Honestly, though, I skipped most of BFA and only came back at the tail-end to level up some characters for Shadowlands and I didn’t think it was a big deal. As a new Horde recruit you take part in a suicide mission to rescue an ally of the Horde from Stormwind… works for me. Then you go help this new character you befriend out in Zuldazar before leaving.
The only part of BFA → Shadowlands transition that is very rough is the Sylvanas thing. When Shadowlands starts you have to read up on why the Warchief suddenly betrayed the Horde. That was not handled well. You’re suddenly allies with Jaina fighting against Sylvanas? Huh? She just tried to murder you X number of hours ago when you were fresh off the boat from Exile’s Reach and its all water under the bridge?
Sylvanas lore is awful. Just awful. The Warchief shuffle is the worst part of the new player experience for Horde players. Blizzard just needs to let Loa of Kings Vol’jin be the head of the War Council for the rest of WoW and not screw with that anymore.
The first time I “like” a FF14 good / WoW bad post. Yours is actually a good post, not the usual trolling. I’ll comment on all your points.
Disclaimer: I played up to Stormblood, so maybe things in FF14 could be better now (or worse).
I agree that crafted gear in WoW is not powerful enough. Disagree on FF14 handling things better, as they downscale level AND gear in Main Quest Scenarios, so having good gear is practically useless for beginners. In WoW you can breeze through practically all mandatory content in green quest gear, while in FF14 I have got stuck for a while a few times in MQS. And getting stuck in main quests is not so beginner/casual friendly. In short: in FF14 crafted gear is better, but often useless.
Again, agree that badges are much better than RNG, in theory. In fact, implementation of badges is a nightmare, because it means repeating the same couple of relevant dungeons ad nauseam. I tend to like dungeons the first 2/3 times, not the first hundred times. And weapons, far the most important items, are out of the badge system anyway.
True, but FF14 goes to the opposite extreme with all those endless hours of cutscenes, the too frequent wait screens, the overlong GCD, the quests which ping-pong you between zones. WoW is too fast, but FF14 is too slow in everything, except when it requires lightning reflexes to avoid the damn crisscrossing lines on the ground…
True, no “but” this time.
Mmm… my experience has been different. I have been vote kicked a few times in FF14, and for very trivial reasons I add. I may have been kicked once or twice in 15 years of WoW, but don’t remember. In general, FF14 community has never seemed to me particularly kind and welcoming (RIFT community was much better), and the attitude of many FF14 fans here has done nothing to debunk that.
There is a mentor program they added back at the end of BfA. But they did a not very good job of implimenting it.
They throw a bunch of random people in a random channel and which channel you are in changes every time you log in. It’s not done by server and sometimes there’s even a language barrier going on.
This makes it particularly hard to find a new player and take them under your wing and nurture them because you’ll probably never see them again.
I’m not sure what you mean, though we often see this claim.
You are responding to a level 44. BoE greens in the AH right now available to that level and lower are typically 3k gold each and up. Neither a level 20 nor a level 44 has anywhere near how much gold it would take to fill every slot.
Most levelers have horrible gear, particularly those who are leveling through questing only. They level so fast that they have a fraction of the gear they used to get when leveling took longer. Blizz has made some attempt to alleviate this for dungeon spammers, which new players probably are not.
Buying gear pre-60 is a massive waste of money and time. It’s not needed. Once you hit 60 I see zero issues with buying a full set of 200 ilvl gear (with the 1 230).
Again, a claim I see often, that “levelers don’t need any gear”. You got your wish. Levelers without heirlooms essentially have no gear. They have ilvls 10 below their level and struggle to kill stuff in the world. I often stop and help people struggling. Do you?
If Blizzard agreed with you, they wouldn’t have added a second chest for completion of dungeons at 30+, because even levelers in dungeons were falling behind. The world is more problematic. I see the new leveling zone gear as an attempt to improve gearing for levelers, not a sop to rp gear addicts as was presented to us. Now levelers still start with a 0 ilvl, but with 5 pieces of ilvl 1 gear instead of 2. I think that’s an improvement.
I have had a way easier time in WoW over FF14. Mostly because I can do everything myself except the latest dungeons/raids.
I never buy BOE gear, I always start brand new alt with nothing and just start questing and working on professions as I go sometimes I save professions after I hit lvl cap.
In FF14 everything feels great until I’m forced to do dungeons where I now have to completely stop my progression till a group is formed because most people are doing content in the latest expansion leaving old content empty.
I don’t have to try looking for people to do old content if I don’t want to, I can just keep questing and do dungeons later if I want.
I play a game because I want to play the game I don’t want to be forced to stop when I don’t need to. FF14 is the only mmo I’ve played that did this aside from instance based games like Vindictus or Warframe.
It’s still a good game, spent bit over 100 hours on it. I love the questing, music, environments, enemies, armour, pretty much everything but I’ll never go back. WoW has everything I love and it doesn’t try to stop my progression.
You do realize heirlooms are actually worse than dungeon blues of the same level now right? You do remember all the screaming and crying at the start of SL? I remember, as I wasn’t a fan, and I’m still not a fan of the re-worked heirlooms.
Ff14 is very good at making you think you are doing something relevant. I played it for a while, then thought about it for a bit and realized 90% of what I had done thus far had been Essentially worthless and barely gotten me any closer to the actual endgame content. That’s my main problem with ff you just don’t doo much of anything for far too long because of the mandatory queues and story.
WoW caters more to competitive players and rewards power for skill. Whereas FF XIV is more about cosmetics for skill, where the gear is just a content everyone gets through, or so I heard.
This makes it so FF XIV players genuinely do what they like, instead of falling victim to doing hard content for power. Whereas in WoW the general attidute is that nothing really matters until the late end game and everyone kind of stresses themselves to squeeze into there. And it’s even worse for new or returning players.
Truth is, there’s a lot of accessible content in WoW, but unfortunately the game is designed so that it’s treated as an after thought. Because all everyone cares about is the late end game.
When I played FF14, I queued for the first 3 or 4 dungeons in MSQ. Guess what, one of them had a cutscene before the boss. I was the tank. After the cutscene ended, the boss was almost dead, the group didn’t need me and just went ahead and killed the boss without me. I believe the name of the dungeon was Toto-rak.
I was like, OK, I guess it’s not always like this.
The last dungeon I did was in a haunted mansion dungeon. I go to a point in the dungeon where you have to teleport back to the beginning and kill the last boss. I had no idea I had to do that. People in the dungeon just ported and I was like “wtf, what do I need to do?”. I was trying to go where they were for a while and after a few minutes someone said: “Teleport back to the entrance”. I was like OK, I ported it back, I entered the boss room and once again the boss was almost dead already.
So no, whatever you are saying is NOT the experience you claim that everyone has in FF14. I was pissed and never logged back in. I think it’s funny when people say that FF14 has mentors and better community when in practice my experience was the opposite.
I’ve had to come to terms with this recently. Vanilla was a fairly immersive experience as far as social and world living went. Retail completely scrapped those two aspects.
I did truly enjoy Vanilla when I played back in the day. Here recently though when I tried Classic I was miserable. I’m not the same kid I used to be.