FFXIV has some serious competition with WoW: Legion

[Taika]

I understand mileage varies, but I have to ask if you were actually read the text for the quests and piecing stuff together as you did them. I can agree that some were very lackluster (post-Cataclysm Westfall in particular was absolutely ridiculous), but progression generally goes from you being a random yahoo that's helping the local authorities to being sent to various places and doing more dangerous things as you get stronger.

I did actually read the quest text in the open world (in dungeons I simply didn't have the time since everyone was rushing forward), but since leveling was so fast I was locked out from the quests in a certain zone before I got anywhere with the story. I was also locked out from many dungeons because I outleveled then (and then they just weren't in my dungeon finder anymore). I did make it my mission to complete all the quests in one zone (so I skipped dungeons entirely) in (I think) the first Cataclysm zone (I don't remember what it was called, it was under water) just to experience what it's like, and then I did quests in Warlords of Draenor zones until I gave up the game. With my partner we also tried to find the Lich king story since we were actually interested in it (my partner liked Warcraft 3 a lot) and people we know spoke highly of the expansion, but we simply didn't manage to do that despite trying to find relevant quests in the different expansion zones and even googling to find advice for a good story quest path. It ended up being so stressful we just ended up running dungeons again (some of them did seem to have something to do with the story).

Which means it ain't that different than FFXIV, specially in the case of the latter.

I found there to be a great difference between WoW and XIV dungeon content. In XIV dungeon content players play as a team, each pull takes at least some time to kill (in WoW we sometimes struggled with even getting one hit in), and there are clear boss fights that take longer and have some mechanics. Sure, people in XIV rush through dungeons too, but in WoW it's on a complete different level.

There are mechanics. They're simply not as pronounced and involve things we don't do here. Some bosses have buffs that need to be removed (either Purged by shaman, or Mass Dispelled by priests, or Spellstolen by mages). There's also the matter of interrupts, which is something this game almost never uses. Bosses usually have abilities that are inconveniences or can potentially lead to a wipe if not interrupted, and it's generally on the DPS and the tank to make sure those abilities never go off. WoW also uses debuffs that must be removed by the healer a lot more than this game does.

Are there really these kinds of mechanics in the leveling dungeons? Because I did as many as I could from my way to 1 to 94 and didn't notice any.

This is a legit concern. I started a shaman just to see what enhance is like at later levels (for research purposes) and I was surprised at how much the exp requirements for leveling have been nerfed. It's very alt-friendly, but I can see how newbies would have difficulty keeping up with the story if you're going solely for the current-level quests that give the best exp reward.

Yup I think the leveling speed was the core of our issues with not being able to see any story (apart from the opening CS of a couple of later expansions).