An unbiased review of wow vs ff14

Community General Discussion
21

You know this based on personal experience of getting pre-nerf cutting edges and clearing ultimates?

If they’re harder, why do FF14 players much less sweaty than Echo and Limit clear them faster? How many ultimates does Shadowbringers currently have?

You’re simply repeating something you’ve heard without actually knowing.

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22

Sounds pretty bad for ff14. Thank gawd I just resubbed to wow.

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23

Who cares about pre-nerf content, only current content matters.

Because Echo and Limit don’t play ff14?

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24

So no, you don’t actually know and are just repeating the myth.

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Top raiders in both communities disagree with this. Ultimates are right on par with the hardest wow fights, except there’s only a handful of them. And savage raids are usually around the mid tier/boss 7 fights. The main limiter being that they can’t be something that isn’t defeatable by a combo of console and PC player raid comp.

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26

are you serious?

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27

Well to be fair, your entire endgame loop for loot in XIV is gaining a currency and upgrading the tombstone gear. There isn’t really any gear or loot diversity, or interesting trinkets or set bonuses. Your black mage is going to be the same as every black mage (maybe with slight changes in spell speed for comfort)

Domination sucks but loot in wow is more interesting overall. Aesthetics are of personal opinion and bias

28

Biggest difference is that ultimates cannot be made redundant by just getting more gear. By the time most wow guilds clear mythic content they’re essentially playing a completely different fight than the bleeding edge prog guilds.

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29

Yah that is true. Evergreen challenging content is for sure a plus 1 for XIV. The ability to level sync and do all the content in the game at an appropriate level and challenge is really cool.

Imagine if we could do any dungeon in wow at max level and it would give cosmetic rewards or something. Scarlet Halls Hardmode. That would be pretty sweet.

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30

One thing I like about FFXIV is that there are trials that are just boss encounters and the raids feature no trash (in most cases). I did the LFR raid yesterday and it was a lot of trash. Like just a ton of it.

It’s so much fun to just log on and be fighting a cool boss fight within 5 minutes if you want.

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31

Honestly, I prefer deterministic gearing through currency to the massive amounts of RNG in WoW.

WoW might have more interesting gear, but the sheer amount of RNG is a major problem. Most of the time gearing feels awful in WoW because I get something useless far too often. At least with deterministic gearing, I know that my effort will be rewarded. I’ll never forget killing Thok in SoO over and over on normal and heroic for 10-11 months for the trinket he dropped - that awful feeling of bad RNG persists for a long time. Getting something to finally drop in WoW tends to give me a feeling of bitter relief - I’m not happy or joyful, just relieved to finally be done with that particular grind.

I see end game gearing as a positive for FF14 over WoW.

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32

Things WoW does better:

  • Fast-paced combat. While it’s simplistic, it’s also fast, and that makes up for a lot of the issues I have with it being, well, simplistic.
  • Build Diversity. Even with the simplified talents, we STILL have much more choice than what FFXIV offers – because it offers nothing.
  • Class Options. Specs are essentially standalone Classes since Cata. We basically have 30-some classes, whereas FFXXIV has 12 or something. No, crafters don’t count, they’re all the same thing and you can’t play the core game as a crafting class.
  • “Something for Everyone” - Multiple difficulties and scaling content ensures everyone has a place that fits for their personal progression. FFXIV has mindnumbing entry level content or hardcore raiding with very little inbetween.
  • Meaningful drops from content. Too much RNG is a problem, but FFXIV does the opposite and actual drops just don’t matter half the time.
  • Quantity of endgame content. FFXIV is the most comparable MMO, but it lacks in meaningful content to progress through compared to WoW, even if you’re doing the top end content.
  • Responsiveness. As OP said, movement and abilities are instant, no acceleration, no animation/calculation mismatch like in FFXIV.
  • Addon Support. It exists. Period.

Things FFXIV does better:

  • Worldbuilding & Story. It’s a game created as an RPG first, MMO second, and it shows. Even if you don’t personally like the story, it does a much better job of putting out a coherent overarching story than WoW ever has.
  • Armor Models. FFXIV uses exclusively 3D models for gear. You can see the layers. WoW uses skin textures for the largest pieces of gear still, even if they do occasionally toss doodads on top of it.
  • Class Design. You have no customization, but the design that’s there is REALLY solid. Each class is far more unique and involved than anything WoW offers, and if this was the only factor, I’d be playing FFXIV instead, easily.
  • Crafting. I still find it to be a pointless minigame, like all MMO Crafting, but it’s undeniable that it’s at least a better system than the barebones mess WoW offers.
  • Emotes. FFXIV offers far more animated emotes, including facial expressions and persistent stances than WoW does. Lets toss the ‘Performance’ feature in here too. It’s a glorified emote for most people, but it’s still great.
  • Community. Between the commendation system, new player bonuses for all involved, harsher moderation (or at least harsher account action from reports), the outlawing of talking about DPS Meters, and things like the Housing system being instanced in neighborhoods instead of solo… FFXIV’s designs foster a much friendlier community than what WoW’s has become.

That’s my take on it.

FWIW, both games have another category of “things they do wrong, period” that doesn’t really fit under these headings. Like, I didn’t list ‘Housing’ as its own thing under FFXIV’s list because I think the implementation of Housing in that game is literally the worst thing I’ve ever seen, in terms of getting into it. It’s fine once you’re in, but getting to that point kills any good will I have toward it. On the other side, WoW has problems like the recently-introduced Domination Socket Gear conflicting with 9.0 Legendary Gear, forcing people to re-grind and re-make their Legendaries, potentially MANY Legendaries, in a non-Domination slot. But I don’t want to make lists for those so I’ll leave it at those examples.

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33

FF14 has a better world? You mean that place that you have to sit in loading screens to move everytime you swap zones? :joy:

Very few MMOs are as seamless as wow is when it comes to the world itself.

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34

Now this is where I disagree you say FF14 actually has a world but how is that so since most of the world is instanced? Wow has more freedom in zone travels not even touching a loadscreen and for that I flip a gold coin to wow.

Yall need to just accept there are 2 mmo’s now. Deal with it. Guildwars2 has a xpack coming out as well. New World launches next month. If you want to curse yourself to playing only 1 mmo, be my guest but don’t down talk another mmo to try and change others opinions let them make the deciding choice as a consumer.

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35

Ok since you both ignored my followup to that bullet point, the world does not feel pseudo single player thanks to having no cross realm like wow.

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36

And it won’t matter for more than 2 weeks because the story is the only thing worth doing in Guild Wars 2 after you’ve played it once and got a little gear. Because you’re still going to be basically BiS despite a new expansion. That game is deathly afraid of providing any meaningful progression after the first month or two you play.

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37

‘wow vs ff14’

Stopped there. There are a billion of these threads, and no matter what you name it, it’s the same drivel. Play one. Play the other. Play both. Stop comparing different games.

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38

I think that’s fair, but there needs to be a better balance. I think that’s why people look back at the way it was done in wrath and even cata, where you could get a loot drop but also earned currency. So deterministic, but you could luck out and get a shiny piece of loot so that was exciting as well. FFXIV sort of does that, as raids can drop loot as well, but the currency is pretty much always better (so deterministic invalidates drops you get at current tier)

I think they both do it wrong, with nice feeling pieces in each lol

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I find they are the same - but FF 14 has a longer GCD

I disagree - earlier WoW had a much more vibrant enviroment with places of note and what have you - much of FF 14 is just open plains with no actual landmarks.

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40

I agree. I did prefer the Cata model, and it sounds like Wrath was similar (I didn’t play wrath) where there was a mix of deterministic and RNG gearing. I’ve just had enough frustration with bad RNG in WoW over the last 5-8 years that it’s a bit of a relief to not have to worry about it in FF14. I enjoy both games for different reasons.