So I have played WoW for a good while and took a gigantic break for a few years and haven’t thought about playing the game until recently, where a friend of mine wanted me to get back into the game. My main game has been FFXIV since it came out and my favorite job in the game bar none is Machinist, I love everything about the class in every expac and I want something like this in WoW, what should I look into? Machinist felt great in it’s complexity to be competitive, it felt generally fast paces and satisfying to play, even though a vast majority of the playerbase disliked playing the job due to it being both complicated and clunky to them, but I loved it.
I know the logical comparison is Hunter but as far as I know, Hunter is generally both brainless and kind of dull, which is a big problem.
Find a casual-ish guild (it’s this game’s FC) and get to know people before you step foot in end game content. Shop around until you find one that clicks and plays at your time.
Pugging in this game is absolutely unforgiving for new players. It’s rather unforgiving for most players, really. That’s where the worst attitudes in this game can be found.
Oh, and when you first step foot in a city, /leave trade
It’ll be a better experience. Also, welcome aboard. Don’t set your sights too high with professions. They suck in this game right now.
Hunter is a good start. It’s like bard/machinist, kinda. No real direct class relation between games that I found. If you’re seeking complexity, I suggest picking up a DOT-based class like warlock (affliction) or shadow priest.
Hunter is famous for being rather simple, unless you choose the melee option. Definitely check out class discords and sites like wowhead.com, because, unlike FFXIV, all classes/specs are not considered viable by the community, if you do choose to PUG. And you will be barred from groups for not playing the favorited specs.
Then WoW is gonna be a big problem, too. FFXIV has great class design. WoW has a LOT more options, since each spec is effectively its own class, + talents on top of that…
But across the board, WoW class design is more simplistic than FFXIV. Not a single spec that I’m aware of fits the description of “feeling great in its complexity to be competitive”.
You might find some options for “Fast paced”, and WoW’s combat in general is and always will be faster paced (oGCDs do not make up the gap caused by FFXIV’s longer GCD), but it won’t be fast paced in a particularly satisfying way.
Closest analogy is probably feral druid. You can still have a lot of spinning plates via savage roar and blood talons. But blizzard has never really rewarded difficult specs, so expect lots of effort for not nearly as much pay off, as if you’d just played a two button spec instead.
Every spec is “fast paced” in the sense that you’ll be smashing buttons constantly. The nature of a GCD that is significantly lower than final fantasy’s.
I was an AST main, but MCH was my go-to DPS and my favorite ranged physical. I settled on fire mage because the combustion window feels pretty similar to hypercharge. I liked it for the rewarding fast window though, I actually kind of felt like they stripped the complexity out of the ranged phys jobs in ShB which is why I played it as my alt DPS.
I think you may find enjoyment from a Fury warrior, outlaw rogue, windwalker monk, or feral druid via Moment of Clarity (for significantly faster paced gameplay compared to the alternatives). A fast-paced melee spec seems to be what you’re looking for.
My personal recommendation would be a warrior or rogue.
Yes I agree, their rework in ShB made them a lot more streamlined and easier to play with more flashy skills. I still like it but not as much as I did in HW and SB, to the point I ended just messing around with other jobs instead of just focusing on the one I like I did until then.
That was probably true up to maybe Mists of Panderia? After that, pretty much all classes began getting streamlined where blizzard actually made admissions on their “button bloat”. So YMMV…
But i do have a question though, even though (especially beast master) hunter can be simplistic, wouldnt you want to engage with a more simplistic class to re-acquaint yourself with how endgame and all the systems, yada yada, work before getting into something you might feel is a bit more complicated, just to familiarize yourself with dungeons, raids and the like?
Everything has been pretty gutted since, relative to the number of buttons you need to press in FFXIV.
It’s pretty apples to oranges. WoW is a lot more frenetic, but streamlined, whereas FFXIV has a slower pace, but is bloated. Both have their pros and cons, but it makes it difficult to recommend a direct analogue.
Does it have to be ranged? because if you want complexity and familiarity, you might actually like UHDK. It sounds like a weird recommendation given what other people have said, but it follows the pattern of a lot of DPS jobs in FF14 with the CD stacking on rigid windows by always using Unholy Blight and Dark Transformation together while trying to always pair blight, transformation, and Apoc together with the pure ST build.
That’s kind of based on when I was a DRG main in SB though, where we’d try to always have at least one of B4B, Sight, or Litany up when we entered LotD.
It doesn’t have to be ranged, just most of my experience is with range. I did dabble here and there with NIN and SAM in FFXIV so I am not completely against melee.
As you can see, it’s nigh impossible to make an easy recommendation. A friend of mine played Summoner and joined up for the release of Shadowlands and asked exactly what you’re asking. I couldn’t make any recommendations, aside from classes that share a theme. There is just so little mechanical equivalence in the actual class design.
Just need to play with a few trial characters until you find something that clicks, I suppose.
It’s just different target demographics. The low GCD is aimed at people who want to be pressing something at all times. Slower pace, but more things to press is catering more to people who want to actively think about what they’re doing.
FFXIV wants you to commit the bosses to muscle memory and make you think about your rotations, whereas WoW tries to make you think about the bosses and commit your rotation to memory.
Not a hard and fast, universal rule, but in general, I think it applies.
It really is. The job design is wildly different in WoW vs FF14. FF14 has more buttons, but is very predictable and rigid. WoW relies more on moment to moment decision making for optimization.
You can plan out every single GCD for an entire fight in FF14. My group knew exactly what our last GCD would be when a boss became untargetable, and you can’t really do that as reliably in WoW.
