Can any WoW refugees explain the exodus to XIV to me?

[Arkdra]

Not a "WoW Refugee", bu I heard people have been leaving because Blzizard killed off a LOT of player favorite characters...

The story is bad but it's not particularly worse than it has been in the past. Still it has certinly irked some people.

I quit after MoP but I still keep up with WoW out of morbid curiosity. The stuff I usually see most often cited as being aggravating:

1. Characters got massively powered down. In Legion, everyone had their artifacts which gave people a whole bunch of power. In BfA, those artifacts get depeleted relatively early on. The thing is, they weren't just about stats. There were cool traits and even spec defining abilities tied to these artifact weapons as well. So when people had to give them up, they lost a bunch of utility.

2. Which combines nicely with a stat squish that had the end result of you cruising into early bfa doing big ae pulls while soloing, and then 4 levels later you would struggle with 1 monster and god help you if a 2nd showed up (spec dependent).

3. The replacement system for this, azerite gear, just isn't adequate. It's grindy, and it added more RNG to the gearing process, and the traits are all fairly dull unlike the cooler ones of the artifact weapons.

4. They also crippled low level exp gain, although this has since been fixed somewhat. But up until 8.1 there was a ton of people complaining about levelling alts being mega tedious now.

5. Which was a bad move considering the big box movers of the expansion were the new allied races. Except the big new races that people were most excited for (Kul tirans and zandalari trolls) still aren't in the game and are also locked behind a really long rep grind.

6. The other big features, island adventures and warfronts, both went over like a lead balloon. They weren't terrible, but they didn't generate much positive buzz to nullify any of the above.

7. Unpopular combat changes. They made the gcd longer and also took a bunch of stuff off the gcd and made it on gcd. I think they may have recanted on this a bit. The current mythic+ modifiers are widely considered to be worse than in Legion and the rewards you get for completion aren't great minus one weekly chest.

8. No real incentive to play the game. By which I mean that unlike in FF14 where you probably get some kind of currency for doing something that will have value, in WoW you just... don't. You pretty much want to get your weekly mythic chest, semi-weekly warfront chest, and then your serious raid drops. Nothing else will drop upgrades for you unless you are a relatively fresh 120, and that includes their casual lfr raids. Only other thing worth doing are emissary world quests, which refresh every couple of days and sometimes aren't worth doing even then.

[MaethusXion]

snip

Ment NPCs, specified in my post now.

Also played during MoP, but quit when XIV came back. Was a WoW-DPS and went back like "lol how do I play this again?"

[Geigerette]

I posted about this in another thread, so I won't get all the way back into it, but I think a lot of it has to do with a couple of posts between Reddit and another post by Blizzard in their own forums asking for votes for the game as BEST MMORPG, and the resulting community comments strongly favouring FFXIV as the best. Mix that in with general MMO player unhappiness from these people who WANT TO PLAY AN MMORPG GAME FOR THE LOVE OF GAMING AGAIN, and then finding a new game that seems loved after years of going without, people were bound to leap into SE's arms.

[Raelsar]

Well, as a player who's still playing WoW (sometimes feeling like it's "just barely"), I'll give it a shot to explain the multitude of issues WoW is having right now.

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The GCD Change and removal of all off-GCD attacks

This one is somewhat undocumented, but WoW made a major change with it's combat abilities in BfA by moving the majority of cooldowns and other off-GCD abilities onto the global cooldown... effectively up-ending the entire flow of the gameplay. No class was spared this change. This initially included all off-GCD abilities, including defensive and movement-enhancing abilities which can require fast timing; that got changed back shortly afterwards, but the rest are all on the GCD now and will remain that way until the next expansion.

I started with this one for a reason, because Blizz has essentially buggered up their gameplay like they never have before, which means the one thing which allowed them to get away with their other issues is no longer saving them.

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Azerite Gear System has a terrible progression approach

"Azerite" gear is the new gearing system, replacing the old tier sets, but it has a major issue with how it works. Each piece has a a choice of bonuses attached to it, 3-5 perks, which are unlocked by gaining Artifact Power to upgrade their "Heart of Azeroth" (HoA) neckpiece (to put it simply, a second parallel leveling system). The first piece you of Azerite gear you get, from the very quest which gives you the HoA, unlocks all 3 perks at HoA level 3. The second piece, which can come from several different sources while leveling to 120, will have perks at level 2, level 5, and level 8. These can be the exact same perks for exact same gear slot, and the cycle repeats every time you "upgrade" the gear piece with a higher item level version.

Needless to say, the system feels very frustrating.

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The Community has reach its boiling point

WoW's community has always had its issues, but the dam has finally broken and the overall community appears to have had enough of it.

To tell the truth, FFXIV's own community might have something to do with it. People get bored, leave for a bit, try another game... it happens to be FFXIV. They play it for a while, they get bored of FFXIV, they wander back to WoW.

They come back with stories of how great the community is here.

They don't say it's perfect here, but the differences are stark:

• Players don't treat one another like garbage. People are actually nice here.
• Optimization is not enforced through all levels of gameplay.
• You aren't forced into "rushing" your way through all the content.
• People will explain stuff to you in a dungeon rather than yell at you for not watching a video in advance and kick you from the group.

[Astaris]

My Son and I played WOW for over a decade. This month, we un subbed. I could list 10000 reasons, but the big 3:

1) Classes... well classes have been "pruned" into shells of their former selves. The gameplay is boring.

2) There is next to zero communication from the Devs. When we do hear from them, it's an announcement on high on why we LOVE the latest stupid change, and it's their way, or the highway.

3) The community is toxic. Even when someone asks a question in the new players forum, they will be told " Git gud, L2P, your gear sucks ".

I am so thankful for the community here. My Son and I have been so impressed how helpful, courteous.. and kind , the players are in FF.

We have found a home.

[Makeda]

3) The community is toxic. Even when someone asks a question in the new players forum, they will be told " Git gud, L2P, your gear sucks ".

That always annoyed me. People "checking" your knowledge with how progressed you were in current raid content and gear. I've had a WoW sub since 2006. I know the lore pretty deeply and I know the game engine, the zones, the mechanics and so on... yet if I'm not in a current raid at any moment I'll often get that "you don't know anything" response from some fool who'd only had a sub for 3 months, bought a boost, and is in a mythic raid group...

- The attitude started showing up about 8 years ago... And It's always driven me nuts. Sure, I might not know as much as that 3-month-hero about the current mythic raid's boss #3... but every single last other thing the game... I'm the old geezer with some 5 year old kid sitting on the porch trying to school me about life... and I tend to respond to them as such... But over there, the community wants to back that person who's barely even taken off their training wheels because 'Armory' says they're ahead of me on the current boss... No perspective.

[RyuuSkyez]

Wow is a shell of a game that it once was. It's old, and not fun. People have to move on at some point in time.