As a new player that really likes this game ...

[basketofseals]

It's not a full wow clone, no. However they did copy a lot from them. Smn for example doesnt feel very final fantasy, it's more like wow warlock. Cba to type the rest on phone.

I feel the opposite. FFXIV SMN is the most summoner-like incarnation we've had since X.

From what I heard WoW had an entire flowchart from vanilla all the way up to wrath of things you had to do to unlock other things that eventually culminated in unlocking the final raid tier and defeating the last boss of the expansion. Then after that it was get to max level and have a high enough ilvl to unlock and run the raid tiers.

That was definitely not a thing. BC greens were far better than Vanilla epics which completely invalidated any previous content. Same thing happened in Wrath, and pretty much every expansion. I can't recall a single thing you ever needed to go back and do. There were a couple of quest gates/attunements, but all of them started and ended in the expansion they were introduced in. Some of them you only actually needed one person in your entire raid group to actually do.