A12 savage World first 3 days after patch

[Ibi]

Difference is, WoW makes a structure for midcore and hardcore. Also makes content around it (like Heroic Dungeons) that give a nice balance of challenging but fair content for people learning. So while true their Heroic/Mythic activity is not as high, that is mostly because Normal mode itself is a process for casual/midcore players. Unless things have changed, my knowledge is more towards WoTLK days. I encountered many raid groups who jumped right into Heroics after beating the Normal mode.

The low end and high end of raiding between the two games is, by and large, quite comparable.

At the low end, you have Normal mode in FFXIV and Raid Finder and WoW.

• Both see clear rates somewhere around 50% of the player base (Sources: FFXIV, WoW).
• Both award gear that's inferior to other items that players can get from other non-raiding sources* over the content's life span (tomestones and crafted gear in FFXIV, world quests, crafted gear, and mythic dungeons in WoW).
• Both provide gear that's a recolor of the raid gear from higher difficulties*, but generally restrict some or all of the other cosmetic rewards (titles, companion pets/minions, mounts).
• Both offer much easier versions of the fight that most players can expect to clear with a relatively small number of attempts, although some groups may struggle on some of the encounters when they're first released, due to a lack of player familiarity with the encounters.

*this has not always been the case, but is applicable for the Legion iteration of Raid Finder

The same is true of the top end difficulties: Savage in FFXIV and Mythic in WoW.

• Both see clear rates of ~0.4% (Sources: FFXIV and WoW).
• Both are at a level of difficulty where it's primarily organized groups with fixed membership that are attempting and clearing the content.
• Both usually see their world first clears with a couple of weeks at the longest, even though the eventual overall clear rate remains very low.
• Both award gear that is the highest item level available (although in Mythic that's previously been the only source of gear of that item level, unlike FFXIV).
• Both have some form of exclusive non-gear rewards (titles, companion pets/minions, mounts), that's not available elsewhere in the game.

But there are some major differences in the raid scene between the two games.

Most obviously, WoW has two additional difficulty setting in between Raid Finder and Mythic:

• Normal, which is referred to by the developers as a "Friends and Family" difficulty. It's primarily intended for groups of friends, where you're never going to consider kicking someone just because they're under performing, which also makes it a pretty good difficulty for PuGs.
• Heroic, which is intended to be challenging while still maintaining a level of group flexibility (in terms of jobs, specs, etc.) that isn't present in Mythic.

Although the clear rates for the entire instance on either setting aren't that high (12.5% and 9.8% respectively), a substantial portion of the player base cleared at least one boss on a given difficulty (32.5% and 24.4% respectively).

Additionally, there's a lot more raid content in WoW. The first raid of Legion, Emerald Nightmare, has seven bosses. There's an 11-boss raid coming in early 2017, The Nighthold, but there's also a three boss mini-raid, Trial of Valor, coming sometime before that.

The increased number of bosses makes it much easier to have a smooth difficulty curve (no jumps like we saw going from A2S to A3S or A5S to A6S) and also to provide more places where a raid branches off, allowing a group to pick and choose between different encounters.

The next major difference would be that WoW has flexible raid sizes. On the normal and heroic difficulties, you're able to have anywhere between 10 and 30 people in the instance, and all the encounters will scale accordingly. My guild had 35 sign ups last night, so we just split into two groups of 17 and 18 and ran two concurrent instances. No need to bench anyone, no need to stress, and when someone else logged on part way through the raid, we could seamlessly bring them into the group and continue as if nothing had changed. By the same token, as long as you have enough players for each role it's not a cancelled raid night or trying to find a PuG replacement if someone can't make it to a raid they've signed up for.

Finally, WoW (at least in Legion, this is another thing that hasn't always been the case) offers considerably more paths by which to improve your gear. World quests (various open world objectives that show up on the world map), world bosses (11 different bosses, a different one of which is available each week), and mythic+ dungeons (timed versions of the dungeons, which scale up in difficulty as you beat the current difficulty) all have the potential to award raid-level gear without requiring the larger-scale coordination that's necessary for a raid group.

In terms of reward, there is a lot you can do. There is not much that will make casual players jump for it but you can properly motivate midcore. For starters, don't put the same aesthetics for gear in the Normal. Put acheivements, mounts, minions, titles, high ilvl gear.

The second sentence here is worth highlighting. There's are significant sections of the player base who, no matter what rewards are available, are either never going to be interested in any kind of raiding or never going to be interested in any kind of raiding that isn't accessed simply by using a queue system that assembles a random group.

Personally, I'm of the belief that that concept extends (in a less granular way) into difficulty as well; no matter the rewards, once the difficult on the content exceeds a certain threshold (which is going to vary from person to person), it doesn't matter what rewards you put on that content, some people are going to have no interest in engaging in it.

At that point, the developers usually* have to make a choice as to whether they're okay with those players never advancing beyond whatever the previous tier of content is or whether they want to lower the difficulty to entice some of those players to engage in it. SE's gone the latter route with The Creator.

*What I'd like to see more of, and what WoW is dipping their toes into with Mythic+ is more content that scales dynamically (rather than in discrete steps) in both difficulty and rewards. A group can essentially choose their own difficulty (or continue challenging content until they reach their ceiling) and get rewards commensurate with that difficulty. I can, however, see that that would obviously require even more resources to create than non-scaling content, and it's no secret that FFXIV's development team are already stretched in that regard.

[Velhart]

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It would be quite interesting to see what the FFXIV team would do if they had the resources/manpower to produce more content within a 3-5 month period. Not sure if it is the amount of money they make off FFXIV or SE simply not providing the resources, but I hope that they are properly funding the game that got them back in a healthy state in their company.