Should you play FFXIV? As Objective as I Can Be

Off-Topic Games, Gaming and Hardware
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Hello. Don’t let the character’s name fool you. If you’re enjoying Battle for Azeroth, then I’m very happy for you, and encourage you to continue supporting Activision in the months to come.

Many have began discussing FFXIV as an alternative to WoW. I’d like to offer comparisons that I think are apt, in order for you to make your own decision. I do hope WoW returns to form one day. I think many publishers are starting to realize they capsized the ship trying to keep Johnny from falling overboard. (Let it also be noted Square-Enix’s hands are not clean regarding micro-transactions and mobile predation).

Ultimately, I hope this answers some questions from a longtime WoW POV, and hopefully answer questions that would make or break the decision for you. MMOs are a huge investment of time, and I don’t want anyone to feel they’ve wasted theirs. My experience in FFXIV is as a Stormblood player, so I cannot provide personal feedback from Heavensward or prior(except where I’ve noted feedback from other players). Some of this is written with raiders in mind, but I’m also excited to discuss casual aspects as well.

I have enjoyed FFXIV, so I imagine the post as a whole will come off as promoting. But, FF has a lot of things I don’t agree with also, so I’m posting as many of the negative things I can think of here.

Thanks for reading in advance, those that choose to.

GCD, oGCD, Weaving, Double-Weaving, Slide Casting, Positionals & You

  • For years, I heard that the base GCD was longer than WoW, and I dismissed FFXIV entirely. I really wish the people who were trying to persuade me back then, explained more as I am attempting to do now. The base GCD applied to Weaponskills and Spells. Off-GCD (oGCD) abilities are more numerous than in WoW, and in effect, create an almost secondary rotation to keep an eye on. Weaponskills need to be performed in orders to create Combos. Doing the wrong combo, or perhaps losing track of your combo, can result in a huge potency loss (potency is the base value affected by other modifiers). Casters and healers lack weaponskills, but still have a plethora of oGCD abilities as well. A bad player and a good player is decided by understanding how to “weave” abilities in between weaponskills or spells, and which abilities can be single-weaved or double-weaved.
  • There is a base latency applied in the game, so healers/casters especially need to slide-cast: min/maxing movement in between each GCD to move incrementally away from an incoming mechanic/move closer to the next. Min/maxing movement is nothing new to our raid community in Azeroth, but it is imperative to understand that one must look at movement in FFXIV with a more proactive mindset.
  • Positionals are for our melee jobs (classes), wherein additional potency/effects are added depending on if you are correctly on the flank or rear of the enemy. This is actually fairly tight; expect to miss a few rear positionals early on. Not doing your positionals adds up to huge DPS loss. An obvious example is the Monk’s Bootshine, which is a guaranteed Crit if executed at rear versus in front/flank. Consider whether you ever had an opinion on the Rogue’s Backstab if you have an interest in MDPS.

Rotation/Mechanic Inversion: Frequency vs Intricacy

  • Over the years, we’ve seen WoW’s rotations become more accessible while the raid mechanics more complex. FFXIV is quite the opposite, at least currently/in Stormblood. Mechanics are thrown at you, with what seems like less than 2 seconds to react, or taking damage and a Vulnerability down debuff. Those Vuln down debuffs are applied liberally as a typical punitive measure in raids across the board. The mechanics are frequent, but most amounts to moving correctly. Add phases and intermissions are more pronounced yet less strenuous, and seem less interested in taxing you as some of WoW’s have. (Think Imperator Mar’Gok’s final intermission urgency). Many of FFXIV’s unique mechanics involve an extra action button, and are manageable, and more readily understood than WoW’s “puzzle”.
  • It can be beneficial to imagine FFXIV’s raid design as inspired from the “bullet hell” shooters of Japan, with rotations requiring almost rhythm game style input. This might sound unusual, but it’s the best way I can describe it. Whether that sounds fun to you is subjective. It definitely is a different sort of encounter.
  • On that note, you can also imagine FFXIV vs WoW raiding as pattern memorization vs design comprehension. The first boss in say Delta v1 is pretty self-explanatory, as is several encounters. The EX Trial Susano back then, on the surface, seems easy enough, but the frequency of the mechanics and the variance in what order the patterns play out is the learning curve. Compare to Imperator Mar’gok, Archimonde, Guldan or Argus, and this kind of application is less important.
  • There’s a lot to be said about FFXIV raids. Normal/Hard (story mode) content has little in the way of DPS checks. Alliance Raids (three per expansion) are the LFR of FFXIV, and they actually ramp up in difficulty linearly. People still wipe in the Alliance Raid Roulette (Raid Finder). There are only four bosses per 8 man raid, but those bosses arguably have more care than others. If I were to compare Garothi Worldbreaker to Alte Roite, I would say the latter is a much better first boss by design and difficulty; no “loot ships” here. FFXIV’s four boss raid structure tends to make the first 2 Savage difficulty fights fairly reasonable for a wide number of percentiles, the third challenging mechanically as a (insert politically incorrect word for less engaged player) check, and the fourth challenging. I would say the fact WoW still requires 20 decent-good, engaged players still makes the final boss in a WoW raid objectively harder than a final boss in an FF raid. However, static groups tend to implode faster since the blame is discovered far quicker when the walls are hit.
  • Raid design is far less interesting in FFXIV, IMO. With this current 8 man raid especially, there is no trash to speak of, (although narratively the “arena” format makes sense this time around). I like effectively clearing trash to save time, but I realize this is a minority opinion, so many reading this may like the idea of not having to do trash. The previous expansion’s raid had some instances with a couple trash packs pre-pull. To reiterate, in the 4 boss, 8 man raid structure, you queue each component individually; you do not enter a large, sprawling naaru structure or ascend a temple to jump on the back of a dragon without requeuing first. The 24 man raid has trash and all four bosses are tackled in sequence, but it still feels a bit disjointed. There’s also “ultimate” remixes of old fights/raids in Stormblood, meant to be a greater challenge with stricter item level caps.
  • Comparing Legion to Stormblood: 40 bosses to 34 (maybe 35 - ). So even though the environments feel smaller and not the magnitude of assaulting an ogre capital, or a citadel of death, the number of encounters to learn is comparable.

Respect (?) For Performance (?)

  • I’ve heard a lot about how FFXIV’s community is better. What they mean to say is “Square-Enix might suspend you if you admit to using a DPS parse to bully bad players.” There are immature FF players. There are company (guild) leaders that mock their members and kick out people in truly appalling situations. There are players that toss in the old “LOL let’s make fun of that roleplay server!” even though one of the most competitive FF PVP players is on that infamous server. So yeah, as a WoW player, I kind of tilted my head and thought to myself “Oh, making fun of Goldshire is still cool in Final Fantasy? K.”
  • Even though DPS can’t widely be posted, the fewer number of players and the more prominent threat of dying to stupid, means it’s still easier to see who your weakest links are. I’ve noted in dungeons, a lot of subpar DPS seem to love to complain about tanks and healers. It’s irrelevant since it’s a dungeon and I consider myself a good performer, but drama does creep it’s head just like in any other MMO.
  • Server communities are more connected, but Square Enix has begun to allow more and more cross-realm activities. Cross-realm friend list have been implemented for some time, and cross-realm visiting is about to hit the game. FFXIV has “hunts”, and this threatens to at least accelerate the pull time/speed of “hunt trains”. I myself feel this is a needless direction, as I can’t see any server unable to tackle the hunts by themselves. Worth noting, if you log out on a server you’re visiting, you’ll still be on that server when you log back in, able to purchase from their economy, but not sell. So while it does phase communities into one another, the control of what server you phase into, is in you the player’s hands (assuming the server isn’t already full).
  • Square Enix has done communities long before WoW tried it’s hand at it, in the form of Linkshells. There are Hunt Linkshells, Scout Linkshells (which is essentially to feed spawn location to the hunt linkshells), Crafting/Trading/Market Board linkshells, Roleplay Linkshells (No server is officially designated as RP, so pockets exist everywhere I’d imagine), etc etc. It’s cool, IMO.

Class Design

  • One character can do all battle classes, crafting and gatherers. One character can specialize into three of the eight crafters. The specializations seem to only remain exclusive recipes until the new expansion comes out (If Heavensward > Stormblood is a standard to expect). It’s pretty damn tough to play FFXIV, then come back to another MMO and say "You want me to grind Rep for every class?"
  • WoW has 36 specs. FFXIV has 15, and a new job coming that’s…basically a minigame (Blue Mage…ehh moving on - we’ll just say 15). With less total options, you get homoegeny in tanks/healers, but more nuance in DPS. While the melee all have similar functionality (as the 8 man raid design means many “must do” items need be checked off by more compositions due to limited availability) - They all keep up a damage buff for themself, apply a specific damage taken up to an enemy, etc etc, you can imagine the melee as “what part of MMO gameplay are you good at?” Aware of your position relative to the creature? Smash things simply but with mobility as a Monk. Aware of raid mechanics and don’t stand in bad? Play a dragoon and amaze people that you don’t tank the floor (because most DRG die a lot - basically Ret Paladins).
  • On tanks/healers, again, the smaller raid size means the paradigm and selection is a lot simpler. Healers consist of HoT versus shield, and a healer that can do one or the other poorly, but provide DPS gains to the party. Tanks got defense, damage, and sustain niches, but all have cooldowns to help.
  • In fact, role actions in Stormblood took away unique components of certain jobs, and gave them to all in the archetype. Your opinion on this may vary.
  • Overall, playing the DPS classes is more enjoyable to me because the skillcap is higher than in modern WoW, but the tanks and healers feel too homoegenous (however, I understand why given the raid size. Consider my friend’s experience: “FF has too many keybinds for no reasons!” So YMMV if you like more to your rotation or not.
  • Threat is typically something to consider as a tank, because the group will probably get mad at you if you don’t weave into DPS stances. The RDM who doesn’t Divert his threat before throwing out 1300+ potency in the span of seconds will accept no responsibility. Luckily, every co-tank can shirk threat to MT (And Ninja’s can add threat/reduce other’s threat) in raid environment, so good groups are fine.
  • Ultimately, the positionals, required weaving of oGCDs that often aren’t anything more than potency gains, will likely divide potential WoW converts along Classic WoW vs Modern WoW lines: if you miss lots of buttons back in old WoW days, I imagine you’ll like FFXIV’s gameplay. If you like only 1-2 major CDs and a four button rotation…you might not FFXIV.
  • CDs generally feel longer lasting to comepensate longer rampups. I could go into detail here, but this post is ridiculously long already. 20% damage reduction for a tank for 20 seconds, is about as good an example I can think of off the top of my head. I personally feel these windows on their own are excessive, but the overall rotation is still complex and engaging enough as a DPS.

PVP

  • WoW’s PVP is better.
  • Seriously, if PVP is VERY important to you, or you have no interest in PVE, don’t play FFXIV.
  • That being said, there is fun things to be had, with cosmetic rewards. The vehicles you can pilot in Revenant Wings, the MOBA-style map, is leaps and bounds more fun and engaging than the vehicles in Strands of the Ancients ever were.
  • Bards/Machinists (Hunter equivalents) are pretty dominant in random, unorganized PVP. They have the mobility that uncoordinated groups cannot easily contest. Tanks are pretty useful, healers feel powerful when people can’t focus fire, just like in WoW.
  • FF’s PVP modes are 4v4 Arena, 24v24v24 FFA between the three factions, and 24v24 in the mentioned Rival Wings MOBA style campaign.
  • FF PVP feels fun, but not enough to warrant a subscription, versus WoW’s PVP (IMO) being the best in the MMORPG genre. That being said, most of us have seen the MOBA genre cleave take much of WoW’s arena hype away. Will you have more fun in a battleground than a Frontline? Most people will say yes.
  • Is FF PVP tolerable and sometimes enjoyable enough to at least get the new haircut style or a glamor (transmog)? Also yes.

Tradeskills

  • FFXIV’s is better.
    Seriously, if crafting is VERY important to you, and you have interest in player housing, play FFXIV.
  • Crafting has rotations. You can fail recipes. You can also auto-craft like WoW once you’ve completed a recipe and you know you have reliable skill.
  • There’s a ton of materials, and this sort of plays into a “bank space racket”, where those who are used to being packrats have to pay an extra sub fee / month for extra bank space. The fact these retainers can be the only source for pets that sell for millions of gil, is light pay-to-win in my opinion. But, that’s a rather macro way to look at it; it’s fine overall, and saavy traders/sellers will be fine.
  • There are high-quality items. It feels freaking awesome to get that HQ craft for a quest when you only had 70% success, and thus saving you the time needed to craft high quality components (that themselves would have needed HQ mats gathered from a gathering prof, which itself would have probably needed to use it’s GP (Gathering Points) to get an HQ item at only 30% success.)
  • You can skip that headache with crafting kits/levekits.
    -Patches also bring crafting to value. In patch 4.4, the crafted gear was the same item level as the Normal Raid gear available, without limit to how much you could buy. Crafting can actually be a part of raid progression planning. So if you hate how Blizzard has made crafters a couple pieces only that are rather deflating in a manner of ways, FFXIV is here.
  • There’s a lot to say about housing. You can make the walls, chimneys on the outside of the house. You can glitch furniture to create psuedo fridges, sinks for a kitchen. Yada yada yada. Lots of work for mostly a “Wow cool dude” response. But hey, if you’re gonna afk anywhere, why not afk at your Company (Guild) house that has severed raid boss heads mounted in the basement that also has a minigame from the casino?

Conclusion/Parting Thoughts

  • Importantly, many players who are “omni” - all crafters/jobs at max level, who also clear the Savage content fairly easily (cutting edge) feel that FFXIV has become stagnant, and advocate for widespread changes.
  • FFXIV still has a Justice/Valor point system.
  • The beginning fifty levels of FFXIV are rough, and you have to do more than 200 quests, unless you skip. There’s plenty of cutscenes, but you can skip them if you want to deprive yourself. I recommend suffering through some of the **** ones, but the important ones are fairly obvious if caring about NPCs isn’t your thing.
  • A lot of these quests “feel legitimate”, and more organic. i.e. "Hey there Warrior of Light. I can handle this task, he can handle this task. Could you, maybe, kill 2 of that Ram over there? That’s all we need from you."
  • A lot of quests are simply “Go talk to that person over there. Then report back.” Any player can teleport for a relatively cheap fee to cut down on the travel time, but it definitely does feel a bit tedious at times.
  • Heavensward is the best MMO story ever executed (although not particularly original in content - execution of similar themes). Everyone who didn’t explain to me how prevailent oGCDs were will burn in hell for not letting me experience HW when it was new. If you liked Storm Peaks, you’ll probably love Heavensward.

On that extremely subjective final point, I hope you’ve found, most, of what I’ve typed here informative. Azeroth will always be a great memory, and should Activision course correct one day, I look forward to doing loremaster again.

tl;dr? FFXIV has slower combat, less engaging PVP, harder crafting, more materials to manage for crafting, more ways to die in raids, more job quests and abilities to unlock, and more weekly “checklists” to do, that aren’t just World Quests.

You decide for yourselves if that sounds like the MMO for you. Cheers.

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Play ffxiv for the lore and the music and sometimes the combat. Play wow for the combat and sometimes the lore I play both depending on my mode since I can pay my wow sub with gold

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Thanks. Excellent comparison. I recently tried setting up a free trial, but ended up running into an authenticator roadblock and gave up.

On crafting, how much bag / bank space do you have (without paying extra) and what is the stack size for craft materials?
Also, HeelsvsBabyface has:
Beginner’s guide:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZgOYbtdtXk
Gathering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPi34gEvqNs
These are 2 years old, so I don’t know how much it’s changed since then.

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Aye, SE’s login tech is a bit awkward. The trial only gets you to 35, too, which really isn’t a good representative of the game as a whole.

Stack sizes go to 999, with crystals (each craft costs a couple of various types) to 9999.
You begin with 140 inventory slots, get access to 350 bank slots in the form of two retainers (175 each), and can get a backpack expansion of 70 slots for free. I think the mobile app premium increases the backpack expansion to 140, but I’d rather get another 175. (Each additional retainer is 2$USD).

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play GW2. It’s PvP is far far better than WoW’s.

this is any FF game. Their music and OST is top tier.

To be fair this isnt really “bad”.
pack rats are minority of the playerbase and the base sub is $12.

dont skip :expressionless:

thats content.
It teaches you the lay of the land and gives you time to learn the classes.

also OP forgot to mention the countless HQ emotes and the details that go into them. (by default ppl start with iirc 2 different styles of sitting, can learn multiple styles of dancing, etc.)

Also no mention of job gauges nor LimitBreaks?

and IMHO healers in 14 are a lot more interesting.

you have your typical WHM. (straight forward healing)
you have Scholar who is a bit less healer but more on buffing party.
and the Astrologian is a more dmg/healing hybrid (think disc priest type)

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Thanks for your feedback as well. I don’t think I could have mentioned every single piece of information. You’re right that the detail in emotes and dances are engaging, and I didn’t go into detail about things like Manderville either. I wanted to ensure at least some attempt at brevity, which was already failed by internet norms.

I am personally of the opinion job gauges aren’t that special, and simply a splash of paint on builder/spender mechanics that aren’t unique in RPGs. I don’t even want to be the one to LB3, since it takes away my personal DPS. :stuck_out_tongue:

I would also disagree with your healer assessment, but impressions needn’t be uniform either. To me:
WHM is raw healing and DPS
SCH has the largest toolkit
AST is weak and does the least personal DPS, giving to the party instead.

I don’t cite AST’s drawback out of enmity; AST is one of my current geared jobs. I just dislike it’s simplicity when you can buff second-nature. It’s super useful, but I don’t particularly enjoy it.

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I really wouldn’t say AST has bad dps :slight_smile:

https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/25#class=Healers&dataset=90

They just don’t have as good aoe, that falls to WHM but SCH is barely behind.

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I’d have to check, but I believe all their attacks are less potency outright to their contemporaries. AST has a lot less to do, so they can spam Malefic more often than the other two. I’d bet there are plenty logs that show groups where the AST is the carry, and not as able to take advantage. I’ll agree spamming seems comparative at 400+, though.

High percentile healing logs usually says more about the group eliminating the need to heal as much to begin with, or in WoW’s history, taking less healers.

Optimally, certainly the margins become irrelevant, but that’s the case with most every job/class.

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Even at mediocre logs AST is just barely in second behind SCH, WHM gets hurt a ton at lower logs though, probably cause they have to do most of the healing. It’s SUPER hard to say anything great about AST in dungeons though, it’s definitely not their strong point, dungeons require very little healing overall and you’re better of just running WHM if you have it or SCH.

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Well, in dungeons, I like rewarding the better of the two DPS (assuming a substantial difference in output) with duration/potency. :slight_smile:

Goes without saying you can do it in raids to help your DPS buddy parse.

AST has good things, I just feel scummy playing it. YMMV.

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I think the best thing to point out here though is, you’ll never get someone saying “why are you playing that!” all three are good. There’s very little in FFXIV where a class you like underperforms to the point people complain about it in parties.

It may not get you into a top end static, but it really is a game where for 99.9% of the community its play what you like.

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I’d say a lot of groups that want to reach endgame, will look at making sure they have complimentary cooldowns/vuln ups. But the flexibility in job access on a single character makes the community more engaged in supporting a team dynamic.

And to reiterate, I didn’t want the original post to come off too glowing. Anyone I’ve talked to from WoW one on one, it might sound like I try to deter people away, because the beginning of FF is a legitimate hurdle.

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Worth getting past though, and also worth noting: Starting on a preferred server is ideal, the 100% xp boost allows you to bypass early portions of the game where grinding would be required (specially in the 40s)

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That’s a good thing to mention I should have included in the OP. Thanks Pyro.

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NP, I always like to try give people the best chance of enjoying something :slight_smile: though FFXIV is definitely not a game for everyone.

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Definitely. I also like to take the position in most things in life, of “I warned you. Don’t blame me.” So I’d rather deter someone. I’m not anyone’s free marketing. :rofl:

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i can agree on this.
why I always mained WHM. also the “healers should dps” debate is large in the game.

also WHM has Holy which is awesome (even if its a mana guzzler) <_<

that it is.

also threeother thigns nto mentioned:

Chocobos!
Marriage! (got free one, but man the $ ones are big and fancy)
& the level scaling system. (so u can help alow lvl w/o 1 shottign everything)

it isnt.
honestly if u arent good at socilizing and makign friends you will get bored reallll fast.

p.s. Lalafell or you are doing it wrong >;3

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From a Gnome?! Shocking! :stuck_out_tongue:

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If you’re making soup, sure, lala’s make the best soup ingredient :slight_smile:

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The funny thing is Popoto follows Lala naming conventions… :thinking: