SWTOR Refugee here....

[Faafetai]

I know many are oppose to this and it kind of stinks but in order to trade with alts you can make an FC to do so and have the tabs of inventory you may be use to in swtor. You can also store all of the money you make on each character into the shared storage, but it will provent you from joining an fc. I think you can trade via mail service but unsure how that works currently and what the cap of gil it would be. You may need a trusted friend to trade items between your characters but it is literally only 5 items at a time which is....painful and I think there is a gil cap of 1 mil per trade but unsure. I just know I couldn't trade 3 mil to a friend in one go. If they made a legacy storage for your character in here oh my gosh it would be amazing! For anyone wondering, you could just farm one set of your stuffs and trade between your alts. I would be so freakin happy with this! I will eventually wish to create an alt but going through the manditory story is really making me question it and no I am not buying a story skip. I do have one on ps4 but it is shared with me and a few friends who come over to play, who just wish to relax and use the ps4 for a day.

The chat is very depressing compared to swtors many chat tabs at least if you know about the special chat channels in swtor you can get a similar effect with linkshells, but know you may have an issue finding the right place to sort them being you only get three tabs in here maybe 4 if you get rid of the battle tab/error message tab.

Another difference I have noticed is you can not just relax and see a bunch of people on Fleet roleplaying and general chat in some places is the same save for the very obvious troll speaking non stop about politics ironically on pub side. You will not also have those strange people on sith side speaking about how they are creating a new religion which I would always read with amusement. I do miss alot of the character that place had and the ability to just talk to everyone on fleet or ask questions. You can kind of get that in the starter towns on some servers, but can also experience the fun killers who will yell at you to keep it to your 'houses and private chat circles' because apparently ffxiv is not an mmo and a myriad of small clicks like high school.

You do get the option to play healer or tank or dps in here without needed to make another character, so that is a bit of an upside, but if you role play it will kind of suck if you want to make your alt character for the role play bits with it leveled up according to their power level. You have to go through the main story everytime. I know the main story in here has its good moments, but it also has its oh god why moments and the quest design is where it is the worst for me personally. (Now go talk to three people or click on this spot for a longer time than the rest of the spots.) It just feels bad to do, I know why it is done to increase suspense, but I think I wouldn't mind it as much if I was doing the story because I wanted to not because it locked most of the content behind this story wall. I remember in swtor when making an alt on sith side I could power level and teleport to flash point locations on other planets through its daily quests menu and didn't have my ship yet. I think I got to 75 without a ship during an xp boost week it was crazy funny.

There are really no options that matter in here for dialogue, no romance options, barley any flirting, and certainly zero co op story things save for alliance raids and msq roulette with the two story dungeons. You can kind of see the other characters with you in the victory pose after dungeons but you can not go through the story instances with a friend as you could in swtor. Coming from there this was one thing that made me very sad. It is all a single player co op 'experience'. For this reason I may go back to swtor for a bit just to enjoy the story again, and have a fun time.

Movement skills. I heavily relied on all my moment abilities on most of the classes allowing for platforming to get datacrons to be a highlight of my enjoyment in swtor. The only ones you get are rescue which can only slide pull someone towards you as a healer. Many jump to enemy or team mate skills but alot of them like paladins you have to wait till level 74 to obtain and you CAN NOT use them out of instance. No fun pulling someone up high to reach your spot you cleaverly found on a lamppost. no teleporting back to currant position with telewarp on the caster/healer mage class of swtor. Also very very limited places to platform. There are many many baby bumpers in this game proventing you from getting on many cheeky places. No fun allowed in limsa on lamp posts. There are some spots you can get to, but over all a place you may think you could platform on you will be unable to because of baby bumpers. I do not even think this game has an unstuck command. I got stuck in a rock face once and had to just use the /return when the game finally stopped telling me 'I couldn't do that while jumping'. Yes game I am hovering inside of rock I can't not be considered jumping. Maybe there is an unstuck command and I am just a silly pants, but I couldn't find anything on this at the time when googling.

Crafting. This is very different in here but you get retainers if paying the subscription who kind of act as your crew in swtor where you can send them out. You have to level them up in only one class to be able to gather resources with them and you can not use them to craft as you could in swtor. Crafting can be kind of fun and challenging, but gosh I really miss just being able to tell 6 of my crew mates to craft something for me. Oh! another upside is you do not have to constantly take your stuff on and off the market every 3 or so days. You can leave a crafted or gathered item up forever! You just have to make sure you touch your retainers menu every couple of days to keep your stuff selling but you don't have to constantly put the item back up and it goes into your mailbox than you have to click click click through your mail to the items you didn't sell in those 3 day.

I may be missing something's but those are some of the differences you will face venturing into final fantasy over swtor. Oh and one more thing EVENTS, they are not like they are in swtor I think the closest would be beast tribe quests where you can get influence with the different beast tribes but events in here are usually a couple of weeks for one reward and when it is gone it will never be back the same like the bounty hunter event where it will be back again at some point so you wont have to rush to do them in swtor. In here if you do not get that crown for little ladys day better get ready for it to not be back ever, except for in the cash shop whenever they decide you are worthy. Oh and cartel coins are not here you get some outfits for subbing long enough but no going into the cartel market getting an item and selling it on the market. Most things are untradeable. Even dungeon loot most of the time many have craft able variants but you can not sell them after getting them from a dungeon or trade them with an alt or a friend. I hate this! I want to be able to trade my pants for someones gloves because rng can be cruel more times than not in ffxiv. There are some emotes and stuff that are tradable, but it is so freakin random sometimes what is or what is not allowed on the market.

Sorry for the long post and sorry in advanced if I think of something else >.< Welcome to Final Fantasy it is a really fun relaxing game and there are some plus' to it over swtor but gosh I wish I could make some of the customizations I could in swtor just kind of fuse the systems somehow you would have the perfect game.

Raising!!! Raising in here does not have a cap so you can keep raising your team without a cooldown. Everytime you raise one person though the negative is their stats are lowered each time to the point they are hitting like wet noodle, but you can keep raising them as much as you have mp. LB3 for healers I think raises without this debuff, but you may not have the chance to use it super often, but at least you do not have a cap.

At the moment housing is horrible in this game compared to swtor strongholds. You can get a small apartment in here but getting a house is impossible without destroying your sanity. Hopefully the new lotto system will make this less horrible but with the way rng is in this game it may be just as bad without the downside of sitting at a placard for the better part of day and watch as jimmy 10 houses moves their plot so all of your hard work is worthless.