Difficulty of normal content.

[caffe_macchiato]

The story was pure garbage, and the gameplay was a grindfest made out of boring chores.

That sounds familiar!

You couldn't just show up and raid (the fun part), you had to grind your anima whatevers, your reputations, do mandatory PVP and M+ to open a chest that gave you a chance of getting a piece of gear that maybe would be good for your class. It was a repetitive, mind-numbing, FOMO based experience. In contrast, FFXIV lets me just log in and raid

And how many hours do you have to play FFXIV before you get to that point? Because most of the posts in this thread celebrate walling off current content and requiring hundreds of hours and ten years of experience before playing. "You're level 100, everything should be easy!" The issue at this point isn't Square Enix, it's the Final Fantasy XIV community which wants something far more restrictive than any other MMO. We have approached the "final boss" territory of FFXIV. And that's FINE! That's great news! Because it means that Final Fantasy XIV is finally approaching its end of life and the company can finally move on to a new MMO.

The raids aren't even difficult, but this thread wants them to be because it filters out the plebs and you're level 100 anyway so just "get gud". Hopefully this is the end!

[Kissune]

That sounds familiar!



And how many hours do you have to play FFXIV before you get to that point? Because most of the posts in this thread celebrate walling off current content and requiring hundreds of hours and ten years of experience before playing. "You're level 100, everything should be easy!" The issue at this point isn't Square Enix, it's the Final Fantasy XIV community which wants something far more restrictive than any other MMO. We have approached the "final boss" territory of FFXIV. And that's FINE! That's great news! Because it means that Final Fantasy XIV is finally approaching its end of life and the company can finally move on to a new MMO.

The raids aren't even difficult, but this thread wants them to be because it filters out the plebs and you're level 100 anyway so just "get gud". Hopefully this is the end!

With all due respect what the hell are you talking about

[Volgia]

That sounds familiar!



And how many hours do you have to play FFXIV before you get to that point? Because most of the posts in this thread celebrate walling off current content and requiring hundreds of hours and ten years of experience before playing. "You're level 100, everything should be easy!" The issue at this point isn't Square Enix, it's the Final Fantasy XIV community which wants something far more restrictive than any other MMO. We have approached the "final boss" territory of FFXIV. And that's FINE! That's great news! Because it means that Final Fantasy XIV is finally approaching its end of life and the company can finally move on to a new MMO.

The raids aren't even difficult, but this thread wants them to be because it filters out the plebs and you're level 100 anyway so just "get gud". Hopefully this is the end!

Damn, you got me on the edge of my seat. What else can you predict?

[HemlockEvergreen]

And how many hours do you have to play FFXIV before you get to that point? Because most of the posts in this thread celebrate walling off current content and requiring hundreds of hours and ten years of experience before playing. "You're level 100, everything should be easy!" The issue at this point isn't Square Enix, it's the Final Fantasy XIV community which wants something far more restrictive than any other MMO. We have approached the "final boss" territory of FFXIV. And that's FINE! That's great news! Because it means that Final Fantasy XIV is finally approaching its end of life and the company can finally move on to a new MMO.

Nah dude, no comparison. You have no idea of what you're talking about. WoW story was so bad that it made you feel bad for caring about it. The way XIV approaches it at least doesn't completely retcon everything every expansion. Shadowlands was so bad that they managed to retroactively ruin Warcraft III.

And the grind is different as well. You don't understand how good it is over here. Universal tokens for all the gear? Bad luck protection books? Catch-up gear that's easy to get if you miss a tier? WoW had none of that. Not to mention the abomination that was the weekly vault.

Let me explain how it worked: You had a vault that you could open once a week, that contained up to 9 pieces of loot. To unlock all of those 9 pieces of loot, you had to complete certain goals on raiding, PVP, and mythic plus dungeon runs. So you had homework to do every week. These were not things that you could do quickly in one day either, they were time consuming.

The vault pieces were random pieces that your class could wear. There was no guarantee that they'd be good for your spec. There was no guarantee that they would be something you don't have already. You could very well get the same pair of boots that are shit for your spec three weeks in a row and there was no fallback system for that. And your BiS depended on the vault. You could not acquire certain optimal pieces without them being from the vault, because some of them were higher item level than what you could get from other sources. So you had no way to plan to get BiS, you depended solely on luck.

All that I mentioned too is max level, endgame content. It's not comparable to the leveling process, which is what you mentioned. But even in that we can mention that if you wanna play another job in XIV, you don't have to level another character from scratch. You can just level and gear the job. If you want to play another class in WoW, you need a different character, in which not only you gonna need to level up through story quests again, but if you wanted to mantain both of your classes geared, you needed to do the loot vault weekly grind twice. The amount of time wasting is not comparable at all.