/r/ffxivdiscussion: If you want WoW-style design, you're going to have to accept-

Full title: If you want WoW-style design, you're going to have to accept WoW-style concessions.

Another discussion on one of the FFXIV Subreddits about the potential future of the game, etc. I'm personally somewhat neutral towards this because if we just copy another game we sort of lose our own identity and uniqueness in doing so, not to mention its no guarantee that it will change FFXIV for the better. On the other hand, sometimes taking a giant leap, such as implementing an idea like this, yields favorable results.

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Original Post: Title. With so many people pointing to WoW, it's important to not just look at the green-side of the grass but to also see the results of what will occur, speaking as someone whose played almost two decades of WoW and a few years of 14.

#1: Your class will wildly vary in terms of effectiveness based on tier, fight and current balance.

On this, I'd argue 14's actually better than WoW: With the way 14's designed, it's easy enough to switch from say Ninja to Samurai or to switch from Gunbreaker to Astrologian, etc etc. But the key part is that eventually, you're going to get to fights that WILL NOT FAVOR YOUR CLASS. No matter how good of a ninja you are, if the boss has "whenever you do a Mudra, I throw a boulder at you", it's going to make ninja less wanted in that content.

This occurs in WoW with specs, mind you: There are sometimes where one spec completely stomps another, meaning that while you can go that warrior, you had BEST be picking fury. Because arms/prot are doodoo.

#2: At higher levels, a meta WILL evolve that the community will embrace.

Let's look back at WoW's Mythic+ Leaderboard. You'll note that 90% of the top players are all one class and spec. Out of the top 350, there was exactly ONE non-demon hunter. You'll also see several of the same class. This is the meta that will happen.

"Well that doesn't matter. I'm a -really- good Machinist, so—" The problem isn't that Machinist will be so bad you do no damage. The problem is that people in the community will end up avoiding certain classes because they're not meta, even if the group is mid/casual. This will lead to new community frustrations and it won't matter how good or bad a class is, community perception will warp it to being not welcome into content.

#3: The disparity within role will increase.

And I'm not talking "A 5% disparity". Certain tiers will outright favor certain classes. There may be situations where the group's melee has to pivot off melee because of how bad it can be. More ranged will be chosen due to highly mobile fights. Hell, DPS without defensives may also be no-gos due to tough healer checks, forcing players to have to further adapt and accommodate.

Couple this with not knowing 14's content before it's out there and day 1 prog and you're going to get people who poured all their time and effort into gearing Gunbreaker being told they need to hard-pivot to warrior due to the nature of how the tier is developing. And it may stay like that until you get enough gear to make Gunbreaker as good as warrior is naturally for this patch.

It kind of relates back to point one, but there may be a point where Summoner outperforms black mage so much you're going to fight to be able to bring Black Mage into content, as an example. People don't want to struggle too much in content and if BLM vs. SMN (in this hypothetical) is a straight 10-15% better? You're gonna get pressured to swap.

#4: WoW's raid and encounter design isn't built around 14's party size.

When people point out that "Wow look at all the good classes that you can bring into a raid and they're ALL UNIQUE AND VIABLE", the difference is WoW's highest end of content is 10+ players, at least 20% larger than your standard 14 raid. This naturally means you'll get more classes getting into content...and sometimes even then you're going to get repeats of classes.

Like it or not, 14's content isn't WoW's. You can't simply 1:1 port ideas easily without retextualizing them and reconsidering them due to the smaller size of 14's content. And 14 doesn't usually approve of double-class-dipping which will lead to new problems.

#5: WoW ALSO has identity problems, not just 14.

Anyone remember Bloodlust? Bloodlust was a unique mechanic only for Shamans that let them massively boost the haste of players. It was the defining reason to take Shamans into content. Then Hunters got it. Then mages got it. Evokers. Oh, and it's also a buff you can get from an item.

A lot of WoW's unique class identity, while it still exists, has slowly eroded over time just like 14. Partially due to the same complaints and partially due to simple pruning. It's not all golden sunshine there.

#6: WoW's turbo-addon support.

You can't compare the two. While it's an open secret people use addons, nothing in the 14 community is as prevalent as Deadly Boss Mods or Weakauras in terms of helping you play the game. This has further warped the scene and a lot of fights are designed around automatically having these tools. Yoshi P has committed that he wants content to be clearable without major addon support...which would likely be at odds if you borrow heavily of WoW designs to 14.

With all that said? There's plenty 14 can learn from WoW and vice versa. I think WoW's fights can be fun and the primary thing I think 14 could take away from WoW fights is the uniqueness of the arena. So many 14 trials and raids take place in a square box due to mechanics whereas WoW's arenas can vary immensely. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. (Spine of Deathwing, vomit).

But the important thing is to be aware WoW's design -isn't- perfect or totally better than 14. You'll simply be trading one problem for another. The community will shift to accommodate this new design and it's important to recognize the flaws that come with this. I'm not saying 14's state is perfect or that WoW is some terrible game you shouldn't look at, but it is very vital to recognize the problems that can (and will) arise by looking to WoW for guidance.

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Notable comments:

- "Why does everyone always seem to ignore that xiv literally just cannot become like WoW
like, why are we even debating if anything should become like in WoW? It's literally not gonna happen because every duty in this game would need to be significantly reworked, on top of massive class reworks like why are we even entertaining nonsense like this for discussion. edit: just for clarities sake, I am talking about fundamental gameplay design ideas here, not something like "Make Glamour like Transmog" or "Alts should share progress with your main" etc."

- "It's wild to see the gaps in performance between WoW's classes from patch to patch. XIV players have no idea how good they have it"

- "I don’t want wow style design. I want FFXIV 4.X design.
Now, in a vacuum, do I prefer 10.X wow over 6.X FFXIV? Uh yes. Tanks feel like tanks and healers feel like healers and gameplay is just less repetitive.
Does that mean I want WoW style specs, gearing, trinkets, leggos, talents, and balance? Oh hell no.
Would I like a return to tanks having to position bosses, mitigate random TB’s and maintain aggro (or similar)? Yes.
Would I like a return to boss cast times being much shorter with the party taking damage more often, having to focus heal the tanks fairly often, and needing to deal with actual mechanics during trash pulls and having more than two buttons to press when healing isn’t needed? Yes.
The reason people so often compare wow and 14’s current versions is that hardly anybody actually played 14 before all the changes ShB brought. So it’s a lot easier to point to wow, a game with a MUCH larger playerbase (compared to pre-5.0 14) and say we like these things. Especially because we can’t just go and play on a SB legacy server.
I’ve been playing wow for about three years now and though it’s tremendously fun, I don’t want the devs to copy wow’s design. I want them to revive their own."

- Quote from Original Post: "Well that doesn't matter. I'm a -really- good Machinist, so—" The problem isn't that Machinist will be so bad you do no damage. The problem is that people in the community will end up avoiding certain classes because they're not meta, even if the group is mid/casual."
Response to Quote: "This can't be understated, it's also not exactly rare that a certain spec actually is absolutely garbage in WoW. Historically Feral, Survival and Windwalkers know the pain of being so bad it's actually griefing to play those specs."

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Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...going_to_have/

Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves or propose your own ideas below. Cheers.

Some notable comments from within this thread:

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Originally Posted by Aurora428

Can we stop using any comparison to WoW as a shield against criticism to FFXIV?

When someone says healing is more fun is in WoW you don't need to pull out a list of whataboutisms as to why FFXIV should never change anything ever.

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"wow style" is misleading; FF fans already know this from FFXI.
Of course some jobs will be OP while others will be looked down upon, that's fine as long as it's not blatant to the point where it feels on purpose.

As for everything else, they should not design jobs around savage/ultimates; instead they could have 2 modes for jobs like they do for pvp. One balanced for raids, one balanced for non-raiding (this one is the default for the game).

there being a meta is fine, dont have to follow it and your free to go against it

I didn't play WoW in my life but from videos I see FFXIV has more interesting job and art style + dev reputation are not comparable

OP still unable to come up with original ideas on their own I see.

no interest in WoW design. I went to that dance and came here. no thank you.

If we want a relevant trinity we have to have wow type of game?

I don't think so. They can undo the years of dumbing things down and I'd wager a good amount of people disgruntled at the moment would be pleased. I at least would be quite happy!

I think a lot of the people against the healers wanting changes have even less faith that devs can make a positive outcome than the healers complaining do. Each one I talk to more in depth seems to think that there is simply no way to make a healer be needed in a dungeon without gating bad players from completing MSQ or making the dungeon take an hour. Then their fall back of just do ultimate falls apart when you point out the majority of your casts are still glare, broil etc.

Healers want to heal, they want to need to heal in ALL content not just ultimates and savages. I think SE are capable of doing that and not making the MSQ unplayable for bad players. Heck most bad and inexperienced healers issue is that they overheal, so higher healing requirements wouldn't even hurt them. They wouldn't notice much difference when they spam cure II and medica II anyway.

I don't want the MSQ to become unplayable for people, I want to not be bored to tears anytime I need to do roulettes. The content that a majority of the playerbase experiences shouldn't be so boring. Yoshi P said himself that they took too much stress from the game, having some bumps in the road for players is a good thing.

Every game has meta. There is always a meta. What's good in ff is that it doesn't matter the vast majority of the time. OP talks about dps needing to move off of melee cause of uptime.. what does that have to do with changing HEALING? Nothing. They could keep every endwalker dungeon exactly the same and if they made the packs for double pulls hit a bit harder and dungeon bosses had more unavoidable raidwides to make us heal that would be something.

You can increase the unavoidable damage that is coming out in dungeons (both the frequency and damage taken), to a point that prevents tanks and dps handling it themselves. Decrease the damage that is avoidable (same mechanics just less damage if you eat it) to allow for people to make mistakes without them being lethal instantly, ensure there is reasonable time between the two so that should a player eat something avoidable the healer has the time to top up before the next raidwide. The healer should have the time to top the group up after the raid wide and the next lot of avoidable damage. It's still plenty time for the healer to manage the situation, but ensures that to complete the dungeon you MUST have a healer. And that as a healer you will always have reason to actually heal.

In the long run I would like to see the healing and mitigation abilites of tanks and dps be lowered and the ogcd heals that healers have also lessened. FFXIV has been the only MMO I've played whose healers spend upwards of 70% of their time not healing across all content. It's really weird.

I think SE could take some design ideas from WoW when it comes to varied boss encounter design with some cleave/aoe fights instead of most everything being a single target dance. Could even do more environmental things we have to counter with fight mechanics to like arena shrinking through a fight and we have to do certain mechanics properly to get parts of the arena back. I do wish they would look to class design in WoW for getting ideas on different ways to approach job design outside of having a static rotation for example having a more proc based job with a priority system.

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Originally Posted by Swordsman

#6: WoW's turbo-addon support.

You can't compare the two. While it's an open secret people use addons, nothing in the 14 community is as prevalent as Deadly Boss Mods or Weakauras in terms of helping you play the game. This has further warped the scene and a lot of fights are designed around automatically having these tools. Yoshi P has committed that he wants content to be clearable without major addon support...which would likely be at odds if you borrow heavily of WoW designs to 14.

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I see this as being one of the major issues, citizen. One game heavily relies on add-ons and the other game outlaws their use. I can say with certainty that Square will not budge on their position concerning add-ons.




Forge's glow watch over you.

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Originally Posted by WeebPolice

I see this as being one of the major issues, citizen. One game heavily relies on add-ons and the other game outlaws their use. I can say with certainty that Square will not budge on their position concerning add-ons.

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not just that, when the game updates, in WoW you are basically on hold until the mod authors update, which means half of your REQUIRED UI is non functional. I prefer FFXIV not needing mods simply because, you can always play without one arm being held hostage by slow to update required mods.

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Originally Posted by WeebPolice

I see this as being one of the major issues, citizen. One game heavily relies on add-ons and the other game outlaws their use. I can say with certainty that Square will not budge on their position concerning add-ons.




Forge's glow watch over you.

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Oh yeah, we'll never hear the end of it when it comes to the debate on addons/mods etc. I've heard that the current iteration of wow practically designs its boss encounters around the likelihood that the player will use an addon such as Deadly Boss Mods, so wow devs will intentionally make certain boss mechanics difficult to notice and they'll bank on DBM making up for the lack of visual and audio cues.

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Originally Posted by Swordsman

Oh yeah, we'll never hear the end of it when it comes to the debate on addons/mods etc. I've heard that the current iteration of wow practically designs its boss encounters around the likelihood that the player will use an addon such as Deadly Boss Mods, so wow devs will intentionally make certain boss mechanics difficult to notice and they'll bank on DBM making up for the lack of visual and audio cues.

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The negatives of having an add-on that's too useful for its own good, citizen. It's a very well made tool, however some players will complain that it nearly plays the game for you.




Do not fear the shadows.

Many young players on youtube complain about mmo genre because every game whants to be like wow. Those who enjoy fortnite cant find fun in wow style.

My thoughts is that FF14 is way better and thats the reason many left wow for this game.

I dont feel the need we go back 40 years and use add-ons again like wow because its a open door for trojans inside software. Really not interested in third party arquive to improve the game. I quit wow to play 14. Another think that this game feels better is the fact theres no talent tree. oldscholl talent tree and dragonflhight style didnt feels good. FF16 was really good action game and i wish another FF MMO could be like that.

I was exited about a LOL MMO but it was canceled.

I generally concur with this, and would much rather have distinct, imbalanced job fantasies in spite of all the concessions. When it gets to a point where I don't feel my class choice meaningfully changes up my skillset, I end up just considering the game "solved" and not worth wasting my time on.

I think there is enough middle ground to be had in identity versus balance, where jobs have unique utility/function without straying too far from a core set of expectations. I don't believe it to be as impossible as FFXIV's design implies it to be; I think jobs are so homogenized here as a matter of convenience to the devs, and could be differentiated with a less lazy design team.

But I also think that "balancing" distinct job fantasies requires a more holistic approach that the FFXIV devs just don't have right now. Instead of flattening all the jobs to conform to the same encounter design expectations, I think a more sophisticated approach to "niche"/"off-meta" jobs would be to simply design *more* content that specifically features/requires those jobs' mechanics. Kind of like the inverse of your "mudra-rock" example.

I don't really like WoW aesthetically or mechanically, but I do really appreciate that most jobs still maintain some kind of unique mechanical core, be it Druid transformations, Wizard portals, Shaman totems, etc. It just sucks that even in games like WoW and GW2 those identities are becoming more and more "aesthetic-only" as well.

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Originally Posted by WeebPolice

The negatives of having an add-on that's too useful for its own good, citizen. It's a very well made tool, however some players will complain that it nearly plays the game for you.




Do not fear the shadows.

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I can sort of understand the whole "nearly plays the game for you" point. Yeah the addon doesn't actually control your character for you, but the fact that its pretty much telling you what to do at each and every step of the boss fight seems a bit unfair to me. Like are you actually playing and figuring out the game for yourself or are you just doing what this addon told you to do? It's a bit of a grey area for me. But yes, DBM is a fantastic raiding addon, and when I played wow until I quit in Mists of Pandaria, we were required by our raid leader to show up to every raid with DBM installed and ready to go. The addon literally tells you everything about the boss encounter and it accomplishes that with very noticeable visual/audio cues like bright flashing lights and icons, and loud horns and sirens lmao.

Bro, I played XI. I want this. lol What's the point of even having jobs when all play so similar? You can change your job literally at the press of a button.

This game has so deteriorated from what an MMORPG is, people nowadays can barely fathom another system. xD

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Originally Posted by Swordsman

#1: Your class will wildly vary in terms of effectiveness based on tier, fight and current balance.

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Yes, I agree with this point. If jobs are too unique then they will be good for some fights and not for others. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing; that's going to depend on how attached each individual is to their jobs. But we know it's easy to switch, so is it necessarily a problem for people willing to main a category instead? ie. ranged physical, ranged magical, melee, tank or healer.

In any case, I think the argument is they can be a bit more unique within the homogeny because they used to be so. This can be achieved by achieving the same thing, but in different ways, or only being slightly disadvantaged rather than entirely disadvantaged.

An example is each gap closer working in a different way. This is the case for many jobs - for example, SMN, NIN, BLM, DRG, DNC and RPR do their gap closers in unique and interesting ways. Maybe DRK, but it always felt like this was it being the tank version of Dragoon. I'm not sure about RDM, because although it was originally fundamental to their rotation, it always looked quite bland as well.

The other gap closers just came about "because the others have them" and are boring or copies really.

Another example is achieving mitigation differently. WAR would increase its HP and take the damage like a beast unmitigated, then heal itself up. PLD would heavily mitigate and block with its shield. DRK used to absorb HP from enemies like other FF games but this overlapped WAR (so it now absorbs it into a magic shield instead making it the magic shield tank). GNB was a jack of all trades. But in Endwalker they just decided they can all be the same and step on eachother's toes.

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#2: At higher levels, a meta WILL evolve that the community will embrace.

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This doesn't matter. I've seen people describe a meta for this game since Heavensward but if you PF or join an "average" static, this isn't a thing. The meta has always been for people being extremely picky with what PF they join or what static they join and ignored by the majority of people, who just play whatever they want.

A universal meta will develop if you literally can't clear the content with certain jobs, but if they are technically viable, a lot of players will just play whatever they want because that's what happens now.

A lot of people will argue PLD wasn't good in Heavensward due to physical mit and lower damage, but it was most definitely used to clear raids even then so it was viable despite these problems and average parties didn't seem to bar PLD's from parties since they were lucky to get a tank at all.

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going to get people who poured all their time and effort into gearing Gunbreaker being told they need to hard-pivot to warrior

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You find out very quickly after tier release if your job isn't gonna be good for it. With the savage delay, this is likely to be known just based on the normal mode. And gear is mostly shared amongst roles ie. amongst tanks so.

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#4: WoW's raid and encounter design isn't built around 14's party size.

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That's a good point, really. There's a world of difference between regular savage raids and DRS.

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- "Why does everyone always seem to ignore that xiv literally just cannot become like WoW

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Unfortunately people seem to just make it sound easy like that without really understanding this game.

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"It's wild to see the gaps in performance between WoW's classes from patch to patch. XIV players have no idea how good they have it"

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I've always heard this for years and, actually, am aware of how good we have it.

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Does that mean I want WoW style specs

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Uh... in 8.0 Yoshi-P is considering replacing leveling with an alternative sense of progression such as "ability points" and went on to basically describe skill trees, before mentioning talents outright as another possibility. He also took well to a suggestion for materia to be a UI instead of attached to gear but is concerned that may simplify the game too much so it's something he will think about.

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Originally Posted by Swordsman

I can sort of understand the whole "nearly plays the game for you" point. Yeah the addon doesn't actually control your character for you, but the fact that its pretty much telling you what to do at each and every step of the boss fight seems a bit unfair to me. Like are you actually playing and figuring out the game for yourself or are you just doing what this addon told you to do? It's a bit of a grey area for me. But yes, DBM is a fantastic raiding addon, and when I played wow until I quit in Mists of Pandaria, we were required by our raid leader to show up to every raid with DBM installed and ready to go. The addon literally tells you everything about the boss encounter and it accomplishes that with very noticeable visual/audio cues like bright flashing lights and icons, and loud horns and sirens lmao.

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Ah, yes, citizen. The air horn from DBM on Yogg-Saron continues to haunt me to this day. We lost many Weeaboo Police Troopers to this unforgiving and destructive boss in the world of Azeroth.




We serve so others do not have to.

I don't know that the OP has proven their premise, but for me it doesn't matter because I'm not looking for WoW-style design. I'm looking for FFXIV to use the massive amount of design space that is just sitting there unused.

It's also not an all-or-nothing thing. You can allow for some additional variance in DPS/tankiness/HPS without actually going all the way to WoW-land with its "this spec is so garbage, we don't want you bringing it."

I think FFXIV just needs to start creating more variation within the roles and to use more of the design space that's available to them. You could absolutely have a priority-based tank instead of a rotational one. You could have a tank with shared-resource mitigation (e.g., you have a pool of 6-10 pips and different abilities use different amounts).

One thing that I think WoW has that adds a lot of variety in both feel and also builds is the Mastery stat for each spec. It would be interesting to have different jobs have a mastery stat (probably replacing direct hit) that interacts with each job's core identity.

Lastly, directly to the OPs point, balance is a big issues and symmetry has been a tool throughout history to help with balance, but the game I want to play doesn't rely on symmetry for balance. Yeah, it's harder, but it's also doable.

Can we stop using any comparison to WoW as a shield against criticism to FFXIV?

When someone says healing is more fun is in WoW you don't need to pull out a list of whataboutisms as to why FFXIV should never change anything ever.

"I don’t want wow style design. I want FFXIV 4.X design"

This should have ended the thread.

Why is it that people always go from one extreme to another when we're comparing WoW to FF?
We don't NEED a 20% dps difference or anything. We just want jobs to play differently, and have minor advantages and disadvantages over others.
So you have a reason to actually level more than 1 job.

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Originally Posted by WeebPolice

Ah, yes, citizen. The air horn from DBM on Yogg-Saron continues to haunt me to this day. We lost many Weeaboo Police Troopers to this unforgiving and destructive boss in the world of Azeroth.

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My condolences. I hope their sacrifices were not in vain and the department obtained many pieces of loot as compensation.

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Originally Posted by Aurora428

Can we stop using any comparison to WoW as a shield against criticism to FFXIV?

When someone says healing is more fun is in WoW you don't need to pull out a list of whataboutisms as to why FFXIV should never change anything ever.

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I'm gonna add this to the original post because of how true this comment is. The reason why the whataboutisms as to why FFXIV should never change anything ever suddenly come out is because some highly invested FFXIV players become unreasonably defensive at the idea that something in the game can be improved.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Why is it that people always go from one extreme to another when we're comparing WoW to FF?
We don't NEED a 20% dps difference or anything. We just want jobs to play differently, and have minor advantages and disadvantages over others.
So you have a reason to actually level more than 1 job.

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Its a method of debasing an argument. If an opponent can make an argument appear irrational then they'll have an easier time dismissing that argument.

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Originally Posted by Swordsman

The reason why the whataboutisms as to why FFXIV should never change anything ever suddenly come out is because some highly invested FFXIV players become unreasonably defensive at the idea that something in the game can be improved.

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I want to say in addition to your reason, the average FF forum user probably doesn't even know what a whataboutism is, and they most likely don't understand that a whataboutism can't be used in an argument because it's a logical fallacy.




Remember the lessons of the past.

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Originally Posted by WeebPolice

I want to say in addition to your reason, the average FF forum user probably doesn't even know what a whataboutism is, and they most likely don't understand that a whataboutism can't be used in an argument because it's a logical fallacy.




Remember the lessons of the past.

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Lol, you're not wrong. There was a time when I used to call out logical fallacies on these forums but then I realized it flew over people's heads most of the time or people remained willfully ignorant to it.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Why is it that people always go from one extreme to another when we're comparing WoW to FF?
We don't NEED a 20% dps difference or anything. We just want jobs to play differently, and have minor advantages and disadvantages over others.
So you have a reason to actually level more than 1 job.

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Because they are the biggest mmorpg's on the market atm

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Originally Posted by Swordsman

- "Why does everyone always seem to ignore that xiv literally just cannot become like WoW

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I have never played WoW, and have barely watched more than a few minutes of the UI vomit that every WoW screenshot looks like.

What I would like to see is XIV retain it's own identity and not just "hey this thing is popular right now, let's do our version of it" and then by the time that patch comes out two years later everyone has forgotten it.

Like we had a recent Fall Guys cross over. Look at how utterly poor the mechanics from that works in 14. This is not a problem with 14, this is a problem of trying to shoe horn one type of gameplay into another type of game that was not designed for that. Was it fun? I'd say it was not very fun because it was some of the worst latency-sensitive minigames in XIV. All of the platforming in the game is like that, because the game is not designed as an action game, it's designed as a dance choreography. If you don't press the buttons at the right time, you fail. If you want your game to be an action game, you have to reduce the button bloat down to 3 buttons (attack, block/parry, and jump) and then what you have is dark souls, not a MMORPG. This game is not Elden Ring any more than it is WoW.

There are things you can do within the game engine that make sense to do. If Square-Enix decided it was worth the effort to completely remake FF1-6 within 14 (not just the raids and nods in the story), and just have those as "FFXIV Reflections" that you can do completely independent of the MSQ. Those would be worth playing, because it would be familiar. However everyone who has played 1-6 would be like "nah, I've not 40 hours to sink into each of these". I think players want something new more than they want to re-tread back over content they've seen before. The game itself has enough of the assets to do this though. We literately have every end boss gauntlet from FF3,FF4,FF5,FF6 in the game already, as well.

It makes more sense for FFXIV to "try less" new things unless they can confidently make it work in 14. The Monster Hunter crossover barely worked, but because 14 relies mostly on choreography, something close to what would be expected sufficed. The FF11/13/15/16 crossovers meanwhile are basically just a series of FATE or Solo instances.

WoW is mostly criticized for it's extremely toxic game culture, meanwhile XIV is mostly criticized for it's inattentiveness to TOS violations inside the game, even when reported.

I'm not a fan of WoW class design but OP is correct in regard to community reaction. The devs didn't wake up one day and decide to homogenize all the jobs out of the blue, they did it in response to players whining about their jobs being useless because they don't have XYZ ability, or that they're too hard to play, or any number of other complaints. If you want the jobs to be unique again you have to accept that they're going to have strengths and weaknesses, meaning they'll be straight up worse in some situations than others. If everyone has a meltdown again when that happens we'll be right back to our current status quo in short order.

I think it’s fine.

I love picking an underused class because it’s nice to play as an underdog. And a rarely picked class.

FFXIV doesn't have to resemble WoW in its entirety but it can take ideas from it.

Another thread of people using WoW to shield against criticism: Reset the count!

But really, FFXIV is already a game with its basis in 2.0 of taking some aspects of Wrath/Cata WoW into its redesign. But since ShB, every class is turning into the burst window meta where everything must line up and nothing plays differently. I think FF14 has the ability and idea of doing different archtypes for jobs outside of what it is now; even with Dawntrail - what really changes in job design since ShB? Atleast try to change things up.

I'm hopeful some experimentation will take place, but I would caution that WoW healing is currently in the exact opposite place of FF14.

Instead of too little threat, there's arguably too much of it - a consequence of player strength through talents and defensive power creep. That's not an enviable position.

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Originally Posted by Lemuel81

FFXIV doesn't have to resemble WoW in its entirety but it can take ideas from it.

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Too true, citizen, but it's unfortunate that WoW is the boogeyman to some fans of FFXIV, so you're going to be met with lots of pushback.

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Originally Posted by Swordsman

Lol, you're not wrong. There was a time when I used to call out logical fallacies on these forums but then I realized it flew over people's heads most of the time or people remained willfully ignorant to it.

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Yes, citizen, the global forums blacklist proves very useful in combating this.

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Originally Posted by Swordsman

The addon literally tells you everything about the boss encounter and it accomplishes that with very noticeable visual/audio cues like bright flashing lights and icons, and loud horns and sirens lmao.

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But to also address your previous point about add-ons in WoW, add-ons do seem to be a bit out of control. A person who uses DBM has a huge advantage over someone who doesn't.





Go forth to victory.

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Originally Posted by Keldion

I'm hopeful some experimentation will take place, but I would caution that WoW healing is currently in the exact opposite place of FF14.

Instead of too little threat, there's arguably too much of it - a consequence of player strength through talents and defensive power creep. That's not an enviable position.

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Sounds like there is a middle road that should be easy to occupy instead of sticking to the extremes.

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Originally Posted by Amenara

Sounds like there is a middle road that should be easy to occupy instead of sticking to the extremes.

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That's the rub - no one wants the extremes, but it isn't easy to reach the middle road. When tanks and damage dealers are experienced at avoiding telegraph AOEs or mitigating what can't be avoided, the needed healing shrinks.

Everything is connected. I'd go as far to claim DRK is the best balanced tank regarding its reliance on healer support. I used to despise this fact, but I've had a change of heart.

Well considering ARR was inspired so much by Cata WoW, I think the devs can still take inspo from wow in certain ways.
Yeah we probably won't be getting 8 hour long raids or big open zones but the FFXIV devs looking at Preservation Evoker's DPS+Heal moves and thinking "hey these could work on Sage!" should still be on the table. WoW has its flaws over XIV but also its positives over XIV, fundementally both games are far more similar compared to other MMOs but with different design principals behind them, much easier to compare XIV to WoW then say Lost Ark. Healing in WOW is incredibly engaging and fun but at the same time extremely punishing when learning to the extent that you will probably have to look at guides to even understand what you are doing on some healers, while XIV healing is far easier to pick up and learn in game but incredibly brain dead and boring. Pretty much every trinity MMO has their flaws with the trinty, XIVs current problem is that the trinty is irrelevant while WOW has unbalanced specs and a large learning curve.

But yeah you can't really directly insert WOW logic into XIV, they have completely different logic and playerbases. Tanks in WOW have threat generation as incredibly important to the gameplay while XIV doesn't, Healing in WOW takes far more commitment you can't nearly full heal in an oGCD like in XIV constantly so if they do take inspo from WOW they'll have to adapt it to this or rework the healer role to be more like WOW if they decide thats a better route.
I for sure think if the 8.0 removal of levelling for another way of gaining power is being discussed the devs have to look at lots of games outside of WOW for inspo, a skill tree for example probably would not work in XIV. But I am cautiously optimistic about experimentation because the XIV endgame has remained pretty similar for most of its lifespan so a mix up of it should happen at some point.

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Originally Posted by Rekh

"wow style" is misleading; FF fans already know this from FFXI.
Of course some jobs will be OP while others will be looked down upon, that's fine as long as it's not blatant to the point where it feels on purpose.

As for everything else, they should not design jobs around savage/ultimates; instead they could have 2 modes for jobs like they do for pvp. One balanced for raids, one balanced for non-raiding (this one is the default for the game).

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this doesnt make sense, non-raiding/ cvasual wouldnt need balance, so having two different skews is assinine

This could work only if a whole system is revamping:
1- stop leveling after 100
2- add gearset system and abilities attach to gear with bonus effect like monster hunter gear sets
3- diverse tanks and healers with different stats and other ways to play the role.

Example paladin passive increase defence but warrior increase max hp + percentage life steal based on HP

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Originally Posted by Rekh

"wow style" is misleading; FF fans already know this from FFXI.
Of course some jobs will be OP while others will be looked down upon, that's fine as long as it's not blatant to the point where it feels on purpose.

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FFXI had a lot of cool ideas that were close to being great. The jobs were well designed but often hindered by the sub job system and how it was so limited..

For example a 75 war/ 37 whm could have been a really good tank if only the whm spells scaled better. Instead of cure being capped at 30hp cure 2 being capped at 90hp. Etc.

75 SMN 37 blm could also have been a strong choice if the low level blm spells scaled better at higher levels.

A lot of jobs would have had a lot of options if sub jobs scaled better. It was a cool idea that didn't quite reach its potential.

The other big issue XI had was it's bestiary was heavily biased. So many mob arch types shared the same weaknesses. You can see it just looking at xiclopedia. 90% of mobs weak to slashing ice and or thunder...

If the bestiary was better balanced a lot of those jobs would again have been a lot more promising and desirable.. again it was a great concept that came close but didn't quite make it...

It's job design was amazing. If only it had gotten the sub jobs and bestiary right to go with it.

I came from WoW when i started FF14. I love both Worlds, spend an insanely amound of time in them.

I never wanted FF14 to be like WoW, in particular not the mythic/m+, the skill-pacing and this freedom of mods. The mythic raids and the impact of mods completely broke to total balancing of WoW.

But i allways wished that FF14 would take some inspiration for how new Content can look like. New Content in FF14 so lame and cheaply made, its allways 30-40% of that what it could or even should be. To fast we reach the point of just repeating the same thing over and over again with nothing new coming in.
Daily quest of wild tribes are done in a few minutes. Some short cutscenes at some points and a few minutes of walking to a location to tell a little story. And thats all, you've seen everything after 2-3 days, "farm" the quests for 2-3 weeks and you are done with a whole contentpatch.

Or you have things like high sea fishing or the gold sourcer, 30-60% just waitingtime for the next possible interactiontime

Rynes Adventure to bring back the Elements in Shadowbringer. It felt so turned down to fit the standart 8-People-Raids-content.

Hunts! HOW And WHY is the Hunting-content in FF14 the most underdeveloped one? Hunting-trains are full with hundreds of players. Its good content to bring players out in the areas, great openworld group-content. But all crippled by stupid long SpawnCDs, no quests,no Hunting-faction, Archivement with out of reach kill requiements. It could be so much more part of the daily gameplay.

FF14 is lacking where WoW tends to have to much,ofc only in my opinion.

The fallacy is to think that because something bad happens in another game (here, WoW), then that bad thing is automatically going to crop up in XIV were it to attempt introducing variations, and that every attempt to do anything else than homogenization is doomed to fall into the exact same horrifying pitfalls.