What's so good about FFXIV?

[xpsync]

Because its not wow and people are looking for new things to try

^^^This 100%^^^, ffxiv is fun at first, once the honeymoon phase ends, many like myself return to wow, or try something else.

The absolute best good thing about ffxiv is that it gives you a whole new unprecedented appreciation for just how excellent wow is, perfect no, but compared to any other mmorpg, it's in it own stratosphere, which isn't the best thing either, as when you're on top you become complacent, so another good thing about ffxiv is that the ffxiv is the greatest mmo becasue it's not wow woke the sleeping giant up.

[Frostfred]

Hey now, as a proud and upstanding member of the Lalas, you wound me sir. They have the single best expressions in the game, and its hilarious that every npc has to basically break their neck to look down to me in cinematics. Don't get me started on being unable to reach a computer console in Praetorium....

Yeah, Lala has quite fun moments in cutscenes. I remember one of the initial Marauder quests, where you save a human boy from some angry mobs. In the cutscene, the boy (maybe looking around 10-15 years old) was on the ground in front of the mobs. Then the Lala jumps in between them, looking like a 5 year old boy, with that mini axe of his in hand that probably would just be enough to cut the toenails of the mob. Heroic scene...

[Swnem]

It has great story and characters, it respects your time and investment as a player, it can be serious and light hearted, the music, social features and community.

Simply the fact i am not put in a hamster wheel is the main factor for me. I don't have to play a constant game of slot machine.

[Wrecktangle]

Much of it definitely is. That or it's part of a guilt trip from their raid/social group.

Something I noticed in WoW is that "time spent" was almost like a whole stat unto itself for many people. You spent 10 hours on something that may or may not even have a significant effect on performance? Great! You didn't? Why not? Don't you care? Why aren't you putting the same effort into your guild as others? Are you just looking to get carried?

Eh people tried to guilt me every now and then, like man you're such a casual raid logger. Sure I wasn't top DPS in my guild, but I was consistently putting up 90-95% logs against people with 7-8 ilvl on me, and if you go by ilvl they're straight 99s or even 100's in some examples so I was pulling WAY more than my weight.

[Dudenoso]

with obsession over bigger numbers

That's a community thing - probably a consequence of being a MMO.

As long the people you play with aren't full retarded over the bigger numbers stuff, you can just gloss over the bigger numbers thing since getting enough gear to do content is easy.

Somehow people were actually butthurt about class balance... when getting 5% more personal DPS would only make a difference if you are consistently getting sub-1% wipes. Most people don't.

When I resub I might look into https://github.com/goatcorp/DalamudPlugins to see if I can easily turn off or reduce the font-size of the damage numbers

The one thing wow just objectively does better is raids. Its one of the reasons i wont ever be playing it properly

Too bad they don't make it in small size anymore. 25-man can go fuck itself

[Jamais]

Nothing about FF interests me, the game seems like a spin off on anime culture pandering to american audience.

Constant shoving down my throat like the game is a second coming of Christ deffo didnt help, but that was done mostly by bitter ex wow players who have an unhealthy obssession with WoW crashing and burning.

Nothing against normal FF players who are just enjoying the game for what it is. It is just not for my taste. Please keep in mind this is purely subjective.

[Blackmist]

People are nice. There are actual new players.

Not seen either of those in WoW for a long time.

[Frostfred]

That's a community thing - probably a consequence of being a MMO.

As long the people you play with aren't full retarded over the bigger numbers stuff, you can just gloss over the bigger numbers thing since getting enough gear to do content is easy.

Somehow people were actually butthurt about class balance... when getting 5% more personal DPS would only make a difference if you are consistently getting sub-1% wipes. Most people don't.

When I resub I might look into https://github.com/goatcorp/DalamudPlugins to see if I can easily turn off or reduce the font-size of the damage numbers

That damage only matters on the sub-x% wipes can imo be a myth in many cases, because two scenarios can happen very often in WoW boss design:

1. Adds. Let's say a fight has multiple adds. In the most simple case, let's say add / boss health is 50/50. So a 5% damage increase on everyone on the raid would actually correlate to sub 10% wipes. That's quite a lot. Of course, in reality, it is a much more complex issue, due to possibilities of multidotting, cleaving, etc. This is just to give one example. Another example, that would fall under the same category, are adds that have to be burst down or they wipe the raid. 5% can make all the difference there. It's not even a 1:1 correlation (5% damage / sub 5% wipes) in that case, as people need time to switch to a target, and many classes need time to get the damage going (e.g. dots).

2. Phases. Sometimes having a little more dps can make a fight much easier, depending on phase changes on a boss. If you're too fast and some mechanics overlap, you can always slow down a bit. If you're just a bit too slow, it's possible you have to get into another tricky phase. Or soft enrage mechanics may not even become an issue. An example I have in mind is the final boss in Plaguefall (I hope that's the correct name of the instance - I mean the one in the green soup, that does the nasty AoE). I was healing it on my monk in our group. In good tries, we had one less aoe phase before the first submerge, which made mana management SO much easier on that boss. In bad tries, it just got out another aoe, which made the rest of the fight much harder due to possible mana issues later on.

That being said, I agree that there is a far too much focus / obsession on the numbers, and it has led to some unrealistic requirements in many guilds. Even some annoying, time-consuming farms for only a marginal increase seem to be required even in more casual and laid-back raiding guilds. That's, as you point out, mostly coming from the community. I'd argue, however, that the focus of a game and marketing around it determines the community, and what it focuses on. E.g. imo the FF14 high-level community is so laid back and helpful towards newbies (like myself), because of several design choices the developers made, which attracted and kept a certain type of player.

[KrayZ33]

That's a community thing - probably a consequence of being a MMO.

As long the people you play with aren't full retarded over the bigger numbers stuff, you can just gloss over the bigger numbers thing since getting enough gear to do content is easy.

Somehow people were actually butthurt about class balance... when getting 5% more personal DPS would only make a difference if you are consistently getting sub-1% wipes. Most people don't.

Well, that is not 100% true, because what actually matters in WoW is how much burst/DPS you can do to get out of a certain difficult boss-phase much quicker.
"DPS" itself isn't necessarily the indicator most people are looking for.
Shorter encounters mean it's most likely easier though

FFXIV is the same, but unlike in WoW, DPS doesn't make a phase/mechanic easier - you can only skip a mechanic or two if you have good enough DPS.
But even that is completely irrelevant in FFXIV because you just learn to play "1 minute longer and most of the time, you can't really skip, lets say "E12S Lions" when it matters and are still progressing.

It's one of the reasons why I like FFXIV btw.
I can really just play "whatever" and don't feel bad about it.
As long as I beat enrage, I beat the encounter.
I *could* play WoW the same way, maybe, but I'd feel bad because when there are like 5 adds that have to get taken out asap or the raid damage gets to high, I'd rather play Nightfae than Kyrian as Hunter.
Or I'd rather play Class/Spec X than Class/Spec Y and feel bad about it.

FFXIV encounters are straight forward "remember how to do this and you are fine".
So when we can't skip a mechanic, we just learn the mechanic and then it's fine.

[Akibaboy]

Why is everyone migrating to this game now? what makes it so good?

It's a 6.5/10 JRPG first.
A 9/10 MMO second.
Quality and content are refreshingly consistent, and themes/fantasy are closely woven together. For comparison, you don't have a Panda, Orc, Demon xpac wildly shifting with each entry... from the start you're building slowly into each experience you're about to have. It's a double edged sword because new players will have A LOT of catching up to do, but will feel nearly as invested as a veteran once they do catch up. WoW has the benefit of if you didn't like Pandaland and want to play today, you just skip all that and never give it a second thought. To each their own.

[Echo of Soul]

Yeah and what do you do without the systems and gear?

What do you mean by no gear? The gearing is one of the best parts of the game.

[Dudenoso]

Raid sizes over the years are a really interesting concept to me.

You would think that as communication tools and server sizes improved over the years, people would have become more open to larger raid sizes. And yet the opposite happened.

Back in 1999-200X we didn't have Discord or other tools or even voice chat in many cases. We even had much smaller populations in the game. Yet people were fine with enormous raid sizes. 72-man, sometimes 100 or more in certain cases.

Then WoW came along and there were better communication tools for people to organize with and far larger servers, and we went down to 40-man raids.

And it just kept shrinking. Now we have every tool imaginable to communicate and organize, yet people complain that anything larger than a couple dungeon groups is absurd and oppressive. People claim it's not even possible to build a 20-man raid team nowadays.

Not that I'm saying I prefer any one or the other. It's just interesting to me how it changed over time when you might have expected the opposite.

I think that's an interesting perspective. I prefer 'small' raids not for the logistical challenges, but because the responsibility spread/distribution goes off if it is divided amongst too many people.

If your raid has 100 people in it, more than half of them must be throughput fodder simply because getting 50 people who know their shit and can do 'complex' fights isn't viable for most groups out there.

That means out of the 100-man, a relatively small amount of menpower can have interesting responsibilities/mechanics and everyone else will be just sort of mashing their heads on the keyboard.

As far as I am concerned, as long as it is a small-ish group almost everyone can have fun with the logistical aspect, synergy and individual mechanics.

Also, I am already just another brick in the wall IRL. If my contribution is taking 1% of the boss' HP, that's bleh

That damage only matters on the sub-x% wipes can imo be a myth in many cases, because two scenarios can happen very often in WoW boss design

I went in thinking only about FFXIV. It's been years since I've raided in WoW. Usually, if you are failling DPS checks in FFXIV that probably means someone is playing their job like utter shit (only had that in PUGs, but you already expect that to be a shitshow anyway), or people are dying - probably because of failed mechanics since healing is predictable.

Well, that is not 100% true, because what actually matters in WoW is how much burst/DPS you can do to get out of a certain difficult boss-phase much quicker.

See that bit about coming in thinking about FFXIV. Afterall, my original reply doesn't apply to WoW: WoW's balance is shit and always has been shit. The difference between playing meta and not-meta there is far bigger than FFXIV:

https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statisti...amount&boss=77
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...ount&boss=2435

[Tyrick]

Unbelievable how many people want to convince others to dislike this game.
After 16 years of playing WoW, I needed to realise the game is nothing like before. It's not a game anymore, it's a chore.
So far final fantasy is better in every way than WoW has been in the past 5-6 years.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Unbelievable how many people want to convince others to dislike this game.
After 16 years of playing WoW, I needed to realise the game is nothing like before. It's not a game anymore, it's a chore.
So far final fantasy is better in every way than WoW has been in the past 5-6 years.

Well, you're posting on a WoW fansite, and the tastes of the WoW fandom seem to not really align with the tastes of the FFXIV fandom. WoW fans want their hardcore aesthetics, not nice and fluffy weeb aesthetics. WoW players generally seem to skip through the quests text and rush to endgame, while in FFXIV there isn't really an emphasis on endgame and you're forced to wade through 200-300 hours of story before you can reach it. FFXIV cultists have become especially annoying since Shadowbringers launched, trying to force their beloved game on everyone else (to the point it has become a meme). They've hyped up FFXIV so much it's going to disappoint when people finally check it out.

[starstationprofm]

They said get the gear. Thats his point, its like when wow was good, your grind was the gear. You didnt need other systems to grind. You get the gear, the mounts, titles, songs. There no need for special power grinds outside of this, its a video game not a job about managing resources and time. You could delete all the side power upgrade in wow and guess what most people would be happy about it, thats how you know a system is shit, when deleting something from your game would only be met with large scale relief. Its a game, for fun, not a job, the grind is fun, when it makes you feel you are enjoying what you are doing during it.

Except back in Classic-WOTLK you had to spend way more time on grinding, rep, mats and consumes than you do in SL.

Hell, weekly buffs alone for Classic raids take you between 30 and 1 hour every night.

[TheRevenantHero]

Square Enix actually cares about their players. Toxic trolls actually get punished. The community is nicer than WoW's. The combat feels more dynamic.

This point is personal but there isn't a half-dozen furry races.

[Kithelle]

The weeb stigma has been broken, primarily by wow streamers. Is I think the nr 1 reason people are trying it out now in such large numbers and not say in BFA or WoD droughts, periods of time who where also largely disliked. FF14 itself hasn't exactly changed a ton.

I wouldn't say it's a weeb stigma and more along the lines of people being sheep...if Asmongold went to say ESO instead that game would be having a big boom simply because they follow their master.

People like Asmongold don't typically leave WoW forever and he will probably be back some day and with him his followers.

[TheRevenantHero]

I wouldn't say it's a weeb stigma and more along the lines of people being sheep...if Asmongold went to say ESO instead that game would be having a big boom simply because they follow their master.

People like Asmongold don't typically leave WoW forever and he will probably be back some day and with him his followers.

FFXIV was seeing a large surge of new players before Asmongold went over there.

[shadowmatrix]

Most importantly, FFXIV doesn't include *MUST DO* systems. Everything is purely optional, a quote I heard puts it best. Wow made me feel like I was just wasting time, FFXIV makes me want to waste my time.

Except questing, dungeons, trials, and raids, FF 14 has its own *MUST DO* activities.

[Echo of Soul]

WoW fans want their hardcore aesthetics, not nice and fluffy weeb aesthetics.

By that logic they should all be playing ESO or New World. WoW is very cartoony and furry, not hardcore at all.

- - - Updated - - -

Except questing, dungeons, trials, and raids, FF 14 has its own *MUST DO* activities.

Those aren't systems though, they're content. Many different types of content to get your gear is just fine, having other things than gear you have to grind in order to keep your characters power up to snuff isn't.