FFXIV has some serious competition with WoW: Legion

[Lokier]

I've played WoW for 12 years, I played vanilla back in 2005. I played Legion in 2016 for, what, four days? And I was bored already. I went back to FFXIV pretty quickly. I don't think FFXIV has much contest against Legion... It's not that *good* an expansion, most of their content is locked behind dailies and things that reset in four days, including *more* fucking table-missions.
I levelled my DH to 110 and I just couldn't bring myself to level my alts / mains to 110, and I love levelling my alts. I have every single class, and a horde, at 100, including two other servers full of characters between 85 and 90. I hit the 50-characters cap for christ sake. WoW Legion was fun to level in... until you hit max level, it's pretty much made the mistake of pulling a Wildstar (and Wildstar is STILL capped at 50 and comprised of dailies if you don't want to raid.)

I had 213 mounts, with most of the ones I did need to hit 250 locked behind things like Arthas (you RNG bastard) and I had already completed my mog' sets (so there was no gear to farm.) The curse of being a 12 year-old player, I guess.
But no, in my personal opinion, I don't think FFXIV is going anywhere. Legion will peak interest for a few months and it'll die down again, like it does in every expansion until they release the next expansion in WoW next year. (They now do year-by-year expansions with three main patches of added content. £50 well spent, aye?)

[DukeGr]

To me the major difference between FFXIV and WoW and the main reason i have accepted FFXIV as my main MMO is the simple fact that FFXIV is good at recycling content. In WoW almost everything gets obsolete especially after a new expansion pops.

I'm not just talking about synced content here or older raids, this includes everything in the game like crafting, gathering etc.

After playing 3 years WoW i realized it is nothing more than a huge trash bin with more obsolete stuff being added there with every expansion, its literally like they delete the old game with each expansion and only focus on the new content.

[Hirmu]

This is a pretty long a rant on the subject and based on my experience in leveling to 94 with Taika in WoW and my long experience in FFXIV. Regarding the differences between WoW and FFXIV, I think most of the time we’re talking about nuances and approaches within a very similar design paradigm more than actual differences. The player base is pretty much the same, or at least similar people. Both games have tons of disposable content and it makes me sad to see this toted as a good thing by so many people (in general, not so much in this thread!).

The WoW leveling experience for me was horrible. The first 20 levels are fine as they bring you from your home village to the first big city, showing a bit of a sidestory on the way to give the impression that something’s going on in the world.

After that it’s literally just wading through trash. There’s no compelling reason to move outside the city to do anything. The game isn’t telling you “Hey, there’s all this cool content you should check out and we’d like especially YOU to go and see it!” In my mind I know that these zones probably have quests in them but the game hasn’t earned my trust that the quests are worth doing and in fact what I do know is that I have to go out of my way to find them and when I do find them, I know that I might outlevel the story before seeing it through and another thing I know already is that once I do outlevel the zone, nothing I did back there has any meaning at all in any way.

Not for the story, not for my character, not for me as a player. I’m never going back. The zone is trash for me now. I don’t need the gear because the dungeons and mobs are maddeningly easy to kill as if they’re made of cotton candy and bittersweet dreams, so the gear is trash. And because there is no Big Story where my character is essential, the story is there like an episode in a bad TV series where nothing really connects with anything. It might be slightly entertaining to see what it’s about, but when I’m out of there, it’s like nothing happened. The story is just a memory of trash to me now, too. It never gets referred to, it doesn’t place me in the world, nothing. Meaningless.

We went out of our way to try to find the story in WoW. Seriously, it was incredibly hard to even find the zones and quests and to identify if this particular quest has anything at all to do with the Lich King or is it just something completely unrelated, like fixing some damn gnome’s flying machine. Still have no clue but we outleveled the area anyway.

But WoW has mechanically better quests than FFXIV. In FFXIV, there are two things I do in quests. I click on NPCs to read a bunch of text and kill mobs that are made of silk paper and fleeting thoughts on a long bus ride. At least in WoW I get to ride a shredder or drive a tank or whatnot, even though the end result is equally meaningless it’s at least funny to do it once. But what FFXIV does do, is that it actively directs me through every area in the game, it tells me what my place is in the world and how everything connects. Every dungeon I do, I’ve been to the area it’s in, I’ve been to the entrance and there’s a quest which tells me why the heck I’m even going there in the first place. I’m a person in the world and everything has a context. And every time you kill a primal? Every npc in the world knows that AND refers to it later. You, specifically YOU are the one who killed all these primals. It’s pretty nice. Of course you had no choice, the game wouldn’t let you skip the killing (I’ll come back to this soon).

Also the gear in FFXIV is not trash. The stuff you get in dungeons? Keep it, you’ll need it for your other jobs. And the zones you were in? You might come back when leveling other jobs to gather those sidequests you didn’t do.

What’s incredibly irritating and lopsided in FFXIV is that the low level gear is what you want to hold on to. The one that’s easiest to get. But the endgame gear, the one that I work hardest and am proudest of? I keep tossing that to the garbage bin at an alarming rate. Every week I’m tossing it away more and more. It makes no sense. But that level 45 gear? Yeah, had that since the launch. Not gonna throw it out since I’ll need it for my DRK when I get around to it. And the dungeons in general? Well, you’re gonna be running them for so many times you’ll end up hating them all with a passion. Because in sharp contrast to WoW throwing the dungeons away after you use them once, FFXIV recycles them over and over and keeps shoving them down your throat a long time after you thought you’d never have to see them again. I swear if I ever have to farm ARF again, I’ll sell my computer and become a frog farmer or something.

Regarding leveling dungeons, WoW is again horrible. Sure there might be some mechanics that the tank or healer did which I didn’t notice. However, as Taika said, we leveled to 94 as two DPS classes and did maybe around 80% of the leveling dungeons available. I didn’t do any mechanics apart from two or three times moving out of the bad stuff. I’m not even exaggerating here. Rest of the time I’m struggling to hit my sprint equivalent to keep up with the tank and throw in a few shots so I’m not completely useless. Bosses sometimes die so fast that I didn’t even realize it was a boss. Now I’m not saying FFXIV dungeons are super challenging, but at least you have time to do frigging dps on the trash pulls and there’s a possibility you might even wipe to a boss. Especially in HW leveling dungeons.

But in the end, the biggest differentiator is between the screen and the chair. FFXIV railroads you incredibly hard and I really get why some people don’t like that. Especially during the mindnumbing filler quests in main scenario. Some people just wanna go out and do things and see what’s there. They enjoy the contained morsels of stories in WoW zones. Others like me find it utterly meaningless and empty. And I think both are equally good ways to enjoy a game. WoW is more for the other, FFXIV for the other type of player.

TL;DR: I’m grumpy. If you’re a connoisseur of grumpy rants, read mine.

[Kaurie]

After that it’s literally just wading through trash. There’s no compelling reason to move outside the city to do anything. The game isn’t telling you “Hey, there’s all this cool content you should check out and we’d like especially YOU to go and see it!”

There is literally a tool that glows on your screen telling you this. The Adventure Guide was added Cataclysm.

That said, I agree with you that FFXIV is generally better at focusing the story for you.

[loreleidiangelo]

So far, I'm preferring WoW, but that's because that game is more to my focus. It puts a bit more emphasis on endgame/skill-oriented content and less on things like Wondrous Tales/new glamours and emotes/admittedly funny but still relatively content-devoid side quests like Hildebrand/Scholasticate.

I was hoping for a pretty reasonable discussion about each games' strengths and weaknesses, but so far all it's been is a "I think Legion sucks" dogpile. Bah. Well, people are entitled to their opinion, but I think XIV would benefit greatly if it actually took a good honest look at why WoW is still top of the MMO genre. Also, the complaints about time gating in Legion are actually making me laugh. What do you think "daily" experts are, and "weekly" challenge logs/raid lockouts/tome caps? They're gating methods; don't be obtuse. Both games have them, and tbh they're not any worse in one game or the other. If you only selectively do certain content in both FFXIV AND WoW, you're going to run out of things to do pretty fast before the "timers" reset on the things you actually like to do. It's a fact. Whenever people gripe about "being bored" in XIV, people always tell them to go do side stuff they may not want to do to alleviate the boredom, but when people run out of things to do in WoW the game automatically sucks and XIV is better? You could easily farm old raids for mounts, achievements, grind old rep for minions and mounts, work on farming out that perfect set of glamour gear, level your professions, work on completing every quest in every zone so you get almost the entirety of the game's lore.

(To people who said the rep gating sucks though, I completely agree. WTF was Blizzard thinking with this? It actually locks out two dungeons from your gameplay if you don't bother with what is otherwise a needlessly drawn-out, boring chore. It's not like people who enjoyed the Suramar rep storyline couldn't still do it even if two dungeons weren't locked behind it. It's the same thing as locking people from HW content if they didn't complete the 2.x MSQ, though...there's "story" behind those dungeons, so gate-gate-gate.)

tl;dr people are parroting the same complaints that players have about XIV sometimes about the current WoW expac, and don't see the hypocrisy in it. I actually think "WoW sucks because the graphics are ugly" is a more valid (albeit a bit uninformed) complaint than "WoW gates too many things compared to FFXIV". I wish the OP hadn't been so aggressive in their opening statement, because to be frank I'd love to see some serious discussion about the pros and cons of both games, but their tone automatically put players on the defensive.

[Martin_Arcainess]

The point of having a open vast world is to be able to have different things in there that you can fit in. Imagine if SOC was small, where would you put all the beast tribe quest?

If you want to explore the world at a slow pace then do it, but if you want to teleport and get to your spot quicker then you may do so. Neither of them is bad.

Hell when you go to work or school, do you catch a bus because it's quicker or do you walk so you can take in the environment. NO you take the bus because you don't care about the environment you just want to get to where you need to go.


Quick or Slow, neither of them are good or bad it's all down to preference.

[Lokier]

WoW does do one thing well; pvp. I've been waiting 90mins at this point for 8vs8.... I just want one item from the shop. T_T

I wish SE implemented an alternative method to get pvp tokens, like trade dungeon tokens in or something. ._.

[AlexionSkylark]

OK... First, I'm gonna present my credentials:

I played WoW since march 2006, Vanilla patch 1.11, if I'm not mistaken. And left it at patch 5.2, the Throne of Thunder raid in Pandaria. Aside from PvP, you can say I made pretty much EVERYTHING there. I raided 40-men Onyxia in a progression guild. I was a guild master for a time, both in a progression and RP guild. I was raid leader in 25 and 10-men groups. I raided (and lead a group) in the not-well-known category of "10-men strict", where we raided without using drops from 25-men raids (or later raids). I have the "Herald of the Titans" feat of strength. I raided in every. single. raid released from Kharazan to Throne of Thunder, clearing all normal modes and some heroic ones. I was among the first groups to adopt the EP/GP loot system as a superior alternative to DKP. I developed an addon for WoW, called "Soundtrack", which played battle and victory songs with cross-fading (was discontinued because of a similar addon that appeared later, with the SAME NAME and more features). I did localization work for SEVERAL addons to my native language. I have ALL the Warcraft books released until 2012. I cosplayed as Kael'Thas at events. I have all issues that were released of the Official Magazine. Every post-wrath expansion I have is a collector's edition. I have a custom-made figurine made after my character. The only things I did NOT do were:

- Raid in a hardcore group (like, raiding 5x/week 3~4h/day).
- Get involved in PvP.

No, I didn't post this all to brag. I just wanted to establish that what I'm about to say is not a rant from a Final Fantasy fanboy, or someone who "didn't play enough WoW and therefore can't argue about it". That all being said, I'll say this with complete honesty at heart:

I have NO INTENTION of ever going back to WoW (did buy myself a WoD expansion last year and leveled a char to 100, may do the same with legion in the near future, mainly to check out the leveling stories), and I can say with no regrets that FINAL FANTASY XIV IS A SUPERIOR GAME TO WOW IN ALMOST EVERY ASPECT

The battle system in FFXIV is much more engaging, and the 2.5s GCD is only bothersome if you like button-mashing than actual tactical thinking. Having to wait 2.5s to perform your next action makes you PLAN and THINK your movements, in a way that WoW combat simply does not. That's the difference between an MMO and an action game, and while I admit that WoW is just catering to another, more mainstream audience, FFXIV's combat is much more tactical and much more strategic than WoW's, and that alone makes it far more superior in terms of deeper gameplay.

Still on that subject, Blizzard has since wrath engaged in a motto called "bring the player, not the class". That was a development vision which ultimately aimed to make players not be favored or unfavored in raid compositions, and create an environment where everyone could play as whatever class they wanted without having to fear ostracism. HOWEVER, this had the side-effect of making EVERY CLASS ABSOLUTELY MEANINGLESS, and created a rollercoaster of buffs and nerfs that everybody rides forever while Blizzard strives in a (fruitless, so far) effort of making each class with the same level of effectiveness. I say every class is meaningless because that ultimately means that you only have 4 real "classes" in WoW, as in "stuff players can bring to the table" - Tank, Healer, Ranged DPS and Melee DPS. The class variations are just the same with different rotations and equipment looks. Your choice of class inside a same role means NADA in the scheme of things, and that creates a very, VERY standardized raiding experience. All fights are designed around 4 roles, not 12 classes. It is VERY washed down. FFXIV, on the other hand, makes your class choice MEAN something. Every class brings a different thing to the table, making each party composition provide a different experience. Which are your tanks, which are your healers, having a MNK or BRD or MCH in your party MEANS something. You can feel special from what you SPECIALLY bring to the raid, instead of just being one more cog in the machine just like the other cogs.

Which brings me to the 3rd point: WoW is a MMORPG made for a standard audience - And the standard audience doesn't like MMOs, or RPGs for that matter. Most people I talked about - Hell, most people I RAIDED WITH - couldn't give a horse's ass about the lore and story of the game. For all they were concern, if they got rid of the open world and adopted a League-of-Legends-like 2D lobby to form groups and spawn players directly inside instances, they would even enjoy the game more. Wrath was a CLEAR effort to bring non-MMO players who used to hate MMOs to WoW, and every expansion after that was a further step in that direction. That being said, FFXIV is ENTIRELY lore and story-driven. Every quest has a dialogue, a small cutscene, a story that moves forward. EVEN THE SMALL SIDEQUESTS. The attention to detail is remarkable. Even the random NPCs on small encampments have a small story delivered to you through dialogue ballons over their heads. It's a LIVING, BREATHING world filled with small and big stories. And speaking of stories...

There is a FUNDAMENTAL difference between WoW and FFXIV lore: in FFXIV, YOU are the main character. People talk to YOU. The story is about YOU, YOUR companions and mentors, and what YOU do in the world. The Warrior of Light IS THE MAIN PROTAGONIST OF THE STORY. By the time you reach lvl 50, you are REVERED by the general populace, you are KNOWN for your feats. State leaders hold you in high regard, people wave at you in the street. The extent of your popularity and influence is made very clear after the 2.55 main scenario quests, where every Crystal Brave Soldier in Eorzea is either too scared or too loyal to arrest you. You are (a big) PART of the lore. While on WoW, you're mostly along for the ride. The real important characters are the NPC ones, and you're just mentioned briefly here and there as one of many adventurers that roamed the land. It is Anveena and Kalecgos who banish Kil'Jaeden from the Sunwell. It is Tirion Fordring who kills Arthas the Lich King. It is Thrall and the Dragon Aspects who kill Deathwing. You are just a spectator, a sidekick to the REAL heroes of Azeroth. Every quest of the main lore you participate in you're ultimately HELPING characters from the pantheon of Warcraft characters save the world. Your character is a FOOTNOTE in the history of Azeroth, the NPCs always did and always will matter much more than you.

And don't even get me started on the visuals of each game... or the myriad of different content available in each one =P

Now, I'll be 100% honest and say there is ONE aspect in that WoW is superior to FFXIV - BOSS DESIGN.
I credit that to the fact that WoW has a seasoned team of encounter designers who are in that business for way longer than the SQEX team - Vanilla and BC bosses were also very lackluster if compared to their more recent equivalents. But I guess that's a matter of time, we'll have pretty complex and engaging fights in no time, if things keep going like they are. The Warring Triad bosses and Alexander Midas / Creator are already a pretty nice indicative of what to expect for the future

[loreleidiangelo]

snip

I find your analysis of class composition flawed. XIV's design structure is really rigid and has found the developers painting themselves into a corner more often than I can count. Raids will always have:

-2 tanks, a "main" tank with superior mitigative abilities, and an "off-tank" with adequate mitigative capabilities but consequential DPS when not tanking
-2 healers, one of which will be a burst/reactive healer and the other of which will be a shield/mitigative healer and will also be judged by their DPS contributions when not healing
-2 melee DPS, whichever ones get boned the least by mechanics and have the best damage output
-a magical ranged DPS, see my melee DPS comment above
-a physical ranged DPS, brought for their resource regenerative capabilties and because they don't compete with other DPS drops (imagine if NIN and BRD/MCH shared all gear, not just accessories lol)


I find that WoW's class system, with things like Druids and Death Knights bringing battle rez, any Shaman bringing Bloodlust (whether heals or DPS), Druids bringing Innervate, Holy Priests bringing an AOE Innervate, mages bringing MP-restoring food, Warlocks bringing their "get out mechanics free" movement portal and a re-raise via Soulstones, as well as a myriad of other utilities I'm forgetting to list here, means that each class actually brings far more to a raid than just damage. Compared to XIV, where we have Dragon Kick (which is basically Virus, which is basically Storm's Path, which is basically that one DRK move...yes, these moves all stack, but the fact remains that the ability is RIDICULOUSLY homogenized across several jobs) vs Battle Litany (a move no other class has) vs Trick Attack (which is fairly homogenized with MCH's Hypercharge/BRD's Foe's at least for casters); healers all have a raise, they all have a way to instantly cast that raise, and AST was basically designed around emulating WHM and SCH as much as possible because the devs couldn't figure out any other way to make them fit in with the current healing meta and raid design. All tanks have a "get out of death free" card, all physical DPS get to cross-class Invigorate, and all casters will get to cross-class THM for Swiftcast. It's so weird that you think that classes in XIV are really unique and varied, when in reality there's a crapton of overlap in pretty much everyone's toolkit, because the devs are afraid of shaking up the balance tree.

I'm not trying to poop on your love of XIV, because it's great that you love the game so much, but I really can't abide when you say that classes in WoW bring nothing unique to the table compared to XIV, which has some of the most homogeneous, bland character utility I have ever seen in an MMO.

I also disagree with you on the global cooldown in this game in relation to "planning and strategic gameplay". Your comment might have merit, except for the fact that this is a rotation-based game and for the most part you are not changing what order you push your glowing buttons in, ever. When you acquire enough muscle memory to push those glowing buttons in your sleep, as well as during early levels when you don't HAVE a whole lot of buttons to push, that is a heck of a long time standing around doing "nothing". There's never a period in an EX primal or raid where I think, "I sure am glad my moves aren't coming up sooner because I'm unable to figure out what button I should be pushing next and I need to consider that". Heck, even in healing, for the most part you're going to be pre-casting and following a healing "rotation"...I'm sure it's the same with tanking, although I've only ever raided as a healer and a DPS. I used to be able to mutter my T9 WHM healing rotation to myself when I was bored in college class. This is kind of a flaw with having a fully pre-scripted raid design, but that's a whole other donkey that I won't waste diatribes of text on here.

Story is subjective, but I actually like that the NPCs in WoW are given some oomph. How many people here complain about Minfillia and Alphinaud's general uselessness? The amount of times we've had to rescue critical, supposedly powerful NPCs is borderline laughable at this point. Not to mention our character, the quintessential "Warrior of Light", is always sent into danger with a band of "other experienced adventures" (aka lampshading that they're other WARRIORS OF LIGHT), giving off the impression that any OTHER band of "experienced adventurers" could have possibly handled the issue just fine (in the point of non-primals, at least - WoL does have that Echo ex machina to make sure we stay relevant against those guys).

Realistically, I'd say that XIV's story PRESENTATION is a lot better than WoW's, but I think that XIV's cartoon-level "black vs white, good guys vs bad guys" simplistic narrative isn't really as compelling and thought-provoking as people make it out to be.

I don't know why you're acting like quests in WoW don't have dialogue windows that you can read. You may not have FELT like reading them, but they are there. In fact, there's a contentious quest line that you can do right now in Highmountain that involves this long ignomious story of two goblin swindlers. The quest line seems to end where you, the player character, get thoroughly duped, except that when you hit max level the quest chain actually CONTINUES, allowing you to seek out these guys again in a different city and possibly get your comeuppance. Really hate it when people act like WoW has no story, just because they can't be arsed to read the quest windows. EVERY zone has a ton of small stories like this...I did the Death Knight campaign on my DK alt, and part of that storyline actually involved finishing up some loose ends from a LEVEL 25-30 ZONE. This quest isn't given to you until level 103.

Just kind of weird that you supposedly have all the Warcraft books and stuff and yet pop-up dialogue bubbles in the open world are really what gives the FFXIV story the edge. O__o But hey, opinions and stuff.

[Duelle]

I find your analysis of class composition flawed. XIV's design structure is really rigid and has found the developers painting themselves into a corner more often than I can count. Raids will always have:

-2 tanks, a "main" tank with superior mitigative abilities, and an "off-tank" with adequate mitigative capabilities but consequential DPS when not tanking
-2 healers, one of which will be a burst/reactive healer and the other of which will be a shield/mitigative healer and will also be judged by their DPS contributions when not healing
-2 melee DPS, whichever ones get boned the least by mechanics and have the best damage output
-a magical ranged DPS, see my melee DPS comment above
-a physical ranged DPS, brought for their resource regenerative capabilties and because they don't compete with other DPS drops (imagine if NIN and BRD/MCH shared all gear, not just accessories lol)

I can't upvote this enough.

FFXIV's approach to class and role design is fairly limited and funnels classes into mini-niches. It's not a good thing in the long run, specially taking into account that AST had to be created as a copy-WHM/copy-SCH job instead of being designed around its own approach to healing.

I find that WoW's class system, with things like Druids and Death Knights bringing battle rez, any Shaman bringing Bloodlust (whether heals or DPS), Druids bringing Innervate, Holy Priests bringing an AOE Innervate, mages bringing MP-restoring food, Warlocks bringing their "get out mechanics free" movement portal and a re-raise via Soulstones, as well as a myriad of other utilities I'm forgetting to list here, means that each class actually brings far more to a raid than just damage.

The thing to really stress here is that a raid's success rarely hinges on the utility classes bring. I think the only time utility was notably abused was in Blackrock Descent with raids stacking druids for battle rezzes. Sure, you can bring up stuff like Bloodlust/Heroism, but the devs eventually got to distributing it to other classes/specs so that Shaman don't have a monopoly on a single and very powerful raid cooldown (mages can do the Time Warp and hunters have Ancient Hysteria via one of their pets).

Compared to XIV, where we have Dragon Kick (which is basically Virus, which is basically Storm's Path, which is basically that one DRK move...yes, these moves all stack, but the fact remains that the ability is RIDICULOUSLY homogenized across several jobs) vs Battle Litany (a move no other class has) vs Trick Attack (which is fairly homogenized with MCH's Hypercharge/BRD's Foe's at least for casters); healers all have a raise, they all have a way to instantly cast that raise, and AST was basically designed around emulating WHM and SCH as much as possible because the devs couldn't figure out any other way to make them fit in with the current healing meta and raid design. All tanks have a "get out of death free" card, all physical DPS get to cross-class Invigorate, and all casters will get to cross-class THM for Swiftcast. It's so weird that you think that classes in XIV are really unique and varied, when in reality there's a crapton of overlap in pretty much everyone's toolkit, because the devs are afraid of shaking up the balance tree.

Some of this can be blamed on thematics. I got shot down during 1.2x for daring to suggest Hallowed Ground/Invincible be removed or nerfed because PLD having an invincibility forces EVERY tank to have an invincibility to compete. That's a huge problem design-wise. I have a similar issue with Swiftcast because it's become a necessity for all casters (for the WoW comparison, only Arcane Mages have access to Swiftcast/Presence of Mind; every other caster just has to eat their cast times and like it but also have more instant-cast spells and things like procs/mechanics that reduce/remove cast times).