This is a pretty long a rant on the subject and based on my experience in leveling to 94 with Taika in WoW and my long experience in FFXIV. Regarding the differences between WoW and FFXIV, I think most of the time we’re talking about nuances and approaches within a very similar design paradigm more than actual differences. The player base is pretty much the same, or at least similar people. Both games have tons of disposable content and it makes me sad to see this toted as a good thing by so many people (in general, not so much in this thread!).

The WoW leveling experience for me was horrible. The first 20 levels are fine as they bring you from your home village to the first big city, showing a bit of a sidestory on the way to give the impression that something’s going on in the world.

After that it’s literally just wading through trash. There’s no compelling reason to move outside the city to do anything. The game isn’t telling you “Hey, there’s all this cool content you should check out and we’d like especially YOU to go and see it!” In my mind I know that these zones probably have quests in them but the game hasn’t earned my trust that the quests are worth doing and in fact what I do know is that I have to go out of my way to find them and when I do find them, I know that I might outlevel the story before seeing it through and another thing I know already is that once I do outlevel the zone, nothing I did back there has any meaning at all in any way.

Not for the story, not for my character, not for me as a player. I’m never going back. The zone is trash for me now. I don’t need the gear because the dungeons and mobs are maddeningly easy to kill as if they’re made of cotton candy and bittersweet dreams, so the gear is trash. And because there is no Big Story where my character is essential, the story is there like an episode in a bad TV series where nothing really connects with anything. It might be slightly entertaining to see what it’s about, but when I’m out of there, it’s like nothing happened. The story is just a memory of trash to me now, too. It never gets referred to, it doesn’t place me in the world, nothing. Meaningless.

We went out of our way to try to find the story in WoW. Seriously, it was incredibly hard to even find the zones and quests and to identify if this particular quest has anything at all to do with the Lich King or is it just something completely unrelated, like fixing some damn gnome’s flying machine. Still have no clue but we outleveled the area anyway.

But WoW has mechanically better quests than FFXIV. In FFXIV, there are two things I do in quests. I click on NPCs to read a bunch of text and kill mobs that are made of silk paper and fleeting thoughts on a long bus ride. At least in WoW I get to ride a shredder or drive a tank or whatnot, even though the end result is equally meaningless it’s at least funny to do it once. But what FFXIV does do, is that it actively directs me through every area in the game, it tells me what my place is in the world and how everything connects. Every dungeon I do, I’ve been to the area it’s in, I’ve been to the entrance and there’s a quest which tells me why the heck I’m even going there in the first place. I’m a person in the world and everything has a context. And every time you kill a primal? Every npc in the world knows that AND refers to it later. You, specifically YOU are the one who killed all these primals. It’s pretty nice. Of course you had no choice, the game wouldn’t let you skip the killing (I’ll come back to this soon).

Also the gear in FFXIV is not trash. The stuff you get in dungeons? Keep it, you’ll need it for your other jobs. And the zones you were in? You might come back when leveling other jobs to gather those sidequests you didn’t do.

What’s incredibly irritating and lopsided in FFXIV is that the low level gear is what you want to hold on to. The one that’s easiest to get. But the endgame gear, the one that I work hardest and am proudest of? I keep tossing that to the garbage bin at an alarming rate. Every week I’m tossing it away more and more. It makes no sense. But that level 45 gear? Yeah, had that since the launch. Not gonna throw it out since I’ll need it for my DRK when I get around to it. And the dungeons in general? Well, you’re gonna be running them for so many times you’ll end up hating them all with a passion. Because in sharp contrast to WoW throwing the dungeons away after you use them once, FFXIV recycles them over and over and keeps shoving them down your throat a long time after you thought you’d never have to see them again. I swear if I ever have to farm ARF again, I’ll sell my computer and become a frog farmer or something.

Regarding leveling dungeons, WoW is again horrible. Sure there might be some mechanics that the tank or healer did which I didn’t notice. However, as Taika said, we leveled to 94 as two DPS classes and did maybe around 80% of the leveling dungeons available. I didn’t do any mechanics apart from two or three times moving out of the bad stuff. I’m not even exaggerating here. Rest of the time I’m struggling to hit my sprint equivalent to keep up with the tank and throw in a few shots so I’m not completely useless. Bosses sometimes die so fast that I didn’t even realize it was a boss. Now I’m not saying FFXIV dungeons are super challenging, but at least you have time to do frigging dps on the trash pulls and there’s a possibility you might even wipe to a boss. Especially in HW leveling dungeons.

But in the end, the biggest differentiator is between the screen and the chair. FFXIV railroads you incredibly hard and I really get why some people don’t like that. Especially during the mindnumbing filler quests in main scenario. Some people just wanna go out and do things and see what’s there. They enjoy the contained morsels of stories in WoW zones. Others like me find it utterly meaningless and empty. And I think both are equally good ways to enjoy a game. WoW is more for the other, FFXIV for the other type of player.

TL;DR: I’m grumpy. If you’re a connoisseur of grumpy rants, read mine.