FFXIV has a fantastic in-game tutorial for sprouts. It doesn’t need the painfully plodding start. That might help someone into the game that has never played a video game before, but someone generally familiar with how games work? Quite painful. There’s a sweet spot between overwhelming a new player and boring them before you can set the hook. FFXIV tends to err on the latter.
And this isn’t about the pace of the GCD - the GCD is fine. It’s about how few buttons you have to start and how disjointed your class feels for literally dozens of hours of gameplay. Some people aren’t able to overlook that initial investment to get to the “good” stuff that is always promised later on.
It’s not that the good stuff isn’t there - it most certainly is. But it’s often a bridge too far for someone who has a genuinely interest but can’t justify being bored to tears or days of their life to get to it.
Right? All the complaints seem to come from people who either don’t play the game or didn’t get very far.
GCD is an issue only if you’re low level. Combat flow sucks low level in WoW, too. My APM on my monk in FFXIV is far higher than a windwalker in WoW.
Competition is very much a thing at the end. They just discourage toxicity within the game, and meter sharing and such to strangers is never done with good intentions, even if people say it is. It’s done to be a douche.
But guild discords aren’t any different for raiders there than they are here. There is a fflogs just like there is a warcraftlogs.
The only thing that really sucks about FFXIV is if you’re playing for PVP, or you don’t like stories or questing. But if you’re playing for a good story and a good adventure, it’s a far better game than WoW has been for ages. Legion felt like a lowball attempt to be FFXIV with all the class stories, for example.
Well, you’re better than me gungadin! I didn’t read anything and threw out a snarky, but true, comment!
Then I read a few posts backwards (not literally) and thought, oops, shouldn’t have said anything. Have no clue what they’re talking about so who am I to throw stones.
The latter is a completely legitimate point. The new player experience is clunky and slow, no matter how you slice it. Trying to get friends into the game that hear some of us talking about the current content… new players often just feel so behind the curve that they give up entirely.
There is no easy solution to this, either. The game is fantastic because of how much it builds of of itself, so if you want to experience in the same way as those singing its praises, you need to slog through.
I’m not saying you need the meters to call out other players, but it’s very difficult to see where you stack up without better addon support. All you can really do is guess.
A few quick pointers - focus on your main story quests and class quests. They generally give you more than enough experience to level up, and those quests unlock the greater portion of content in the game and class abilities. Blue quests with a + symbol will also unlock content, so they’re worth picking up. The rest of the quests are more-or-less there for lore or leveling alternate classes.
Yeah it is. I absolutely hated the combat for the first 15 levels. It took me 3 times to get into it. I also went with a conjurer (the game’s holy priest) up front. Man, it was rough.
Archer was a lot better after I swapped to that. But the melee in this game are high action.
I will also say that I recently rolled a shaman on retail, about a month back, on a new server to see if a fresh start would make the game feel a little better. I got to level 11 with it and it is not any more enjoyable than the same level range in FFXIV.
The in-game threat meter gives you a good baseline of where you stand. But yes, you can go ahead and download a meter for your own personal information, or between friends. You don’t use it to call out or punish others.
When I got my brother and a couple friends into XIV the way I told them to look at it is that it’s a Final Fantasy game first, and an MMO second. A LOT of the main scenario plays like a single player rpg.
Ohhh. So these “deliver so-and-so this letter” and such quests, I shouldn’t be worrying about as much? I got to the Arcanist guild, I think that’s my main quest right now. But I’ve been attuning to crystals around Limsa Lominsa and doing those misc quests.
Btw I looked you up too-- your dragoon looks cool, I like his armor. I know a lot of people knock the FF look (I was skeptical admittedly) but I do like the Amano vibes, I always like Final Fantasy concept art. Even the peasant gear my little guy has on looks decent.
I mean… can we even say that WoW has a leveling experience at all? The developers don’t care about it at all. It’s just a relic of the past that exists purely because of tradition. All development is dedicated to the endgame, aside from a few, “OH CRAP!” features they tossed in when they remembered that people had to experience the disjointed mess the game became.
