WoW players that switched to FFXIV, I need your opinions

[Vargarii]

If I miss anything from wow its addons, a shorter GCD and the vast amount of resources Blizzard was willing to devote to WoW.

I miss addons, and I wish the recognition for fight mechanics was player side like wow instead of server side. The GCD issue can be solved by playing a class like bard, samurai, or ninja, all of which are played at 38-45 cpm, which isn't that far behind playin wow.

What I found worse than wow is the leveling is kinda slow, and you don't start getting off the GCD skills to keep you pressing buttons for a little while.

This isn't actually true. It's only true if you don't know how to level, like the first time you leveled in wow. There is gear to increase leveling speed, also after your first 70 you get a large xp boost for alt classes. I started a new character after stormblood and had it 30 on it's first day for the class, and I didn't even go at it that hard. The GCD thing definitely makes lower levels boring, though.

if you want to do hardcore you do extreme primals, and savage raids.

Primal Raids are not hardcore content. They put weapons in them slightly behind raid content for a reason. Honestly, savage isn't hardcore content right now either. Unless the new post savage content is going to be a new raid tier a la wow tiers, then a lot of people may be in for a rude awakening on encounter difficulty going forward.


There were some other things I wanted to address from posts, but I was super late to this party so others did it already.

As far as my own reasons for playing this game, it's largely based on the community, and my ability to still do harder content without playing as often as I did in wow. I see friends in wow going back and doing a lot of old raid tiers hoping for warforged trinkets and such and I'm not down with that(of course if they were properly progressed they wouldn't need to). I also enjoy the skillgap(gotta wave that epeen sometimes), it's incredibly large in this game, despite the devs effort to make things easier for players. Finally, I should touch on the community that keeps me here more than anything else I named. I played wow from the release of Blackwing lair on, and despite all my friends and promises to do guild meetups I bailed every time. The people I met in this game have become close enough to me that I kept that promise for the first time.

[Wrecktangle]

@Kyriani I was hoping you'd take a few mins to respond to the math I gave you a few posts prior to this. I took them time to do the research and tests, I would appreciate you taking the time to respond.

I miss addons, and I wish the recognition for fight mechanics was player side like wow instead of server side. The GCD issue can be solved by playing a class like bard, samurai, or ninja, all of which are played at 38-45 cpm, which isn't that far behind playin wow.

Eh, If I run pure ST talents my CPM on my Ret which has probably some of the most empty GCD space out of the mDPS classes and I'm still around 60 CPM. That's easily over 25% more than the fastest class in FF14 per your metrics (if I run other talents my CPM will be higher artificially so I didn't use that approach). However, your suggestions are accurate and I do agree with them.

This isn't actually true. It's only true if you don't know how to level, like the first time you leveled in wow. There is gear to increase leveling speed, also after your first 70 you get a large xp boost for alt classes. I started a new character after stormblood and had it 30 on it's first day for the class, and I didn't even go at it that hard. The GCD thing definitely makes lower levels boring, though.

I have a level 5 NIN, how can I get to level 30 in one day (which could be as little as 1 hour or as much as like 12). What process did you use, was it fun, and how much time did you play in that one day?

Primal Raids are not hardcore content. They put weapons in them slightly behind raid content for a reason. Honestly, savage isn't hardcore content right now either. Unless the new post savage content is going to be a new raid tier a la wow tiers, then a lot of people may be in for a rude awakening on encounter difficulty going forward.

On one hand you are correct they are not hardcore content to me, but that's because a measure of how I define the term hardcore as a measure of time played, not in any measure of skill.

[Deleted]

Primal Raids are not hardcore content. They put weapons in them slightly behind raid content for a reason. Honestly, savage isn't hardcore content right now either. Unless the new post savage content is going to be a new raid tier a la wow tiers, then a lot of people may be in for a rude awakening on encounter difficulty going forward.

Extreme Primals arent hardcore? Duty finder says otherwise. Sure none of them are mythic raid levels of hardcore but ET-s are still above normal raids. And yes, Ultimate mode will be pretty fucking horrifying. We got the first picture yesterday and it showed Bahamut, Nael and Twintania. In the same boss arena.

[Kyriani]

@Kyriani I was hoping you'd take a few mins to respond to the math I gave you a few posts prior to this. I took them time to do the research and tests, I would appreciate you taking the time to respond.

My apologies, I got distracted by other things and hadn't checked MMOC for replies in a bit.

After reading the post you are referring to. It's difficult for me to respond to because I don't have all the information. Just going by the stats, I would expect that the difference between a max ilvl non-raider and a max ilvl savage raider would be about 10-15% on average but thats just an eyeball assumption on my part. I'm not really one for doing math. Your 25% seems awfully high to me though and leaves me with questions such as:

Do both your 310 set and 327 set have full tier 6 materia?
Are you using the same fight for your tests or did you simply use a target dummy?
Did one set get more crits than the other?
Did one fight have you targeted with more stuff to move out of than the other?

It's difficult for me to take your numbers on face value. Not to say you're numbers are wrong, just that there are a lot of variables that can account for a difference in performance that are out of your control.

I'm not sure I agree with your model for raid comparison to WoW. It's hard to quantify in any way because difficulty between the two games is very different. But this is a matter of opinion. I also wouldn't make any claims to know what "most players" do as far as difficulty in wow is concerned. I will say however that prior to my leaving WoW, the trend I saw (and this is purely anecdotal on my part) is that there's a sense of "if you aren't raiding Mythic, you aren't really raiding" in WoW. The people I knew and interacted with that were into raiding weren't about to settle for normal or heroic. It was Mythic or bust. And for those people who "busted" they stopped organized raiding altogether and just turned to mythic+ and pug raids of varying difficulty. But again that's purely anecdotal.

As for content... Savage Raiders actually DO run daily roulettes, run maps/aquapolis, do fates. I also run ex primals rarely when FC members pressure me to. Once in a very rare while they might try to push me to fill a spot in a savage omega but I almost always decline. Generally speaking I interact with people at all play levels.

And yea I do prefer to steamroll content. I'm not interested in being challenged, I'm only interested in being entertained these days. I'm older now and my days of hardcore bleeding edge difficulty raiding are behind me.

[Tome]

The only other Final Fantasy games I have played in the past are Final Fantassy X and X-2, which I thought were both pretty interesting and deep story telling games.

I have played WoW for 12 years, but these later years I just couldn't bother with the game anymore, for many reasons.

I was so tired and annoyed by the game I jumped into Final Fantasy XIV witthout know that much about it. While the beginning was very slow and annoying, it later on became really nice and fun, and addicting to play.

I have played FFXIV for 8 months now, and I ditched WoW completely 5 months ago or so. I play both FFXIV and GW2, switching between them every now and then.

FFXIV just brings out a lot of fun and interesting stuff, and the story is actually good.

[Wrecktangle]

Extreme Primals arent hardcore? Duty finder says otherwise. Sure none of them are mythic raid levels of hardcore but ET-s are still above normal raids. And yes, Ultimate mode will be pretty fucking horrifying. We got the first picture yesterday and it showed Bahamut, Nael and Twintania. In the same boss arena.

Using my definition of hardcore (time invested not skill), EX primals are most certainly not hardcore, as a blind min ilvl group have cleared it in one lockout or less. Using myself as an example, I cleared both in 5 pulls blind, like 2 days after official release I didn't get to 70 until EA was over basically.

For your average gamer I would say that O3S and O4S+ qualify as hardcore (time invested to learn/clear), but O1S and O2S I cleared in an extremely quick (less than 1 lockout for 1, and 1 lockout got us to enrage at 2, with a mere 2-3 more pulls to clear, again min ilvl and blind) fashion with players who average in the 10th-30th percentile (which I've never been grouped with in WoW)

As a previous top 20 US raider in WoW, mythic really isn't that hard either unless you are blazing the trail blind at min ilvl. It's just harder to get 19 people to be as good as you rather than 7.

My apologies, I got distracted by other things and hadn't checked MMOC for replies in a bit.

No worries, I just thought it was a worthwhile discussion to have.

After reading the post you are referring to. It's difficult for me to respond to because I don't have all the information. Just going by the stats, I would expect that the difference between a max ilvl non-raider and a max ilvl savage raider would be about 10-15% on average but thats just an eyeball assumption on my part. I'm not really one for doing math. Your 25% seems awfully high to me though and leaves me with questions such as:

Do both your 310 set and 327 set have full tier 6 materia?
Are you using the same fight for your tests or did you simply use a target dummy?
Did one set get more crits than the other?
Did one fight have you targeted with more stuff to move out of than the other?

It's difficult for me to take your numbers on face value. Not to say you're numbers are wrong, just that there are a lot of variables that can account for a difference in performance that are out of your control.

That's kind of why I wanted to discuss this. I know from actual testing that the results are fairly large, not staggering, but large. I wasn't sure if you had a number in your head or you had done your own testing so I appreciate the clarification. I am full well aware I can't make you like the same kind of content I do (as a fellow older NJian myself), but I can help clear up some misconceptions that you had about actual quantifiable output and the impact ilvl has on it.

Both sets were fully decked in T6 materia.
Both tests are done via target dummy solo, with no pt buffs, no one else attacking it, no food/pots. I did 3 runs for each set and averaged the results. Both Crit & DH's were within 1% (i.e. 16% vs. 17%) when averaged.
All tests were measured over 5 minute parse runs via ACT.

Does my testing method assuage you of most of your doubts? Are there any remaining? I'll also throw in a bit extra of much less scientific info. My brother on his SAM as a fresh ~i300 70 was doing like 2.5k dps, he's now doing 3.8k dps @ i311. Some of this is skill based as he becomes more knowledgeable/experienced and the remainder is gear related. The point of this exercise was to hopefully demonstrate that the vilification of WoW's ilvl DPS scaling is mostly confirmation bias and not actually so different from FF14.

I'm not sure I agree with your model for raid comparison to WoW. It's hard to quantify in any way because difficulty between the two games is very different. But this is a matter of opinion. I also wouldn't make any claims to know what "most players" do as far as difficulty in wow is concerned. I will say however that prior to my leaving WoW, the trend I saw (and this is purely anecdotal on my part) is that there's a sense of "if you aren't raiding Mythic, you aren't really raiding" in WoW. The people I knew and interacted with that were into raiding weren't about to settle for normal or heroic. It was Mythic or bust. And for those people who "busted" they stopped organized raiding altogether and just turned to mythic+ and pug raids of varying difficulty. But again that's purely anecdotal.

I personally agree with the if you're not doing mythic you're not really raiding mantra, but that's because I can clear heroic with my eyes closed day 1 in min ilvl gear. If I couldn't I obviously would feel different so my objective point is that the statement holds less merit than I *want* it to haha.

I raided heroic only in legion, and I was very bored of it very quickly. M+ was the main draw of the expansion for me. I could do hard small party content (which I've grown more fond of in my older age) instead of massive sprawling parties of people. I could get similar quality rewards and similar quality experiences. It's actually one of the reasons I like FF14 so much. I quite like the harder smaller party size content.

As for content... Savage Raiders actually DO run daily roulettes, run maps/aquapolis, do fates. I also run ex primals rarely when FC members pressure me to. Once in a very rare while they might try to push me to fill a spot in a savage omega but I almost always decline. Generally speaking I interact with people at all play levels.

And yea I do prefer to steamroll content. I'm not interested in being challenged, I'm only interested in being entertained these days. I'm older now and my days of hardcore bleeding edge difficulty raiding are behind me.

Fair enough.

[dope_danny]

The only other Final Fantasy games I have played in the past are Final Fantassy X and X-2, which I thought were both pretty interesting and deep story telling games.

I have played WoW for 12 years, but these later years I just couldn't bother with the game anymore, for many reasons.

I was so tired and annoyed by the game I jumped into Final Fantasy XIV witthout know that much about it. While the beginning was very slow and annoying, it later on became really nice and fun, and addicting to play.

I have played FFXIV for 8 months now, and I ditched WoW completely 5 months ago or so. I play both FFXIV and GW2, switching between them every now and then.

FFXIV just brings out a lot of fun and interesting stuff, and the story is actually good.

Man you should really look up 4 through 9. Tastes differ on each as they have a range of genres but on the whole at least one of them will probably be one of your favourite rpgs if you liked X which is good but one of the weaker entries compared to those.

[Deleted]

As a previous top 20 US raider in WoW

See, that's the most important part. Of course your definition of hardcore will be different As a former top wow raider. Maybe isn't the right word, but it is true that in terms of diccifulty extreme primals are above normal raids (With the exception of the Coil of course). At any rate next month we will get the Ultimate difficulty, which will probably be hardcore enough.

Best thing: It won't be a new difficulty for exisitng content, but actual new stuff.

[Darkarath]

Hey guys, I'm looking the Lodestone forums and short stories, the cinematics of the game... but I'm not getting much out of it. As a WoW lore nerd I would like to become a FF14 lore nerd too, because I play games mostly for characters and story so, if someone could link me a text or a video that explains everything that I need to set me in the right path I will appreciate it.

[Sorrior]

Hey guys, I'm looking the Lodestone forums and short stories, the cinematics of the game... but I'm not getting much out of it. As a WoW lore nerd I would like to become a FF14 lore nerd too, because I play games mostly for characters and story so, if someone could link me a text or a video that explains everything that I need to set me in the right path I will appreciate it.

Actuallly ya know how wow recently released chronicles? Yeeah ffxiv did Libra Eorzea last year at their convention INSANE amounts of lore.

That aside I will try to find a few youtube bids buuut I warn ya it is several thousand years of backstory covering the various Astral and umbra eras, when certain races first made it to eorzea even certain gods and a description on the seven heaven abd hells.. oh then it even lists dominant populations in each city state.

Sadly we still need to await the second one and some lore as in exact dates may only be found in game..Take the drk the first one is given a year for when he did his thing in a red mage quest oddly enough.

Buut it is certainly worth it the amount of details and world back story is amazing

[Darkarath]

Actuallly ya know how wow recently released chronicles? Yeeah ffxiv did Libra Eorzea last year at their convention INSANE amounts of lore.

That aside I will try to find a few youtube bids buuut I warn ya it is several thousand years of backstory covering the various Astral and umbra eras, when certain races first made it to eorzea even certain gods and a description on the seven heaven abd hells.. oh then it even lists dominant populations in each city state.

Sadly we still need to await the second one and some lore as in exact dates may only be found in game..Take the drk the first one is given a year for when he did his thing in a red mage quest oddly enough.

Buut it is certainly worth it the amount of details and world back story is amazing

So Libra Eorzea is a book? When I tapped it on google it looks like an APP... I loved Chronicles, so if FF14 has something similar it would be amazing.

[Echocho]

Best thing: It won't be a new difficulty for exisitng content, but actual new stuff.

That's without a doubt the best way to handle multiple difficulties and I love them for it, even if it means I'll never get to see it. A game should cater to different skill levels, but not through different difficulties of the same content. Having content that only the hardcore players get to complete is an amazing design philosophy and SquareEnix should get a freakin medal for going down that route.

[dope_danny]

So Libra Eorzea is a book? When I tapped it on google it looks like an APP... I loved Chronicles, so if FF14 has something similar it would be amazing.

Libra eorzea is an app, Encycoledia Eorzea is a huge hardback book full of everything up to the end of Heavensward. Info on all the astral and umbral eras, the way aether interacts with the world and the science of magic and stuff. Was sold out for a long time and depending on region still is but totally worth picking up.

Also of course theres this from the pre ARR

[Sorrior]

So Libra Eorzea is a book? When I tapped it on google it looks like an APP... I loved Chronicles, so if FF14 has something similar it would be amazing.

Ohhh might have gotten em mixed up but yeah their is a book too. Weirdly I do think same nsme. Check the SE store. Gets you a minion too

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Libra eorzea is an app, Encycoledia Eorzea is a huge hardback book full of everything up to the end of Heavensward. Info on all the astral and umbral eras, the way aether interacts with the world and the science of magic and stuff. Was sold out for a long time and depending on region still is but totally worth picking up.

Also of course theres this from the pre ARR

Ohhh right thank you my bad got em mixed up then.

[Deleted]

See, that's the most important part. Of course your definition of hardcore will be different As a former top wow raider. Maybe isn't the right word, but it is true that in terms of diccifulty extreme primals are above normal raids (With the exception of the Coil of course). At any rate next month we will get the Ultimate difficulty, which will probably be hardcore enough.

Best thing: It won't be a new difficulty for exisitng content, but actual new stuff.

As someone that plays mostly in a raid that struggles to kill KJ HC right now. I think extreme primals (at least the ones we have right now in SB) are way below most WoW - normal bosses.
In terms of DPS/Healing/Tanking skills required to beat them, there is really not much to go on about.

I'm actually not a fan of the "ultimate" difficulty idea. I'd rather have more enganging and harder 4 man dungeons.... deep dungeons - which I've never tried higher than 100, because they are rather boring - aside, there is basically no difficult (even slightly difficult) 4 man content.

I'm pretty sure more people would play that than this new ultimate difficulty.

I think (and I'm not alone here if I look around and ask my friends who also play this game) the biggest reason why I don't raid savage is because I can't be bothered to join a group of people I've never met before. Even though I could probably easily clear most of that shit - I had trouble to look for a random group to do Extreme Trials at first, because it's so freaking bothersome to deal with all that elitism and toxicity in case something happens.. and FFXIV isn't really nicer than WoW in that enviroment

3h after new content hits - "WATCH VIDEO, KNOW THE FIGHT" - bla bla...
"PRACTICE GROUP" -> everyone leaves after 1-2 wipes.

I can understand their reasoning, honestly, I did leave my savage group because me and my DPS friend were literally 1k+ dps above the rest and just didn't want to bother trying after seeing how they performed in Omega Normal after 2 weeks (we didn't wipe, but wtf is a DPS doing 200dps above a tank? So instead of making the dudes feel bad, we decided to lie and say "uhm, savage isn't our thing"), so it's not like I don't get it why they do it... but it's just so bothersome to find people that are equally bad - or good - with a similar mindset.
Which means:
Fewer Players required = more fun.
Basically, I'd rather turn every game into a co-op party and never bother with anyone I don't know - and interact with randoms when I'm doing something that doesn't require me to rely on them.

[Aliven]

The only other Final Fantasy games I have played in the past are Final Fantassy X and X-2, which I thought were both pretty interesting and deep story telling games.

I have played WoW for 12 years, but these later years I just couldn't bother with the game anymore, for many reasons.

I was so tired and annoyed by the game I jumped into Final Fantasy XIV witthout know that much about it. While the beginning was very slow and annoying, it later on became really nice and fun, and addicting to play.

I have played FFXIV for 8 months now, and I ditched WoW completely 5 months ago or so. I play both FFXIV and GW2, switching between them every now and then.

FFXIV just brings out a lot of fun and interesting stuff, and the story is actually good.

I played FF 7, 8, 9, 10 (didnt finish last one). I played wow from BC till patch 7.2. I quitted wow, and the only reason why i would ever come back is aesthetics. Im huge sucker for bulky armor.

Since i quitted wow, some 3 months ago i tested FF14, DC online, ESO. In the years playing wow i played also nearly every MMO in existence, some longer, some stayed only couple hours on HDD (less than downloading those bloody things took time).

Games which stood out for me: GW2 (best race in Charr and most accessible MMO in the market), ESO (elder scrolls lore, great representation and gameplay) and FF14. The last one just awoke so many feelings towards my childhood playing ff7-9. Its like being long in abusive relationship, and thinking this is the way those things always play out (WOW) only to find somebody who treats you fair and you are so astounded by it you just drop in awe.

[Deleted]

Hey guys, I'm looking the Lodestone forums and short stories, the cinematics of the game... but I'm not getting much out of it. As a WoW lore nerd I would like to become a FF14 lore nerd too, because I play games mostly for characters and story so, if someone could link me a text or a video that explains everything that I need to set me in the right path I will appreciate it.

Well the gamw itself is a very good source of lore. Unlike wow everything happens in game. All that you will miss are the 1.0 cutscenes, but most world building is done right in front of you. The lorebook Encyclopedia Eorzea is a very good source, and so is the lore forum. There is a guy there called Anonymoose, whose lore knowledge is second only to the devs.

[Wrecktangle]

See, that's the most important part. Of course your definition of hardcore will be different As a former top wow raider. Maybe isn't the right word, but it is true that in terms of diccifulty extreme primals are above normal raids (With the exception of the Coil of course). At any rate next month we will get the Ultimate difficulty, which will probably be hardcore enough.

Best thing: It won't be a new difficulty for exisitng content, but actual new stuff.

Yeah the reason I draw importance to my specific definition is because I personally believe that the term "hardcore" and the term "difficult" should not be used interchangeably as the general MMO populace tends to do. You can clear difficult content in an amazingly short amount of time. I've done it. You can farm easy content ad-nausea in a hardcore fashion (a la Yokai, Relic weapons, dungeons, etc.).

Even though I personally think the EX primals are very easy, they are still "difficult content" in my eyes. They are not hardcore content though because the time commitment to learn and clear is not very high. I felt similarly with O1S/O2S.

I hope that clarifies my position and the reason why I wanted to detail the specifics. As far as ultimate goes, I'll likely never see it because I'm a little lazy looking for a static so I'm sticking with the O4S pug game atm.

I'm actually not a fan of the "ultimate" difficulty idea. I'd rather have more enganging and harder 4 man dungeons.... deep dungeons - which I've never tried higher than 100, because they are rather boring - aside, there is basically no difficult (even slightly difficult) 4 man content.

I'm pretty sure more people would play that than this new ultimate difficulty.

I can echo this statement. It's one of the reasons I really liked Legion for as long as I did. Pushing M+ keys as high as we could go was really challenging and rewarding and fun with a core group of friends. Much better than raiding with 15-20 people I didn't care as much about.

Basically, I'd rather turn every game into a co-op party and never bother with anyone I don't know - and interact with randoms when I'm doing something that doesn't require me to rely on them.

One of my favorite bits of Blade and Soul was trying to do dungeons with as few people as possible. The game actually rewarded you for it too which I liked.

[Faroth]

Hey guys, I'm looking the Lodestone forums and short stories, the cinematics of the game... but I'm not getting much out of it. As a WoW lore nerd I would like to become a FF14 lore nerd too, because I play games mostly for characters and story so, if someone could link me a text or a video that explains everything that I need to set me in the right path I will appreciate it.

That gives an overview of the 1.0 story that built up to A Realm Reborn if you want the overview to go along with the 2 hours of 1.0 cut scenes dope_danny provided.

However, if you want the official recap from Louisoix himself:



There's also Hydaelyn RPers' site that would be a good place to ask questions.

There's a lot of vague and unexplored lore. Keep in mind where WoW basically had the night elves with characters who have literally been around 10,000 years, Eorzea isn't in the same boat. We have multiple eras of peace with equal number of eras marked by total catastrophe where civilizations have been wiped out, technology lost, etc. There's a lot of lore that's unknown in-game and thus out of game for the time being. The exploration of these lost civilizations is considered an ongoing effort by small groups of scholars and archaeologists.

When you start A Realm Reborn, you're a new arrival to the city states of Eorzea, so coming in without much awareness of history works fine. You'll get a lot from looking at chat bubbles from NPCs around towns and through the MSQ and side quests. Some things might pique interest, like a dungeon of ruins in A Realm Reborn before level 50 and some vague suggestions of what happened which, if you're paying attention, gets addressed more, in the 1st expansion's 24 man raid Weeping City of Mach.

1.0 story points actually do come up in 2.0 and 3.0, but not so in depth that you HAVE to have experienced them to understand it.

Heck, you may even want to be sure to explore every job's story quest to really piece EVERYTHING together and become a true scholar of Eorzea. I was a huge lore buff in WoW and I feel like there's a lot that still eludes my grasp in Eorzea.

The one thing that disappoints me more than anything is that A Realm Reborn pinpointed the player as THE Warrior of Light where 1.0 made a specific point that numerous adventurers were appearing with the Echo and were referred to as the Warriors (plural) of Light. What's now the Scions were actively searching for them and bringing them together. Really wish they had kept that concept in place for the story.

Another source for 1.0 cut scenes

There always the FFXIV Wiki

I wish I could find the forum/blog post from a 1.0 player who described what the final hours was like and how it felt to witness the moon coming down, the way everyone was talking and how it felt knowing impending doom was ticking down in the final moments, then getting booted and seeing the video go up that revealed what happened with Dalamud.



Sidenote: In the End of An Era video, when just about EVERYTHING is being laid waste by Mega Flare, I love the hopeless expression with pained emotion they pulled off with the Warrior of Light. You can see that pit of the stomach despair and utter helplessness in his facial expression.

[Vargarii]

Wrecktangle, I'm a stay at home dad, I definitely used the whole day. I duo'd with my wife on an off day for her. Basically we blindly clung to the story quest(you typically outlevel it anyway) and as soon as we unlocked hunting logs we cleared the first two asap. After 10-12 we did fates in some of the key areas while picking up hunting log kills as we moved, then at 15 we focused purely on story to unlock the little noob tests to get the level 15 gear and the ring that increases xp up til level 30, unlocked dungeons after that and just did story and dungeons to 30.

I thought about it some and reading your reply, I feel like my original answer left out a lot of key info. While I don't feel leveling is slow if you know the path, we had a lot of advantages. We chose tank/healer for starters, as pre-order players we had moogle caps for boosted xp to 10, the ring once we did the 15 stuff to get to 30 with, and the preorder earring for boosted xp up to 50. Those are not small advantages, now that I think about it. I'm still confident in being able to level to 30 in a fairly short time, but if I were doing it solo as dps I admit it would definitely take more time, and I'd probably go about it in a different manner.

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My apologies, I got distracted by other things and hadn't checked MMOC for replies in a bit.

After reading the post you are referring to. It's difficult for me to respond to because I don't have all the information. Just going by the stats, I would expect that the difference between a max ilvl non-raider and a max ilvl savage raider would be about 10-15% on average but thats just an eyeball assumption on my part. I'm not really one for doing math. Your 25% seems awfully high to me though and leaves me with questions such as:

Do both your 310 set and 327 set have full tier 6 materia?
Are you using the same fight for your tests or did you simply use a target dummy?
Did one set get more crits than the other?
Did one fight have you targeted with more stuff to move out of than the other?

It's difficult for me to take your numbers on face value. Not to say you're numbers are wrong, just that there are a lot of variables that can account for a difference in performance that are out of your control.

I'm not sure I agree with your model for raid comparison to WoW. It's hard to quantify in any way because difficulty between the two games is very different. But this is a matter of opinion. I also wouldn't make any claims to know what "most players" do as far as difficulty in wow is concerned. I will say however that prior to my leaving WoW, the trend I saw (and this is purely anecdotal on my part) is that there's a sense of "if you aren't raiding Mythic, you aren't really raiding" in WoW. The people I knew and interacted with that were into raiding weren't about to settle for normal or heroic. It was Mythic or bust. And for those people who "busted" they stopped organized raiding altogether and just turned to mythic+ and pug raids of varying difficulty. But again that's purely anecdotal.

As for content... Savage Raiders actually DO run daily roulettes, run maps/aquapolis, do fates. I also run ex primals rarely when FC members pressure me to. Once in a very rare while they might try to push me to fill a spot in a savage omega but I almost always decline. Generally speaking I interact with people at all play levels.

And yea I do prefer to steamroll content. I'm not interested in being challenged, I'm only interested in being entertained these days. I'm older now and my days of hardcore bleeding edge difficulty raiding are behind me.

I know it'll vary from class to class, but there's right at a 20% difference between an ilvl 320 sam and an ilvl 340 sam with equal playing ability. Add skill variance and that gap is even wider. I'm not sure that the 25% he threw out is all that unfair of a guess.

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Extreme Primals arent hardcore? Duty finder says otherwise. Sure none of them are mythic raid levels of hardcore but ET-s are still above normal raids. And yes, Ultimate mode will be pretty fucking horrifying. We got the first picture yesterday and it showed Bahamut, Nael and Twintania. In the same boss arena.

Normal raids aren't even softcore content, though. They are made to be cleared by any tom dick and harry to see the content. I don't believe they are a good scale for labeling what's hardcore and what isn't. The devs believe that this entire tier is balanced in a way that an average raider can kill neo by the time the new tier hits. That remains to be seen, but still. Ex primals are tuned to a level to be cleared/pugged in a fairly swift manner, and duty finder is a nightmare, but there are still groups who have made duty finder clears of ex primals and 01S/O2S in fairly timely manners(week1).