Finally tried WoW

[Shurrikhan]

WoW's storytelling is fundamentally hamstringed because of the moment-to-moment experience. You walk up to an NPC and click him and read paragraphs of quest text which is located in a small window of your monitor. You accept tens of thousands of quests in this game, which means tens of thousands of paragraphs, so the player quickly learns to skim over the quest text and just hit accept. Then the NPC starts walking and talking, and may or may not summarize the quest text.

Absolutely a problem with the base game, but given I could say the same for playing XIV without SimpleTweaks or the like, I gotta say:

Download WoW's Immersion addon. You then have at least the quality of the XIV quest/dialogue textboxes. Since trying it, I cannot enjoyably quest without it, especially give my ultrawide monitor placing the quest in left-edge Narnia.

Here is what WoW has that I absolutely do not want to see in FFXIV: Entire Open World Level Scaling, Item Level Scaling, progression locked behind dailies, handout legendaries, epics, etc, borrowed power features.

That's fair.

I don't quite understand the concerns about borrowed power features when XIV's every tier is essentially "borrowed power" due to ease of catch-up, but as long as one doesn't want customization at all, as in XIV, I see why one would rather not offer any seasonal/expansion-limited customization no matter how well it might work for being a bit more thematic or experimental.

As for the others, yeah, they've been controversial in WoW as well. I happen to prefer them (minus the dailies-limited progression, though that's pretty well disposed of in favor of ever-increasing seasonal progress caps), but only just barely, and would have probably preferred a slightly different balance between freedom and immersion, or at least other complementary features (I hate being unable to find a threatening open world mob now, for instance).