You are, but it’s literally not possible to explain it to someone who hasn’t played both. Almost every mythic raid streamer that went and played ffxiv had the exact same comment/thoughts about ffxiv when just viewing them in videos, and then had a lot of high praise when actually playing the game.
As someone who raided in all but Ultimates, many of those telegraphed shapes are not there in the harder mode versions of Trials and Raids (Extreme/Savage).
Having participated in both WoW and XIV raids, XIV raids are far better designed due to their streamlined designs and mechanics through all raid tiers. (Raid markers/Raid mechanic depicters/etc etc…)
It’s pound for pound designed more cohesively with 8 players in mind including color scheme and arena layout. WoW has a lot of garbage all over the ground that’s difficult to differentiate floor from aoe at times and each raid has some sort of unique mechanic indicator you have to constantly read about to make sure you know what indicator means what.
Everything in XIV’s raiding be it Trials, Raids or Ultimates are exceptionally streamlined.
Ahh yes, them “unique mechanic” that makes every raid somehow feel… different instead of some homogenized reskin of previous ones.
There is a reason why there is such a stark reception of raiding in WoW vs XIV and battles themselves are one of them.
In any XIV raid, you can go into a fight and recognize various mechanics such as AoE’s, stackers, tank busters, etc etc…
In WoW, most fights have unique animations to them that you might not recognize and thereby complicating something that doesn’t need to be complicated by changing the way a buster or a stacker looks. It causes bloated need for ‘education’ rather than it being visually obvious as to what it exactly is.
I can look at a car and understand it is a car and that it operates relatively the same as most other cars. That’s XIV raiding.
In WoW, it’s more like they gut out every car and replace it with the worst aesthetics making it difficult to digest both visually and mechanically to the point people just are put off by it.
More like all of wow’s raids expect you to have an add on installed that tells you what is happening.
14 is more telegraphed since add ons are not allowed. I mean you can use them, but you aren’t expected to.
Don’t really feel like writing it all out again, so I’ll just quote myself:
Because 14 has timers built into the game already.
Wows raids are designed with add-ons in mind.
I find add-ons to be a double edged sword. For example, I think some of the add-ons I’ve been using in Era are great, specifically the Voiceover one. It has made questing much much better.
But then I think of the negative aspects, specifically, the UI/HUD. It took almost 18(?) years for Blizzard to FINALLY overhaul their own UI/HUD mostly due to the fact there were so many add-ons that did it for them.
Now, third party support is nice and all, but the problem with that is that Blizzard outright failed when it came to making WoW more enticing to newcomers.
New Player: “I’m going to try playing WoW.”
Vet: “Okay before you do that, download these add-ons, they do X, Y and Z since Blizzard doesn’t have that in the game. And when you want to PvP, download these. And when you want to raid, you should definitely download these. Oh also…”
Absolutely awful for new player retention and they have mentioned having a problem in getting new players and keeping them.
XIV’s add-ons is mostly deprived people downloading different kinds of ERP mods.
Yeah 14 was built with the stuff we use addons for built into the game already.
Besides dps meters but FF14 uses those and Logs.
Cactuarbot is a big cheat tho.
xD I hear that a lot about cactbot. Another is ACT. It does trivialize it especially if you set it up to specifically tell you what to do.
I played on PS5 so I couldn’t use add-ons, but I did the calls for my raid so I was a veritable ACT myself. 
XIV definitely focused on the poor aspects WoW was lacking in and put a lot of effort into those things like, as you said, building the game up with a lot of those things in mind that WoW didn’t have.
While things like voiceover is incredibly well done, I still want these companies to stop being lazy and do it themselves. I don’t get how some randos can do things like that yet Blizzard can’t or won’t. (Maybe legal reasons?)
WoW raids have dps checks 
It’s not as hardcore as some people act like it is, but if you don’t have the dps even in bfd you can’t beat the last 2 bosses before chains and stacks take you out.
Even the murloc is a soft dps check because of the tentacles.
Other bosses, Baron for example, you can take however long you want to kill him, as long as healers have mana he will never wipe you–not a dps check.
I haven’t looked into Cactbot - I stopped doing prog raiding by the point it was a lot better known - but ACT, Advanced Combat Tracker, doesn’t really give you any more information than Details does.
There are a LOT of voice acting in FFXIV, and a LOT of cinematics. This is expensive, but I think this is less that it’s too expensive and more that a massive amount of the player base would just skip all cutscenes and anything voiced, like a lot of people that don’t care about the story of FFXIV do. (There were a lot of people doing this in 2021 during that big exodus.) I would guess it’s not worth the cost for how much people would just skip past all of it.
If I remember correctly it’s something that people use with ACT that does calls. Or it might be the other way around. I don’t use it so I can’t remember exactly.
Ah yea, the notorious CS skipper. That will set some XIV’ers off. I think that is a minority though. Most people from what I can tell enjoy it for the story. Another point of contention between WoW and XIV might I add.
Only if you make it know that you are doing it in game. They won’t know one way or another. So if you stream it, players can report you for it. SE doesn’t go out of their way to pursue this unless it is reported.
Had to stress it a lot when it came to our FC members raiding. Don’t know them? Don’t say anything. Don’t even offer their parse up if they ask for it in group.
There might be some other tool that interacts with ACT, or a plugin for ACT, for call-outs that I’m not aware of. You use plugins for it to have meters appear on-screen as an overlay in the first place, so maybe there are plugins for it that are used in the fashion of DBM/Bigwigs instead of just Details or Recount.
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It’s an addon in ACT that does the callouts based on timing from the start of the fight and specific ability uses. Since FFXIV is a LOT stricter on it’s timers it works but it’s not needed unless your bad for the most part. You can actually follow what happens in Savage/Ultimates after you learn to watch the boss in ffxiv and not just your bars like in WoW.
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Thread is a top kek. Vanilla isn’t hard. FF14 isn’t hard. Retail isn’t hard.
Ff14 and retail are also lobby games and barley even MMO’s. If you play Simon sez or DDR WoW edition(ez mode wildstar) and think it’s hard, oh boy. I have about 500 games to show you and I think you’re gonna really struggle on them all.
Mmos are big chat rooms with avatar mini games. Kekw.
It has been over 3 years since I played FFXIV, but my impression was that most of the end game content was puggable and that parsing isn’t really even needed. Something of BFD level difficulty would be puggable through the Duty Finder.
Then at the very high end you have extreme/savage content where you probably need a competent FC to complete it.
man its a shame wildstar failed. such a good game.
Yea the design of XIV’s raids, UI/HUD, and jobs (for the most part) is really well done. I have my qualms with XIV, but it is definitely well polished.
Sorry… im not gonna sit on a online game and stare at people in cat suits.