I play both games regularly and have for over two years. So long before it was popular in the WoW community. Here are my thoughts on the core differences:
A lot of people have said that the combat feels a lot slower. This is sort of true and sort of not. FF14 has a significantly slower GCD than WoW does. However, they also use a lot more oGCD abilities than WoW does. While WoW reserves oGCDs mainly for utility spells, every class in FF14 has several oGCDs as part of their core rotation. Last I checked, the highest APM classes in WoW were still busier than the highest APM classes in FF14, but at max level the difference isn’t really that noticeable.
However, that’s at max level. Before you get there the game doles out your skills very slowly piece by piece, with most of the oGCDs coming at the end. This means that for the bulk of your leveling career, you’re stuck on that same 2.5s GCD cadence.
Once you get to max level, I find FF14 classes to be less interesting than WoW classes. Most of them follow a set script and rarely deviate from it. The weaponskill combo system sort of enforces this. Your GCDs will be spent the same way every time and your oGCDs will largely be used on cooldown, trying to line up with the raid’s buff windows. WoW classes tend to have a little more room for finesse as there are some classes who use more of a priority system than a set rotation.
I mentioned the raid buff windows and that’s probably another major difference. FF14 emphasizes players buffing their friends a lot more than WoW does. Nearly every class has some way to buff the damage of the entire party to the point where the only two classes that don’t (Black Mage and Samurai) are notable because of it. Most of these group buffs are on either a minute or two minute timer. Which means that everyone is aiming to dump everything within a 20s window every minute. There’s nothing as individually powerful as say, Bloodlust, but there are A LOT more group buffs.
On encounter design, I find WoW to be more interesting. FF14 bosses are basically always in a featureless Soul Caliber-style arena (complete with a ring-out.) The mechanics themselves rarely explore anything other than an AoE that you’re supposed to dodge. So most of learning a raid consists of learning the dance you need to perform in order to not die while still outputting maximum damage. WoW bosses tend to have mechanics that are a little more involved and more frequently require the players to interact with special objects or with the arena itself. I won’t say that WoW bosses are harder, since I honestly believe that the Ultimate fights in FF14 are more difficult than anything in WoW, but I do think that WoW fights in general are more technically complex. Which is actually somewhat impressive since WoW has more raid bosses overall. FF14 typically gives around 5-6 bosses per “raid tier” while if WoW gives us a raid with only 9 bosses it’s considered a small raid. And those Ultimate fights I mentioned? There’s only three in the game and they are added extremely infrequently. Less frequently than once an expansion. The majority of fights in FF14 top out at Savage or Extreme difficulty, which I would say lands somewhere between Heroic and Mythic but closer to Heroic. World first for FF14 doesn’t take nearly as long as it does for WoW. But while I don’t find the fights in FF14 as mechanically interesting as fights in WoW, I do find them a lot more fun to look at. They go really hard on spectacle in boss fights, with each boss boasting their own unique score and phase transitions typically involve really over-the-top animations that are just a joy to watch. For me the first place this really hit home was Shiva. Her first phase involves a very typical strings and choir melody that you would expect for an ice boss. But once you hit her transition, she freezes the entire arena and the music syncs up with her movements as she glides down. The music fades out to silence, she clicks her heel to shatter the frozen arena, and at that point a hard rock score kicks in. It feels really intense the first time you see it.
I think it also bears mentioning that dungeons are mostly a joke. There’s no difficulty slider for dungeons and they’re typically used a vehicle to deliver the story. So they’re designed to be completable by the lowest common denominator. FF14 has nothing to compare to M+.
So let’s talk about the story. FF14 obviously focuses on this much more than WoW does. You will spend most of your time in FF14 watching cutscenes and for a great many of those cutscenes, they’re not voiced. (Voiced cutscenes become more common in later expansions.) So I hope you like the story because you’re going to see a lot of it whether you like it or not. The vast majority of features in the game are gated behind story progress. You can also really tell that both the writing team and the art team became more and more proficient with their tools. The early ARR stuff is really really jank. But you have to play through it to get to everything else. I think this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, content never really sunsets in FF14 the same way it does in WoW. Since everyone needs to play the entire story, FF14 makes it easy for max level players to sync down and run old content so that new players have a party to run with. So I run raids and dungeons from old expansions basically daily. Conversely in WoW, once a new raid comes out, any raid before it basically dies.
Nearly everything you do in Final Fantasy has some sort of story attached to it. Even if you’re just unlocking a new basic gameplay feature like the barbershop… that comes with a small cutscene and brief story elements. The story in Final Fantasy also makes a much larger effort than WoW does of making your character a main player in the story. True just like in WoW you have no agency, but you’re involved in all the major decision-making meetings that the movers and shakers of the world attend. Major characters frequently talk to you as a peer and acknowledge the fact that you regularly engage in punch-outs with gods. I think it helps that Final Fantasy 14 is so cutscene-heavy in this regard since I think WoW would struggle to do something similar. Cutscenes in WoW are rare, never involve your character in any greater capacity than that of a side observer, and rarely go longer than 4 minutes. In FF14, you’ll occasionally get a warning similar to, “after speaking to this NPC, several cutscenes will play in sequence. We recommend setting aside time to view them all.” They are NOT joking around with that warning. Any time you see that warning, you’re looking at 15 minutes minimum and the longest cutscene in the game (the first time you get that warning) is nearly 50 minutes. Longer doesn’t necessarily mean better, but it is a lot harder to deliver compelling character developments or to get players invested in the happenings of the world the way WoW does it. The story in WoW tends to happen around or adjacent to the player character. In FF14, the player character is one of the main characters and the story cannot happen without them.
For content outside of the endgame mainstays, FF14 has a very clear advantage here. For WoW, this would be stuff like the Mage Tower or Torghast or world dailies. FF14 has plenty of gross grindy stuff just like WoW does (Beast Tribes and Relic Weapons being the best examples) but typically these systems are much more independent than they would be in WoW. If you want to raid but don’t want to run Bozja (the endgame open world combat zone in Shadowbringers) then that’s totally doable. Nothing you get in Bozja is required to raid. Whereas if you never run Torghast in WoW, you can’t do anything else because now you’ve locked yourself out of legendaries. While it’s true that Bozja gives gear, it’s nothing that isn’t comparable to what you’d get if you raid regularly. The main reasons to run Bozja are to see the story or to get bonuses that make you better in Bozja. Similarly to old raid content, FF14 side content never sunsets. You can run Eureka or the Deep Dungeons right now and if they’re your jam, you can make them the bulk of what you do. One thing I think WoW could learn from FF14 is to stop being so reward-focused and just let good content be good content. The more you force people to run Torghast the more resentful they’ll become of it. Most people do side content in WoW for the rewards, not because they enjoy it and want to do more of it.
All in all, FF14 is definitely more of an mmoRPG while WoW is more of an MMOrpg. I’ve frequently called FF14 a JRPG disguised as an MMO. It’s main strengths are those of a single-player RPG. I think it does a much better job than WoW does of providing that spectacle and in-the-moment engagement of progressing to endgame. While on the other end, I think that WoW has a more technically complex combat system with more room to grow and demonstrate mastery within that system. I play the two games in very different ways (it’s why I’m subbed to both.) If I could smoosh them together into a super MMO I would. Each game has very clear areas that they focus on compared to the other and those focus areas turn out noticeably better than the do in the opposite game. There’s a lot of little things too that aren’t really worth going into depth on. WoW generally has the edge in QoL stuff with transmog being a prime example. The system is a lot friendlier in WoW. FF14 has a lot more “fluff stuff” to engage with like player housing (aka expensive decorating) and an entire casino-like hub for playing minigames. Did you know that FF14 is one of the most popular online mahjong clients in the world? Like how wild is that? People pay a sub JUST to play mahjong!
Ultimately, I’m not really willing to call one game strictly better than the other. (Though I do think that on a technical level, WoW is built better than Final Fantasy.) They appeal to very different tastes and I’m not surprised that many people who migrated there from WoW stayed there as it was more in line with the game they wanted to play. There will also be many like the OP for whom WoW’s strengths are more in line with the experience they want and will stay here. Or maybe even people like me who enjoy both games and just play both.