What problems do you have with Final Fantasy 14?

[TheRevenantHero]

You need good memory in xiv, but you need to be good at reacting in WoW. One has RNG built in mechanics, guess which.

You can faceroll through a lot of WoW's mechanics. FFXIV is nowhere near as forgiving.

[Swnem]

I'm sure this one has been beaten more than a dead horse but the biggest problem I have is that final is in the name but it never is the final one.

It was supposed to be, the first one. But, turns out it was successful so it keeps coming back.

[BeerEelemental]

As an avid player of both WoW (played it up till bfa pretty much, since vanilla) and FF14 (playing since ARR), i can say hands down that the base content for wow is a lot harder in raids (heroic upwards) in general and the base content for ff14 is a lot harder in dungeons in general, especially from Stormblood and upwards.

Mythic raids in wow are a LOT harder than savage/ultimate in FFXIV, in essence. The problem in wow however are addons, you got stuff like weak auras, decursive, dbm etc. that basically almost play the game for you. In FFXIV you don't have this (outside the grey area damage meters) and if you compare FFXIV savage/ultimate to mythic Wow raids with addons, i'd say the difficulty is about on equal footing.

Dungeons on the other hand (outside of mythic+) have been a faceroll ever since wotlk, and end of heavenwards and upwards dungeons in FFXIV do require some tactics, for bosses at least. I'm not saying that they are the hardest bosses ever, but they do have a learning curve, especially in the start of an expansion when the scaling doesn't favor the overgeared yet.

However, in general i find FFXIV's content to be a LOT more polished than wow's, also the main reason i started playing wow less and less and ffxiv more and more. Ofcourse every game has it's issues and the ones i find in ffxiv are:
- Glamour system is absolutely terrible (the dresser interface, etc.).
- Social engagement can sometimes be very lacking, as in FC's aren't as obvious as wow's guilds and the linkshells are pretty much hidden unless you know them, etc.
- There are quite a bunch of really weird people in ffxiv, trying to push their erp stuff on people especially if you hang out in limsa for example. I've also run into some people that randomly started rp'ing inside a dungeon and got angry when the other people didn't want to participate. This is far and few between though.

Can't really think of anything else, and they are more minor nuisances than actual 'problems' (of which i could name about 20 from the top of my head for wow...)

[Delever]

Yes, actually. ShB has been cut content left and right. Seeing the focus on Bozja while everything else suffers killed a lot of my interest as well.

The cut content outside of reducing dungeons to 1 per patch was entirely cause of covid and had nothing to do with bozja. The ultimate for example got delayed because of sokkens condition and because of the pandemic.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

delayed because of sokkens condition

Soken has assistants who could have picked up the slack. Could also contract other composers. Uematsu is still making tracks for Granblue, why not call him up?

[Delever]

Soken has assistants who could have picked up the slack. Could also contract other composers. Uematsu is still making tracks for Granblue, why not call him up?

I dont know the insided of the company and how it works obviously. I said it was due to both sokkens condition and the pandemic. If it was only sokkens condition I m sure a workaround could have been found.

[Dakhath]

Soken is fantastic and all that, but the company doesn't cease to operate with him laid low.

[PizzaSHARK]

The battle system is obsessed with high-end raiding gameplay and literally everything else involving the battle system suffers because of it. The basic gameplay concept for XIV is "manage a complex rotation while remembering to do mechanics properly." Mechanics are set in stone and *rigidly* scripted so that this is possible, with ultimates pushing this to about as hard as their outdated servers can manage. When you're doing savages or ultimates, it works well and it can even be pretty rewarding.

Outside of that, it's garbage. If you aren't being challenged to memorize and repeat mechanics, then doing your rotation is completely brainless and it makes you wonder "why do I need to push 10 buttons when I could just push a few?" It results in a system wherein each individual keystroke feels like it has very little impact, and absent the design setting that demands this style of design, it feels awful.

What's funny is that the game's PvP, as lackluster as it is, literally shows how much better the combat system *could* be if they weren't so obsessed with perfect DPS balance and design... in a game that doesn't even officially allow the use of DPS meters and refuses to ever add them in an official capacity... because the PvP toolkits for each class have pretty much removed every single bit of fluff and fat possible and each keystroke is impactful and meaningful. That doesn't mean those toolkits are good as-is, as anyone who does much PvP will tell you, there's far too few buttons to go around. But it's a good foundation to build off of.

I also have a severe issue with the way they handle loot in raids. Raiding in MMOs is possibly the most "play with your friends and help them overcome challenges!" kind of content you can come up with, but the way S-E handles loot is **aggressively** anti-"play with your friends!" The coffer system needs to be thrown out immediately and replaced with personal loot. Every single kill should have the boss drop one of each type of coffer it can drop, plus one of each type of upgrade material it can drop. You may receive *one* coffer or upgrade component per week, per boss. Even if you have already received loot that week, the boss always drops the same number of coffers and materials; you just simply can't roll on them. This allows you to play with and assist your friends, no matter where you each are in progression through the tier.

The fact that such a terrible and moronic system has remained in the live game for so long is really a testament to how excessively cautious the development team is. It seems like the sheer weight of whining and complaining they got in Heavensward has given them developer PTSD or something and they live in mortal terror of ever displeasing the playerbase again.

But it's definitely contributed to me burning out and leaving the game behind. If I can't play with my friends, what the fuck is the point of pushing to learn and progress through the raid tier at all? It's simply not possible to play with *all* of my friends in a single group, in a single set of clears each week, so it always means I can do nothing but sit and watch and cheer them on instead of actually *helping* them. Maybe that'd be fine if it was a single-player game, but this is a friggin MMO - teamwork and playing with friends is what it's supposed to be about!

[Echo of Soul]

"why do I need to push 10 buttons when I could just push a few?"

That question can be applied to any game. You can design a game to only have one button if you want but that can get really boring. I made really bad choices in the beginning of World of Warcraft. I played a mage in vanilla and it bored me so much because I only had one button to press so in TBC I changed to a warlock which turned out to also only have one button. I had to play a suboptimal spec going fire instead of shadow just to avoid boredom. I think a combat system is better when you can't turn your brain off, when you have to pay attention and engage.

[Biomega]

That question can be applied to any game. You can design a game to only have one button if you want but that can get really boring. I made really bad choices in the beginning of World of Warcraft. I played a mage in vanilla and it bored me so much because I only had one button to press so in TBC I changed to a warlock which turned out to also only have one button. I had to play a suboptimal spec going fire instead of shadow just to avoid boredom. I think a combat system is better when you can't turn your brain off, when you have to pay attention and engage.

While you're not entirely wrong there, there is a lot of space between 1-button rotations and 10-button rotations. More doesn't automatically equal better; neither does less. It's about finding a good middle ground.

WoW does a fairly good job at that for most classes now. There's a few outliers (hi there Havoc DH) but by and large I think they're in a decent spot in terms of rotational complexity and skill ceiling. There's OTHER issues with class design in WoW, to be sure, but rotations are pretty decent for the most part.

FF14 has a bit too much bloat for my taste. Same with SWTOR. A lot of it is just very clunky, piano-style gameplay where you just have 10 buttons to go through in some order. That's not that appealing to me.

[Echo of Soul]

FF14 has a bit too much bloat for my taste. Same with SWTOR. A lot of it is just very clunky, piano-style gameplay where you just have 10 buttons to go through in some order. That's not that appealing to me.

It depends on the job really. I personally enjoy both Machinist and Red Mage and they're a lot simpler than Ninja for example. I'd put Monk in that category too if you're not minmaxing, you can get a lot out of the job by just doing a flank combo and one rear combo and there is like one ogcd ability to worry about.

I also play with a lot of macros, it helps me perform better. If you know how to write them to get over the queue limitation they can be really helpful. It's the same as WoW really where some classes could get really awkward to play without using macros.

[BeerEelemental]

It depends on the job really. I personally enjoy both Machinist and Red Mage and they're a lot simpler than Ninja for example. I'd put Monk in that category too if you're not minmaxing, you can get a lot out of the job by just doing a flank combo and one rear combo and there is like one ogcd ability to worry about.

I also play with a lot of macros, it helps me perform better. If you know how to write them to get over the queue limitation they can be really helpful. It's the same as WoW really where some classes could get really awkward to play without using macros.

Using macro's for combat abilities is possibly the worst advise you could give someone in ff14, be wary of that.
'write them to get over the queue limitation' is flat nonsense, macro'd actions can _not_ be queued, at all, ever. The moment you use macro's for combat rotations you are gonna be bumping up your gcd space, and you will lose a LOT of dps.

What you _can_ use macro's for:
- crafting.
- mouse over macro's for off-target attacks (so you can keep main target on auto attack) or healing.
- ground target macro's (so you don't have to press twice if you use targeted macro).
- general text macro's etc.

Just want to repeat, do. not. ever. use. macro's for your base combat rotation, it will hurt you a lot in the long run.


There is also an in-depth video on this made by Mrhappy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qshNKeDENlk

[Jackstraw]

You can faceroll through a lot of WoW's mechanics. FFXIV is nowhere near as forgiving.

Excuse me, what.

[Echo of Soul]

'write them to get over the queue limitation' is flat nonsense

You can try it out yourself ingame if you want. Just write a macro with the same action over and over again filling all 15 lines and compare that to a macro that only contains one line, there's a noticable difference.

[draugril]

One of those peeves I have when new players are asking about it and the FF14 community swears up and down that everything feels great and EVEN FASTER THAN WOW! once you level up which is absolutely untrue. Just leads people to disappointment later when they realize that isn't the case.

Depends on the class. I find that there's a much larger gap between the most and least frenetic classes in their respective games. While the average might be slower in FFXIV, even at the cap, there is room for other classes to be much more demanding in their pacing. Whereas in WoW, everyone is more-or-less the in the same ballpark,

[Tenjen]

Excuse me, what.

having raided in both. FFXIV is far less forgiving of mistakes. One persons mistakes get everyone killed or create a domino effect of deaths much more commonly than in wow, even with the ability to mid combat rez because thats accounted for in balancing the fights. A few bad plays during the fight can mean the boss attempt is already lost even before the deaths begin.

[Necromantic]

If we're using say expert roulette as the context, I would argue wall to wall pulls with people pushing AOE buttons and tanks using CDs should be the standard.

Should be however, there is no documented standard. I've talked to people about what they feel is "standard" and the range is quite huge. Therefore, the conclusion is not to expect anything in random groups because what I expect to happen may not be the same as you. One of us may be perfectly content while the other feels we're way off.

What if you simply want more than the bare minimum? Should you have to go to FC/LS/statics to get that?

Yes you should. You're not always going to get bare minimum in random groups but never go in expecting professionals.

FF14 has a bit too much bloat for my taste. Same with SWTOR. A lot of it is just very clunky, piano-style gameplay where you just have 10 buttons to go through in some order. That's not that appealing to me.

What job uses 10 buttons? I play on PS5 and I can fit 16 buttons on my standard action bar... 10 would be a cakewalk.

It depends on the job really. I personally enjoy both Machinist and Red Mage and they're a lot simpler than Ninja for example. I'd put Monk in that category too if you're not minmaxing, you can get a lot out of the job by just doing a flank combo and one rear combo and there is like one ogcd ability to worry about.

I also play with a lot of macros, it helps me perform better. If you know how to write them to get over the queue limitation they can be really helpful. It's the same as WoW really where some classes could get really awkward to play without using macros.

I really REALLY wanted to play Ninja when I started playing but I absolutely hate positionals, especially on console. It's not challenging or fun, its just annoying.

[Jackstraw]

having raided in both. FFXIV is far less forgiving of mistakes. One persons mistakes get everyone killed or create a domino effect of deaths much more commonly than in wow, even with the ability to mid combat rez because thats accounted for in balancing the fights. A few bad plays during the fight can mean the boss attempt is already lost even before the deaths begin.

It's apparent to me that whoever pushes this narrative has not played any difficulty higher than heroic starting from possibly Mogu'shan vaults.
How can you say this in a world where Tomb of Sargeras exists is completely beyond me.

[Kalisandra]

I really really hate the look and feel of the UI.

Maybe it's 17 years playing wow, but the UI and macro system makes interacting with the game so much better. All my keybinds are shift/none macros. Easy.

Also, and this is not just a FF problem, but click to heal like Vuhdo should be standard, or at the least, available.i bailed on LOTRO for this reason, wanted to play minstrel but the heal UI doesn't work for me

The lack of WoW-like addons and the cruddy healing UI was my main sticking point with FFXIV. The other was that I felt that they'd gone overboard in making rotations 'interesting' by adding lots of off-GCD spells and also made the jobs all feel 'samey' because they seemed to use a similar sort of build-and-spend system (and last time I tried FFXIV was to escape Legion, which had also made everything into build-spend).

As for the community being nicer, I only ever participated in-game, and back in late ARR and Heavensward it was fairly nice and quite chatty, though I did have a run in with someone who was quite nasty about my lack of DPS as a healer. It got a bit heated when I replied that it'd be higher if I wasn't healing them constantly because they stood in all the mechanics. When I came back later everyone was much less chatty. I wonder if SE's policy on being nice in chat or getting the banhammer has become more of the thing over time.

[javierdsv]

My problem is that it sucks, uhmm, yeah, that's it. No need for further explanation.