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

[Roda]

It's less about actual boxes and more just mocking WoW's layers of RNG.

Imagine if all loot was Pyros.

Thats it.
Thread ends here.

What's wrong with WoW atm is that it's basically is Eureka was the whole game.
Timers upon timers to get to the fun stuff of the game, and then more timers on top of it once you get there.
Skill is rewarded, but flat luck is often rewarded more.
When you upgrade to a new tier or level up to a certain threshold you are actively made weaker until you can recover the ground you already crossed (the last expansion gave a bunch of interesting items that altered how your skills interacted and the effects shut off in the middle of leveling to the new level cap along with introducing no new skills along the way, and you have to grind for exp to unlock new, randomly selected traits on new gear, the higher the item level the higher the exp requirement)

[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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

[KaivaC]

Wow...so many stories about what happened with WoW. Thank you for this, everyone. Really.

I think there could be an agreement that SQEX feels like it has shifted a little bit, so I really do hope that this thread is taken seriously enough that the devs do heed the pitfalls that were warned about here.

[Talinthis]

i can explain it easy. the game is 14 years old, FFXIV is still somewhat new, and the shadowbringers release trailer atomic bomb they showed just recently is a massive reason for it.

[Ruinfeild]

I am waiting for the toxic portion of the Wow community to hop over (if they ever do) and try the same attitude in FFXIV, get reported, banned, then come to the forum to cry about how FFXIV is a safe space for special snowflakes and how WoW is way better.

[Awful]

Basically BFA is probably their 2nd worst expansion (Warlords of Draenor arguably is worse) for many reasons:

-Getting better gear on RNG (Titanforging) from 5-10 ilvls
-The only way to get better gear with your right Azurite traits was through raiding making Mythic+ a gamble to get better gear and most of the stats didn't have Azurite traits
-There were PvP Azurite traits but they were so bad so you could just double stack PvE Azurite traits and play cheesey comps to 1-2 shot other teams
-They butchered crafting where they made it so you HAD to have the specialization in order to wear it, people used to craft the gear like in FFXIV and wear it regardless, in WoW they changed it to where you needed to be a certain crafting spec. The next day people couldn't wear their gear and spent hundreds of thousands of gold to get gear that had 0 slots, then Blizz changed it again oops.
-Rep grinding was more of "you need it to unlock X race" and always was a chore from lvl 1- max lvl to unlock new races even though their selling point was new races it's a disappointment.
-Locking story behind premium services
-Stories being a "coming soon" when there was no reason to even have them broken in the first place
-PvP pathing/LoSing is just a mess you can hit people behind pillars and walls
-They admitted defeat with their Azurite system and are taking it out what a shocker honestly that's the biggest one right there

There's more but more people have or will cover it, WoW's a pretty dead game right now and it's a shame that they've fallen so far from grace no games perfect but when I see them getting worse and worse it's not looking good.

[Makeda]

-Classes were gutted. You can't even fill 2 hotbars anymore. Haste was lowered, tanks less tanky.

That's a feature not a problem.

It's one of the few complaints I have with this game.

You should NEVER be clicking a button. Keybinds only.

And you can really only keybind viably the number of things that can fit in a 3x3 or 4x3 row of keys with at most 2 modifier keys. But this also means 90% of your rotation should be on about 6 keybinds.

Anything more is uneeded strain.

This is one of the major features of ESO and Guild Wars 2. Solid gameplay on very few keys. Or even look at Overwatch - you're basically down to 3-4 keys there and yet the play is more dynamic than in any MMO.

keybind bloat is not dynamic play, it's just finger strain masking as complexity.

Make each ability count for more - rather than bogging a game down with a lot of them. Up requirements on moving, aiming, targeting, timing, interrupts, and so on instead.
- In ESO, you live and die by knowing when to activate block and weaving hard and soft hits, and of course aiming. In modern WoW your interrupt key is vital and plays a role similar to the 'GTFO of red' here - but could be a lot better if the two things were more blended. Overwatch's few keybinds means the game is all about position, aiming, and timing cooldowns.

Adding 3 billion buttons all over a screen is a flaw in design, not a feature.

[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.

[Makeda]

On the story...

In FFXIV your character is two things:
1. The big world saving hero. This is not all that important for a good story. It is however common in heroic fiction.
2. The protagonist. This I am a fan of. And if you are scratching your head at me typing this with a 'well duh idiot, of course, it's the character you're playing'... it's because you've never seen a story that is not 1st, 2nd, or even 3rd person... You haven't played WoW (or I am told, read Great Gatsby).

In WoW you are neither of the above two things.

1. You do save the world repeatedly, but the very next NPC you meet is often 'who is this clown?' Since Legion they have been making a point of having people notice you are a hero, but just as often as not they forget to...

2. You are not the protagonist... You're not the central character of the story you are playing through. That is Sylvanus, Jaina, Anduin, Thrall, that guy who whines 'Tyranda!' all the time, Tyranda herself, and so on...
- But you don't even get to see the story through them... It's just really weird to explain because it violates every last rule of good fiction... They are the characters that the story is about...

There is a rule in writing called "don't tell, show". WoW tells, it doesn't show. We get novels, we get cinematics, we get blogs... about people like Sylvanus. A cutscene happens and our character is usually frozen in place while the actual protagonists and antagonists yell at each other... then the scene ends and we click on a yellow question mark...

Not actually being the character the story is about... is really weird...

First person POV: I did this, then I did that... Basically a memoir
Second person POV: you did this, then you did that... Like a 'pick your path' adventure novel
Third person POV: Conan did this, then Conan did that... Most fiction is in this space

WoW: You as conan click on Thrall, and then watches a movies where Thrall does this, then Thrall does that... Conan isn't even in the movie... Conan feels a WTF moment...
...Oh wait... this is WoW... "conan" not Conan... because you're not even a character in this story... you don't get to have a name with a capital letter in it...