Another one to the pile: I’m one more WoW player who made the switch to FFXIV. It happened prior to Shadowlands, and I’m of the position that SL offered me no incentive to stay. I wasn’t even really that set on sticking with FF when I downloaded the free account trial back in Stormblood (when you could only go to level 35), but after a few months I was thoroughly sold. And that’s as someone who had been skeptical about the game for the longest time whenever other WoW players would bring it up, mostly because I had no experience with the FF series at the time (as someone who was simply never that into JRPGs) and I had fallen into my phase of thinking that WoW had to still be the best MMO on the market. But all of the rumors turned out to be true for me: FFXIV really is a fantastic MMO and Final Fantasy game both, with a fascinating history and a promising future, and is absolutely worth every dime in contrast to how I feel about WoW and Blizzard products these days. I quickly found myself invested in the game, and Shadowbringers was something I did not want to miss out on.
The main hangup a lot of WoW veterans are bound to have initially is the apparent slowness of the combat thanks to the longer GCD, but I really don’t find it to be so slow that it’s impossible to get used to. And all classes make use of plenty of off-global abilities you weave into your rotation. FFXIV is designed to be casual-friendly, ergo it doesn’t have a combat system as robust as say, what Black Desert Online tries to be, but it’s more than serviceable and there’s plenty of endgame content for high-end PvE just as there is in WoW.
If anyone happens to be reading this thread and is on the fence: This is the game that made me a Final Fantasy fan. The main story is excellent, emotional and gripping, the soundtracks are top-notch, the graphics are modernized (and are much improved if you look up and make use of Shader addons, which are permitted by Square themselves) and the character models are visually pleasing and well-animated, the world is engaging and relevant, and being available on consoles if you have a PS4 or PS5 is something that I’d also consider to be a perk. FFXIV also has various standard features that WoW has lacked for years, such as player housing and a camera tool/photo mode. I would absolutely recommend it to anyone willing to give it enough time and an honest shot.
As I can’t directly link things thanks to the Trust system, here’s my Elezen Bard in a Sentinel glamour I’m fond of: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/586731958818701342/835541633897594890/ffxiv_04062021_122643_843.png
Was it the Nanamo arc? It was the Nanamo arc. I’m not going to spoil anything, but that was the first time the game took me for an emotional ride all the way into the first expansion.
FFXIV is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s not like WoW’s endgame where you need to be raid-ready in a week or two after expansion release, need to push that DPS to the moon and clear content after content. It’s something you take at your own pace. I had 22 days of play time before ever reaching Shadowbringers because I explored different jobs for their story, crafting professions, was doing some RP and was hanging out with my FC. That’s around 500 hours of game time before even reaching the current expansion. Not because it was made that long, but because I choose it to be that long.
Don’t fall into the trap of rushing endgame, rushing gearing and trying to approach it from a raider’s point of view. There’s raids, but you will miss so much doing it.
Which brings me to an important point: there are tons of mini-games in FFXIV. Triple Triad, Mahjong, Chocobo Racing, the Gold Saucer and so on. Yoshi-P, I will personally fly to Japan and buy you a car if you add Blitzball as a mini game in the future. That was my addiction in FFX and I’d subscribe to FFXIV long term just to make a Blitzball team with my FC and play in a ranking ladder. Add a Blitzball stadium to the gold saucer and play the FFX intro when you go into it. Search your feelings, Yoshi, you know you want to.
That does seem to be the spot the story starts to really get good.
Something else I like about FFXIV is their patch trailers. They’ve changed over time sadly, but they do a great job of really hyping players up. That and the music is always spot on.
This had my partner and I on the edge of our seats. It was probably the first time we really felt something, which was kind of sad considering all of ARR but I just couldn’t get into that one.
Something else I kind of realized out of the blue, I’m not a raider in WoW like, at all. I’ll go back and do them later for Mog pieces after an expansion or two but I have no interest in doing them recent. FF 14 though? I find myself much more willing to pug things as they come. Maybe it’s tje stories that go with them, or the mechanics that tend to keep me more engaged, especially as a Monk and their constant need to find that sweet spot of the boss butt to pummel, or even more the community that always seems super willing to be patient and help if you say it’s your first time doing run. But I find myself much more willing to get into raids than I am in WoW.
I’m right about halfway done my fates but I did something over a hundred of each memory months ago and now that I’ve been catching up on that grind I’ve run my store dry and need another couple hundred to get the last half out of the way
Here’s a question for all the Final Fantasy franchise veterans out there. How many times has your nostalgia punched you right in the feels or even got you outright killed? I’ve been playing 14 since the launch of ARR but I’ve taken a lot of breaks so I really just finished Stormblood last week for the first time and I just had one the other day when I ran the Burn for the first time. Got to the final boss, for some reason didn’t think to look at it’s name before the fight started and the first attempt went pretty much;
Game: The dragon dissipates into Mist.
Me: Oh! It’s a Mist Dragon like in Final Fantasy Fou–oooh…I probably should have been trying to dodge that. Ouch.
for like half of my weapons i pretty much relied on bozja cluster farms because they set it up in a way that you have three full parties spread out all across the zone so you have two people from each party in four different areas spread through all three sections
which means someone’s getting the cluster rewards from all 4 areas thanks to their party being spread all across, while having three full parties doing it means that there’s no noticeable loss of manpower
and having all 3 zones covered means that you also get a good chunk of memories of all kinds if the quest’s available
check your datacenter’s bozja/delubrum reginae/eureka/baldesion arsenal discord to see if they set up this kinda thing, i know crystal DC does
only thing is that it’s usually scheduled for an hour of play but if you’re in VC then they usually just shoot the breeze about random stuff like a good number of the top-end players in FFXIV crossplay with WoW so you got a bunch of stuff like that going on
Good tips here, don’t rush it. I just recently made it up to shadowbringers despite the fact that I started really heavily playing when it launch nearly 2 years ago. If you need to, take breaks, don’t burn yourself out, try the side stuff, etc.
Should preface that with a slight spoiler warning to anyone that watches the video as uh… the two minute mark starts the waterworks and new players won’t understand why.
It turns out that if you treat your community with respect and add features that are specifically made to boost social interaction, it reflects positively on the community as a whole.
Look at any average discussion on GD or on the WoW reddit in regards to systems or whether Blizzard is the good guy. It’s the 2008 CoD community on steroids. But FFXIV seems more chill. I’ve had big disagreements with people in the past, but I can honestly count the number of times I was met with outright toxicity on one hand in the past year.
I remember reading an interesting article that, summarized, boiled it down to the fact FFXIV is just much better in having little systems that reward social behavior. There’s also their focus on promoting a good atmosphere. There’s an entire two-minute animated short, which is beautifully made btw, with a message that boils down to: “you can take your time! Nobody should make you rush or stress!”
And then there’s the obvious level of developer interaction. The developers thank players at every turn. They form bands and play for the fans, they show a passion for the franchise, and Yoshi-P even streams stuff like Monster Hunter and hangs out with the community. The dude literally did a three-hour live stream the other day where he was baking cookies. The dude seems ridiculously approachable.
WoW’s lead developer is literally in a guild called “Elitist Jerks” and the game’s entire premise is “us vs. them,” with all major content additions being about some form of ranking competition. Yeah, no idea why FFXIV’s pugging system seems so much more approachable…
Demitri moonlights as a swordslinger.
This might be my favorite armor I’ve found so far while leveling. Really need to take these again in proper daylight
Yeah, the fights are just as difficult as WoW if you’re doing Savage raiding, but it’s a bit of an odd comparison. The way the devs go about the fights is very, very different. You go in, everyone is assigned a spot, and it’s essentially rote memorization of mechanics until you get it down. It’s why a lot of people refer to FFXIV raiding as a “dance.” And, well, it really is. Here’s a cool Twitter account that actually takes raid data and turns it into a realtime view. The devs are very, very clearly designing fights with certain patterns in mind, and it’s real pretty.
It takes a bit of getting used to, but I really like it. Seeing your team hitting a perfectly choreographed sequence is awesome and feels fantastic after a few hours of work.
I think a lot of the community is also because in WoW, the raid leader controls the field. Everyone is up to the mercy of them for invites and whatnot. In FFXIV, it is the player who chooses if they want to join or not. The RL can put in a ton of different metrics to filter what they do or don’t want on their team, but once the PF goes up, anyone who can see the listing is allowed in and Square expects you will give those players an honest effort before removing anyone.
As for the pace of play, I think FFXIV is up there with WoW. The actual APM might be slower, but it’s so much more interesting. I have two full hotbars as a RDM and I am using every single one of those buttons in a typical fight. I am never not pressing something. In WoW, my rogue felt like I might have a higher APM but mostly through pressing the same couple of buttons repeatedly.
My brother told me the reason it feels slower sometimes is because you have more buttons and the APM is therefore paced accordingly. When he put it that way it started it make more sense.
