Does WoW have a faster pace than FFXIV?

[Driavna]

No, OP said FFXIV combat is faster because it contains more mechanics in the design comparing to wow in which you just spam abilities.

Do you understand that FF14 has the same problem, right? We have a lot of classes that follow very rigid rotations that you repeat over and over. Having more buttons to press means nothing really.

Also, what has this to do with pacing? WoW has faster gameplay compared to FFXIV. That does not make one game better than the other, is all about preferences. But I guess is another one of "those topics": WoW bad, FFXIV good!

[Cetonis]

(snip)

Whew, that's quite the cherry pick. It's strange to both (a) pick something decidedly on the far high end of the WoW cpm scale, and then (b) pick Bard, of all things, to represent FFXIV. Why not MCH? That would have been a far better choice for multiple reasons (no procs to argue complexity about, no weird apm vs. cpm debate, not a button-count outlier, etc).

I don't broadly disagree with the points that you seem to want to make, but there's no need to distort and exaggerate. Good-faith arguments will do just fine.

[linay]

I don't broadly disagree with the points that you seem to want to make

While I don't disagree either, I don't see the relevance of the point Yamr3 is making considering the post they originally responded to already stated the same point:

It is faster but its not surprising since GCD is sitting at 1 sec so all specs should have over 60 apm which is not the case and a ton of them is sitting way below that. In ffxiv despite gcd being 2.5 sec jobs do 31+ apm the least.

396 vs 789 buttons in 9 minutes certainly fits within the comparison ballpark considering the base GCD difference that Nedkel mentioned.

[Shurrikhan]

Sure, because stuff in WoW definitely doesn't stutter animation canceling all buggy while throwing 123123 numbers at you which you're unable to track at all.
It's better to look at the combat log than the actual game.

Wait, what? XIV cancels its combat animations before their completion far more often than WoW does. Granted, that's to be expected; apart from Fire Blast, with so few oGCDs left to weave in, and each animation being so short apart from perhaps Rampage or Blade Dance, why would it possibly have the animation cancelling that we do?

The game might have poor graphics but it's for basically any reason except the one you've decided to go with.

[Shurrikhan]

Digging a bit more fwiw, looking over some of these logs I'd say that ~90% of the players over 60 cpm are spamming 3-5 skills for the bulk (~80% or more) of those actions. The other 20% can involve a myriad of different skills though.

What should that matter if it's an optimal action and requires at least as much from the player as just hitting 1234567854 DRG combos in eternally repeating loops?


Aside:

As for whether the particular choice of comparisons are "cherry-picking"; they are, but in XIV's favor. A caster, with casts up of up to nearly twice the length of GCDs (or nearly 3 times the length of most melee specs' GCDs) is being compared to a proc-shot-heavy physical ranged. And it's still double the apm.

That's not to say that more APM is always better. It's not. But WoW does very clearly outpace XIV, for better or worse.

[Nedkel]

What should that matter if it's an optimal action and requires at least as much from the player as just hitting 1234567854 DRG combos in eternally repeating loops?


Aside:

As for whether the particular choice of comparisons are "cherry-picking"; they are, but in XIV's favor. A caster, with casts up of up to nearly twice the length of GCDs (or nearly 3 times the length of most melee specs' GCDs) is being compared to a proc-shot-heavy physical ranged. And it's still double the apm.

That's not to say that more APM is always better. It's not. But WoW does very clearly outpace XIV, for better or worse.

It makes a giant difference between having double the action speed but spamming few buttons, and having it slower but having to use 15+ non-situational skills and numerous mechanics and decisions to do in a rotation, with far more resources to manage.
I choose second over first at any time, mainly because wow few buttons rotation and lack of any meaningful mechanics or resources management and also because of WoW combat tied up to the GCD i consider ffxiv combat design far far superior to the WoW one. Of course you could have a hard time playing WoW but thats mainly due to the dungeons and raids design which are random and far less predictable than FFXIV in comparison.

Since a recurring subtopic is button presses, let's look into it a little more. I decided to match the Shadow Priest casts with one of the top DPS for E2S. They're a Bard, so it's range and range. To prevent naming and shaming I will not quote the player's name but you can verify yourselves by looking through FFlogs.

This image here shows the Shadow Priest from the first boss in Mythic The Eternal Palace


This image below shows one of the bard I'm using as an example from E2S.


Both of those are range classes and not really a unique rotation to say. Not a vast difference until we look at time. In the Priest's log, they used 263 actions in 3 minutes vs. the bard using 396 in 9 minutes on E2S. If we took the same pacing of 263 buttons every 3 minutes while tripling the same boss's HP, the Priest would've done 789 buttons in 9 minutes. Which would match the Bard's kill time on E2S.

Both fights relatively don't have players moving very much besides a mechanic here and there requiring you to stack on someone moving the AoE out or standing on your soak marker in E2S and dodging the combo in the last phase.

If we look at this, the Priest was doing 90.5 CPM and the Bard is doing 46.6. We could go into the nitty gritty of which classes are spam classes but I believe that is a different category of issues, balance and game design over time. Neither side are wrong to play, which we all can agree on; however, for the above average player, WoW is considerably faster in CPM to FF14's CPM, even if it's 2 extra buttons. Which, CPM aside and only looking at rotations, is a personal flavor difference for each player themselves.

And how does that compare to redmage like this
https://i.imgur.com/AlZOIKh.png

If you really want to make a fair comparison, compare classes that are similar to each other in the design purpose. I could guarantee you bard i far more engaging to play than arcane mage for instance.