Yeah they have put more nice stuff into casting animations in recent patches but more would be very welcome. The problem is I think there you’re running into game engine limitations and very old code.
I think it’s a philosophy… WoW has continually strived to reduce visual clutter. Which has the negative side effect of ‘your abilities feel kinda pathetic’. And I don’t think that trade is worth it, personally.
Well it is part of an effort to make the game run smoothly on lower end computers yet still look good. Blizzard has done really well with that, but its making the game feel older and more clunky as time goes on.
Nothing feels better then LB3
For some ppl who don’t know what Limit breaks are
I played White Mage… and the ‘Assize’ spell was my favourite. The animation of it was just so pretty.
But ya, LB3s are pretty crazy.
I’d disagree on ‘meaningful classes’ being a healer sucks in FFXIV no matter which one you choose…they are all 2-3 button classes that are a snoozefest. Tank balance and melee dps balance is as bad as any class balancing in WoW.
Also, EVERYTHING is locked behind MSQ so until you grind that with some unskippable cut scenes taking 20+ minutes (or more). Cya in several months if you want access to everything.
They do crafting better I will admit.
What are you talking about? When I was healing as a WhM I had a lot more than 3 buttons I used regularly. So many different cooldown abilities to manage, the lily effects, etc.
Tons of stuff to pay attention to.
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That wasn’t my experience at max level. Sure, there was a basic rotation, but you had a lot more cooldowns that needed to be used at the appropriate time. I was playing as a scholar, and it felt like there was plenty of opportunity to make food use of proactive abilities.
If your goal is to maximize damage as a healer, you’re probably going to have a bad time though. Your time is pretty filled with doing healing.
At end game content everyone is overgeared and you actually do very little healing so then everyone expects you to DPS with your one dot spell and 1 direct damge plus maybe another spender such as the lily for whm.
When you outgear content you shouldn’t expect to need to push more than a few abilities…
if I go and do ICC in WoW, I literally don’t use any ability other than Holy Nova or Halo.
That’s not a PROBLEM with the game, it’s just… gear.
the ONLY unskippable cutscenes are for the lvl 50 8 man dungeon. they are unskippable because new players would be locked out of every boss fight and everyone would be gone before they were done watching the story. you can skip literally everything else.
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Also, they sell a ‘skip the story’ service if you REALLY want to get to end-game fast.
Mostly what you say is true OP and i agree. But ima have to disagree with you in the play all classes part, you’re being quite deceptive there making it seem like it’s all good and no catch-
You’re forgetting something,- FF14 is extremely alt unfriendly. As per design. The game’s designed to have one character where you do it all and put all the effort.
The alt effort you put in WoW is NOTHING compared to what you’ll have to go through in FF14, not only that, but it doesnt matter because you’ll experience the same game so its meaningless. You are 100% better off race-changing in ff14.
Only positive thing WoW has, is that i get to be lots of races on various toons, it has a higher sense of identity on more toons. FF14 all the meaning and identity, love goes into one toon. As annoying as it can be to deal with endgame content, its not that bad when you consider ff14 one-character-at-a-time design.
I would say FFXIV is focused on players who tend to feel a connection to their characters than WoW is. They want to make your character feel special, feel like they have a story, and feel like they really have a place both in the world and in your heart as a player.
WoW makes it very hard to REALLY connect to a character. Your character has very little involvement in the story, there’s not a lot of continuity to your character’s story(every expansion it kinda feels like you’re starting from scratch and your former accomplishments are mostly gone), and if you ever want to try something new… you have to ditch the character entirely. Additionally, since everything you do is account wide, it doesn’t feel like anything you do really develops your CHARACTER. But, as a counterpoint, as you said, it makes it very easy if you don’t really want to care about your character to just… create tons of characters and play them and get to share all the goodies.(although I’d argue that the SL intro quest is really making playing multiple characters agonizingly painful lol)
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What do you consider endgame content? We talking Eden Savage raids 9-12, Extreme Emerald Weapon, or Ultimates?
And this should be changing in some unknown point in the future, with those two dungeons changing into soloable story dungeons or some noise.
But yes, I cannot stress enough how much I just want badges back lol.
I rant and rave about how much better XIV is with their characters and their plot, but that is just story and plot. What really hurts me is the daily dungeon rewards that WoW had, that XIV took, and then WoW just dropped haha.
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Not wrong. For me, the character connection in wow comes from me internally connecting with them and goofing around not the actual game. I really like pandas…
Story wise forget about it lol. HATE being praised as the ultimate savior. To me being the protagonists in anything, is always better when you’re just a nobody. And that’s why it worked more in old wow.
Hearing ‘champions of azeroth’ to me is like hearing nails on a blackboard.
I prefer being the filthy nwah left on a boat to rot, not the ultimate savior of the universe. Cringe inducing.
For all of 30-45 minutes, then your the proper level to get your magical story-based unique skill stone that lets you access amazing powers and rapidly advance your status in said guild.
Repeated x13 or however many classes there are now, and suddenly within two weeks your a master of every single class.
Oh no, you had to spend 30-45 minutes with baby spells, what a tragedy. 
They’ve added massive power leveling paths in the game already, so your almost never actually weak for very long, and without much effort at all, congradulations your now the best dragoon and best black mage in the area, then you pick up warrior two days from now, repeat, repeat repeat.
Suddenly just by swapping weapons you instantly go from being a powerful dragoon to a powerful samurai.
It’s so detached and immersion breaking it’s ridiculous. The only reason the player character isn’t a full on mary sue is they are randomly too stupid to actually do anything in certain scripted parts of the game.
You can defend it all you want, but there’s a reason most games don’t let you play every single class on the same character.
Leveling in FFXIV takes a LOT longer than 30-45 minutes to go from 1 to 70… This isn’t WoW where you gain 10 levels per minute.
Ya, because it forces you to spend longer with the game, inflating play times, which is a statistic they can present to shareholders to make the game look good.
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you get your class skill stone at 30, not 70.
I said it takes you 30-45 minutes to hit level 30 with your base class to unlock the “SPecial” classes.
And unlocking that base class to 30, just means you have to get other classes to 15 and chain reaction style start unlocking class after class. Because most of them only require 30 in one base class 15 in another, and once you get all the base classes to 30, you basically unlock everything with almost no effort.
I didn’t say you maxed level in 30-45 minutes, don’t be disingenuous.
And no, it doesn’t inflate play times, it’s because one character being able to do -everything- is not realistic, and immersion breaking.
There’s zero reason why my shaman should be able to be a farseer, and then through a few weeks of training become high warlord as well. 
Just being able to swap classes on the fly is the most ridiculous thing for an MMO.