Having played FFXIV for the past many years through the end of the base of DT, It is a quite true that Jobs play very similarly. Not like 1:1 but when I am learning a new job, I can basically make my hotkey bars so similar.
1-2-3 are the basic combo
Shift+1-2-3 are the other half of the combo for most melee classes
4-5 and if needed Shift 4-5 are the AoE combos. They are all basically the same thing for AoE.
Each has a pair of buttons for their 2 minute cooldowns, they all now have 2 minute cooldowns for DPS
They all have 2 buttons it seams for Off GCD attacks to expend some kind of bar that fills
There are differences, obvious, Ninja, Bard, Black Mage, and Dancer kind of stick out, mostly because dancer is more of a game of staring at the hotkey bars in case of a proc… I don’t like that one as much.
Tanks all feel VERY similar, Sage and Scholar are similar… (I main Sage)
Hell, Sage is the reason I decided to, after 20 years, finally make a Disc priest in WoW! I can say that Healing as a Disc Priest in WoW is SO MUCH more complicated than healing as anything in FFXIV, and each healer I’ve played in WoW feels so freaking different than the other healers. I don’t feel like “Well I’ve leveled one I’ve leveled them all”
I will give WoW credit for having so many class specs that play so vastly different from every other one. Even just playing a pure DPS has different playstyles in it. Sub Rogue is different from Outlaw, and different from Assassin.
There is a joy in that, but there is also frustration as it’s a ton more work to learn a new spec, let alone a whole new class. This isn’t even mentioning the talent trees. FFXIV, for what it’s worth, each class is pretty simple to play for the most part and there is really only 1 proper way to play them letting you focus purely on the Boss fights which are really fun! It also makes balancing so much easier for the devs.
Balancing in WoW is a nightmare as it’s 39 different jobs basically, all at once. But at least I have a lot more options for tailoring my class to how I want to play it. I don’t care if the Max DPS is one specific talent setup that involves 3x the work for 10% more DPS. I will go for the one that makes sense to me and since I don’t group outside of LFR, I don’t need to Min-Max, just find the build that is the most fun and to be frank, easiest to execute.
It may sound like I’m bashing 14, I’m not. I loved my time in it and I’ll probably go back some day but DT was not fun for me so I went back to WoW.