Speaking as someone who played FFXIV before WoW

Community General Discussion
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I’ve seen so many people on here talk about how FFXIV is some kind of amazing game and 2nd coming that is totally killing WoW and so amazing. Keep in mind that I’ve played since launch and was one of the turbo-nerds that would max and gear every combat job for fun for a while. I used to do End-game every time new content came out, on at least one of each class type. Melee dps, Ranged DPS/mage, Tank, Healer.

Now I’m going to talk to you about why I’ve left FFXIV and come to WoW, and loved every second of it, yes, even during BFA where I’ve been told it’s the weakest in a long time.

Binding Coil 1: Class design

I see a lot of vocal people talking about how the rotations are better and more robust in FFXIV…and for the most part they’re completely right!..if you’re a DPS player. See, most of these posts you’re going to see are from DPS players, because in many ways DPS rotations in FFXIV are way better. I agree with them. With a few rare exceptions DPS rotations in FFXIV almost spoiled WoW for me with how much better the DPS rotations are…

…buuuut, if we’re talking about tanks and healers, that’s a different story. They’ve openly admitted they were having trouble balancing the healers, which is why we haven’t gotten a new one in so long, and in an attempt to balance them they homogenized the healers, and DESTROYED the gameplay of one in particular, and it’s in a joke state that makes it very undesired at end-game.

On to tanks. See, in WoW, most tanks have some form of active mitigation that they’re maintaining at all times as part of their rotation, and you’re fully engaged in tanking the whole time. Ignore pain, the stagger mechanic entirely, Blood constantly self-healing etc. FFXIV doesn’t have this, well, they kind of do but on a MUCH lesser scale. You’ll be spending most of your time rotating like a more boring DPS, then popping a cooldown once a big hit is about to come, rinse-repeat forever.

Binding Coil 2: Design Philosophy

The real issue with the way FFXIV is can be broken down to design philosophy. I can say with CONFIDENCE that no job in FFXIV will ever have a spell-reflect like warrior. I can GUARANTEE you that no healer will have a heal that damages the target after if they don’t take damage. I can easily argue with you that something like stagger or ignore pain would NEVER exist in ffxiv. They will NEVER introduce a melee healer that has a window where they heal by damaging, or a healer that gets a bunch of it’s healing from damaging enemies like Disc. Why is this?

Balance. Is. King. FFXIV has to remain sterile and clean at all times. Every fight has a very specific way it’s done in very specific windows, and deviating from that at all will kill you. They can’t have anything be too unique in that game, because they can’t have it break their precious and delicately designed fights in any way shape or form. Anything that does is often nerfed or changed fairly quickly.

Healing in particular is so scripted and easily predictable, that healers spend more of the fight spamming 1 DPS button than actually healing, and heals are so much bigger that you pop off 1-2 heals on the whole party and everythings K. Everyone’s healthbar Yoyos around in ffxiv because of how fight design is. You’re all EXPECTED to live at exactly 10% hp each. Your tank is EXPECTED to die to this unless he pops a cooldown. Your tank is EXPECTED to live this one at exactly 50% hp. There’s nothing wrong with boiling things down to numbers, it’s what our genre was built on, after-all, but there comes a point where it’s too much. FFXIV is at that point, and it makes healing and tanking feel the same in every fight.

Tank: Do DPS rotation> Pop cooldown for tank buster> Get healed > Tank swap.
Other tank does the same thing.

Healer: DPS until tank buster or aoe damage, heal once or twice, continue to DPS.

Do other mechanics that usually involve standing in a spot, not being pushed off a platform, or killing ads, often in a specific spot.

Binding coil 3: Story

Now, the base game has sort of a joke of a story. It’s kind of funny to me how many “refugees” talk about how great the story is at first, when it’s literally a massive fetch-quest that forces you to go back to an annoying spot to get to every few quests about 10 times or so.

It gets better with each expansion, and I won’t lie and say Stormblood or Shadowbringers were bad. The writing itself is fantastic!..and yet…

I find myself far more engaged in the story of the Zandalari and a few of the extremely stand-out characters in WoW’s storyline even in BFA Bwonsamdi is easily a cooler character than anyone I’ve seen in FFXIV and I hope we see more of him.

This section is less of a huge point for me, as I don’t usually play MMOs for the story anyways, I’d say this one could go either way.

Binding coil 4: The Open World

At any given day on FFXIV the only people you’ll usually find in the open-world after about a week into the expansion is the crafters-gatherers. You’d be shocked to hear FFXIV is even WORSE about this than WoW. The incentives you’re given to actually go out in the world and do things are TINY. This is to the point that it’s laughable. It’s a shame, too, because some of those zones are really breathtaking. There’s not even something like Open World PVP to encourage people to go out there because, well…

Binding Coil 5: Twin- I mean PVP.

FFXIV is built on a bad engine. It’s not Older than WoWs engine, and yet from the start it was incredibly more restrictive. They’ve tried to fix it, but PvP has always felt like an absolute mess, to the point where they had to YEP you guessed it, sterilize and homogenize. Many skills and abilities are just gone in pvp. Stats are all polished to specific exact numbers. 1-button rotations, you name it. The way the engine works, the tick is so laughably bad people are just sliding all over and sometimes it feels like you’re playing with weird bots, not people.

This is true in more than just PvP but that’s where it’s the most apparent and silly.

Binding Coil 6: The community

This’ll be a stort one because a lot of this is subjective, but in my time on Emerald Dream I’ve stricken up more conversations and made more friends than I EVER have in FFXIV. The way that game is designed, You could be literally in the middle of town trying to find people to talk to, and you’ll be avoided like the plague.

The only time anyone ever talks to you in FFXIV is in dungeons, in linkshells, or if you’re in their guild. It feels way more like a bunch of exclusive chatrooms than a community at times, and yet in WoW I can just walk right out into the middle of Org and say something dumb, and the whole place erupts in conversation. I’ve made a bunch of my friends this way.

Binding coil 7: Closing the door on the crystal

WoW just offers so much more to me in terms of freedom to actually play how you want. Like I said, there’s a load of skills and even whole specs that just would simply never exist or work in FFXIV. Don’t even get me started on stealth as a whole, no, ninja does not compare. Not remotely. You can’t expect anything that interesting or special from FFXIV, because it’s designed to be so specifically how the devs want it to be at all times. Sure the WoW devs are constantly doing stupid things, but at LEAST they’re willing to get their hands dirty and try it in the first place.

Look at the state of Blue-mage, they were so scared that job was going to kill their precious perfect balance they made it it’s own single-player mini-game after years of people asking for it, because it’d be “too strong” in normal content, and then they limited the skills it could use in that content ANYWAYS defeating the purpose. They also said it’s designed to be single-player content but forces you to do multiplayer content in order to…look, I don’t want to get into it, I’ll be on this forever.

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Been there. Came back.
Leveled a paladin, considered the premier tank. It is, and it’s boring. It has a single target rotation and an aoe rotation. You have to activate abilities in specific order or your abilities hit like wet noodles (and lose certain effects).
Not fun.

I’m not sure what the story is, because I was too busy clicking through text stories they should have voiced. All this text could be summarized into 2 sentences.

Criminally boring.

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Paladin actually ends up being an off-tank most of the time at end-game, because having good self-mitigation tools isn’t even that important because of how predictable the fights are, so Paladins tools to actually support the other tank or other party members makes it permanently an off-tank.

Though most fights now have tank swaps so who is the “off tank” rarely matters.

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Jesus christ dude, nobody’s gonna read that. I can tell you right now without reading a single paragraph of that monument of text that they scratch different itches and that some people like one more than the other, and nothing you can say will or should change that. There’s no reason to go writing a will and testament about it

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I know I would, but I often come to forums to read so…

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Like, i get where you’re coming from, but good lord man, that is a great wall of china level of text.

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I’ve seen this topic thrown around so much I just figured it needed a larger analysis in order to add anything to the discussion

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FF14 has its pros and cons just like WoW neither is better nor worse then the other

WoW is definitely more casual friendly though

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I get you, but ultimately what this discussion always will boil down to is that they’re two very different games in the way they choose to structure their content, and comparing the two in any meaningful capacity will always be excluding key points in the context of anyone’s argument.

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I ultimately agree with your assessment. WoW is a very enjoyable game in its own right. Somethings about it are advantageous (I particularly find the engine for FF rather annoying). I wrote what I dislike here; Ffxiv: ARR the new King of MMORPG - #12 by anon40921684

There are other parts of the game which do satisfy my wants and desires as a player.

  • The story from the get-go does feel more enjoyable and involved. Even as loremaster in WoW I don’t think I’ve matched the same experience (though I liked BC/WoD and Classic ones a ton).

  • Lack of sharding is actually amazing. You will run into people on your server and natural interaction in that sense I wish we could get back in retail (classic WoW is an option but… I like retail gameplay more).

  • A friendly community; people on both sides I’ve noticed are really kind, but kindness from strangers is a fair bit more commonplace there. People who do a well wishing at the start of a pug.

  • I’d contend your assessment of classes. As a dancer main I know my personal dps is not going to ever parse the same (and FF class logs prove the same) but I also know that due to the way the class works I will increase the damage of another class by an amount enough that I am more than sufficient. WoW misses that level of nuance in terms of its class design and the concept of a ‘support + dps’ class is a pretty novel concept here.

I enjoy both games but it is understandable the appeal of FFXIV and I’d love for Blizzard to improve on its game.

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The issue with ffxiv is that EVERYTHING is subtle. Shaman has just as much support capability as dancer, but it comes in the form of very direct and noticeable things. For the most part dancers “support” is just raw number damage buffs on a single target…

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Thing I like about WoW’s dps specs, as opposed to something like FFXIV is most dps spec rotations don’t go above 8 buttons. Where in FF you have so many. From someone who can’t afford a gaming mouse, having to keybind abilities becomes a chore when I have to start thinking creatively and start running out of keys near WASD.

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This right here is why FFXIV takes top place for me as an MMO. It’s not all about personal stats and performance, You’re there as a group. Ninjas used to do less damage themselves, but brought with them the incredibly important Trick attack for raidwide burst windows. Same with old machinist and Dragoon’s crit buff. These are things wow sorely lacks and though we’ve had a few bits and pieces return in class buffs and whatnot, it’s a miserable shell of what it once was.

The feeling of class identity in FFXIV is such a sorely missed component of WoW. When i see a class in FFXIV i’m like "Oh cool, we have a dragoon, we get the crit buff, or Nice, we have a White mage, i can pull more risky pulls due to them bringing holy to the table.

What’s the equivalent of that in wow? Bloodlust? a spell that’s shared across three classes, and even has an item to perform a slightly weaker version of it? Lame dude.

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I read the whole thing.

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I’ll be honest, I didn’t do a deep read and analysis of the OP. I’m going to guess from what I skimmed that you went over the nearly universally common complaints of people who play MMOs, but where the things that were complained about don’t actually make a difference to anyone outside of the edge cases.

But the differences between the two games are around the base assumptions made in the original design. In WoW the assumption is that everything, literally everything, funnels into combat and raids. There is nothing else. In FF XIV everything is based around the story. There is combat, there are raids, but the story drives the game.

There are little things that will highlight this difference. When gathering in WoW nodes are often placed next to mobs because everything must somehow be combat or raids. In FFXIV, gathering can be done with no combat at all. In WoW crafting is essentially grinding through all the mats you’ve collected, mostly throwing away the stuff you’ve crafted to get to whatever the thing is you wanted. In FFXIV, crafting is a full class, and progression is based around quests and interactions with other crafting classes.

Perhaps the biggest difference is how classes and alts are handled. In WoW you create and alt and repeat the exact same content you cleared on all your other characters. The same content, over and over and over. In FFXIV each character can be all combat classes, all gathering classes and all crafting classes; each class has to be leveled with it’s own XP. There’s a knock on effect of this choice. In WoW content must be repeated, and if the content is boring there has to be something to goad the player into repeating it, or shortening it. In FFXIV, because completed quests aren’t repeated, more content has to be created. A character that has completed the main storyline on one class would clear side quests on another class, or do dungeon runs, with class based story line quests every 5 levels.

The differences are fundamental. WoW is a streamlined experience that funnels the player into a single end point. I’ve been playing WoW for over a decade and this hasn’t changed. FFXIV can’t funnel players into a single end point. It’s possible to just have a max level crafter on all crafting classes with just the starter level 10 combat class. This would not be the easiest thing to do, but you could do it. And that character would have a great deal of quest content to get through to get there.

I suppose the best advice is to play FFXIV since it’s free through the 1st (technically 2nd) expansion. Playing for free does not give you the full experience, but it will give you an idea of the game’s mechanics. There’s simply a lot more involved in playing FFXIV than WoW. But while I think FFXIV is an objectively better game, you might not like it. And if you don’t like it, don’t play it. Play what you like. If you’re not going to do that, why the f are you wasting time with free will and consciousness? Go be an ant in a human meat suit if you’re just going to not decide for yourself. Bah.

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And as a tank and healer player primarily, that’s ironically where my problem lies. This is mostly only true for the dps classes. Tanks and healers get more samey each expansion.

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I read it and he makes some fair points, but is way overvaluing some things WoW does and/or undervaluing things FFXIV does.

For instance, his tank role criticisms especially in relation to Raid design. I have a warrior in FFXIV and for those who may not know, each class is 1 role with no exceptions. A warrior is a tank with no DPS “specs”. I’d have to count, but I am quite confident I have way more buttons to manage than a retail WoW warrior.

I, for one, do not like how FFXIV expects one to be a piano player and have something like 30+ keybinds. FFXIV largely uses a true rotation system as abilities have chain and combo effects. For instance I can’t just push part 3 in a chain without first pressing part 1 and part 2 or I lose out on bonus effects and damage when I would’ve been better off pushing something else. This means though that you not only have to be precise, but also thinking ahead to make sure you have time to do the full chain or even what chain you want to do.

Melee DPS even go 1 step further and have different damage values for flanking (side) attacks vs back attacks and there is synergy between 1 melee DPS who picks a partner melee and uses a buff they both get if they stay within 10 yards of each other while it is active.

WoW combat has a higher server tick/GCD, but FFXIV is far more complex when you get your full tooklit which includes off global cooldown abilities as well as maintaining a separate resource bar that often either gives you access to even more powers or improved combo chains or what not.

Also even “normal” dungeon bosses will flat out kill you for mistakes. Most spells are telegraphed but boss patterns, especially in later expansions, will do a rapid fire series of moves that one who has no idea is going to scramble and almost surely screw up that just doesn’t exist until you get to raiding in WoW.

Moving on to story. I happen to like FFXIV’s story. Sure it is cheesy how much the NPC’s end up fawning over you, but the OP is woefully wrong calling it simply fetch quests…or at least is being disingenious in implying that WoW is different.

FFXIV has a huge storyline that can’t be ignored. Sure it boils down often to “go here and assist so and so” and that person’s tasks are “go murder 12 of these, collect 8 of these, and kill this named mob”…that isn’t different than WoW EXCEPT the difference is you actually are part of a small-ish group and often they have their own “quests” and stuff they’ve been doing in the meantime and comparing results and notes and stuff leads to big story progression points.

Also it has way more cutscenes and voice over work than WoW does. Only GW2 has “more” when it comes to their quests but is countered by GW2 having next to no true “quests” to begin with.

His healing beefs can be legit. I’ve not played a healer over there but what knowledge I do have though is most WoW healers would hate it because their healers are all built from the ground up to at least be active during fights and weave damage in instead of just being a boring healbot.

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Ignoringbag space, of course.

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Well, yes, shadowbringers in particular gutted a lot of the identity tanks and healers had, and im not defending that. But it didn’t used to be that way. Each tank had a specialty and healers even still have their own identity. Warriors were great main tanks with their self healing and massive HP pools, paladins offered great support as an offtank. Dark knights existed.

White mages were pure throughput healing/dps machines, scholars were more about preventing damage and buffing/debuffing, and Astrologians were the kings of party buffs. Honestly AST was some of the most fun healing i’ve ever played.

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I just re-upped my FF XIV (hoping to reach max level finally), and boy, I didn’t realize how much I missed my Au Ra Dragoon. Yes, I play FF’s ugliest and least popular race lol

Oh, and my fat chocobo. The music alone when I mount makes me happy. The music there is astounding. Mounts have themes. Bosses have themes. They put a lot of work in over there.

At the end of the day though, I’ve sunk way too much time and energy in WoW to ever truly abandon it. ESO and FF have given me second thoughts though, on more than one occasion.

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