Make FFXIV more like FFXI and less like WoW

[LiadansWhisper]

I never said the word must.

If SE wants to try and copy WoW they can, and have.

Also, I should point out one of the main reasons for WoW's success is their excellent server performance. Something Final Fantasy 14 is having difficulty with. So I think they lack this key ingredient to become the next WoW.

And I disagree with you that this game does quite a bit things differently than WoW. It really doesn't. It is a shameless copycat. And you need to just admit that.

Now you may be right it was a smart financial move. Time will tell. I won't even attempt to argue that WoW is not profitable, because it is. But is it the type of game most long-time Final Fantasy fans were looking for? I kind of doubt it.

This isn't WoW. Not by a longshot.

- The most obvious reason is that I can level every class on one character, something that's impossible in WoW.
- There are no Jobs in WoW.
- There are no cross-class skills.
- You can only have 2 Crafts in WoW, and it's impossible to HQ anything (and crafted items are patently useless to PvE until max level and have almost no use for PvP).
- Food does not last through death (although it lasts longer than in FF), and the raid-quality food generally only gives one stat - a primary stat such as Intellect, Stamina (Vitality), Dexterity, or Strength. You can't HQ food.
- There is no Archaeology in FF.
- Herbalism (aka Botany) is only used for Alchemy and Inscription. The only way to find cooking ingredients is to kill animals that drop them, or grow your own - on your own farm.
- There is no use for lumber or wood - and, in fact, you can't gather them at all.
- There are almost no loading screens in WoW. The only "loading screens" are between continents. You can fly from the top of Winterspring to the tip of Tanaris in Kalimdor, and there isn't a single loading screen.
- You can fly in Wow.
- Mounts have different run speeds, and flying mounts have different fly speeds.
- You have to buy successive levels of mount training.
- You can climb to the top of any hill in WoW - or fly to it, outside of Eversong and the Draenei starting area.
- You can fall to your death while out of combat. In fact, I spent a good long time dying horribly in Howling Fjord trying to get to mining nodes while too low level to fly.
- You can level from 10-90 without ever stepping foot in the world - leveling entirely in dungeons or PvP Battlegrounds.
- You can level from 1-90 without ever stepping into a dungeon or Battleground - leveling entirely through quests.
- You will never run out of quests in WoW. If you exhaust the quests in one zone, you simply go to the next zone and there will be more quests there.
- You can level 1-90 by doing nothing but grinding mobs. It'll take a long time, but you can do it.
- You can level 5-90 by doing nothing but gathering professions (aka Mining and Herbalism). Each node you harvest gives a small amount of experience, depending on how high level your gathering skill is, and how high level your character is.
- You can trade Justice Points in WoW for trade good items, like ores, enchanting materials, cloth, Spirits of Harmony, etc. Unlike FF, there is nothing overtly "special" about these items, and you can also farm them separately on your own.
- You can trade Justice Points in WoW for "Heirloom Gear," which are pieces specifically tailored to a particular class or spec, with all of the correct stats on it, that levels up with your chracter and gives you an experience bonus while leveling that alt character so that you level faster.
- You can use your non-combat pets in WoW to battle other non-combat pets, a la Pokemon.
- You can run non-heroic dungeons as many times as you want in WoW, and they do not have a lockout. However, Heroic Dungeons have a 24 hour lockout (resetting at like, 3am PST every day) after you have completed one (unless you do it using WoW's version of Duty Roulette).
- Like FF, WoW's raids have a 1 week lockout, resetting every Tuesday morning. Unlike FF, you are not immediately locked to an instance by entering it after bosses have been defeated (unless it is a Heroic version of the raid, but even then you are asked whether you want to stay by a pop up window).
- Crafts in WoW are not separate classes. You do not wear special gear to use them, and you do not use experience points to level them. In fact, nothing you wear will change the outcome of the item you are creating. You cannot fail at creating an item. You can mass create items and have 0 chance of failure - even if you were doing it naked.
- Crafting items does not incur durability loss.
- You can friend people cross-server.
- If you meet some cool guys in a dungeon, you can queue for a new dungeon with them again at the end of your run - regardless of what server they are from.
- Raids in FFXIV are fixed at 8 man parties, or 24 man alliances (being 3 groups of 8). Raids in WoW can be 10 man, 25 man, or 10-25 man "Flexible," allowing groups to participate regardless of raid size. If you have 10 people, you can go! If you have 12 people, you can go! If you have 17 people, you can go! And so on.
- If you want to enter a raid instance in WoW, the system does not care how many people you bring inside - so long as you do not exceed the maximum number for that raid size. So if you want to do a 10 man with 2 people, you can do it! If you want to do one of the old 40 man raids with 1 person, you can do it! If you want to do a 25 man with 5 people, you can do it! WoW's system doesn't care if you would probably fail at trying to do an on-level 25 man with 5 people - it's your choice to go in.
- Most endgame gear - including that purchased with the equivalent of Tomestones - has gem sockets (i.e. Materia slots).
- Gems (i.e. Materia) are created by a crafting profession (Jewelcrafting).
- You cannot lose gems while slotting them into an item, but you cannot "overmeld" an item.
- Most pieces of gear can be specially enchanted with extra stats.
- If an item has poor stats on it for your particular Job, you can "Reforge" some of those stats into a more beneficial stat.
- WoW has Glyphs, which can change the function of a spell or ability.

I mean, I could go on for pages. These are not the same games. FF has some things from WoW that have worked really well, but it is, by no means, a WoW clone. It's not even close - and it's not trying to be (which is one of the beauties of the game).

Oh thought you meant loot. FFXI fights were more fun and there was more of a variety of styles. In FFXIV it's mostly in/out dodging or simple tank/spank and take care of adds. It's probably due mainly to how simple FFXIV mechanics are that it's impossible to add much variety.

I'm not going to argue that the fights in FFXIV are simplistic. I think the most "complicated" fight I've seen so far have been Ultima HM. Even then, it's very much in a set rotation, whereas the hardest and most rewarding fights I've encountered in WoW were extremely complicated and had an element of RNG to them that doesn't really occur in this game.