Ah ok - that helps me understand a bit better. Speaking personally - I find raiding to be the only redeeming quality of BfA besides maybe the world design (it is aesthetically pleasing) and the cutscene/story work. One of my favorite bits of FF14 is seeing MY character in the scenes. WoW did a good job doing this in BfA. It made me care more than it normally does.
Islands were a bust, warfronts a bust, dungeons are good, but I'd argue slightly lower quality than Legion IMO, class design is average at best, more often worse. In my case - Ret, it feels pretty sad. Legion Ret was probably my second, maybe third favorite iteration (a good thing), and BfA ret is a noticeable step down.
I wanted to touch base on this comment - I may be an outlier here, but I haven't cared about gear since WotLK honestly, and I'm not so sure I'm that much of a minority in that thinking. I'd honestly be ok if they removed gear entirely and made it strictly cosmetic and just scaled your power over time as content got harder. Truthfully I'm not confident I'd even notice a difference. This applies equally to both WoW and FF14. The only thing that really rewards me nowadays in MMO's is the experience or a cosmetic reward that lets me fulfill some fantasy I couldn't before (good example being the first warfront gear set for alliance, I did it every week despite hating that content because I wanted that reward badly. To help suplement my chances I also got to 1800 in pvp to get the alternate color appearance (but i wanted gold not bronze color scheme!)I don't really care if joe schmoe gets X ilvl gear but you should have to actually put some effort in for it, not queing up for an AFKfront and getting free gear.
Mythic week caches, timewalking week caches, currencies that you work for, all these are far better systems then RNG hope that we have now in wow. They could have went the deterministic route of gearing, a la FFXIV, but instead they went like 100% RNG with 0 effort required.
To offer some additional insight. I just upgraded this morning from a 375 to a 400 weapon. Huge upgrade by FF14 standards that many people would be like ooo wow yay so exciting. Except nothing changed; I have marginally bigger numbers that I can't see anyway (they're hidden) and I had to reglamour... Nothing exciting about that TBH, just like in WoW.
Classic will be fun with friends (not solo IMO), and SHB will be fun with friends (not solo IMO).
Whichever one you have more friends doing go with that. As someone who played on the classic private server it WAS fun with friends, until it wasn't. I've experienced the same phenomenon in FF14, so I always say go with friends.
Regarding tank discussing yes you do owe me that. Popcorn is ready. I'm also a fan of risk/reward for tanking, and I agree it's unfortunate to lose it, but I will not shed a single tear for tank stances. They're archaic and not fun design. If they could replicate the risk/reward sensation with my dynamic/organic gameplay I'd fully support it 100%. I posited changes a long time ago about how i'd do it.
I respectfully disagree. I've had this discussion in guild.
- Show me a heroic raider with a higher ilvl than a mythic one
- Show me a normal raider with a higher ilvl than heroic
- Show me a non-raider who doesn't participate in any challenging content (M+, Raiding) with a higher ilvl than a normal raider
You won't. And if you do it's an outlier. You're not going to find a heroic raider who doesn't do at least 1 M+ a week, and if you find a hardcore M+ boy (no raiding) he'll still be below a mythic raider, as intended. That's what I mean by open ended and by design and working as intended. It has structure. It works in 99% of cases and makes sense. Again, I'm not saying it's better or worse, because as I've stated gear doesn't do a damn thing for me in either game so I don't have a dog in the fight. And like you said, at the end of the day, they lead to the same place.
This is a surprisingly good simile. I endorse it.The best simile I can come up with would be that, to me, WoW is like walking through a bad neighborhood that gives you a "bad" vibe, but getting harassed very little, if at all, by people and overall the people are good...they're just rough around the edges. You really only get harassed when you're directly affecting and genuinely upsetting someone. FFXIV is like a nice neighborhood where you get a generally good vibe and the people are pretty nice in passing and seem overly positive, but when interacting with them directly, they're pretty entitled assholes who get triggered over extremely minor and stupid shit.