A decent MMO plagued by some serious problems that make it unplayable in the long run

[Aoyi]

This is straight up false. There are many drop quests that are not 100% drops, that require you to 'farm' mobs. My biggest complaint though are the fetch quests. Go here and come back so I can send you somewhere else! They aren't as bad at this as they used to be but this still makes up a disgusting chunk of MSQs (which means they are unavoidable). Completely horrible quest design.


It's a weak position anyway. "Leveling also sucks in this other game" doesn't make it okay for leveling to suck. In fact it's kind of a problem. We need to be more vocal about these boring ass MMO-standard quests so developers stop using them and figure something better out.

So out of curiosity, what quest was that false for in final fantasy, because I have 4 classes at 80 now and never encountered a single quest where it wasn't a 100% drop rate. I'm genuinely curious because they designed it to be that way. If you are talking a fishing quest, that's different as you are fishing in pools with lots of fish.

[Swnem]

Jesus christ, man. I guess you just want to argue. You literally said:



The only "reward" from ShB fates are the Bicolor gemstones. Ok, sure, you didn't specifically say the word, but jeez.





At this point it's pretty clear that you're just going to keep arguing for the sake of it. I don't know why you're so incredibly invested in arguing against the simple fact that the open world is pretty empty most of the time after initial MSQ rushes are over. Maybe you think you need to "defend" the game against something, or maybe you just like arguing. I don't know. In any case, I'm finished with this topic.

Oooh, so we are gonna ignore the existence of the rare fates? Or is it you don't know about them? I love how all your points involve ignoring details. Are we also ignoring Hunts marks? I guess we are. I do recall mentioning those as well.

I honestly think that is what you are doing. You insist on seeing it in a skewed way. You keep saying you are alone doing the FATE's. I keep saying you are doing it alone cause you want to. The game doesn't tech shard players there with you and you are not grouping up. Yet, you keep saying "oh but i'm alone". You are. But it's your choice to do so! This game is NOT WOW! It works differently! You keep thinking about it in WoW terms like all that can't break free from it's mold.

[Swnem]

Case in fact not in point: This conversation was about WoW. I didn't bring it up. I responded to someone else who did before poster above ingrained himself on the conversation and started trying to veer it to somewhere else and now pretends that wasn't the case.

[oplawlz]

I mean, you can't really shit on the whole storyline when you've only seen a very tiny portion of a part of the storyline that almost no one likes. It gets better by expansion.

But they force every player to go through the bad part, which is many, may hours, to get to the parts you say are good. The paid skip is a classic scum move of creating a problem in a game and selling the solution - no one with a brain is going to fall for that.

[Akasha64]

No, it's not, but the reason WoW was ever good in the first place wasn't the quest design.

Yes, it was. Maybe not nowadays, but back in 2004 it was a huge improvement over what was available. I only played Star Wars: Galaxies before but getting experience in that game was way grindier. It literally consisted of grinding mobs or going to a terminal over and over again for the same mission nearby. I heard it was similar in Everquest too. That leveling was just killing mobs over and over. Those are two of the pre-WoW era MMOs. The yellow exclamation point above NPCs head was a big innovation for the genre, and is part of the reason for WoW's success. It's copied to this day.

GW2 thought it could reinvent this system but really the system is similar to WoW's, except they just removed the middle-man for quests and it has you searching every nook and cranny of the map for 100% map completion, which in my opinion kind of sucks. The devs mark every interesting spot (landmark) on the map, and tell the players to go there, so it kind of ruins the element of surprise and organically finding these things out for yourself. You have to go to all these spots too, or you won't get 100% map completion; no cherry-picking is allowed.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Yes, it was. Maybe not nowadays, but back in 2004 it was a huge improvement over what was available. I only played Star Wars: Galaxies before but getting experience in that game was way grindier. It literally consisted of grinding mobs or going to a terminal over and over again for the same mission nearby. I heard it was similar in Everquest too. That leveling was just killing mobs over and over. Those are two of the pre-WoW era MMOs. The yellow exclamation point above NPCs head was a big innovation for the genre, and is part of the reason for WoW's success. It's copied to this day.

GW2 thought it could reinvent this system but really the system is similar to WoW's, except they just removed the middle-man for quests and it has you searching every nook and cranny of the map for 100% map completion, which in my opinion kind of sucks. The devs mark every interesting spot (landmark) on the map, and tell the players to go there, so it kind of ruins the element of surprise and organically finding these things out for yourself. You have to go to all these spots too, or you won't get 100% map completion; no cherry-picking is allowed.

Hearts weren't supposed to be GW2's innovative leveling features. Dynamic events were supposed to be GW2's innovative leveling feature, and they did, in fact, change the genre to the point where now WoW and FFXIV have incorporated them as World Quests and FATEs. Hearts were added late in development when playtesters were confused and instinctively looked for quests to complete, rather than heading to the dynamic events.

What made dynamic events great were the zone wide meta events, where one dynamic event would lead straight into another, sometimes branching off into a different strain of quests depending on whether or not the last event was a sucess or a failure. Until PoF released, the endgame of GW2 was basically doing the Silverwastes and HoT meta events, which consisted of dozens of dynamic events that all culminated in a huge, awesome end event. IMO, the only problem with dynamic events is how immersion breaking they are. With regular quests, you do them at your own pace when you want to, and once you've done them, you've done them. In GW2, the dynamic events not only repeat, but some of them are dialogue heavy and story important. It just feels bizarre to be killing the Mouth of Mordremoth for the two hundredth time with Laranthir shouting how this is the final battle... only for you to do it all over again in a few hours, but then again every raid is like that.

[Akasha64]

Hearts weren't supposed to be GW2's innovative leveling features. Dynamic events were supposed to be GW2's innovative leveling feature, and they did, in fact, change the genre to the point where now WoW and FFXIV have incorporated them as World Quests and FATEs.

Not sure if that's completely true. First time I saw Dynamic events or a system like that was in Rift. I know that's a slightly more obscure MMO compared to GW2, but it did have dynamic events and was released over a year before. I played this game, and experienced the Rifts, so playing these dynamic events one year later in GW2 didn't feel that novel to me.

Taken from the Rift wiki:

Rifts are areas of elemental instability that represent the intrusion of elemental planes into the land of Telara. Once opened, these rifts begin to spawn monsters that proceed to march towards important points on the map. It is up to players to defeat these monsters and to close the rifts. If rifts are left unchecked, the invading monsters will eventually conquer large portions of the map, inflicting casualties and significantly hampering the operations in that area. Entering the area around a rift triggers a prompt for the player to join a public group, rather than forcing the player to manually create a group. After sealing a rift, players are rewarded based on their contribution to the fight, such as healing, dealing damage, or buffing other players. The severity and locations of rifts are entirely dynamic.

[Wrecktangle]

1.The idea that there is nothing to do in the open world is laughable. The open world in FFXIV is alive with all the FATE events going on. There are all sorts of rewards you can get from running them in Shadowbringers.

This was very true for the first say 3 weeks of the expansion. The open world is nearly empty on my full server. ARR Zones still see some traffic from sprouts, but otherwise modern expansion areas are empty.

However, I must agree with the poster you quoted. The open world really doesn't have anything exciting in it, and it's pretty commonly stated that the open world is overly neglected each expansion.

4. This is completely false. Did you try Eureka? Gold saucer mini games? Hunts? PvP? Almost everything in the game has a progression system and rewards more variable than just gear. Wich btw is very different than WoW, wich is fact is only gear grind, pets and mounts. FF has all sorts of cosmetics, QoL, cutomisation options for your character, emotes, and housing items.

• I did try Eureka. It made me quit the game until the next expansion. I don't think grinding nameless mobs or zerging trivial HP sponges engaging gameplay. I think it was hands down one of the worst forms of content ever made in any MMO I've ever played in the past 15 years.
• Hunts are boring. The spawn conditions and stuff is interesting, but everything else about them is boring.
• PVP is awful in this game. I could go on for days about why, but people have documented its issues for years now so i won't rehash.
• Gold Saucer mini games are a travesty. Whoever designed Chocobo Racing should have been dragged out back and beaten. Triple Triad is fine, but ultimately boring, shallow, and unscalable. LoV is hilarious. I shouldn't even need to talk about it at this stage of the game.

You then go on to say "FF14 has all sorts of:"

• Cosmetics - ok so does every game.
• QoL - this isn't a feature...
• Customization options for your character - uh like what? Other than glamour, I look and play identically to every other PLD in the game.
• Emotes - ok so does every game, BUT I will concede FF14 loves their cash shop emotes and puts some effort into them
• Housing - for all the NUMEROUS issues FF14 housing has, it's still a half decent system and one that isn't paralelled in WoW, let alone many other games well. Even though I personally don't give 2 shits about housing, I RESPECT the content and its value. It's easy to understand why people like it even if I don't.

Since when is speed-clearing dungeons being really good at the game? You contradicted yourself as well. You said anyone with eyes and hands can do it, so if everybody can do it, how is that even being good at the game? I have also speed-cleared dungeons but I didn't enjoy it. Tank keeps pulling and pulling and doesn't even wait for healer mana. It's a pretty stressful experience. If I have to choose between that, or taking 10 extra minutes with a few Trust NPCs, I'll happily take the latter.

Correct and I stand by that statement. It isn't a contradiction in any way. I'm saying that to be good at this game it's trivial. Which is why it's absolutely mind boggling when people like you claim that being good is somehow an offensive or bad thing, when it's not. Your actual example further corroborates my statement because if your experience was stressful it's because either 1. Your team was bad, or 2. You were bad.

If you're on the primal datacenter I'd be glad to run a dungeon with you (PLD main) and we can see where the issue lies.

The reason I called them idiots is because they hinder the experience of the game by rushing these dungeons and making it a stressful experience for the healer, instead of enjoying the scenery and story, but different strokes for different folks, I guess. These days I mostly focus on crafting/gathering, so I usually don't run dungeons much more than the first time anyway. Trusts all the way. I have not even cared about expert roulette in ages.

So why is your experience worth more than 3 other peoples? Enjoying the story is a one and done affair, and it's noted upon entering the dungeon and in my experience very often accommodated by most players.

As for who told me, some person in my FC, but it was based on her experience so your experience could have been different. Admittedly, I didn't play during the first year or ARR days at all.

No, it was based on her bias, not her experience. She peddled misinformation and then you (not knowing better) trusted her and shared it and were then called out on it (not even just by me, but by many others).

For instance everything I've shared with you, you should use to draw your own conclusions. That may align with what I've said, you may keep your same viewpoint, or some hybrid of the two, but you shouldn't accept what you read as blind accuracy regardless of whether you trust them or not. Many people are too biased, others genuinely ignorant, and some even have malicious agendas.

I will also let you know that they are just as much if not more populated than wow open world. The difference being WoW is artificially creating activity by putting you in a shard with all the people across all servers to make it look like it's active as they disappear in front of your eyes at any moment.

One could argue this is actually good design. I for one enjoy the feel, but also if it does TOO much sharding it can be annoying to fight over mobs (which the tagging algorithm helps mitigate somewhat).

2. Classes... and again with this nonsense. A class that uses 3 to 4 rotational buttons is not more complex than ones that use 20. But, even if you say that somehow having more buttons doesn't make it more complex, wich obviously it does, there are also positionals and usually 2 resources and buffs to track. To top it off, you don't have weak auras to make alerts. So, yes, definitly more complex as there is more you need to be aware of, wich is especially challenging as you have to do mechanics and FF has quite strict enrage timers.

WoW definitely pruned far too much. You'll find few people who disagree with that. However, even in it's pruned state, abilities synergize off each other and kits have a fair amount of decision trees. FF14 has neither of these functions. FF14 is binary and predictive in nearly all jobs. In fact, BRD is probably the largest divergence from this paradigm and ironically it's also frequently touted as one of the best designed jobs, and to further add insult to injury it's also one of the jobs most commonly recommended to WoW refugees.

You're conflating difficulty with complexity and even then you're doing it erroneously. # of buttons doesn't make FF14 more complex, especially when you take into account how rigid those 20 buttons are. For instance, on DRG you will NEVER hit Vorpal Thrust first. Ever. It is always the second button after a True Thrust. Same with Disembowel. The combos are rigid which really makes the chains irrelevant from both a difficulty and complexity standpoint (which is why I said you were doing it erroneously). Not only that, but most DoTs and Buffs are triggered passively through executing these rigid chains, further reducing both metrics simultaneously.

3. I'm gonna be honest. I don't think those things are positive in any way. They are just sources of unbalance. Also, we know essences are bland and azerite gear could be alright if they didn't hide a gambling box system behind it and didn't slap AP levels on it.
I would like to see set bonuses in FF, but not the rest. I don't think making gear complex is a positive and trinkets are a special flustercluck no one needs.

I didn't find the essences bland at all. In fact they were some of the better portions of gameplay. I found the azerite gear more bland, but they did FINALLY improve on it to a half decent iteration (far too late).

As a Ret I had a few different essences that dramatically shaped both gearing decisions and gameplay decisions, as well as provided an outlet to both collect and empower gameplay enhancing features. It was one of the the few things about BfA that I found enjoyable.

I think this really tied in with your open world thing. You seem to think that having infinite RNG and AP grinds is somehow good. I could not disagree more and it's why i stoped playing WoW. If there is one thig i am glad FF does is allowing you to build up currency and get your gear off a vendor. Btw you also seem to ignore that materia is a thing. You can customise your stats with them.

This isn't a black and white thing. I happen to HATE FF14's idea that you're done gearing. I also don't care for the frequency at which WoW throws me inconsequential loot. While AP grinds and indefinite gameplay loops are present, I don't subscribe or chase them and treat them merely as passive progression, which is what most sane gamers do.

Materia is an abomination in this game. It's such a bland uninspiring mess of generic stat increases. It's by no means a stat customization tool given how stats offer no real gameplay enhancing choices or synergy (barring like BRD/BLM).

Ya know, I always hear people say that, but these are the same people that are diehard WoW fans as well but don't criticize WoW for that. Like, really, is killing 15 Defias Pillager and 15 Defias Looter (Classic Westfall quest) any better? In FFXIV at least they NEVER let you kill like 30 mobs on quests like that. Usually it's 5 or less. This at least to me makes questing feel less grindy.

I mean I guess it's okay for knocking on FFXIV for MMO style quests, but if you are going to do that you should do the same for WoW as well, which also has standard MMO style quests. No reason to uphold double standards on this.

Speaking personally, that quest you're referencing is actually a good one that I think FF14 should take notes from. Here's why. Those Pillagers (the mages?) were absolutely fucking terrifying. They aggro'd from a nautical mile away, hit incredibly hard and would run and try to aggro more when almost dead. This opened up so many differing gameplay avenues that are completely missing from both modern WoW and FF14.

Now to take the matter more seriously, quest design in both games sucks. I personally think FF14's is WORSE when done in bulk, but better when done in sections (i.e. the difference between being a new player and a current player). WoW's done a great job taking notes from FF14 by bringing the PC into cutscenes and making them more integral to the story. I personally like a little more combat than FF14 gives, and a little more story than WoW gives.

[Kuja]

Considering most final fantasies have turn based combat, the delayed combat is something I expected myself. But it wasn't as slow as I thought, thankfully. Still, I prefer a faster pace myself.

[Akasha64]

No, it was based on her bias, not her experience. She peddled misinformation and then you (not knowing better) trusted her and shared it and were then called out on it (not even just by me, but by many others).

Okay. That is fine. To be honest, I cannot determine the accuracy of the information since I did not play during ARR days at all. Though this same person has given me misinformation in the past, so I guess I'm not surprised to hear it's wrong from a third-party (again).

If you're on the primal datacenter I'd be glad to run a dungeon with you (PLD main) and we can see where the issue lies.

Well, thanks for the offer. Though I'm on the Aether datacenter. Also I'm not subbed at the moment to the game cause waiting for 5.1 to drop. I usually don't have issues healing speedruns (dungeons), but I just don't find it fun. It's a hasty experience, like people are rushing through to get on with their day or something. Though yeah, I do recall some runs where tank didn't pay attention to healer mana and were chain-pulling the entire dungeon. Maybe that happened only a few times, but those negative experiences definitely stick out in your mind long after.

I get it though that the Trust clearing speed might not be optimal to some, especially if you want to run that dungeon many times, but it fits my needs for now. For instance, when 5.1 hits, I'm pretty sure I'll do the new dungeon with Trusts maybe 1 or 2 times. Maybe 1 or 2 more times if people in my FC want to do it, but I don't see myself going beyond that much. So in my case the time-savings is kind of negligible at best, so I'd rather just enjoy the experience.

[Graeham]

In my opinion the biggest issue with FFXIV at the moment is that the development team is too comfortable. WoW is a rival though it isn't as big a rival as it should be due to various controversies. I'd love for FFXIV to be threatened to the degree where the development team need to shake things up more in order to be relevant, since at the moment the content model isn't changing much.

[Faroth]

In my opinion the biggest issue with FFXIV at the moment is that the development team is too comfortable. WoW is a rival though it isn't as big a rival as it should be due to various controversies. I'd love for FFXIV to be threatened to the degree where the development team need to shake things up more in order to be relevant, since at the moment the content model isn't changing much.

I wouldn't expect it until after this expansion and that would be a decent approach in my opinion. Since A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, Stormblood, and Shadowbringers were all part of one vision, a single story arc that was originally presented to revive the 1.0 disastrous launch, it seems fairly well designed for them to be consistent.

On the other hand, even with a shake up, I think the design lends itself well to what Yoshida has talked about in allowing players to easily come back, catch up, and take a break again, play other games, etc. I don't want to see XIV starting to do umpteen raid paths, RNG loot, BiS raid superior gear from randomness of the RNG gods, needing to log in every day to meet half a dozen different quotas, and such.

I think WoW goes a little too far in trying to change things up and reinvent the wheel every, or every other, expansion. XIV certainly has a different directive vision and approach I wouldn't want them to completely abandon.

[Wrecktangle]

I get it though that the Trust clearing speed might not be optimal to some, especially if you want to run that dungeon many times, but it fits my needs for now. For instance, when 5.1 hits, I'm pretty sure I'll do the new dungeon with Trusts maybe 1 or 2 times. Maybe 1 or 2 more times if people in my FC want to do it, but I don't see myself going beyond that much. So in my case the time-savings is kind of negligible at best, so I'd rather just enjoy the experience.

And while I have never and will never utilize trusts, I respect their inclusion. If it keeps players who can't or won't perform at a bare minimum level (i.e. AOEing, DPS while healing, using tanking cooldowns, etc.) out of my queues it's even better.

On the other hand, even with a shake up, I think the design lends itself well to what Yoshida has talked about in allowing players to easily come back, catch up, and take a break again, play other games, etc. I don't want to see XIV starting to do umpteen raid paths, RNG loot, BiS raid superior gear from randomness of the RNG gods, needing to log in every day to meet half a dozen different quotas, and such.

I think WoW goes a little too far in trying to change things up and reinvent the wheel every, or every other, expansion. XIV certainly has a different directive vision and approach I wouldn't want them to completely abandon.

I think most of us agree in some way that WoW does XYZ too far and FF14 does XYZ not far enough. At least that's generally how I feel about a lot of different things and I've seen online media echo the same things.

I mean if I had my way FF14 would:

• steal WoW's transmog/collection features
• release an HD texture update
• keep their job identities, but bring in WoW's combat synergy, fluidity, and depth
• improve the dye system to be 3 channel (main, secondary, and accessory) and make it consistent across material types
• fix their netcode
• make side games that they're actually proud of and derive inspiration from successful franchises

There's dozens of things in FF14 that I don't care for, but these issues stand out to me the most. I love the jobs and their design, but I don't think the combat engine is half as good as their job design.

[Faroth]

Every time I go back to WoW, I just feel like I'm spamming 3 buttons until my whack-a-mole procs light up. I find it terribly dull every time I go back. I adjust and get back in the rhythm, but I really don't see why people think it's so amazing and claim it has such depth.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Akasha64]

And while I have never and will never utilize trusts, I respect their inclusion. If it keeps players who can't or won't perform at a bare minimum level (i.e. AOEing, DPS while healing, using tanking cooldowns, etc.) out of my queues it's even better.

Hmm, interesting. So you say you never used Trusts. Why is that? I get that the essence to a great MMORPG experience for some is doing dungeons with other players, but Trusts are a low risk proposition and pretty much drama-free, so there's no reason not to do them. What's frustrating is getting into a dungeon and someone keeps disconnecting. Darn, in such an instance it really is a nightmare to do it with other people. You wish you did it with Trusts in such a scenario.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

• make side games that they're actually proud of and derive inspiration from successful franchises

^

There are so many stories that could be told in the XIV setting. Perhaps a game about Cid's years at the magitek academy and how he came to decide he would defect, or a story following a younger Gosetsu fighting alongside Lord Kaien against the Empire, or playing an Imperial Officer and giving us a humanized look at the Garleans. Perhaps a game following Louisox in Sharlayan. Or, they could do wackier things, such as giving Hildibrand his own series of games, etc. In any event, a spinoff game would have a huge advantage over FFXIV: an actual, fleshed out main character. The WoL is almost a non-character in FFXIV. Everyone else deduces the plot, everyone lays out the plans, everyone else has relationships with other characters, etc. A character with his own relationships, capable of making his own deductions and formulating his own plans, would go to great lengths to make the story more memorable.

[Sharby]

Biggest issue with FF14's gameplay is how barbaric the combat UI is and lack of third party UI support, though HUD layout option remedies some of this. Often times when I mess up I find that its due to me fighting the game to register my inputs properly than me messing up.


Other than that I don't think I want them to copy WoW in any regard because after going back to WoW for a sub cycle I just couldn't enjoy the combat anymore, the whole 'builder and spender' game design is just super resident sleeper, most classes just feel rly boring. The last time I can honestly say WoW had superior combat/class design to Shadowbringers was during WoD and MoP. The only modern spec that's similar to those days is Outlaw.

Also playing WoW is just draining atm, it feels like every single obstacle put into place is just another way to exploit your hours played and shit. Way too much timegating. Enemy distribution in WoW sucks, alts in WoW suck, making money in WoW sucks, professions suck, its just a mess. Going from the gorgeous BFA zones back to the older ones is so jarring, why are the main cities worse graphically than temporary locations? The fact that you're forced to go to SW/Org often is also annoying. The fact that nothing in WoW is permanent except for shitty features like mission tables and they actively nerf player agency is discouraging to want to invest any time into it. And this is coming from someone who's been playing WoW for all 15 years.

Pretty much the only things I'd say WoW does better to me is that its zone design feels a lot more alive in the sense that they're 'fuller.' Whereas FF14 zones are often pretty empty and barren; and it's UI systems.

Its fine if you don't enjoy FF14, but I genuinely believe its the best MMO on the market atm which doesn't mean its the best at everything but holistically it plays exactly like an MMO should.

[Wrecktangle]

Every time I go back to WoW, I just feel like I'm spamming 3 buttons until my whack-a-mole procs light up. I find it terribly dull every time I go back. I adjust and get back in the rhythm, but I really don't see why people think it's so amazing and claim it has such depth.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's a post I made a while ago:

While WoW may have much fewer buttons, the gameplay is deep (at least on my Ret Paladin, I know I know). I have a lot of optimizations to make:

1) Don't cap Holy Power
2) Spend procs so you don't waste them being overwritten by new procs
3) Have to spend Holy Power ever 4s to maintain 15% damage buff
4) Don't let CS sit on 2 charges
5) Use abilities in an appropriate priority so you don't get stuck with nothing to do/deal less damage (not sure how many classes have this issue, but it's a Ret one since it's a priority based cooldown class with no filler attack)
6) Priority changes during DPS cooldown with addition of an extra attack

That's just the baseline stuff. This changes depending on which talents you select, which azerite traits, trinkets, and Necklace powers you use. For instance, due to my traits, during my DPS cooldown, I have to prioritize spending Holy Power over a more fluid rotation because I have an extra generator and button forcing more clashes. Not only that, but the increased crit chance I get from it, props up my other azerite trait that deals DoT on a specific ability crit, but that ability can proc back to back, but I have to delay it so if it crits it doesn't overwrite my Dot (all while trying to not overcap resources/let abilities sit idle).

Each of these elements on their own are pretty shallow. Don't cap resources, spend procs, don't let abilities sit idle, etc. That's FF14 gameplay in a nutshell too.

But where it does shine is how they overlap and layer over each other. Each decision points interacts with the others, whereas in FF14 they do not. They're consistently binary (some exclusions, like BRD/BLM come to mind, and an example of why I always say that I feel FF14 does casters MUCH better than WoW does). You will NEVER hit Fast Blade after Riot Blade. You will never hit True Thrust after Disembowl. That's not a choice, that's forced gameplay.

If you combine your statement and mine you effectively answer your own question. There's an obvious allure to the simplicity in which you can come back and feel comfortable and get the rhythm, but at the same time there's a ton of optimizations to be made inside the class that allow for deeper gameplay.

You choose to enjoy WoW in a shallow manner and it works for you. That's fantastic and likely intended. The difference is that WoW gives me room to look deeper if I want too. FF14 doesn't.

Hmm, interesting. So you say you never used Trusts. Why is that? I get that the essence to a great MMORPG experience for some is doing dungeons with other players, but Trusts are a low risk proposition and pretty much drama-free, so there's no reason not to do them. What's frustrating is getting into a dungeon and someone keeps disconnecting. Darn, in such an instance it really is a nightmare to do it with other people. You wish you did it with Trusts in such a scenario.

Simply not interested. I'm a PLD main, so I get insta-queues. I clear half my expert dungeons in 12-15 minutes depending on which one I get.

Even though I'm a magnet for terrible players they're still better than AI teammates who can't AOE in almost every possible scenario. Not to mention, when I do get a catastrophically bad experience, I like to share it with you all! As far as actual drama, it's a near negligible occurrence.

[leviathonlx]

Here's a post I made a while ago:



If you combine your statement and mine you effectively answer your own question. There's an obvious allure to the simplicity in which you can come back and feel comfortable and get the rhythm, but at the same time there's a ton of optimizations to be made inside the class that allow for deeper gameplay.

You choose to enjoy WoW in a shallow manner and it works for you. That's fantastic and likely intended. The difference is that WoW gives me room to look deeper if I want too. FF14 doesn't.



Simply not interested. I'm a PLD main, so I get insta-queues. I clear half my expert dungeons in 12-15 minutes depending on which one I get.

Even though I'm a magnet for terrible players they're still better than AI teammates who can't AOE in almost every possible scenario. Not to mention, when I do get a catastrophically bad experience, I like to share it with you all! As far as actual drama, it's a near negligible occurrence.

Yea overall I'd say to play my feral druid well is a bit deeper than most FF14 jobs as FF14 is very rotational in that you're doing the same exact rotation with little to no variation throughout the entire battle. Now I won't say WoW class design is perfect either and honestly I fully expect us to see class revamps to come with the level squish especially with what Holinka tweeted. It's just unfortunate we had to deal with BFA's class design as I do get the impression they decided to not spend much time on classes in BFA since they knew they were going to drastically alter thing with the next expacs squish.

[Irian]

Every time I go back to WoW, I just feel like I'm spamming 3 buttons until my whack-a-mole procs light up. I find it terribly dull every time I go back. I adjust and get back in the rhythm, but I really don't see why people think it's so amazing and claim it has such depth.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Because of bias pretty much.

People like to pretend there's way more to WoW's combat than there actually is. The truth is that the raid mechanics carry that entire game's difficulty and that's exactly why I don't enjoy playing it. I miss design like FFXIV's that puts way more complexity and difficulty in the class rotations and presents challenge by making those rotations tricky to pull off during a boss encounter.

Current WoW reeks of a game being lead designed by a raid encounter designer. Raid bosses have more abilities than the player classes do. Maybe some people find that to be fun but I can't stand it.