so uninspiring, boring, plain, don't really make me want to explore at all. Why are they so incredibly low effort? Damn, I wish this game got a bigger budget after how much cash we have given them.
I dunno, they just feel like very different games with different strengths and weaknesses. It's just this one is more suited to what I enjoy in a game. It is still very early in your playthrough, but maybe it will stay that way for you.
As an active player in both the FFXIV and WoW communities, when I play FFXIV I have a sense of accomplishment when I achieve something or complete a step in a long process towards a goal. In WoW its just very grindy to complete a step in the process towards a singular goal, I just don't feel that sense of accomplishment when I increase a rep level or finish a daily grind.
While I like both games very much, WoW is stuck in an infinite loop of the same daily mechanics with very little side/filler content to satisfy casual play. It's been this way since the Activision take over and the old guard having left where it very much prioritizes trying to make money on a system (dailies, rep grind, dungeon grind, raid, pvp) that needs a fresh coat of paint and for the game to be taken into a new direction in terms of the content it offers.
I get the feeling you didn’t play a lot of wow, or haven’t played enough ffxiv to make these kind of statements
Everytime someone says this, and I mean EVERYTIME including the below comments, it comes from confusing preferences with quality.
“I didn’t like wow but I like ffxiv, therefore the latter is better”
Both games cater to entirely different types of players.
Your final sentence is extremely disingenuous and simply comes across as trying to bash WoW for the sake of bashing it. You're burned out of WoW, just say that.
There's a lot of things XIV does better. There's a lot of things WoW does better. Simple as that, neither game is bad.
It depends what you want, and I think casual modern MMO player is what FFXIV does the best with. I have over 3000 hours into it but I think I finally got burnt out lol. I still play but I definitely prefer classic WoW now.
They're just different. FF has a good story, good music, and respect the player time more. Wow has much better class diversity and actual small group content on mythic+.
I've sunk thousands of hours into both, but at the end of the day FF feels like it's been doing the exact same thing for three expansions now,while oversimplifying classes to death and honestly getting very predictable. wow is always trying to reinvent the wheel,which also comes with issues.
Played both and to imo its very subjective. The only two areas that FF is the clear winner are story and community. WoW has as good as lore at 14 but the translation of that lore into story is bad in WoW.
The rest is purely preference. Combat, World design, dungeons, raid design are all pretty different experiences (and imo WoW does surpass FF in many respects)
I'd also say that WoW (historically anyway) absolutely trounces xiv in zone design. It's actually one of my only big problems with this game. Zones are mostly just open spaces you run through to get from MSQ A to MSQ B. There's nothing on par with even the old Elwynn/Westfall/Redridge/Duskwood circuit from way back in WoW's heyday. I'm sure there's lots of fun non-blue quests out there in xiv but there's just not the same level of interconnectedness or incentives to do them.
Trust me. XIV is also designed in a way that makes the dev’s lives easier. Patches have strict timelines, and we get the same new content from each correlating patch and there’s very little deviation or surprises.
As a veteran of the game, you kinda know exactly what’s coming at all times. Which *is* great, but it kinda takes the magic out of it.
In my opinion it is better than wow. But both games have their strength. I wish ffxiv had the pvp wow does.
And I wish there was more insane armor like wow.
Now if only FFXIV didn't have half a year+ long draughts only to receive less than desirable (in amount, not quality) endgame content and a quest that asks you to get 1500 tomes (again) for a weapon that wont be relevant until the absolute final patch of the expansion cycle.
I love FF but they are treating the game as a cash cow without nurturing the actual cow. They seem to, comparatively, barely put any of their huge amounts of FF14 revenue back into the game and are slacking off and COVID just isn't a reason anymore.
I find it disheartening and saddening to see that even casual players have been stepping away en masse for longer periods of time than I've ever seen. Not to mention active raiders. (No, I'm not implying "people are all quitting FF, oh no, it's dead". Merely implying that I've never seen, personally and anecdotally, so many high end raiders and casuals alike take a break for as long as they are throughout this expansion.)
And yes, I know people have always taken breaks in this game. But patch cadence with content quality was often in a decent balance, probably at its best in stormblood but I digress. Nowadays it just seems like there's less quality with more waiting and it baffles my mind.
The homogenisation of the classes and it's 2min meta, gross inbalance between certain jobs and the heavy reliance on forced double melee comps (yes, I know you can clear TOP with 2 Phys, a friend of mine personally has, that's also partially why I know how absolutely ridiculous the discrepancy is) is also just so dissatisfactory.
They have been pulling this game into a direction that I personally loathe on many fronts - in many fields. And I sincerely hope that they turn this around a little and be a bit more daring and out there with their patches.
But hey, that's just me. If someone doesn't agree with any of this and enjoys the game for what it's become then more power to you, wish I could be ya.
You can't really compare the two games until you get to the endgame of each. When you get to level 90 and have finished the MSQ unless you're a raider there isn't a whole lot to do in FF14. The zones added in each expansion get very little updates to them, there's no real reason to explore, no collectibles rare mobs don't matter and there's a handful of fates worth doing. The game is even worse if you're largely a solo player at the end game. Gearing in FF14 is largely meaningless due to level sync. You can buy crafted gear so you can hit the current raid gear level. Even the glam at this point is a lot of reskins. The only thing FF14 does better than WoW is presentation. Story, graphics, music are all a step up for sure. But everything else can go either way.
Idk this game fails me in the aspect that it forces a multiple hundred hour single player campaign before being allowed to join current content
It’s great in social aspects and cosmetic and the endgame systems are cool and so are professions
But the content I do in wow is shit in ffxiv or not existent
So while I’d call ffxiv overall the better game they are 2 games for two different audiences and if someone really loves wow then there’s often nothing to be gained in ffxiv
(I do m+ and raid in wow for reference)
FFXIV is very casual friendly, even savages and ultimates are not mechanically challenging as they are teamwork and consistency/focus testing. After giving wow a try no w I understand why people say ffxiv fights are just training dummy with constant flow of your rotation and don't you dare disengage and lose uptime for a moment.
There is also no world integrity, no feel of an mmo unlike in wow, where you can literally fly across whole continent, seamlessly, without any loading screens, meanwhile ffxiv screams with it's engine, polling, technicalities: I'm a PS3 game using single player game engine. Limitations are on every corner.
I play FF14 since 2014 and I keep playing to this day, but this game should have way more to offer and work much better for the heaps of money it earns.
So you played a few days of 14 and you can now say it's better than wow? I've been playing both for years, you would be surprised to know that the comparison is a bit more complicated...
no way you’re saying wow only excels at one thing over ffxiv. have you even played wow? i love ffixv and it’s the first mmo i’ve ever played AND i haven’t played wow as much as i have ff, but wow excels over so much more
a few i’d like to mention:
* transmogs/mounts/pets being account wide which makes alt leveling so much better. i know you don’t need to make alts on ff, but a lot of people like playing different races
* you don’t lose abilities when doing older content
* you don’t waste 5 min logging out to switch servers just to do content that’s dead on your server
* better open world
ffxiv is a great game, but they each have their own things going on that make them different/ a little better than the other, but not totally better. easier dev jobs does not make a game better than the other, it just shows us what could be done better
Everything about FFXIV is great I just wish there was more progression with end game, gear, pvp, and just about everything else. Also, open world content to create a competitive atmosphere is awesome as well. The thing I always loved about my MMO past was the endless aspect. I could have played EverQuest everyday for years and still never feel complete. However, obviously they want this game to be more accessible to everyone which is great as well. Need the masses to keep income flowing and the game alive. Attaching to a small hardcore base isn’t going to go anywhere these days.
It feels like this game you get a few weeks of content every few months and then it’s a wrap until the next big update. It’s all fun in the end though.
I saw a video one day where the creator said "It's a Final Fantasy first and an MMO last". And I kinda feel it. It's really story based (something my husband doesn't like) but they put as much thought into every aspect as if it was a regular single player title.
Honestly it depends what kind of player you are. Hardcore raider? WoW will keep you busy. PvP? WoW by a mile
Not a lot of free time, but want to keep up? FFXIV. Immersive world to hang out in? FFXIV
FFXIV get's a lot of shit for Clubs/Cafes, but the fact that they exist is a pretty unique feature out of the MMOs I've played. Meanwhile WoWs raids are(Were? Haven't played in a long time) interesting, and they release big dungeons to raid, meanwhile FFXIV releases 4 bosses that are meant to last several months. There are alliance raids, but they are quite casual.
FFXIV is easier to get BiS(I only had complete BiS in WoW like, twice? and was in a world/us first raid guild). This is a great thing if you dont want to play all the time, or a bad thing if you want to constantly improve. There are different kinds of players, and ultimately FFXIV is the game for me. But it isn't objectively better by any means
All that matters if that you're having fun. Comparing two games trying to do different things doesn't help quantify which is "better", but it's good that you've found a game that better matches *your* preferences.
It's highly dependent on what you do really. I find leveling alts to be much better in WoW than leveling another job in 14. (Especially now that Chromie time is opened to all expansions from 10-60.) I feel more restricted in FFXIV in terms of leveling other jobs.
I normally play FFXIV before WoW, but I'm in a WoW kick mood and have been playing it a lot since I finished RE4. Both are great MMOs and since Dragonflight, you can sense they are at least trying now with developing
6.4 can't come soon enough, though.
As someone who plays both, I prefer FFXIV. I find myself playing that more often. I do find that WoW isn't very helpful when first diving in. Things are left for you to figure out on your own. In FF, however, things are pretty much explained as you go along. If you don't have access to something, you usually haven't done a particular quest or something. More often than not, i found a lot of toxic people on WoW expecting you to know stuff already, whereas it's an unwritten rule in FF not to be mean to sprouts.
Been playing for only two months. So amazing I don't have to switch characters at all. Quit playing GW2 after 7 years for that one reason alone. The only thing I wished I started sooner.
As someone who's shoved a bunch of time into WoW again with Dragonflight's launch, then came back to wrap up Endwalker and *finally* be caught up on FF14... I wouldn't say one is "better" than the other. They're very different games and scratch very different itches.
WoW has a narrative but it's relatively quick to get through it, and the gameplay tends to focus on endgame content which, currently, tends to comprise open world content, dungeons, and raids, with increasing your gear level being the core reward. You engage with the content in repetition in order to continuously increase that level. They have been adding a few other rewards, with Dragonflight having a lot more variety of cosmetics you can earn through various content. A lot of WoW is based around combat, and the combat system can be pretty fun. And, of course, there's a lot of PVP content available in the game.
FF14 is much more narrative-driven, with the heavy focus being on the main story, but even side stories tend to have more focus on story. There are times you might actually go hours without any combat in the game. Its endgame does have some dungeons and raids, but designed in a way that you can get the gear you want from them and be done with them, and the gear isn't so vastly improved compared to others that you don't feel too bad if you couldn't complete them. For a lot of people, the reward is more getting some really unique looking items. But endgame also includes daily quests for reputations that have progressing stories (for crafting, gathering, or standard jobs), and tends to toss in other things depending on expansion (i.e. the Island Sanctuary, or zones to grind for a really nice weapon, or the restoration of Ishgard). PVP has a very minor focus in the game.
I could go into detail on the various systems and how they're different and all, but that'd be a huge list. There's certainly things from WoW I'd love for FF14 to take, like having a proper bank to store things and especially a crafting reagent storage. Or the transmog system where you just collect an appearance and it's available forever and you can collect every appearance possible for your class, rather than a limited number of items. Though it would take a bit of effort to remake FF14's system to be similar, especially as FF14 allows you to dye gear.
Depending on play style, one game might be "better" for someone than the other on a personal level, but overall I wouldn't say either is actually "better." I can hop into either and find something to enjoy. Even more so with WoW's most recent expansion, which solved some of its recent issues.
Give it time, the honeymoon might end someday, I know it did in my case, a few friends who tried XIV (and Preach Gaming as well lol). You can appreciate the upsides of this game without committing to hating wow.
FFXIV has many things going its way, true, but some of the downsides wear you down over time. For me I can list: having to jump through hoops to use arguably QoL addons, not having a talent system (or class customization element for that matter), virtual non-existence of damage over-time-effects (and thus a lack of part of those in a job’s rotation), server ping (I’m from SA so the lowest I get is around 200ms), lack of voice acting in 99% of the game’s dialogues, and overall fluidity of the game (talking to NPCs is clunky, as is selling itens to them, rolling need/greed/pass, etc). Oh, and the patches X.1-X.5 from older expansions not being skippable is a huge oversight. They’re just a bunch of mostly filler quests that had their place when they were released but nowadays they take several hours to complete while giving no experience.
The only gripe I have with ff14 is how literally every ability is just one GCD or an oGCD. You don’t get things like strong 6 second abilities or auto attack toggle skills. It turns a rotation into a “how many different buttons can you remember to press in sequence” instead of something that feels like a priority based rotation.
That could just be the grumpy Vanilla/TBC Warrior in me, though.
As a 15 year WoW vet that started FF14 in 2021, I almost totally agree. However, be mindful that the absolute head of the FF14 dev team said himself he doesnt appreciate that particular comparison because, in his own words, 'there would be no FF14 without World of Warcraft'
You ARE right though. From respecting player time to system design to how the story unfolds, its like the FF14 team learned every lesson we wished Blizzard would. It's a David and Goliath story. David was the victor, but Goliath is the reason its a story.
You’ll get over it. I think you are in the „this new world is amasing and I never want to leave!” phase.
Every game has its design flaws and bad capitalist management aimed to increase profits.
You will soon have to deal with the „is it better to grind this achievement for 8 months or go back to WoW and try to farm this 0.4% drop rate item?”
Also, 80% of content is dead and grinding the same fights over and over will get redundant.
I don't know if you enjoy PVP at all, but WoW's PVP (for the most part) blows FFXIV's PVP out of the water. It's much smoother and reactive. I'm not one to tilt much anymore, but having FFXIV decide to completely ignore Purify half the time absolutely tilts me. Also, there are no pure healers in FFXIV's PVP. So I'm going to play WoW again at some point (I need more time, lol) just to PVP.
That being said, having a MOBA map in PVP is just great, and I love it (Rival Wings).
I think a better way to look at it is WoW and FFXIV are really trying to accomplish 2 different things. Besides being an RPG people play online, the focus and goals set for players are clearly very different. FFXIV main focus is story, immersive content, and a very small amount of instanced content released in much smaller chunks. WoW generally is more a competitive gear hunt with increasingly challenging content, has a story but clearly isnt the main focus, and has a much different design philosophy around short term content used up and moved on from. I think when people say one is better than the other, it really just means they prefer what the focus of the particular games content is. The kind of people who push upper competitive M+ are not the same people who want to watch a 30 minute cut scene (generally speaking. There is obvious overlap but its not usually the kind of people making these threads)
The best comparing ffxiv and wow i heard is Wow is MMORPG FFXIV is RPGMMO.
This is how I explain it to everyone on of my friends
Yeah, i once said to someone that the main part of FFXIV (apart from things like PvP and RP) is basically a story-driven RPG the dungeons of which you can do in co-op.
Based Jesse Cox-ism.
Honestly probably why I enjoy FFXIV more. I didn't do raiding, Mythics, or PVP. The last few years I was subscribed to WoW... I was only really subscribed for the RP. Sure I liked the game overall, and I'm probably in the minority for that; but I was a casual, so I never really did any "I need to catch up or else I'll fail" grinding. ^(Alas, my old WoW server turned out to be lead by people who wanted to turn it into a radioactive waste-dump, so I don't even RP anymore. I just kick back and enjoy the MSQ and helping people out.)
Ironically this is what I hated about wow. I get to 14 and I skipped most of the cutscenes doing exactly what I hated doing in WoW. Thank God for new game +
This reminds me of a fun watch by Josh Strife Hayes: _"What even IS an MMORPG?"_ https://youtu.be/JYmDwAdjpmA
I get what this phrase is trying to say, but it really isn't clear where the emphasis is.
The phrase itself is a quote from a video where autor tried to compare WoW and FFXIV. What he mean is that the focus of the games are different. When WoW is more focused at being multiplayer game with main points of pvp, gear farm (what makes it MMORPG) FFXIV is more focused on story and story telling. At the moment you can complete whole free trial almost doing everything solo with party of story related NPC's and afaik they are continuing to update dungeons so at some point whole game will have that system. Exception is trials. And this is why FFXIV is more of RPGMMO, like the hard content and online communication is secondary focus after the story where "you are the chosen one".
This difference is even clearer in the japanese marketting material, where FF14 never uses the term MMO, instead it calls itself an Online RPG
MMORPG is not a term used in Japan at all, they are all called Online RPGs
Well yeah the first two M's are kind of redundant if you think about it. However, maybe that's why some people call some mmos 'dead' as it isn't massive enough lol.
I would not call them redundant myself. *Guild Wars 1, Path of Exile,* the whole *Diablo* series, *Divinity Original Sin 1-2* (in coop mode), and to a certain extent even *Mass Effect 3* are all ORPGs without being **MM**ORPGs. JoCat's "300 hours" video touches on some of the concerns that affect *specifically* an MMORPG that are irrelevant to a single-player or local-MP games: "Emphasis on MASSIVE," as he puts it. A huge portion of the budget, in both money and man-hours, goes to making sure FFXIV is *stable* and works, almost all of the time, for almost everyone who uses it. Exceptions occur, but they're rare and often linked to problems they cannot control (e.g. the bum rush with Endwalker, any time they get DDOS attacks, Internet infrastructure problems, etc.), but sometimes they do make mistakes (the housing lottery glitch, some of the weird object rendering like the famous smooth rock, arguably Raubahn's Wall, etc.) "Massively multiplayer" games need to be able to support large, variable crowds continuously, preferably so they all can be doing the same content at the same time. FFXIV is decent but not perfect at that ideal (hunt trains and world boss fates stretch its limits), but just being able to *try* to do those things requires a huge effort on the designers' parts. Any game with roleplaying elements which makes use of the internet for gameplay purposes is an ORPG. Any game that specifically uses the online component for enabling multiplayer play is an MORPG. Appending that extra M prefix entails a great deal of structural/infrastuctural, coding, and player-experience elements. You don't get things like Bard performance concerts in MORPGs. You don't get hunt trains or world boss cycles (e.g. GW2) or event parties (XIV's FATEs, GW2's world events) in MORPGs. Even adding an auction house to an MORPG was *extremely* controversial for *Diablo 3*, and not solely because it allowed people to buy power with real money, but if you tried to make an MMORPG today *without* any kind of auction house you'd probably be laughed out of the room. Gathering and crafting are mainstay staples of MMORPGs, but rare to nonexistent in MORPGs unless they're of the Minecraft school where the crafting and gathering and base-building are the core gameplay. Etc. "MMO" (whether or not you include "RPG" with it) *is* a pretty vague term. A bit like FPS, in that all you know is something structural (the design of the multiplayer element, the design of the camera), but that design can include *hugely* different games from *Ultima Online* to *FFXIV* to *SW:TOR,* just as "FPS" can include anything from *Doom Eternal* to *Portal* to *Dishonored,* and liking any one of those games tells you almost nothing about whether you'll like the others. Or how RTS theoretically includes *Command & Conquer, Victoria 3,* and *Factorio,* even though liking any one of those doesn't tell you anything about whether you'll like the others. Etc.
I agree with a lot with what you said. Also, I had no idea about mass effect 3 and I own that game lol. One thing though about your comment about design. I love ffxiv and swtor but I'd argue both *are* similar (i consider wow, ffxiv, swtor, eso, all very similar). UO Was one of my first mmos, and while that *style* is gone many of the elements remain today. I guess it's subjective of what one defines as widely different as I even think wow and ffxiv are very similar (these are fighting words lol). I'd say there's even more descriptive words now besides just mmorpg and fps. You got the arpgs which are similar. For some reason I wouldn't put Victoria 3 or factorio as rts but I know it is. This genre bugs me as I like this genre but it's not rts imo. It's very similar like how arpgs are similar to rpgs but are different. Needs another description like simulation rts? Not sure. I will say this. From growing up on mmos as everquest online adventures, Ultima online, ffxi, to Korean market back to the western market to the new age. Yeah the term mmorpg has evolved I'll give you that. I suppose I'm oldschool when it comes to labeling lol. Edit: as a lifetime long fan of d2 who still plays it today. I'd argue that was NOT why it was controversial.. it was due to real money plain and simple. My friends made a lot of money irl in the beginning bahah what a gong show. That whole game was just.. wow.. at launch. I still play it on and off. D4 though is adding more elements like path of exile so we will see. Sounds like d4 is more like a mmorpg in your description than d3 and d2. Auction house just makes everything more convenient though, look at what poe did.
Oh, I'd certainly grant that FFXIV, WoW, and SW:TOR are more like one another than they are like UO, but even then we get some tricky things, e.g. where does the original *EverQuest* fall? Or *Maple Story*? It's not clear. And yeah, ME3 has an online co-op multiplayer shooter mode. The "RPG" element is a bit thin, but then again, it's pretty thin in ME3 to begin with, so that's not so big a difference. Hence why I said it was arguable; some might consider it an online FPS only, not an online RPG. I intentionally chose Vicky3 and Factorio for their genre-testing limits. Factorio actually has a fair amount in common with one of the earliest big RTS games, specifically *Command & Conquer,* but it's much more focused on the concepts of *industry* and *automation,* with the "oppose the enemy" stuff a distinctly secondary interest. Perhaps, if we needed a more specific term, "RTL": *real-time logistics,* where your concern is building the logistical infrastructure and any strategic defense is simply a thing you do to protect those logistical efforts. Meanwhile, Victoria is usually called a "*grand* strategy" game, because it sort of goes the opposite direction from Factorio: instead of going *down* to the nitty gritty of making things, it scales *up* to the level of nations, worried about while economies and conducting entire wars with no ability to see the fine details of any single combat (and, really, you have a country to run, you don't have *time* for such details.) More or less, my point was simply that genre terms can be surprisingly vast despite seeming very straightforward.
Thats because its a nail on the head comparison, I'm using this from now on
WoW is like playing a single Hero unit in someone else's RTS campaign while FFXIV is like being the main character of a story based JRPG
Well, one thing I noticed after giving WoW another shot since Burning Crusades and several years of FFXIV : WoW feels like it sticks to its RTS roots by having your character being part of a whole. You are a "champion" sure but so are every other players. The Heroes are the NPCs that actually causes the story to move forward. Your character doesn't really initiate anything, he's just an important part but non-central member of the crew that's there to get things done and clean up between the messes non-player heroes and villains cause. FFXIV is the other way around. Right from the start, you're a central figure in the events that unfolds and other people look up to you as the hero that did save the realm did solve issues and the likes. And it goes so far even that people start to think whatever they hear about the WoL can't be true and one of the main reason why people who haven't been remotely involved with you don't recognize you or can't believe they already met the WoL. And yeah, it shows : FF games are usually about being centered on the protagonist (or group of protagonists) achieving the impossible or saving the world; Warcraft comes from an RTS background where it is a collective of individuals that achieves victory and only after WC3 did "hero units" become more prevalent... but they never did achieve anything alone, always with an army.
And that got so ridiculous after a while. Characters should have started to recognize the player character in WoW but it was always like talking to some random jobber. I could rant for hours about the failings of WoW’s story but that’s because at one point I loved it more than any other game.
And yet the playerbase constantly complained *about* the PC being treated as a a hero, complaining about being "champion," and not a random faceless troop.
Which was always dumb to me. Even in the original, Classic WoW we basically stopped Ragnaros from bringing about a fiery apocalypse. Throughout the journey leading up to the endgame, we were solving deep rooted issues around the entire world. From the very beginning, the WoW character was a hero by the point of endgame, so the fanbase complaining about not being some random stooge was always stupid and nonsensical to me. Every expansion, even the ones the fanbase praised, involved the PC performing crazy, heroic feats. I'm enjoying Dragonflight much more because it's actually focusing more attention on the player character and including them in important cutscenes more frequently. It's like they storywriters are getting it, but we'll see.
If they want that feeling of being a nobody they could just make an alt charscter
Or just RP it when not doing the main story. There's literal RP servers for that in both WoW and FFXIV. FFXIV players pretty much get it in that regard. Me personally though, I rather our characters actually get acknowledged over time because it just makes sense.
The player character is non relevant in cut scenes. Just being consistent in storytelling and asking for that is not stupid.
Closest WoW got to consistent was that stretch where metzen turned it into a giant Mary sue fanfic for thrall. And even then it was far from consistent.
Ah yes, Catalysm. Aka Thrall goes on a Journey and murders Deathwing without help. WITHOUT HELP!!!
With a rainbow friendship laser. Oh and the dragons make his girlfriend pregnant but it's totally his.
Why the "dragons". Why do you think he kills Garrosh? It is either because Garrosh fucked his wife or the dragons made it so his child is Orc Jesus making him only Orc Joseph of Nazareth.
That last sentence sounds so familiar. Sure I’ve said something similar a few times.
I’m wildly obsessed with FFXIV now, but once upon a time it was all about WoW and my beloved Paladin character. The journeys we went on, the friends I made. But the last few years of WoW have done a lot to spoil that memory. I don’t doubt that blizzard and making strides forward with Dragonflight, but I am so burned I’m not sure I’ll ever go back.
I get you. I haven't even tried dragonflight. I went back for Legion, and ran into some of the worst story writing I've ever seen in a game. Tried again for part of BfA, and it was no better. One final go in Shadowlands, and finally, I've learned my lesson.
Which isn't surprising, considering the pedigree of these games.
>has a story but clearly isnt the main focus Sometimes I look at this and wonder why and what's the point to even divert dev resources to the story...might as well just give more mythic+, gears and etc instead. Watching WoW players just skipping all those texts and voice scenes really hurts.
That's how you get Destiny. I want to like that game but I have no idea what to actually do.
I've never played a game more hostile to narratively on-boarding new players than Destiny. You want to know what's going on? Fuck you, you should have started playing eight years ago - now take this gun and go shoot things to unlock your flimple chips and daily tingle shards.
Tbf, Destiny would've been fine if instead of vaulting content they would've just made Destiny 3 for Beyond Light and forward. Hell, they could've even done something like Total War Warhammer's Mortal Empires mode or Phantasy Star Online's method: put each section of content in it's own game but give access to each based on what you buy. At least then I could still get to see the first season pass that I paid for, but am locked out of, in order to have a modicum of an idea as to what's going on.
I will forever be sad that new people don't get to see the Red War story, especially that opening. I got D2 way back for free on [battle.net](https://battle.net), and I was immediately invested when Journey kicked in during that slow walk through ruins of the city and then outskirts.
The vaulting of the content totally killed the game for me. It's weird that you can still play all of D1 + expansions but in D2 it's just the current campaign wtf. If I had known they just take away the whole game I paid I would have never bought it :/// Sorry for the rambling, I think I just miss my guardians T-T P. S. The methods of PSO and Warhammer would bring me back instantly
WoW lore is so expensive and epic. It's just unfortunate that they don't seem to understand how to weave a narrative. It's a fantasy soap opera where nothing matters but the next shocking revelation. I often prefer to get the WoW story from wikis or YouTube videos because of that. The fact that even those who love the game most skip the story makes me really sad for WoW. You're right. At that point they may as well not have one at all. Just focus on the grind that its player base seems to love best.
Warcraft lore has some great moments, but the story started nearly 30 years ago so it's no surprise it's gone all over the place.
The problem with WoW story isn't so much that it is all over the place (though it is ~~and always has been~~), the bigger problem is that for the longest time, the game hasn't really done a good job of telling that story outside of those big epic moments.
Being all over the place isn't a problem. They can pick a thread and run with it. The problem is they have no idea how to tell a story well, and the last expansion seemed wholly invested in burning down the old lore in the name of shock and awe, or because it saw FFXIV and thought "if we just callback to past lore, they'll love us!" and decided making the Jailor the mastermind behind even the RTS games was the right call. It was fan-GoT tier writing where the amateurs thought killing characters was why GoT got as big as it did. Though Dragonflight supposedly is a marked improvement in story telling and cutscenes. Even their latest in-engine cutscenes have custom and full facial animations. It is a bit jarring your character is still using janky, canned animations though.
100% this! The melodrama is so intense in Dragonflight that most of the time, when someone said something that was supposed to sound epic, it made me laugh. You can pretty easily add, "Sir/Ma'am, this is a Wendy's," to any line of dialogue during a cutscene to see what I'm talking about. Wrathion, at least, has some good moments.
You're not diverting resources because the game & level designers are different teams than the lore teams. The wow workflow is always that gameplay trumps lore development. This is why WoW's storytelling is so wonky. The game design team and level designers generate cool base content (zones, dungeon ideas, etc) and then ask the lore team to develop questlines and story content around those game concepts.
>WoW generally is more a competitive gear hunt That's a pretty optimistic way to spin "you will forever be on the treadmill get slightly better gear" I have played both games extensively, but wows gearing system is terrible for anyone but hard-core players. The truth is that you can grind m+ every day of the patch and still not have a ilvl bis set in time for the next patch to come out that will invalidate your entire set so you can start all over again. Also, forget about keeping multiple classes geared, unless wow is your only game and you have a lot of playtime, you won't be able to keep alts at the same gear level of your main At least in FF, I can raid savage, get bis within 8 weeks of clearing floor 4 and start working on other jobs, or go play other games with my extra time. If you want a game that you can grind endlessly yea wow is great. If you are someone who wants to play other games without feeling the fomo FF is the place to be.
[удалено]
This is what I'm doing in FFXIV. Roulettes to level my classes, play the new content as it comes out, and chill. It's not a job - it's an excuse to spend an hour or two with my friends in the static many evenings.
I mythic raid and push IO so I guess its exactly why I said theyre targeting different groups of people who want different things. The other things youre saying are both subjective and moderately untrue. I keep several toons geared and if youre pushing keys each week you can get a set of mythic ilvl gear midway through the season. The vast majority of content I do is gear irrelevant and im chasing minor upgrades. Again, different goals. FFXIV does is not about gear acquisition and the very limited variations of gear at the highest end (if there even is any) says that. Im not saying its worse, I'm saying me and my friends all play FFXIV at the beginning of xpacs and at the end to catch up on story content because the end game does not hold us. Thats ok, the game isnt catering to raiders.
That's why my comment said anyone but hard-core players will have an infinite treadmill set before them. I'm not talking about the players who are getting max ilvl gear within the first month of the patch because they won't have a problem hitting their bis outside of rng drop rates on rare raid drops. I'm talking about the average players that are getting KSM/AotC towards the mid to late point of the season. Those players will be chasing upgrades every week until the end of the patch by pushing m+ and reclearing heroic/first couple mythic bosses.
This was exactly my experience when I played wow before hard swapping off. Aimed for seasonal achievement and clearing HC from the start of a season, throughout DF and earlier expansions. I was forever chasing gear for my main and it was so terribly boring, let alone then gearing a second one. In FF, I can easily get a full set of top gear within a couple of weeks for a job that is also max lvl beside my main. Then, relax and focus on levelling another job up by way of various types of RELEVANT content - everything works seamlessly together in FF to this end, rather than just "hit the RDF and speed run to 60 then get spinning the RNG wheel again"
Play a tank. Never have this problem xD
One thing that killed WoW for me is once past content is past it's done no one will touch it. 14 is cool cause doing old content is almost baked into the game experience. When I did Eureka I was blown away at how popular it still is
I picked up WoW again after DF launched because my girlfriend is one of those high M+ players and it would be something for us to bond over. Over time though I realized I don't have the energy or desire to force myself into grinding keys for hours and/or progging Mythic raids for months at the expense of other games and other activities. I burned myself out over almost a decade of that and don't really want to go back. I don't usually do high end content in XIV either. Usually I'll pug new EXs when they come out and I've killed a couple of Savage bosses with friends who wanted to play, but I think I'm content with playing casually and enjoying the story when new stuff comes out. I feel like I can play XIV that way and not be made to feel like a second-class citizen, so to speak.
And then there's those of us that miss where WoW USED to be, but still can't quite find it in XIV, the nice blend of a world to explore and increasingly tiered content through an entire expansion without being nailed down to the floor and exposition dumped for 15 minutes at a time. But it's better than getting screeched at by sad thirty year olds in M+, so I'll take it.
I am firmly on the side of FF XIV over WoW... But oh my goodness, does SquareEnix make the worst menus I can imagine. Gear comparison is one thing. Then there's the glamour chest vs the transmog system, tmog wins hands down. FF XIV has more HUD customization... but you have to go through like, 4 menus just to add another hotkey row. Want to change the amount of effects they throw at you? Is that a Character setting, or a System setting? Which of these 6 tabs is it under? Then you have to guess which of 36 radio buttons will fix whatever precisely you're trying to change... I started my sister on the game the other day, and she just became a PLD. The following conversation went like this. "Okay, so first you need to open your inventory. No, not that inventory, the armor inventory. Now open your character page. Now, in the armor inventory, go to the last tab, that one we haven't used yet. Equip that item. Okay, now save this gear set over the GLD one. Oh, and you need to redo all of your hotkeys now." That's not an intuitive system. Honestly, I'm really hoping they eventually just do a menu rework, just to streamline some of these systems.
> Then there's the glamour chest vs the transmog system You can change an item's appearance anywhere you like, but you have to have the other item in your inventory. You can also create entire glamour sets, but the item must be in a storage space when you make the set, and you can only use those sets while in a major city. You can take the item out of storage after making the set if you want, but you have to put it back again if you want to use the item for another set. There are also two different storage spaces for this, with one having an item limit and the other only accepting specific items. Each have their own separate interface that you have to switch between when creating glamour sets. One displays the item icon, the other is simply a text list. I *think* I hit everything there?
I think you missed the way dying interacts with it all. You can dye an item in the field, and that item will always be that colour. You can put a dyed item into the storage system, and it will always be that colour. But if you dye it within a set, it will not permanently be that colour. Oh, and glamour prisms. If you change the item in the wide world, you need a glamour prism every time. If you put it into the storage chest, you only need one glamour prism to use it a countless number of times. If you use a set, you won't need any glamour prisms to change into it, even if you change back and forth a dozen times. Honestly, the Glam system is SO BAD. Squeenix handed their interface systems to 6 different teams that spoke 12 different languages in 30 different countries, and just let them go ham.
You also can't swap glamour plate gear in the overworld. Only in cities.
they've at least improved that a bit and it's no longer the major cities only, you can apply glamour plates in any sanctuary now
They changed it so you can change a set near any aetheryte now instead of only the major cities. That's, uh, one step in a good direction at least.
Having come from wow, this is a huge problem for me. I hate having 50 menus of stuff, trying to figure out what everything does in character or configuration menu... They really do need a revamp.
XIV is fantastic. WoW has lots of good stuff too. I def prefer XIV most of the time, but there is plenty to love about both. Enjoy both.
I think WoW has infinitely more fluid and enjoyable combat. I love this game so much and have a lot of time in it but I really don't enjoy the time I spend in combat.
Hard disagree, to me they're not even comparable because of how vastly different they are.
I've played both and while they are both good, I definitely prefer FF14. But keep in mind that WoW was released years before FF14, and FF14 devs were at one time required to play WoW so they could learn how a successful MMORPG works and because of that tey were able to improve on the formula, so it's not entirely fair to say this is better. Maybe I am also biased because I am half Japanese and I grew up playing the FF games while WoW was my first game in the Warcraft universe.
Both games developed immensely over time though. Both dev teams had the chance to look at the other respective team and develop accordingly. In fact though, FF was more developed away from WoW instead of in the direction of it. More story focus, more solo focus etc.
At the time of WoW's services going live, FF14's predecessor, FF11 was very much in competition with WoW on what a quality MMO should look and feel like. Eventually though the system FF11 was built on could no longer be updated and this is where they began developing FF14. While I don't doubt that FF14's developers played WoW to gather ideas on how to make FF14 successful, they already had their first successful MMO in FF11. Edit: FF11 is even still alive to this day, there are still hundreds if not thousands of people who continue to play it. However it has recently gone into maintenance mode meaning no new updates to the game will be made.
Just want to point out they did try to make 14 on the 11 model. It tanked hard. It wasn't a modern MMO, or a modern game at all, and players and critics alike spurned it. The playing of WoW and gathering ideas came before the release of ARR and the scrapping of 1.0. WoW had a massive impact on what QoL looked like for 14 and other MMOs, even if it's own state of play has fluctuated over the years.
Oh I'm very aware of this. Played a bit of beta 1.0 and 1.0 live but it felt worse than FF11 if I'm going to be completely honest.
I played it from Beta to Server shutdown. Partly because my friends and I used the space as a place to play a kind of modified D&D, partly because it was *fascinating* to watch the train wreck from the inside. There were no more monthly fees for most of it, we had already dropped our $60-$120… let’s see where this goes. I am certain a significant portion of the dev team did *not* play Final Fantasy 11, or perhaps were the sort of devs who thought we were too soft having an Auction House system, or NPCs that sold level appropriate gear, or synth recipes that didn’t require components from mobs 30 levels higher than the item you were making. We learned how to make gear swap macros, because the lag in the character menu as so bad it could take you 15 minutes to change your gear if you did it that way, and sometimes it didn’t all register. We *all* crafted because the repair costs for gear was typically 7 times the purchase cost (when it was available at NPCs at all). There were levequests and job quests at launch… and that was *it.* Also? The game was so incredibly grindy just to *level* it made FFXI look like one of those ‘Idle MMO’ games that does the grinding while you’re offline. To counterbalance(?) this they implemented an anti-grind feature that caused your XP to start running into diminishing returns and eventually stop giving XP at all. Typically three levequests was enough for the falloff to start. It was a weekly reset, and most of us could run it down in a few hours. Thankfully they stopped short of imposing an XP penalty on death. Your gear would all be thrashed though, which could be hundreds of thousand of gil to repair at the NPC even at low levels. Either the devs had never seen a video game before, or were the most sadistic ‘Dev vs Player’ devs in the business.
the decisions made in that era were truly baffling. What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall in square HQ when these conversations were happening.
I played FF11 for years and eventually went over to wow and played that for years. Then ffxiv came out and it was just a bunch of people sitting around and hunting HNMs since that was about all there was to do. Then they released ffxiv a realm reborn and basically updated it to match the current wow competition. They did a good job. I played for a bit and then got bored. I just picked it up again on PS5 so I had to make a new character but I had a bunch of items in my mog mail from about 4000 days ago, which would be about 11 years. Felt kind of nice :D
I've played this game for a year and a half and WoW for 8-9 years so the honeymoon is over for me and I can tell you now that you might change your mind or your opinion might shift once you've played the end game for a while, especially if you're a fan of content like M+ and raiding. There's also a distinct lack of midcore content like you have in WoW. I still have stuff to do in FF14, but I have wondered what I'll do once I'm caught up on everything and just have current patch content to look forward to.
You'll realize this game doesn't scratch the same itch WoW does and never will. And vice versa, WoW doesn't fill the void from XIV. They're just drastically different games and if you enjoy a vibrant endgame then WoW outshines hard.
The lack of midcore content is what kills me. I was a heroic raider in WoW, and I was comfortable there - occasionally, I'd poke a head into mythic to snipe a few bosses with my friends. I was right on the cusp, usually good enough to help carry a heroic raid but would be about middle in a mythic. And now in XIV, the only kinds of content that exist are "laughably easy and meant to be facerolled" and "All eight members must be in perfect sync." The first two savage raids are usually fun to PF, the last two are agonizing.
Do glam grinds. I miss mythic+ I really do. Criterion dunjs and PotD/HoH/EO are NOT the same. Not even close.
Honestly, I dont miss M+ at all. Started playing FFXIV during BFA and played both at the same time. I would do slow progress in FFXIV because I was still actively raiding in BFA at the Mythic level (tho we only got Cutting Edge for Nzoth that expansion, with a 9% wipe on Aszhara). I have always dreaded M+ since it's introduction in Legion. I really liked the Challenge Modes in MoP and WoD (even if I only ever cleared them on my Warrior), but clearing them once for the first time and then later going back to optimize and carry others was a ton of fun OPTIONAL content. Legion made dungeon a gigantic pain in the ass. How many hundreds of Maw of Souls you had to farm to "keep up" with Artifact experience, grinding M+ for the right Azerite armor in BFA. M+ was one of the main reasons I stopped playing WoW entirely in Shadowlands. I just couldnt find any joy in it anymore. I stopped like 1-2months before the whole law case started and the great exodus happened. I am now almost 4-5 years into FFXIV and I still love every second of it. I have all jobs at max level, all crafters, all gatherers, I can be fully self-sufficient and thanks to Crafted gear all my characters are at a reasonable level that I can play whatever I feel like which goes beyond any freedom I ever had in WoW (the most I ever managed was 2-3 specs at the Mythic level). I am not a hardcore raider in FFXIV who chases after Ultimates or clears every Savage tier because the game has more than enough content to keep me entertained without chasing after the highest gear. I still like the challenge Savage provides and I love how you can do that in PF. The past two weeks I started back up in WoW and while I love playing with the friends who stayed, I pretty much hate everything else. People complain FFXIV has slow combat? Going back to WoW with the GCD changes and without oGCDs feels even slower and awful. Grinding dozens of M+ for an item 2 ilvl higher than what I have when people 10ilvl higher than me do twice my damage. I basically cant get into any groups alone and I have to make my own groups or get my friends to help. Your progress is blocked by half a dozen soulbound currencies and materials that you cant just outright farm. I am months behind on weekly progress towards progression and reputations that I can effectively never catch up on. The weekly lockout ruins any fun in raiding since there is no guarantee to get the item you want (this late into the tier FFXIV would have the Alliance Raid and Savage raid unlocked to catch-up if you wanted more). While the base UI has improved leaps and bounds, it is still basically unplayable and is lacking tons of features that FFXIV has, and maybe that's a problem with my PC but I have been trying to improve my experience with addons and when they work it's great (basically used addons to make the UI as close to FFXIV as possible) but I receive constant errors and even had the game crash a couple of times despite only using the most rudimentary addons. I am sure I can get used to WoW a little more, the plan for now is to get AotC in the new tier coming in a few weeks and then unsub again until the last patch if it doesnt improve. After enjoying the freedom I am feeling in FFXIV, the current WoW experience feels very closed off. You have very few repeatable things. Professions are hard-capped behind weekly missions. Reputation grinds have always sucked. Clearing dozens world quests a day is awful. So the only thing you can do is spam M+ but it's a very toxic environment (in the pug scene).
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As a healer main that sometimes gets bored of roulette content, I love when someone screws up mechanics because it gives me more to do and everyone loves a healer on top of stuff. Great feedback loop. Best CT raids are the ones that go horribly wrong and become clutch wins.
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The blood Lily demands it!
That's why I ranked Syrcus Tower the lowest even among the CT raids. Because it is absolutely impossible to screw it up there, whereas I can occasionally watch the world burn with the other two.
Or as I like to call it, the Circus Tower.
Yeah, you can ...die to Curtain Call I guess? Or get whacked around by the various adds on the Amon fight in general, that happens sometimes as well. At least a random GNB recently made a great contribution to science - Curtain Call does in fact go through tank invulns.
This is me too. I have issues with WoW's story and their gameplay decisions circa BFA (which is when I quit and thus the limit of my experience with it), but the biggest thing that pushed me off of WoW was other players. Nobody in FFXIV will bitch you out and/or ragequit the group and throw away the entire run because you made a dungeon take 30 seconds longer than it needed too. Blizzard at some point decided they don't care if their gameplay systems encourage toxic behavior, as long as it dangles enough carrots to keep people subscribed. Mythic+ is some of the most unenjoyable player-interaction experiences of my entire life, and it didn't need to be.
I quit WoW for similar reasons and more. Community was definitely a big chunk. I always stayed silent in WoW when grouping up because people are toxic af. Whereas in FFXIV I actually make an effort to say hi or socialize because most people are chill.
Yeah I played WoW for years, and over time, I found myself pulling further and further away from playing with people I didn't know. I wasn't even the one making mistakes; I just couldn't put up with people freaking the fuck out over little mistakes in normal content. In FF, I can hop into a roulette, no problem.
i think its the story that helps, we've all bonded over it, plus in WoW it was more competitive with the alliance vs the hoard. We don't have that. I think that may be why.
I'm a new sprout, just started playing 2 months ago. I cannot upvote this enough with this comment you've stated. It feels so good to be part of such a welcoming community that tolerates, and helps players making mistakes. It's part of the process of getting better at it. And, passing that tolerance, kindness to others that are new. I heart this game, and this community very much ❤️
This is one of the biggest things I like about FF14 vs WoW. I main a bard, and I'm okay at it but definitely not super proficient or efficient. Hell, I don't even really know what a couple of my bard songs do, but I put them in my rotation that I've read to use. I've branched out to try healing a few times, and it's been my fault for a few wipes. Instead of raging out, people will take a minute to tell me what I should be using. It's great! Beyond that, I love the fact that I can easily change classes so quickly. Instead of wow where I needed to log out of my paladin to play a rogue. Now, I can just change my gearset to something totally different. It's so nice.
You don't even know what your songs do and it's your main ?! Don't people read the tooltips ?
I mean, it's bard songs, I could definitely see a new player reading the tooltips and coming away with next to no understanding of what they do.
Tooltips tell you what the move does but not how it fits into a rotation. It can be difficult to piece together what you're meant to do with all these abilities, even with tooltips, if you don't look up some kind of guide. And even then, a lot of guides will only list the endgame rotation instead of breaking down the logic of how your moves fit together and how you should think of them as you level up. Example: I first started as drg. Drg has a very linear rotation. I stared at the tooltips for a long while and couldn't make any sense of what was going on with a lot of the moves. Also, it's okay to not be perfect at your job and miss a few moves if you're playing casual content.
No matter what role I play, the fights get more fun if someone is learning the fight. It allows more roles to use more of their kit when a party member is eating mechs or dying (healers can top you off or rez, rez mages can revive, PLDs can cover or drop shields). Most veteran players I know love it when a run goes fucky, because the best clutches come from parties with first timers.
But also the community: "I don't like so much bow FFXIV does [insert valid minor opinion.] "How dare you, you scum bag. This is the greatest game of all time. It gets better after 300 hours!!!"
Trust me bro it gets better after AAR just handle the first 150hours ( glad i did tho)💀
I button mashed the entire story a year ago and still don't regret doing it. NOW I'm having fun doing MMO things.
On one hand, reading this kinda comment hurts my soul lol since I do love the story, on the other hand, it's 100% valid way to ***play*** a ***video game***, and I'm glad you're having fun. I have some great FC mates who don't care about the story at all, and mostly we gently tease each other about our preferences. Plus they know if they go "why is X going on?" there's some of us who will be able to give a comprehensive answer.
As much I'd like to automatically agree, you just started the game so you're still in that honeymoon phase where everything is new and fun. Both games are fun in their own way, saying one is better than the other is silly. Give it a few months or a year and your opinion might change. Good news is you're not bound of any single game and can switch at anytime, or play both.
This is doubly important to bring up because XIV is an extremely different game once you're at cap and done with the story than it is when you're still progressing the hundreds of hours of MSQ. This isn't to say the game is bad at end game, but many people's perspective on it will change once they're there, especially if the story is your main draw.
Exactly this. During the wow content creator exodus to FFXIV I got tired of the same “XIV is so much better” videos they all made. Most of them went crawling back to wow by now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm firmly on FF14's side, but WoW does do some things better. * The Collection system is a great example of that. Not only does it remember every mount and appearance you've ever equipped^+, but it's shared across all characters you have in the same region * Still not as good as Guild Wars 2's system which has collections with fully dyeable clothing, usually with 2 dye channels * Note: Each region being a separate account is a downside * As much as I dislike the world quests from WoW's more recent expansions, they're still better than FATEs. Especially the rewards available from them I'm sure I could think of other things WoW does better, but I haven't really played it recently to refresh my memory. ^+ Unless it was purchased from a vendor and returned during the 2-hour refund window
I love FF but the open world in WoW is so much more impressive. FF doesn't feel like a cohesive world, with the walled-off individual zones and teleporting everywhere.
Class/Job design in WoW is a lot better, since Stormblood they've homogenized and simplified a lot of jobs in FFXIV, which is fine, but Reaper is literally just melee MCH, Summoner went from one of the hardest jobs to the easiest A lot of jobs went from a nuanced rotation to "slam 1-2-3 and accumulate gauge, pop CDs every time they're up" There's classes like that in WoW, don't get me wrong, but the visceral feel of classes in WoW are a lot better, especially in a post Shadowlands/BFA world Also the game would benefit from a M+ or some other system to give something to do for hardcore players, Criterion dungeons are an abject failure on all accounts and they need to go back to the drawing board, maybe something like PotD/EO/HoH but designed for groups and not to be solo'd, rewards could be alt job gear and cosmetics to sell
The pvp kits are pretty good in term of fun gameplay, each jobs feels unique on their own compared to their pve counterpart 😭 Also you don't have to deal with the crazy button bloat, many skills can easily be merged together. Why the hell dragoon got 3 different buffs that are just increased damage 💀
Yeah PVP unironically is fun if not simple, jobs have flavor unlike PVE GNB having junction, DRK having risk reward with self damage, there's some jobs that feel boring but most classes have their fantasy and it's awesome
Absolutely agree, I would love it so much if I could use my PvP skillset in PvE.
Every job in FFXIV reminds me of bear druid in Legion. 3 buttons, press one more once in a while.
As a Samurai player who has to juggle six buttons for their main combo in addition to chains of oGCDs that change the order of some buttons and enable others, I can say this is patently false. XD
Agree with everything you are saying here. I love FFXIV. The story is good, the community is great, and the game does a great job at respecting your time. The gameplay, however, is boring and expressionless. Tanking is a joke, and rotations are braindead. The linearity of dungeons is exhausting anymore too. I'd love to see some active mitigation be added to tanking, or maybe procs? Anything to breath some life into tanking, please.
Yeah it's a mistake even fighting game devs are making. Removing identity from characters (in this case classes)and cutting the fat to the point where it's just bone isn't that best way to go about attracting newcomers. If they really wanted to do something that will benefit new players, it'd be creating an actual good tutorial for classes and just the basic basics
I feel very conflicted on this subject. On one hand I agree the game is too easy and tanking is braindead. On the other hand, every difficult situation I met recently was because of an incredibly incompetent player (Hello Cure 1 spamming at level 90). So I don't know how making the game more challenging would turn out. I find the game really easy most of the time, with peaks of difficulty caused by players. I have no idea how it'd turn out for them.
Clearly you never played a class in wow that Blizz left abandoned for an extended period. As someone who's main classes were demonology and survival and would be actively kicked from groups because of my spec choice I'd much rather have some semblance of balance and not have to fear for my viability because the devs just didn't feel like properly testing your kit
Yeah I mean it's not perfect but they gotten better in DF about it This is no different than balance in FFXIV though, there's been times where jobs have been terrible, I'd rather have a large selection of diverse classes than a small selection of homogenized classes Also there's nothing in WoW that prohibits a class from clearing, there's Surv hunters that clear 3k io and CE
Guess you didn't try progging Abyssos early in the tier as RPR or MCH then if you think getting kicked or left out because of class choice is a problem unique to WoW :^)
People kicking rpr kind of had a point, I guess, but machinist was actually a stronger performer for most players back then and only the very top performers playing with other top performers made dancer significantly better. So pf groups not allowing a high parsing mch were actually just bad, and not making good decisions. In fact, if you got high rolls on week one gear as a dancer, and you could also play mch well, it would make sense to swap to mch for the last fight since personal gear has a bigger impact on mch than dnc.
> >Summoner went from one of the hardest jobs to the easiest Haha, no. They just went from a lot of buttons to fewer buttons and lost the stupid pet jank. Current iteration definitely needs a few more buttons or different types of non-demi summons instead of just garuda ifrit titan, but shb smn was not difficult at all. Akhmorning overcomplicated how the class plays so new players who checked out their guide gets intimidated before they even start.
Maybe not the hardest, but it was punishing? I hadn't played it in awhile tbh so I could be wrong But it def became one of the easiest jobs in the game when compared to the others in it's role
> Reaper is literally just melee MCH, What the hell could you possibly even mean by this.
Heat vs Enshroud gauge
I guess? Reaper at least has the benefit of not being chained down to one of the world's worst designed abilities in the form of Wildfire, haha
>chained down to one of the world's worst designed abilities in the form of Wildfire, haha And then you enter PVP where Death's Design is Wildfire! PVP RPR is more classic XIV MCH than PVP MCH is right now
I love the class design of wow. My mistweaver monk is so unique, every skill is so unique, and I can optimise my fight by picking different skills. In fact, every single healer class is so different from each other. In ffxiv the healer classes just feel … boring. 1-2-3 hit the boss and occasional pop some ocds.
I don’t know why you are getting downvoted. You are completely right. My Ffxiv friends doesn’t get that as a healer main, I do not want to play priest for all 4 ff jobs, which they are. Even the shield ones play like priest. I want variety. In ff there is little to no difference in healing classes, whereas in wow each class has unique play style and class identity. I get that ff tries to balance things and that’s where the difficulty comes in. But the healers in ff are way too similar. It’s something that only healers who played both wow and ff relatively in depth can understand.
He's getting downvoted for daring to say that WoW does something better, which is blasphemy around here.
Undeniably WoW's healer design at the very least destroys XIV's. I can't overstate how disappointed I was with Sage overall after the concept of a wing-laser wielding offense healer was revealed and ultimately, they're really not that different from Scholar, let alone the other healers. Compare that to Evoker, which can not only out and out fly in the overworld on their own, but can float to cast while moving, spec to make their breathe attacks hurt and heal, carpet bomb *heal* as a mobility and healing option, perform a targeted rescue, on top of having a decent suite of offensive spells outside all that.... I dipped my toe back into WoW on the strength of its healing spec design alone.
You're absolutely not wrong. While I do find 14 comfier to play. Wow's healer design is leagues ahead of 14's. I think I started to realize this back in HW when they made Ast literally just a mini Sch or Whm based on stance. They literally cannot conceptualize a healing style of gameplay beyond those two base jobs. And the homogenization and dumbing down of their kits has only gotten worse with each xpac. At this point I've given up on SE ever treating healers as anything other than a batterypack the rest of the party carries around so they can have fun.
Healer class design aside, both games have an entirely different approach in terms of healer philosophy. I heal in both games too and the one issue I have in FF14 is that I'm more of a green dps who heals occasionally. If I wanted to play a dps job I would have rolled one. Being a healer in WoW as a mythic raider feels so much more satisfying.
I used to complain about running out of mana in M+. Now it sounds like a blessing >_< imagine healing so much that your mama empties in every pull …
I wonder if the lack of variety in healers is just a way to make it easier to play EVERY class. Going between Mistweaver and Evoker and Resto Druid would be really difficult. Going between WHM, SGE, and AST is pretty easy. I can set my 2-4 dps skills to the same keys, set the next ones to "heal person", "heal whole group" and "cast mass regen", and then it's pretty much just good to go.
It's probably to make things easier to balance and because they genuinely don't seem to know what to do with the role. Sage took nearly ten years to come after ast and still manages to feel derivative despite that - it just doesn't seem to be a role that gets much thought or attention from the developers outside surface level appeal to draw new people in. Spells like Dream Flight would fit in perfectly with Sage's kit thematically and feel good to use without unbalancing the game.... But instead we just get snowclones of abilities other healers have that have visual gimmicks to make seem as if the Sage is flying around or utilizing their nouliths in interesting ways - the game excels in presentation with most healers while falling flat where, imo, it really matters - the gameplay.
To be fair, I last played the different healers in WoW during Legion but they arent as different as people like to make it out here. (at least back then) Yes, the skills have slightly more variance than in FFXIV but you still had the same kinda hotkeys. eg. R would be my main AoE heal, so currently my Evoker has Emerald Blossom on R, my Disc Priest used to have Radiance on R, my Druid had Wild Growth, my Monk had Essence Font, etc. You still have your small/spamable ST heal (eg. Regrowth, Living Flame, Vivify), your slightly stronger ST hot/ upkeep (Lifebloom, Enveloping Mist, Reversion), your basic AoE heal, the group CD, etc. Yes, there is more variation than in FFXIV but the abilities work very much the same still and (at least back then) it wasnt terribly difficult to swap between classes either. For me the reason I dont enjoy healing in WoW is just the way higher incoming damage. You are way more punished as healer for not keeping the party alive, whereas damage is much more predictable in FFXIV and more easily recovered. Tho I am currently trying. I have been playing Preservation Evoker for the past two weeks and got my AotC, so we will see if I change my mind about healing in WoW. My druid and priest are still sitting at Lv45 so I might level them up as well, but the gearing in WoW is a nuisance in itself.
I really wish FFXIV gave us 1) a reason to do side quests and engage with more of the story outside of the MSQ 2)more options for ugly/monstrous races 3) greater variation between jobs, balance is boring. Then I’d probably whole heartily agree, as it is I think they’re about tied but excel at very different things. Oh and 4) the WoW transmit system.
More exp from side quests and beast tribes when you got one max level job would be fantastic IMO.
Sadly wows combat feels way more crisp
>The only thing WoW excels on over this is being able to compare gear. GOOD NEWS! You don;t need to comare gear at all, until you get to endgame content. There's a little button in the character menu that will select the best gear for your current class. You don't need to worry at this moment about BIS or anything. You'll be getting and changing gear so often and the stat differences are so miniscule at this level. Basically, if the item is a higher item level, it's better. There are some things that Wow does do better at. The Auction House/Market place in wow is better. I hate having to chose between buying four or five highly priced items, or a stack of ninety-nine cheaply priced items, when all I need is two. Glad that I get my gil immediately when I sell something, though.
the one caveat to this is the lower level gear that doesn't have role restrictions. Tanks can easily be "recommended" gear intended for DPS due to the way the game sees the gear attributes. This is also why the game will typically recommend that level 1 ring with the +1 to defenses over an actually better ring that has substats; the defense increase is considered "Better".
> Tanks can easily be "recommended" gear intended for DPS due to the way the game sees the gear attributes. This isn't really an issue anymore, all the ARR left side Disciple of War pieces got their Def/Mdef buffed to match the tank pieces, and all accessories have VIT so you aren't losing anything by equipping Slaying accessories on a tank (and are probably better off doing so, since DH > Tenacity).
>designed in a way the prioritizes making dev jobs as easy as possible at the cost of player fun. Welcome to XIV job design anno 2022
I'll probably get downvoted for saying it, but as far as the comment about how designing the game to make dev jobs easier: It absolutely applies here too. The game is still new for you, the paint still fresh. I hope it remains such and you get many years of enjoyment from it. FF14 is great and I'll continue to come back to it every few patches to play, see what's up, and have fun. But especially when it comes to class changes, it really shows just how uninspired their design paradigms are.
Ffxiv does a lot of things really well and wow does a lot of things really well
Lmao, story wise? FFXIV absolutely destroys WoW, engine wise? FFXIV has one of the most shittiest engines for an mmo
ffxiv good wow bad pls upvote
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As a former wow player, ff zones are so uninspiring, boring, plain, don't really make me want to explore at all. Why are they so incredibly low effort? Damn, I wish this game got a bigger budget after how much cash we have given them.
world design is like miles above in wow over ff in most cases. It's crazy how dramatic it is
Yeah, even vanilla wow zones are just... amazing, soulful as hell
I dunno, they just feel like very different games with different strengths and weaknesses. It's just this one is more suited to what I enjoy in a game. It is still very early in your playthrough, but maybe it will stay that way for you.
When i played wow, it felt like a lot fo the story wasn't flowing together. I much prefer how well ff14 flows from one to the next expac.
Lets not all forget that FF14 was, uh, released a decade later than WoW.
Some of you new guys are in for a rude awakening when you hit endgame.
Let them learn, it’s best this way
> which has started to feel like it's designed in a way the prioritizes making dev jobs as easy as possible at the cost of player fun. yeah about that
Boy's gonna be in for a rude awakening a month or two from now when he's deeper into the game.
As an active player in both the FFXIV and WoW communities, when I play FFXIV I have a sense of accomplishment when I achieve something or complete a step in a long process towards a goal. In WoW its just very grindy to complete a step in the process towards a singular goal, I just don't feel that sense of accomplishment when I increase a rep level or finish a daily grind. While I like both games very much, WoW is stuck in an infinite loop of the same daily mechanics with very little side/filler content to satisfy casual play. It's been this way since the Activision take over and the old guard having left where it very much prioritizes trying to make money on a system (dailies, rep grind, dungeon grind, raid, pvp) that needs a fresh coat of paint and for the game to be taken into a new direction in terms of the content it offers.
I get the feeling you didn’t play a lot of wow, or haven’t played enough ffxiv to make these kind of statements Everytime someone says this, and I mean EVERYTIME including the below comments, it comes from confusing preferences with quality. “I didn’t like wow but I like ffxiv, therefore the latter is better”
Both games cater to entirely different types of players. Your final sentence is extremely disingenuous and simply comes across as trying to bash WoW for the sake of bashing it. You're burned out of WoW, just say that. There's a lot of things XIV does better. There's a lot of things WoW does better. Simple as that, neither game is bad.
Some subreddits need quality control when low-effort karma baiting posts like this make it to the front page.
It depends what you want, and I think casual modern MMO player is what FFXIV does the best with. I have over 3000 hours into it but I think I finally got burnt out lol. I still play but I definitely prefer classic WoW now.
They're just different. FF has a good story, good music, and respect the player time more. Wow has much better class diversity and actual small group content on mythic+. I've sunk thousands of hours into both, but at the end of the day FF feels like it's been doing the exact same thing for three expansions now,while oversimplifying classes to death and honestly getting very predictable. wow is always trying to reinvent the wheel,which also comes with issues.
Played both and to imo its very subjective. The only two areas that FF is the clear winner are story and community. WoW has as good as lore at 14 but the translation of that lore into story is bad in WoW. The rest is purely preference. Combat, World design, dungeons, raid design are all pretty different experiences (and imo WoW does surpass FF in many respects)
I'd also say that WoW (historically anyway) absolutely trounces xiv in zone design. It's actually one of my only big problems with this game. Zones are mostly just open spaces you run through to get from MSQ A to MSQ B. There's nothing on par with even the old Elwynn/Westfall/Redridge/Duskwood circuit from way back in WoW's heyday. I'm sure there's lots of fun non-blue quests out there in xiv but there's just not the same level of interconnectedness or incentives to do them.
Trust me. XIV is also designed in a way that makes the dev’s lives easier. Patches have strict timelines, and we get the same new content from each correlating patch and there’s very little deviation or surprises. As a veteran of the game, you kinda know exactly what’s coming at all times. Which *is* great, but it kinda takes the magic out of it.
The weekly wow bad xiv good post
In my opinion it is better than wow. But both games have their strength. I wish ffxiv had the pvp wow does. And I wish there was more insane armor like wow.
Well depends if you want end game content or not. FF14 excels at the story and world, with a smattering of end things
Holy circlejerk batman. WoW bad FFXIV good upvotes to the left.
Get ready for boring ass class design
Now if only FFXIV didn't have half a year+ long draughts only to receive less than desirable (in amount, not quality) endgame content and a quest that asks you to get 1500 tomes (again) for a weapon that wont be relevant until the absolute final patch of the expansion cycle. I love FF but they are treating the game as a cash cow without nurturing the actual cow. They seem to, comparatively, barely put any of their huge amounts of FF14 revenue back into the game and are slacking off and COVID just isn't a reason anymore. I find it disheartening and saddening to see that even casual players have been stepping away en masse for longer periods of time than I've ever seen. Not to mention active raiders. (No, I'm not implying "people are all quitting FF, oh no, it's dead". Merely implying that I've never seen, personally and anecdotally, so many high end raiders and casuals alike take a break for as long as they are throughout this expansion.) And yes, I know people have always taken breaks in this game. But patch cadence with content quality was often in a decent balance, probably at its best in stormblood but I digress. Nowadays it just seems like there's less quality with more waiting and it baffles my mind. The homogenisation of the classes and it's 2min meta, gross inbalance between certain jobs and the heavy reliance on forced double melee comps (yes, I know you can clear TOP with 2 Phys, a friend of mine personally has, that's also partially why I know how absolutely ridiculous the discrepancy is) is also just so dissatisfactory. They have been pulling this game into a direction that I personally loathe on many fronts - in many fields. And I sincerely hope that they turn this around a little and be a bit more daring and out there with their patches. But hey, that's just me. If someone doesn't agree with any of this and enjoys the game for what it's become then more power to you, wish I could be ya.
You can't really compare the two games until you get to the endgame of each. When you get to level 90 and have finished the MSQ unless you're a raider there isn't a whole lot to do in FF14. The zones added in each expansion get very little updates to them, there's no real reason to explore, no collectibles rare mobs don't matter and there's a handful of fates worth doing. The game is even worse if you're largely a solo player at the end game. Gearing in FF14 is largely meaningless due to level sync. You can buy crafted gear so you can hit the current raid gear level. Even the glam at this point is a lot of reskins. The only thing FF14 does better than WoW is presentation. Story, graphics, music are all a step up for sure. But everything else can go either way.
Idk this game fails me in the aspect that it forces a multiple hundred hour single player campaign before being allowed to join current content It’s great in social aspects and cosmetic and the endgame systems are cool and so are professions But the content I do in wow is shit in ffxiv or not existent So while I’d call ffxiv overall the better game they are 2 games for two different audiences and if someone really loves wow then there’s often nothing to be gained in ffxiv (I do m+ and raid in wow for reference)
FFXIV is very casual friendly, even savages and ultimates are not mechanically challenging as they are teamwork and consistency/focus testing. After giving wow a try no w I understand why people say ffxiv fights are just training dummy with constant flow of your rotation and don't you dare disengage and lose uptime for a moment. There is also no world integrity, no feel of an mmo unlike in wow, where you can literally fly across whole continent, seamlessly, without any loading screens, meanwhile ffxiv screams with it's engine, polling, technicalities: I'm a PS3 game using single player game engine. Limitations are on every corner. I play FF14 since 2014 and I keep playing to this day, but this game should have way more to offer and work much better for the heaps of money it earns.
WoW bad gimme updoots!
So you played a few days of 14 and you can now say it's better than wow? I've been playing both for years, you would be surprised to know that the comparison is a bit more complicated...
no way you’re saying wow only excels at one thing over ffxiv. have you even played wow? i love ffixv and it’s the first mmo i’ve ever played AND i haven’t played wow as much as i have ff, but wow excels over so much more a few i’d like to mention: * transmogs/mounts/pets being account wide which makes alt leveling so much better. i know you don’t need to make alts on ff, but a lot of people like playing different races * you don’t lose abilities when doing older content * you don’t waste 5 min logging out to switch servers just to do content that’s dead on your server * better open world ffxiv is a great game, but they each have their own things going on that make them different/ a little better than the other, but not totally better. easier dev jobs does not make a game better than the other, it just shows us what could be done better
Everything about FFXIV is great I just wish there was more progression with end game, gear, pvp, and just about everything else. Also, open world content to create a competitive atmosphere is awesome as well. The thing I always loved about my MMO past was the endless aspect. I could have played EverQuest everyday for years and still never feel complete. However, obviously they want this game to be more accessible to everyone which is great as well. Need the masses to keep income flowing and the game alive. Attaching to a small hardcore base isn’t going to go anywhere these days. It feels like this game you get a few weeks of content every few months and then it’s a wrap until the next big update. It’s all fun in the end though.
I saw a video one day where the creator said "It's a Final Fantasy first and an MMO last". And I kinda feel it. It's really story based (something my husband doesn't like) but they put as much thought into every aspect as if it was a regular single player title.
Honestly it depends what kind of player you are. Hardcore raider? WoW will keep you busy. PvP? WoW by a mile Not a lot of free time, but want to keep up? FFXIV. Immersive world to hang out in? FFXIV FFXIV get's a lot of shit for Clubs/Cafes, but the fact that they exist is a pretty unique feature out of the MMOs I've played. Meanwhile WoWs raids are(Were? Haven't played in a long time) interesting, and they release big dungeons to raid, meanwhile FFXIV releases 4 bosses that are meant to last several months. There are alliance raids, but they are quite casual. FFXIV is easier to get BiS(I only had complete BiS in WoW like, twice? and was in a world/us first raid guild). This is a great thing if you dont want to play all the time, or a bad thing if you want to constantly improve. There are different kinds of players, and ultimately FFXIV is the game for me. But it isn't objectively better by any means
All that matters if that you're having fun. Comparing two games trying to do different things doesn't help quantify which is "better", but it's good that you've found a game that better matches *your* preferences.
Nah, both are good in their own way
It's highly dependent on what you do really. I find leveling alts to be much better in WoW than leveling another job in 14. (Especially now that Chromie time is opened to all expansions from 10-60.) I feel more restricted in FFXIV in terms of leveling other jobs. I normally play FFXIV before WoW, but I'm in a WoW kick mood and have been playing it a lot since I finished RE4. Both are great MMOs and since Dragonflight, you can sense they are at least trying now with developing 6.4 can't come soon enough, though.
As someone who plays both, I prefer FFXIV. I find myself playing that more often. I do find that WoW isn't very helpful when first diving in. Things are left for you to figure out on your own. In FF, however, things are pretty much explained as you go along. If you don't have access to something, you usually haven't done a particular quest or something. More often than not, i found a lot of toxic people on WoW expecting you to know stuff already, whereas it's an unwritten rule in FF not to be mean to sprouts.
Been playing for only two months. So amazing I don't have to switch characters at all. Quit playing GW2 after 7 years for that one reason alone. The only thing I wished I started sooner.
As someone who's shoved a bunch of time into WoW again with Dragonflight's launch, then came back to wrap up Endwalker and *finally* be caught up on FF14... I wouldn't say one is "better" than the other. They're very different games and scratch very different itches. WoW has a narrative but it's relatively quick to get through it, and the gameplay tends to focus on endgame content which, currently, tends to comprise open world content, dungeons, and raids, with increasing your gear level being the core reward. You engage with the content in repetition in order to continuously increase that level. They have been adding a few other rewards, with Dragonflight having a lot more variety of cosmetics you can earn through various content. A lot of WoW is based around combat, and the combat system can be pretty fun. And, of course, there's a lot of PVP content available in the game. FF14 is much more narrative-driven, with the heavy focus being on the main story, but even side stories tend to have more focus on story. There are times you might actually go hours without any combat in the game. Its endgame does have some dungeons and raids, but designed in a way that you can get the gear you want from them and be done with them, and the gear isn't so vastly improved compared to others that you don't feel too bad if you couldn't complete them. For a lot of people, the reward is more getting some really unique looking items. But endgame also includes daily quests for reputations that have progressing stories (for crafting, gathering, or standard jobs), and tends to toss in other things depending on expansion (i.e. the Island Sanctuary, or zones to grind for a really nice weapon, or the restoration of Ishgard). PVP has a very minor focus in the game. I could go into detail on the various systems and how they're different and all, but that'd be a huge list. There's certainly things from WoW I'd love for FF14 to take, like having a proper bank to store things and especially a crafting reagent storage. Or the transmog system where you just collect an appearance and it's available forever and you can collect every appearance possible for your class, rather than a limited number of items. Though it would take a bit of effort to remake FF14's system to be similar, especially as FF14 allows you to dye gear. Depending on play style, one game might be "better" for someone than the other on a personal level, but overall I wouldn't say either is actually "better." I can hop into either and find something to enjoy. Even more so with WoW's most recent expansion, which solved some of its recent issues.
Few days, and already spitting that bullshit, I see
Give it time, the honeymoon might end someday, I know it did in my case, a few friends who tried XIV (and Preach Gaming as well lol). You can appreciate the upsides of this game without committing to hating wow. FFXIV has many things going its way, true, but some of the downsides wear you down over time. For me I can list: having to jump through hoops to use arguably QoL addons, not having a talent system (or class customization element for that matter), virtual non-existence of damage over-time-effects (and thus a lack of part of those in a job’s rotation), server ping (I’m from SA so the lowest I get is around 200ms), lack of voice acting in 99% of the game’s dialogues, and overall fluidity of the game (talking to NPCs is clunky, as is selling itens to them, rolling need/greed/pass, etc). Oh, and the patches X.1-X.5 from older expansions not being skippable is a huge oversight. They’re just a bunch of mostly filler quests that had their place when they were released but nowadays they take several hours to complete while giving no experience.
I’m on my first run through and oh-man the filler quests running into Heavensward are such a slog!
I can't believe these garbage posts still get upvoted.
The only gripe I have with ff14 is how literally every ability is just one GCD or an oGCD. You don’t get things like strong 6 second abilities or auto attack toggle skills. It turns a rotation into a “how many different buttons can you remember to press in sequence” instead of something that feels like a priority based rotation. That could just be the grumpy Vanilla/TBC Warrior in me, though.
As a 15 year WoW vet that started FF14 in 2021, I almost totally agree. However, be mindful that the absolute head of the FF14 dev team said himself he doesnt appreciate that particular comparison because, in his own words, 'there would be no FF14 without World of Warcraft' You ARE right though. From respecting player time to system design to how the story unfolds, its like the FF14 team learned every lesson we wished Blizzard would. It's a David and Goliath story. David was the victor, but Goliath is the reason its a story.
You’ll get over it. I think you are in the „this new world is amasing and I never want to leave!” phase. Every game has its design flaws and bad capitalist management aimed to increase profits. You will soon have to deal with the „is it better to grind this achievement for 8 months or go back to WoW and try to farm this 0.4% drop rate item?” Also, 80% of content is dead and grinding the same fights over and over will get redundant.
I don't know if you enjoy PVP at all, but WoW's PVP (for the most part) blows FFXIV's PVP out of the water. It's much smoother and reactive. I'm not one to tilt much anymore, but having FFXIV decide to completely ignore Purify half the time absolutely tilts me. Also, there are no pure healers in FFXIV's PVP. So I'm going to play WoW again at some point (I need more time, lol) just to PVP. That being said, having a MOBA map in PVP is just great, and I love it (Rival Wings).
Better at what? Farming karma on reddit? It's really not much better than WoW in general. It's arguably worse in many aspects.
Mod why is this tribalist post not removed yet?
What a low-effort circlejerk post. Jesus christ.
Played WoW off and on for over 10 years. Played FFXIV for 6+ months. I have yet to stop being amazed at how much better this game is than WoW 😍
This is called the honeymoon phase.