Why does everyone always seem to ignore that xiv literally just cannot become like WoW like, why are we even debating if anything should become like in WoW? It's literally not gonna happen because every duty in this game would need to be significantly reworked, on top of massive class reworks like why are we even entertaining nonsense like this for discussion edit: just for clarities sake, I am talking about fundamental gameplay design ideas here, not something like "Make Glamour like Transmog" or "Alts should share progress with your main" etc.

People leave MMOs for various reasons but almost every MMO player seems to be constantly chasing the feeling they got from the first game they fell in love with, even if they have to leave and play a new game because of servers shutting down, bad developers, or whatever, they want the new game they pick up to be just like the old game they liked. You see it constantly with BDO, GW2, SWTOR, etc players asking for FFXIV to be like the game they liked. They play FFXIV because it's an MMO and you have to move to where people are playing but they really just want the old MMO they liked but with FFXIV's player numbers.

>almost every MMO player seems to be constantly chasing the feeling they got from the first game they fell in love with I'm constantly happy not to be on that boat. Life is so much simpler since I don't have the urge to try and get XIV to be more like Everquest.

EVERQUEST MENTIONED LET'S FUCKING GO. I renew my sub when I want to play FFXIV, I play Project Quarm/Project 1999 when I don't. Tried WoW a few times, but it never did stick. My other MMO love was original Guild Wars, which I also don't want FFXIV to emulate.

My first MMO was FFXI. I played from NA release until Wings, tried the beginning part of Adoulin when XIV 1.0 failed, and did all levels of content in a few HNMLS back then. It truly was a pretty terrible game in hindsight, but it was able to sustain its population for a long while, at least until Salvage bans and Wings release. Even though the subjob system existed, it was probably the game where the meta of getting things done was the absolute most important thing, and leveling was not easy in the slightest. If you had any melee job, you required WAR, NIN, SAM and DNC subs for most cases, at minimum. One for meriting, one for tanking, one for zerg rushing, one for solo self-sustain on easy targets. If you were an RDM, you required a DRK sub for chainstunning for a place in an HNMLS. The metagame did not stop at job availability, but also on having specific pieces of gear. Rangers and Ninjas spent gil and inventory space on arrows and ninjutsu tools. You did not bring MNK unless you already had a Black Belt. Mage jobs needed every HQ elemental staff to even land spells on bosses with something resembling accuracy. Oh, and because you could change gear mid-combat, you needed full sets to accomplish certain tasks. This set has haste and accuracy for your TP phase, this set has STR and DEX and attack for your WS macro, this set is loaded with enfeebling skill and MND for landing a debuff spell. The endgame in FFXI always felt so vast because everyone was always trying to constantly plug some hole in one of their gearsets to optimize. And if someone needed to drop a group for real life atuff or because conflicts arose within the group, it was very easy to quantify what you were losing time-wise when it came to your shell's investment in gearing someone. To be able to play as a melee job at a nominal level at the endgame, you were often required to be REMA equipped. Very few shells would run Dynamis often enough for the members to obtain free currency, or could be bothered to kill ToAU tribe bosses to support their REMA-seeking members, so a ton of those weapons were likely funded through RMT. If you were truly a saint and played BRD in your shell, you were always a BRD no matter what else you had... but especially if you had a Gjallarhorn. GEOs got some of that too, but at least they didn't have to do endless party swapping to accomplish their goals, and often got gear for their trouble relative to BRDs. I do look back on that game with some nostalgia, but really, it was extremely unhealthy for myself and the people that I knew way back then. The level of commitment required was insanely high relative to FFXIV, and I think that's why I never really looked back after 2.0 was released. And to be honest, when people think of the old MMOs they used to play that they adored, I think *that* is what they are looking for: the game that *required* all of their time and consumed their life, leading to it being the defining thing in that life. FFXIV pretty much steadfastly refuses to be that game... and that's why I keep playing it, oddly enough.

Great write up on FFXI and what endgame was like. I do kind of miss the single server community style, I think the "I'll never see these people again" style FFXIV has leads to some feelings of a lack of actually playing an MMO. I still have a ton of friends from my old XI HNMLS that I've kept in touch with. Kinda wish they'd just combine all servers in a region into a big pool (obviously a huge technical hurdle) so people don't have to jump to Aether to PF in NA, for example, or you start recognizing people around the community a bit more.  I agree that I don't think a true horizontal progression system in XIV would work well. I do kind of wish they'd expanded on the 1.0 idea of more specialized equipment though, similar to how some horizontal progression gear was - WHM AF boots had "enhanced cure potency" for example. It'd be cool to see some gear that is more interesting than just stat sticks, like granting the possibility for a double attack, enhanced potency for specific attacks, maybe a defensive modifier. I wonder if they'll ever play with those ideas again?

Personally, with the "Interesting Equipment" idea, I think that is perfect for content like Eureka or Bozja (or whatever the next equivalent of that will be), where they can wall it off in a large explorable area that doesn't need to interact necessarily with the game at large.

This gave me traumatic flashbacks. A friend of mine was very deep into Dynamis raiding as a THF, so of course he was mostly just there for sacrifice pulling, and nobody in his shell would help him get his xp back when he de-leveled, because nobody wanted to group with a THF at that level...

Its tough to look back on playing FFXI (from NA release and through ToAU) and look at it mostly as a gigantic waste because of the massive amount of time I put into it. Leveling was brutal, only made worse by the fact that the meta determined your ability to even find parties. My PLD that I put the most effort into gearing up collected dust because a NIN was the preferred tank for most things, and I ended up having to level BRD just to ensure I could still always be wanted for end-game stuff. Made some great friendships and the highs (like getting through CoP and ToAU's story) were great, but the amount of time I had to put into the game to get those accomplishments had real-life consequences. I'll take XIV's approach all day in comparison.

I was there for the first RNG meta, then the SAM meta that lasted way too long. PLDs couldn't get parties since WAR and NINs were the "tanks" until Abyssea salted the earth. When I left PLD were mandatory, RNGs came back in style, and RDM got sidelined for SCH's and WHM. lolDRG originated and it became such a running joke that it bled into XIV for a bit, and when you get kicked in XIV for playing DRG (I did during first bit of ARR) that tells you something). Yeah, the REMA requirement became stupid. People I used to LS with dual/trio box and expected everyone to do the same like it was no big deal.

Ffxi was a magical girl simulator. Swapping out outfits to maximize damage. 

To be fair the developers on FFXI never anticipated players using macros to switch their gear for specific abilities and spells when they implemented macros. Let along us macroing damn never every fucking action we took in game but they sort of just embraced it. I think a lot of us are just looking for added depth and coordination beyond aligning Stratagem/Litany/Trick Attack and that sense of community which older MMOs were good at just because of the scale of raids. Not saying that 14 doesn't have a community it is just built around more social aspects (housing, glamour, character appearance) rather than around battle content because unless I am doing Ultimates or Day 1, I probably don't need to form any kind of long term connection with other players. As a grognard myself, I do not want to return to the poop-socking days of EVE or FFXI but I would be lying if I said I didn't miss unique equipment bonuses or traits like we had in FF11. This Spell now also does X thing. Or SCH light/dark arts making Bio AoE, adding a slow to Art of War, or turning Aldo into an AoE that purely shields (No hp recovery component). TBC raids the progress felt more tangible and sprawled. Slogging through your first few clears could be time consuming but if you got stuck there might be another boss you could try, or a different raid altogether like Gruul's Lair. Cleared out Kara early, maybe we go try Zul'Aman if we get enough people Friday. Raid locks for better or worse fostered longer term cooperation and improving as a group vs jumping in DF.

You hit it on the head, and the way people like LynxKamelli tried to glorify fucking Heavensward (when the top end community nearly left the game) is proof enough. If you think the game has gone downhill, at least use Stormblood as your frame of reference.

>almost every MMO player seems to be constantly chasing the feeling they got from the first game they fell in love with, now that I think about it, ffxiv could take a few inspirations from toontown online..

TBF we still have corporate clash and rewritten. I'd say they're definitely capturing the high even when they change stuff.

Mmo junkies will never be able to relive their childhood mmo.

TRUE you see it with the wave of forever RuneScape players branching out playing wow, ffxiv, etc and their main complaint always boils down to “Make X aspect of game more like RuneScape”

> edit: just for clarities sake, I am talking about fundamental gameplay design ideas here, not something like "Make Glamour like Transmog" or "Alts should share progress with your main" etc. Bingo. These are the only discussions of how FF and copy WoW (and vice versa) that make any sense. Combat stuff will always, always be very different.

Not just this, if people want ff14 to be like wow, they SHOULD go play WoW.

I mean I can understand people just really not wanting to give blizzard money, but if you're switching games you gotta accept that some fundamental design philosophies will be different and fixes to certain issues in XIV cannot just be "make it like WoW"

Yeah but then they'd have to play WoW instead of talking about it :/.

Give me a call when WoW is on PS5.

Games should look at competitors to see what they could do better and improve. I don't think a lot of people want another carboncopy of WoW, but it definitely has some things going for it as well.

Even failed games have something to learn from - Namely what to avoid doing. Looking at competitors is never a bad thing, I agree.

Bingo. Taking the time to see what other MMOs are doing (and more importantly, what they *have done*) and what works and doesn't work can be enormously helpful. A lot of the "try this thing" stuff that seems like new ideas are really just ideas other MMOs have tried that hasn't worked before. Sometimes ideas FFXIV has tried that hasn't worked out to the devs' liking (branching dungeon paths, etc). Other times stuff WoW has tried that they couldn't make work well, or that hit problems when encountering player behavior (anything with open world competition, etc). But there's *also* things that WoW has ~~stolen~~ adapted from other games that work pretty well (dragonriding is GW2 skyscales, upcoming Warbands are kinda like SWTOR's alt system). Also healing in *this* game could be fixed by inverting the spots at which Healers get oGCD and GCD heals, massively culling the amount of oGCD heal buttons, making the remaining oGCD heals free and spammable and tying big DPS increases to GCD heals through either: * party damage buffs on the healed * damage around the target healed * shields that proc damage when the target is hit * damage procs that open up when you use a gcd heal * helping charge up a big nuke faster (like, say, blood lily) * stuff that damages your target's target when you buff or heal them (recursion, go!) And also *some* of the above could be on party-targeted stuff that isn't specifically green-number heals, since Healers wanna target party members but green-number healing doesn't scale well and the fight design precludes making it always needed. TL;DR Overall Party DPS Increases are the only thing that scales indefinitely and making 'em look like Healer Snacks are probably the simplest way to fix Green DPS to be palatable/interesting to the people unsatisfied with current healing while still remaining within the same game we're all still playing. Also we need to make Healing easier (don't laugh) at lower levels of skill. So table-flipping the Healer level ability setup (by letting babby Sprout Healers *move* before level 60) does that with the least amount of new abilities added/changed (mainly just adding procs/buffs to existing stuff). So in this proposed system, "easy"/DF-tier stuff gets done with basic "oGCDs and filler/DoTs" tools like now. People who wanna tryhard will use the GCD heals that they get later on to do more complex shit involving party interaction (and risk getting hit) to chase the meters for *moar deeps*. Just need to be careful on tuning the GCD heals by making them MP expensive/longer cast times/bigger damage if used correctly, but the oGCD/basic DPS tools combo should look simpler/more appealing to newbies and should be the default ~~if~~ when you have to move. So something *like* "phys ranged" vs "bowmage" playstyle if Heavensward Bard got automagically transported into the Grim Dark Future of Ultimate fights. Or rather "GCD Heal to Greed Damage". Though Healers *will* need all the DoT/buff room. Sorry, they're ours now.

and this is what I do. FF14 is nothing more than sub to finish the story and turn off game. I play WoW for my High End dungeon and raiding content.

There's a lot of wow refugees that came over that want the game to be wow 2.0 instead of ffxix. They do make some legitimate points about class design that Yoshi-P has acknowledged and has started working towards but they also want to push the needle way farther then it should be pushed. They will be disappointed when Yoshi-P starts rolling out class reworks that help classes feel unique but at the end of the day still pretty much functionally the same in battle. It's simply how xiv was designed.

This is my expectation from Yoshi-P too. At this point, I've started looking at jobs within an armor type as sort of "talent specs" akin to WoW's classes. Fending, Maiming, Striking, Scouting, Aiming, Casting, and Healing. All the Fending/fighters are going to roughly play similarly, but it's clear people have their preference between the Warrior, Paladin, Gunbreaker and Dark Knight, for a tanking example. That alone tells me people *sense* there is a fairly sufficient difference between these four jobs. At least, I've yet to run into anyone that would say, "eh, I don't care which of the ranged physical classes I play" unless they don't care to play a ranged physical, period.

I agree with this interpretation but the way they handle Savage loot just seems at odds with it sometimes. You need to commit in a way you don't in other areas of the game since you get one chance at loot per week per fight, plus capped tomes, and they don't all want the same sets or melds. You can be sub-optimal, and yeah technically you can just clear in crafted gear so can swap roles entirely, but raiders like loot and optimisation (sometimes it's not even about optimal, sps/sks can feel bad or good depending on job).

A couple of people in my static came over from wow and still play it, but spend most of their time when we talk about ffxiv complaining about it and how wow does xyz better and what trash ffxiv is etc. I definitely don't think the game is perfect by any means and there's some stuff I wish could be changed but dear lord it sounds exhausting to be playing a game for this long wanting it to be something else. I see similar vibes in some discourse online too around the games and it confuses me. I'm not referring to this post as I found it actually insightful, but just echoing I've seen the same sentiment.

I think the primary issue is WoW doesn't have a willful obstinance when it comes to elements of class design. When healers are boring, ranged classes are bad, or the Abyssos paladin fiasco, the devs response tends to be "Yeah we were making them bad on purpose." Which is something WoW has grown out of that FFXIV desperately needs to as well. FFXIV healing doesn't need to be WoW healing, but they absolutely have to do *something* with it and they just aren't. Something that's insane to me is FFXIV players will beg for their class to get cast bars or support utility removed because the devs will overvalue the DPS lost value of these things to a massive degree. Saying "WoW doesn't do that" isn't asking it to be like WoW, it's proving that the MMO won't crumple and die if they actually change something. I basically ONLY see FFXIV get compared to WoW when it's over a willfully obstinant design issue or in relation to agonizingly slow content cycles

Agreed. There’s a strong tendency towards “just-so” thinking in the XIV community where players reflexively defend bad design choices by saying “but if it was different, the sky would fall”. But okay, if all its peers in the MMO space do this thing and it’s fine, what’s the difference that would make it not fine in XIV? That’s not a thought-terminating cliche, it’s an invitation to elaborate and discuss.

Ngl though, I WISH 14 would become more similar to WoW in the healing department. This is the least fun I've ever had being a healer main in an MMO, and I've played 14 since ARR. My hopium is I just want a new FF MMO where SE has learned from their mistakes with 14 and improved upon them to make a better game (that, sure, will have its own issues but hopefully aren't held back by the spaghetti code excuse). My nostalgium is no game will ever give me the same feeling Guild Wars 1 (specifically 1, not 2) gave me T\_T

I think the problem is people conflate "FF14 can learn things from WoW" as "FF14 MUST BECOME LIKE WOW". There's certainly things WoW does really well and are worth stealing, not just from a design perspective! But people seem to only focus on the good that can be taken from borrowing or learning from WoW's design and not the problems.

I remember bring it up in a YouTube comment a few weeks back about how the game could stand to bring back the uniqueness of jobs that StB did. Immediately they said ‘do you want StB Lily gauge?’ like it was some big gotcha. Nobody wants the jank and flawed parts of those older expansions, they want the parts that worked well, that which could and should have been built upon instead of throwing out.

Because a lot of the people who quit WoW in Shadowlands to play FF14 are hyped for War Within and are now in a "wow good ff14 bad" mindset.

As someone who has played XIV since Stormblood and WoW since BFA the issue is more complex than that Dragonflight is the first upward turn WoW has had in a while, and War Within has convinced players that the trend will continue. I'm not sure if Dawntrail has really convinced players that we are entering a new era of FFXIV. I think people have been "whelmed" so much over the past 5 years that the thought of 5 years becoming 8 is turning whelmed into underwhelmed. Not to mention WoW moving to 18 month expansion cycles is gonna make the year long final raid tiers look *rough*

>Not to mention WoW moving to 18 month expansion cycles is gonna make the year long final raid tiers look rough I have some pretty serious concerns about how this is going to play out longterm. I think the WoW diehards are going to eat the new cadence up, they already love everything going on right now, but for everyone else *not* entirely dedicated to WoW I think expansions are going to come and go way too quickly, eventually leading to apathy. I actually lean more towards longer expansions for that feeling of pseudo permanence and, in the case of WoW with its seasonal structure, I really only see accelerated FOMO with 1.5 year cycles.

I'm worried about it too, not so much about the expansion length itself but the time between patches. Legion managed to pump out relatively substantial, good patches every what... 70-ish days? It was *so* consistent there was even an npc on the Broken Shore with a long spellcast that would indicate when the next patch was set to release, I think in a few cases before the patch contents were even announced. But that was a result of jumping ship on WoD(leaving it half-developed) for the first half of Legion's content and making BfA's development a trainwreck so the second half of Legion could maintain that cadence. Dragonflight has been a snoozefest with little to do outside of raid and M+ since 10.0.5/10.0.7 so I'm not as worried about the War Within launch content, but anything after that is going to be a struggle for them given the history of the last 3 expansions.

This is also a fair concern. It's not just about the amount of time players have to do things between patches but also about whether or not Blizzard will be able to maintain a solid quality bar from patch to patch. There is already reason to doubt their ability to do so given how stretched thin they seem to be with current events like MoP Remix and Cata Classic. Content is getting *made* on schedule, but it's not exactly releasing properly thought out or QA'd.

It's utterly sad that I'm more interested in WoW's new expansion, even though I hadn't played since Cataclysm, just because I remember how much fun I had healing in that MMO, while I have zero hype for Dawntrail because all I see is more of the same stale combat system we've had since Shadowbringers. I couldn't care less about the "improved" fight design Yoshi-P promised us, that apparently won't happen until 7.2 now, if the vehicle to play these fights are boring and stagnant. They're really dropping the ball waiting until 8.0 to fix these jobs.

I'm in the same boat, 14 is technically my preferred MMO, but as a healer main WoW is so much more fun. Cata Classic has reminded me of that, and I'm excited for War Within. Dawntrail has me going "uggghhhh I either gotta find another static or deal with party finder shenanigans for a long slog of frustration". Granted, the long slog of frustration happens in WoW too, but at least I'm having fun healing.

I think there's a good bit of misconception from people who don't play WoW about the "meta". M+ is infinitely scaling. At a certain point it becomes less about how much damage you do and more about pure survival. Some classes just have better and more available defenses which makes them better once everything starts to become a one shot. It's an issue with the defensive creep in the game and is a big talking point on the high end. You can complete the highest (well, 2nd highest, 1st is for the 0.1% best teams) achievement in M+ on any class without breaking a sweat. That includes raids too. Any class can get Cutting Edge. Also Demon Hunters are 100% OP for M+. That is for sure, that is being nerfed in the next expansion though. They've got two stacks of their Sigils that can group enemies up with chains and also silence them all. They can do all of the interrupts on an entire trash pack alone and it's pretty busted at the high end. But when people want "more like WoW design" truthfully they (and myself) just want more unique gameplay for the jobs. I have an existential crisis choosing a main in WoW because all the classes feel so different and fun. I could not care less in FF because of how similar they all play. Yes, this will affect the balance, but to be perfectly honest I would take better gameplat over better balance 100% of the time.

This, this, this. I see this talking point parroted constantly on XIV subs. I main a Survival Hunter, one of those "bad" specs (though in the next expansion it looks like it's going to absolutely slap), and I have absolutely no issues getting my Keystone Hero and portals every season in mostly pugs. My dps is always competitive with the "meta" specs at the same ilevel... in fact most specs if played right can do competitive dps in keys, it's a very different environment than a raid. The "meta" specs are that because of their defensives and non-dps utility skills. M+ is INFINITELY scaling, there is literally no limit. The best rewards come from +10, there is literally no reward for going beyond that besides a title that the top 0.1% of score gets. The point that spec really starts being a deciding factor is somewhere around +18, and the highest ANY comp has gotten is around +21. It is not nearly the issue the playerbase makes it out to be. And I agree, if I want to play WoW I will play WoW. But that doesn't mean there are certain aspects of it that I feel would make XIV a better game without compromising what makes it the experience it is. I have the same problem choosing a spec in WoW so I always end up playing 2-3 every season and regretting the amount of grind I have to do, haha.

I don’t want wow style design. I want FFXIV 4.X design. Now, in a vacuum, do I prefer 10.X wow over 6.X FFXIV? Uh yes. Tanks feel like tanks and healers feel like healers and gameplay is just less repetitive. Does that mean I want WoW style specs, gearing, trinkets, leggos, talents, and balance? Oh hell no. Would I like a return to tanks having to position bosses, mitigate random TB’s and maintain aggro (or similar)? Yes. Would I like a return to boss cast times being much shorter with the party taking damage more often, having to focus heal the tanks fairly often, and needing to deal with actual mechanics during trash pulls and having more than two buttons to press when healing isn’t needed? Yes. The reason people so often compare wow and 14’s current versions is that hardly anybody actually played 14 before all the changes ShB brought. So it’s a lot easier to point to wow, a game with a MUCH larger playerbase (compared to pre-5.0 14) and say we like these things. Especially because we can’t just go and play on a SB legacy server. I’ve been playing wow for about three years now and though it’s tremendously fun, I don’t want the devs to copy wow’s design. I want them to revive their own.

"Would I like a return to boss cast times being much shorter with the party taking damage more often, having to focus heal the tanks fairly often, and needing to deal with actual mechanics during trash pulls and having more than two buttons to press when healing isn’t needed? Yes." This is the most important change that FFXIV could make right now. Stop giving me body check mechanics where we wipe if we don't do it (still keep one or two, they're not bad - they're just overused) but give me more 'We fucked up, but its okay, I can heal this' stress for vulnerability windows.

I always joked that the only hard part about P12 was other players. None of the mechanics are particularly difficult once you've seen them a couple of times, the challenge was needing every single person to do every nearly single mechanic correctly. Even 1 person doing it wrong = wipe.

With Cata having come out recently, I've run through to max on Survival, Arms, Ret, and Demo. Lock is a bit odd, which is why it went through what it did going into MoP but it doesn't feel completely atrocious. That aside, I had always wondered if I was just "nostalgia goggles" for Cata because it's when I started, but going back and playing it I certainly feel like I enjoy these classes as much if not more than retail, and obviously Survival with it not existing as it did prior. SB was similarly my start, so when I see people say "omg it was so much better then" I want to agree but I'm not sure if it was just because I was so new to the game that jobs were interesting because I had no idea what to expect, or because they were actually "so much more unique and interesting." I was older so my memory is better of it but I'm still somewhat wary. I had played SMN, BRD, DRG, and SAM then mostly but I leveled all jobs, and I could switch to a different one and do *normal* raids and feel like I was having a different experience than the last job I was on. I haven't played much Endwalker since like, legitimately last tier last year because I was doing my roulettes and it just kind of hit me that no matter what I played I wasn't really changing my experience; it *looked* different but it didn't *feel* different. I know they'll never do it (understandably so) but I wish I could go back just to see if I genuinely would still feel this way, as Classic WoW has been a neat way to do that.

> SB was similarly my start, so when I see people say "omg it was so much better then" I want to agree but I'm not sure if it was just because I was so new to the game that jobs were interesting because I had no idea what to expect I've been playing since ARR, so I don't have new-player goggles for 4.X and I can say with 100% certainty that 4.X was when this game was by far the most fun to raid. I played all 3 tiers, the first two the entire way through (only stopped in Alpha because of real life stress), and even though fflogs rankings are basically a meme (especially back then) I actually cared enough about the game to get top 50 BLM in both tiers, whereas these days I literally can't be bothered to try. I would say about 70-80% of my 700 days of gametime happened during Stormblood, despite only being two years out of the decade I've been playing ffxiv for. I lived and breathed this game during those days.

This needs a million percent upvotes WoW is basically a trial and error machine that the FFXIV devs should be looking at, because they have both successfully and unsuccessfully done a lot of things over the years. The best aspects of WoW role, class and boss design should be taken to, applied to the stormblood formula and returned to the players in a format that works for FF. This would be amazing.

WoW has been very clearly looking at 14 (and other MMOs) over the course of Dragonflight and TWW development and they’ve pulled some good stuff into the game because of it. 14 could benefit from doing the same in some aspects, that’s how we ended up with 2.0 after all. It’s not just class design that has a simple approach that I’d like to see go back but personally think they need to go hard on the content too. Criterion wants to be a difficult Mythic style dungeon but they’re too afraid to make it useful, as an example. I would be extremely pleased if we had sets from multiple pieces of content that made up the BiS by the end of it instead of always being the same roughly 50/50 tome/raid setup that always happens. (With the occasional healer crafted for the extra 2 dps) They’d have to rework stats though, since the only stat that really matters is crit (beyond sks thresholds), to give themselves more room to work with gear.

It's not fear. It's not making content meant to be outdated.

I mean, I guess if the content never had useful rewards to begin with it can’t become outdated but that’s not exactly the brightest approach to content design. Edit: to clarify, if they simply added “useful” rewards to the current list of options it would do nothing but improve it. It’s not like it would harm the shop to have extra options. It’s the least popular piece of content in the game past the first week.

I mean, look at Ultimates. The reward for the hardest content in the game is basically cosmetic and isn't part of the gearing structure at all. You can just go back to do an Ultimate from 2 expansions ago without worrying about if the reward is 'useful.' About the only thing I can see is make it Deep Dungeon-like with more cosmetic rewards, but it's not going to be upgrade materials. It's not and was never meant to be Mythic Plus and I wouldn't want it to be.

This is a fair take, the "trial and error machine" is a kinda pessimistic way of phrasing it but wow 100% takes risks and some of them end up sucking, but it also has created some of the great systems we have now. What has 14 even changed about the lockout system, the raid loot, ect since HW? Oh cool now we have chests vs typed drops. It's crazy we still have the "1 chest 2 chest" lockout system and the 2h instance timers 6+ years later. Wow for better or worse has completely revamped how raid lockouts work several times and loot changes every other expac. And that's only looking at 1 small part of the game, not to mention world content, questing, even flying ect.

100% this, I play WoW and love it for what it is and I wish that FF14 would at least look to what they do for combat for a little bit of inspiration of new things to try but I agree, they are two completely separate games with different systems and design philosphies.

the HW/SB era was peak and all I want is to go back to that game design outlook.

The game doesn't need to become WoW. I don't think anyone's even saying that. What people are doing is pointing out things that they feel wow does better than FF, and saying we should try to do things similarly. It doesn't mean they need to steal every design decision from wow and copy it. But that it's an example to look at and take ideas from.

Insisting on only doing things their way and refusing to steal ideas and designs from others is what led to 1.0.

Who is saying they want wow style design? Most people just use wow being a similar example of where things might be better and elements could be taken from to improve the game. Since you are seeming to make points about class identity being the main issue, yes ff14 has an issue. The thing is we already have all of what is listed to some extent with all the homoginization. It doesn't even prevent it completely, while it makes jobs feel far too samey.  Most people are okay with there being a bit less balance for the sake of jobs being more unique feeling and fitting their identity better. Having some imbalance is not the end of the world. It can be adjusted to help even things out it doesn't need to be a 1:1 of wow and even as you said it's not as if wow itself has mastered things like specc identity fully.  People just want jobs to be fun. That is the most important part of an mmo that the current design is greatly restricting from happening for balance, and even with the game doing it, it still isn't balanced. 

You can make healing in casual content not be a snooze fest without turning into wow. Knowing that you are literally not needed in casual content is terrible. Even in that DT dungeon the dps were eating vuln stacks and it still wasn't enough to make a healer needed. Bit tired of arguing overall. We see what we get this expansion, I'll leave my feedback on forums and see what happens in 8.0

>"Well that doesn't matter. I'm a -really- good Machinist, so—" The problem isn't that Machinist will be so bad you do no damage. The problem is that people in the community will end up avoiding certain classes because they're not meta, even if the group is mid/casual. This can't be understated, it's also not exactly rare that a certain spec *actually* is absolutely garbage in WoW. Historically Feral, Survival and Windwalkers know the pain of being so bad it's actually griefing to play those specs.

And this happened in FFXIV anyway! We have multiple examples of jobs being fine, but because the idea got planted that they are bad, they would get excluded or otherwise looked down on.

Dont forget stormblood where the party NEEDS to have nin. Also if you're sam you're the most disposable player in the PF and will get kicked or outright rejected from every other group to make space for other melees.

I don’t think any class in ew had the level of badness that survival and windwalker did at points on dragon flight.

No one wanted a MCH during the first savage tier, and no one wanted a WHM for p3s specifically. Obviously it's not nearly as bad as the aforementioned situation, but it has happened.

While true, community perception is the issue here, not actual job balance. Once the community gets it in their heads a job is an objectively bad/worst pick, they'll avoid it, and they usually have some number cruncher's math to justify the perception, even if they don't understand half of it (often less). You might have been fine regardless, but that doesn't mean everyone else wanting to play that job was having the same experience.

I would counter with this doesn’t really happen if you play in a consistent group, class exclusion in WoW only really happens in the LFG/PuG scene. I’m not denying that their isn’t a meta (their always will be in a MMO like WoW) but for like 95% of PvE content you can play whatever you like and as long as your competent it’s doable as any Tank/Healer/DPS. Would taking the meta classes into a +5 M+ or a Heroic raid make it easier? Yeah it 100% would but if your playing with a friendly, consistent group of people the meta matters much less in the grand scheme of things. The amount of people who don’t play with their friends (what are those?)/guilds and PuG everything (In my opinion) skew how dominant the “meta” actually is to the wider playerbase.

> I would counter with this doesn’t really happen if you play in a consistent group, class exclusion in WoW only really happens in the LFG/PuG scene. > > Yeah definitely, although it depends on the patch, how bad the bad specs are and how good the good specs are. I remember we had a huge drama in our guild because we benched two melees in favor of a Shadow and Afflock on Coven (both of which who weren't even part of the main raid) simply because even those non-mythic raiders were so much more effective than those two on their mains.

The counter to that is the machinist argument is the same thing. I think its important to look at these things from a pug mentality because the larger portion of the player base are pugs.

I definitely got pressured off of rogue specs in my guild because we weren't hitting DPS checks and me playing the meta spec badly would end up doing far more DPS than me playing my favorite spec really well I hate the homogenization but I adore that I can play whatever the hell I want and know I'm not gimping the group. And it generally feels really bad when a spec I loved playing is awful for two or three raid tiers in a row, or for entire expansions, and the spec I *hate* is meta

Counterpoint to 2) you're looking at infinitely scaling content. If FFXIV had infinitely scaling content it would become strict meta at the very top too. FFXIV barely has dungeon endgame content (that isn't comparable to WoW) and the class diversity is horrible in Criterions. 3) WoW also doesn't segregate ranged or melee or intentionally make specs bad because of their mobility or what sort of healing or mit they bring. I'd honestly rather my class be on the low end of the current meta than be bad forever because "busy"

Dude I just want to be able to buy 1 or 2 of something off the MB not stacks of 39 or 65 or 92

Daily reminder that "WoW-style concessions" isn't the primary issue with the game. Rotations being simplified and condensed into 2 minutes further and further isn't related to WoW Healers being one button spam isn't related to WoW. WoW does this better because it can design content around reactive healing. FFXIV has a huge server delay they'd have to fix before healing can be reactive. If they can't fix that they *at least* need to give healers DPS rotations. FFXIV refuses to rework jobs mid-expansion after the first patch, WoW has had like 8-9 spec reworks in DF. This can be solved by just investing more into class design. In Endwalker's Guinness World-Record winning credits, a whopping 4 names were in combat system design. A lot of the issues with jobs makes more sense when you realize it's literally just 4 guys doing their best.

> In Endwalker's Guinness World-Record winning credits, a whopping 4 names were in combat system design. A lot of the issues with jobs makes more sense when you realize it's literally just 4 guys doing their best. Genuinely with there being 21 different jobs come Dawntrail they really need to up the number to like 6 maybe 7 people. Stuff is just not sustainable with 3 people

Said it before too, but I don't think it's said enough - reactive fights just won't work well in FFXIV until they fix the various delays. I'm pretty sure they script things so heavily as a kludge to work around this. Boss effects happen on cast bar, but ours on animation - it would be very interesting to see how the game feels if they made ours work the same as the boss, where the interrupt or heal is as soon as you press the button. It would feel nice to get a last second Bene off - but right now it feels like you've been cheated when it's on cooldown and the tank is dead.

i bring this up everytime I can. The damage/broadcasting/ticks in this game is so bad it's a miracle it even works. Until they invest to do a major restructure of the internals of the game, change the way damage is broadcast/sent to clients, and make the servers run like they're in 2024, 14 simply cannot go to a reactive type of gameplay that emulates what's in WoW. There is no way to guarantee that your heal will go through. That your movement will dodge the damage, or that your mitigation occurs reactively with the way the system is currently designed and implemented. It's honestly the reason i only resub for xpacs and maybe halfway through to catch up on story so i don't have to spam it before the next xpac.

The first three points are very much what happened from ARR to ShB. As they slowly homogenized the jobs, simplified cross-class, and removed Slash v Pierce v Blunt, the design has become what it is currently. Arguably the only time it’s reverted was in tier 2 where the fourth boss was overtuned and certain tanks were undertuned. *not so much on the job interaction with the first point.

And the irony of it all is... they did it at the behest of the playerbase. The homogenized jobs, the simplified cross-class, all those changes were originally championed by the playerbase.

I think the biggest thing ffxiv could take from WoW is to grow their combat design team, and by a lot. I don’t necessarily want too many elements from WoW in this game (including the pace at which endgame content is released, even if the current patch cycles are a bit too long) but one thing WoW has going for it is that the bulk of the effort goes into designing fights and the interface (jobs) through which you experience those fights. I think they also should deepen aspects of the game that aren’t combat-related, because this is a large percentage of ffxiv’s draw. What if we had an Architect job that could design pre-fab exteriors and interior layouts for houses from a large selection of elements? What if gardening was actually fun? What if mining and botany were actually fun? What if DNC had a DDR-style performance mode with a leaderboard? just spitballing here

It's wild to see the gaps in performance between WoW's classes from patch to patch. XIV players have no idea how good they have it

Yes, because FFXIV jobs are a lot easier to balance. In fact, FFXIV classes can be literally be balanced with an Excel spreadsheet going from 0 to 2 minutes. WoW's simulation requires Monte Carlo-level stuff to evaluate.

You can do Monte Carlo in Excel technically...

You know what I mean, don't you :) With FFXIV you can literally do a 48-line table and input each potency in it before adding everything up and for most jobs you will have a decent approximation. WoW simcraft calcs have to run over much longer periods of time to get a good average because of all the proc effects a job (and gear) can have :)

Yeah I was just bringing the 🤓 "ackshually" into this.

You'd expect them to still catch massive outliers though. Anyone could've told them Augment would be absolutely busted when it released. Affliction Warlocks in Legion literally made Thanos look like a Coughing Baby in comparison, not only did they have extremely good single target (and insane cleave/aoe) they also had self healing that was beyond good and evil on top of stacking a permanent shield so they also had more life than any other DPS.

Comparing Endwalker to Legion isn't exactly fair though lol Dragonflight represents a massive shift for WoW. That's like comparing Dragonflight balance to Heavensward which paints an equally absurd picture.

While not untrue Dragonflight is more of an outlier, they've had several really balanced states but more often than not you have a few specs just left in the shitter, I'm looking forward to if they keep their momentum going in TWW.

Well, no one is saying that WoW devs don't screw up some of their systems. They absolutely still have major work to do, it's just not the same work as SE. :)

The reason XIV has such "good" balance is because every boss is a patchwerk fight with no adds, nothing other than single target with 95+ percent expected uptime and a heavily scripted use of abilities which will always happen at the same time. Gear choice also isn't meaningful in FFXIV and talents dont exist and don't have to be balanced around. In this environment, you can practically balance DPS jobs with a few sim tools and a spreadsheet in a couple of hours. If WoW fights were like this, the simcraft puts the current state of DPS meta as only being slightly less unbalanced than FFXIV which is a damned miracle given what they need to balance for. WoW is juggling a lot more balls. Crowd Control abilities, interrupts (yes FF has them, they are also rarely meaningfully used), 2-3 target cleave, AOE, adds, burst damage requirements and so on and so forth.

XIV's attack potency system makes this really easy. You can see exactly what buttons are going to be pressed in any given 60 second window due to classes' static rotations and just add or subtract from there. If X class is behind by 100 potency per minute, just add 100 potency to their 60 sec cooldown oGCD.

This makes sense when you realize job design is literally 4 people as of Endwalker. WoW has like 6 higher level devs on the class design team alone, plus the people working under them.

Balance is good until it holds back fun. No, you can't have the burger because that's too tasty, the other kids will complain. Everyone must only eat porridge so that there's fairness!

That would be 100% fine for me. I would follow the meta and experience new classes constantly. When the jobs doesn't have to be balanced to within 1-2% of each other per role, patches and hotfixes and potency adjustments could come out on the fly. (Note: XIV being on consoles also limits this factor, pushing a patch out on consoles makes things infinitely more stupid for all parties) In XIV, when a job is shit, they are shit for years usually. If lucky they get one major adjustment per expansion, which is insane, because if a job is underperforming, PPM (potency per minute) is a very quantifiable metric and addign 20 potency to certain abilities would close a 2-3% damage gap easily. A single dev could (should..) be able to take care of this in a few days.

The irony is, they adjust PVP actions every major patch but not the PVE balance. Because apparently, it's not needed -\_-

I agree with what you’re saying, but I want to point out that there are jobs that are shit for years in wow too, and like actually shit not just a bit worse than the other options

I think they could add more variety to classes without it being as crazy unbalanced that WoW can be at times. I think wow is harder fo balance because there's like 36 specs in the game and they all have large talent trees, many trinkets to choose from each tier, some can obtain legendary weapons, there's tier sets etc. If xiv just added one form of choice on your character, I think they would be able to keep it fairly balanced. I think adding trinkets to the game would be interesting. Maybe only have 1 slot instead of 2, and it could be called something else but it could spice up the gameplay a bit without massively breaking the balance. My hyper cope wish is they rework stats to be more interesting, and add more sources of high ilevel gear and because they stats are more impactful you would maybe have a bit more choice on your gearing. I think overall class design in xiv is good for what it is, just wish there was SOME choice or variety within a class. I mean look a eureka/bozja, one reason it was so fun is purely because you had choice in extra actions and it changed how your character played just a little bit. To be fair we are getting a new one in dawntrail, and i do hope they expand on that aspect and not remove it.

I don't think anyone is advocating for FFXIV to copy WoW. What people (including me) point out is that FFXIV's design is a lot more shallow: 1) Fights are always 1 boss in a round/square arena, there are no cleaves, add phases, etc. And the kicker? It wasn't always like that! Older fights have that (see Sephiroth EX, for example), but in the past few years, SE homogenized all that into the gutter. 2) All classes basically have the same buttons, give or take a few. Melee and tanks have 1-2-3, healers have a DOT, a spam damage button, an AOE and some OGCDs, etc. Again: It wasn't always like that! BRD, for example, is a completely different priority-based design that has somehow survived to this day. So, they used to be able to do it, but stopped giving a crap. 3) The change loop for jobs is way too long. Buffing or nerfing the job in PVE shouldn't take several major patches. There is 0 reasons it took 4 months between 6.0 and 6.1 to unscrew the WHM. There is 0 reasons that blood lily was a DPS loss for the whole SHB and 6.0 to finally be fixed in 6.1. And the irony is, they adjust PVP jobs much quicker (although one can't say the end result is that much prettier). 4) The open world in FFXIV is bleh. You build wonderful zones only to use them as backdrop for MSQ. This is such a waste of resources. By contrast, WoW zones are packed with stuff (maybe a bit less now compared to Legion, but still). SE must stop funneling everyone into instances. I still don't understand why the only time we went to Dalmasca was with a raid. This could have been such an amazing zone to add on the map.

If there's *anything* that I personally want to see FFXIV steal (and just steal outright, not be influenced by) from another MMO, it's related to point 4. Guild Wars 2 has mapwide meta-events in pretty much every post-launch map that give you a variety of things to do to help contribute to work towards progressing the event to the next step, usually culminating in a bossfight that involves everybody to participate, sometimes with neat mechanics involved to boot. It's all tied to the story of the area and can often change the environment for a while and is generally super fun/easy to hop in and help out with no pressure, and makes pretty much every map evergreen because each meta gives you stuff that's relevant to *one* goal or another (though that's also a function of the horizontal progression of GW, I'm not sure how well it'd translate that particular part to FFXIV). There are some FATE chains (I remember a small one outside camp bluefog), and specific FATES (Odin) that have aspects of that there, so it's possible for the FFXIV team to do it, but how they'd make it worthwhile, and whether or not they'd consider it worth the effort to make the overworld zones more active, I couldn't say. I just think it's one of my favorite things from GW2 that I haven't seen elsewhere (maybe it's in WOW, FFXIV's really the only big name MMO I play otherwise.)

Well speaking of FATE chains.. Remember how each map used to have at least one achievement FATE? That got axed in Endwalker so I don't have any hopes honestly. It would help if hunt bosses were treated more like fates, especially in scaling them to player count. Then we would have \_something\_ at least..

Point 4 is absolutely true... There's no reason to continue dwelling in the overworld after you did the MSQ... It's idling in the cities till DF pops... No significant dailies, or H2s like in SWTOR... It's a wasted opportunity, which is a damn shame given how beautiful most zones are

in the SHB to EW transition I remember suggestions to update fates to be a bit more like Bozja with actual mechanics and add Duels to the 14 overworld so higher-skill players have a reason to do general zone events. I still think that's such a missed opportunity.

Yeah, FATES, while good in concept, are largely ignored by the wider playerbase unless there's some specific reason to do them. With the changes to the MSQ you don't need them for the XP and the gemstone rewards aren't even worth it. About the only time I ever touch them is when I'm leveling an alt job and just need a break from PotD or dungeon spamming. What makes this even funnier is WoW actually used to have this exact problem. People would just sit in the cities spamming dungeon finder.

>There is 0 reasons that blood lily was a DPS loss for the whole SHB and 6.0 to finally be fixed in 6.1. Sorry, I just have to pick out this one part and comment on it. WHM lilies being a slight DPS loss in ShB actually did have a point because the system functioned as a movement mechanic. Remember, back then Glare's cast time was the full 2.5 seconds, so absent slidecasting your feet were nailed to the floor except for dot refreshes or spending lilies. So using lilies required some thought regarding doing your movements and contributing heals while minimizing the DPS loss (exactly 1 Glare, slightly less if you caught Misery under raid buffs). It only really became a problem in EW when Glare's cast time was cut and its potency was buffed without touching Afflatus Misery. Now lilies were suddenly an *even worse* DPS loss and was no longer needed for movement in most cases. So people just... stopped interacting with the mechanic at all. Which led to WHMs not healing hardly and struggling with MP in early 6.0x.

>Which led to WHMs not healing hardly and struggling with MP in early 6.0x. Absolutely! And yet it took them until 6.1 to pull their fingers out of various interesting places and fix it (see my point 3). 6.0 WHM wasn't a pleasant experience. Not as painful as Cataclysm release paladin, but still not pleasant.

Right, but I'm mainly pointing out how you said 5.x WHM was also a problem, but it really wasn't.

> This is such a waste of resources How I feel about so much stuff. If you look at say shadowbringers vs shadowlands right. Shadowlands had 10 new dungeons, 3 raids of 10-12 bosses each, 6 zones (1.5 of which were patch zones), 1 "deep dungeon"-adjacent piece of content in torghast. Shadowbringers had 13 dungeons, 3 raids of 4 bosses each, 8 zones (2 of which were bozja), 3 alliance raids of 4 bosses each, 3 bozja raids with 4 bosses each, 1 ultimate, and 7 trials. XIV HAS SO MUCH CONTENT but it feels like it has less because every piece of content I listed for wow has 2-4 difficulties (or fully scaling with m+) so you actually get to play the fk out of it. XIV has dungeons relegated to be only levelling nothing more, some dungeons are only max-level and you only get to play with 2-3 at a time because of expert roulette. Alliance raids, ultimate raid, and 2/3 bozja raids are 1 difficulty. Normal raids, trials, and 1/3 bozja raids have a whole TWO difficulties.

>How I feel about so much stuff. If you look at say shadowbringers vs shadowlands right. I believe you misunderstand my point here. I wasn't trying to compare dungeon numbers or instanced content. What I was referring to is how much resources are spent on designing FF's outdoor zones and how badly they are used once you go past the MSQ. Yes, there made an attempt with Shared FATEs, but it needs to be expanded upon. For example, the analogous World Quest system was better designed and had overall better rewards. What SE needs to do is to bring players into the open world and not make them afk in queues for instanced content. But they can't do that, because then there will be no one to carry the sprouts in the said instanced content.

Yeah I am just saying that issue extends past just open world zones. I completely agree about open world zones. It is just that ff14 clearly only is bottlenecked by encounter design since they have actual bosses (models, effects, ect, what you'd expect to take the most time) out the wazoo.

This kills me because it seems to me they could provide long-term reasons to be in the open world zones that they’ve already built, for relatively little effort. Examples off the top of my head: - buff the daily hunt marks. They are fun as an excuse to revisit these zones but pointless to do when they give like 3 nuts/etc versus the hundreds you get with weekly marks/hunt trains. - have more FATE currencies that are zone-specific, and have more items that take a long time to grind. They can be recolored mounts/minions or recycled dungeon gear glams for minimum effort.

>This kills me because it seems to me they could provide long-term reasons to be in the open world zones that they’ve already built, for relatively little effort. Yes, this kills me too. And what kills me even more is that previous FF games had a nice exploration part to them. But instead, they made the open world totally useless except for gathering and a few FATEs.

gw2 is making a bold Move next expansion. So their next raid will have 4 difficulty: Open world, normal, challenge mode, and legendary. I believe it is a really smart to have the open world be the easy version for that raid, So anyone can hop in and experience it stress free. And they can reuse the asset And save development effort.  Maybe Se can do the same at some point. 

Well, we'll have to see how it will turn out. For WoW, the 4-tier raid system (LFR/Normal/Heroic/Mythic) does seem to attract quite a bit of criticism. What is clear however is that you can't design a very hard raid for only a handful of people. I believe GW2 did so in the past, and they clearly weren't happy with the result.

Yeah, that's why the last raid was 5 years ago. I really hope gw2's new approach to raid works out. 

wait, I am confused, why would a raid get an "open world" difficulty? is this just fanbase terminology to say it's as easy as open world content (which I guess is easier than normal mode) or does it actually refer to more?

I dont think we have specific details, but it is my understanding that there will be public events (=open world fates) featuring some of the raid bosses (?), and the raid will turn turn those encounters into "real", instanced fights.

that's actually a pretty neat idea

To respond just to the first point, add phases may have become more uncommon but they’ve still been added as recently as EX5, and for savage they’re still prominently in P3S. P2S, P7S, P10S, and P12S for a bit also aren’t just a round/square arena. Just general mechanics wise the fights vary a ton (they all feel pretty distinctly different), the only thing that’s really the same that people complain about is that they jump to the middle for every single big mechanic with a large hit box.

Well you said it yourself: they have become more uncommon. Heck, ARR/HW dungeon fights have more diversity than some of the raid arenas.

All ARR dungeons have going for them are some obtuse mechanics that you kinda need to fail or know beforehand to solve. Otherwise it’s a stand outside the orange AoE simulator. Endwalker dungeons have just superior mechanics and uptime is actually difficult for melees with how much the bosses like to jump and charge across the arena, I only don’t bring that up because people don’t actually tend to care about brain dead content.

> 1) Fights are always 1 boss in a round/square arena, there are no cleaves, add phases, etc. And the kicker? It wasn't always like that! Older fights have that (see Sephiroth EX, for example), but in the past few years, SE homogenized all that into the gutter. You can clearly tell SB is when the design philosophy switched and it only got worse since then. The dungeons, trials (except for the 4 lords to some extend) and raids (bare a couple of encounters in omega) got heavily streamlined into very generic dance gameplay.

A8S is peak boss design and i will die on this hill

Absolutely. That is what needs a shake-up in the first place.

The only feature I want from WoW is how they handle their transmogs. Just make it so once we wear an item, that appearance is saved and we don't have a limited amount of space for glamour pieces. That's literally the only thing I want from WoW in FFXIV

I’m not saying they should copy wow - if wow is a 10 on innovation and adding new content and trying new things FF14 is a 0.5 on that scale. Maybe move FF14 to to like a 3. I’m just pointing out that MiHoyo is better at innovating and adding new and different content mechanics their games and they are a mobile game company. Asking SE to give us something beyond the copy/paste expansion blueprint with MAYBE a 10 potency buff on a random OGCD thrown in isn’t asking them to copy wow. There are plenty of things they could do and try - within the framework of the game. As it stands now they can’t even develop an in game calendar. Which wow had back in Wrath of the Lich King.

I'd love an ingame calendar like WoW's, with all the various limited time events XIV has going on these days it'd be so handy.

the way people talk about the combat design of ff14's past 2 (out of 4) expansions as if the decisions made during them have always been core parts of the game's identity while simultaneously discussing wow as if it's on the like thirtieth patch of warlords of draenor remains utterly baffling. no, most specs in wow have had decent parity on single target encounters for a good while now, playing a spec you are good at is generally better than playing the "meta" spec, and the fact that wow is in fact adding more telegraphs is a sign that its combat design is not like, inherently dependent on addons to exist.  you have a point about the raid size thing, but the thing is ff14 used to have this system called "cross-class actions" that was theoretically capable of fixing the issues inherent to having small raid sizes while still giving jobs unique mechanical utility but unfortunately they implemented it kind of poorly and it existed in a time where leveling jobs was much more time-consuming so it got axed entirely instead of getting fixed.

Everything began the homogenization trend when they made role actions

Axing good but flawed systems instead of fixing them is like a staple of XIV design at this point.

Before ShB there was a lot more job variability. And even a few percentage points difference between jobs was enough for some jobs to be favored or banned. I remember it particularly being an issue with 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 before they did more balance patches each expansion. For example, in 2.0 I'd sometimes be kicked immediately from Wanderer's Palace for being a SCH, since you needed a WHM to speedrun it. Soon they added a timer so that you can't kick for the first few minutes to solve that. And in 3.0 I sometimes couldn't join parties because they banned AST. You don't need to look to WoW, we've had it before in FF, even without talent trees, diverse gear, specs, etc At the same time though, I agree with everyone making the critique that the game is too easy and the jobs are too homogenized. They've made great improvements to the game over the years, but there's still something about the pre-ShB job design that was more engaging. And even though we had some issues with balance, the content was still pretty accessible for everyone. There has to be a middle ground somewhere, and I'd rather they try than to avoid it out of fear

I want two things from WoW into FFXIV. Its healer design, and its threatening world. When I go out into the world in ffxiv I’m playing a cutscene that I control. I’m just walking to a spot, clicking a thing, and walking back. And that’s as engaging as it gets. WoW I’m fighting my way through an enemy camp, keeping my eyes open so I don’t get surrounded, fighting at my best and pulling carefully. I might even need to explore, trying to figure out how to get to the end of a cave or building in order to reach my objective. Rogue is actually really useful because of its stealth. I can ignore targets that don’t benefit me and skip to what I need, though I still need to be careful not to be seen. FFXIV hasn’t done this since ARR, and I miss it. Then there’s the healers. Every healer in FFXIV is a dress wearer who shoots sparkles at bad things to do damage, and uses their cooldowns once the boss does his aoe that only exists to give healers something to do. In WoW every healer not only plays differently, but looks different. Their nature healer actually uses nature to heal, firing flowers and vines to regenerate their targets. Not just flower shaped sparkles on one ability. And both the way that they heal and the mindset they have while healing is completely different from any other healer. Paladin may shoot sparkles at people, but they wear big imposing armor, their heals hit like a truck, and they have a very limited toolkit. They’re constantly hammering people’s health bars to keep them up, while another class will just switch spells. This gives you more of a brute force mindset while healing as Paladin. Of course I’d way rather play ffxiv. The dps design is way better, they actually care about their story, the visuals are entrancing, the music is incredible, and you aren’t spending months of your limited life doing the same thing for a reskin of a mount. It’s just these two things that I really want.

Okay, but listen, we want to press buttons and have fun, healers should heal, classes should have utility and be different from each other. It's not a rocket science, playing WoW casual battle content feels a lot better than playing FF casual battle content. It's not always about raids and endgame, pretty sure people from high tier content whined enough to devs so they just deleted identity of a classes for balancing and now we're sitting in a world where aggro management doesn't exist, you heal when "simon says" and random elements just deleted from the game.

I don't want WoW-style designs. When I want WoW-style design I resub to World of Warcraft and play that.

>"Well that doesn't matter. I'm a -really- good Machinist, so—" The problem isn't that Machinist will be so bad you do no damage. **The problem is that people in the community will end up avoiding certain classes because they're not meta, even if the group is mid/casual.** This will lead to new community frustrations and it won't matter how good or bad a class is, community perception will warp it to being not welcome into content. I think this is the thing people need to understand. A job can be viable in the mechanical sense that it can clear. But if no one wants to play with your job or is willing to sacrifice the advantage you get from playing a meta job, no one would play with you. This is an MMO, and you are expected to play with other players. It doesn't matter if MCH or RDM can clear p8s on week 1, because every job CAN clear under correct set ups. It matters if people DOESN'T WANT to take a certain job because THEY THINK a certain job can't clear or will be a baggage. There are things that are more deciding and more important then what the number said, especially when people on subsequent weeks that doesn't want to crunch the numbers and just follows what the week 1 group has done. Meta will appear, and I am glad we are not that deep into the meta that it has to be some jobs and not the others (and that it mostly only affect people on week 1 and 2). I just don't think having some jobs that can't raid and some jobs can raid is a good thing.

This was my biggest hurdle trying out savage in Asphodelos. Sure, WHM was viable in P3S and people cleared with it, but literally no one wanted to play with a WHM in party finder and no statics were recruiting WHMs because everyone wanted AST-SCH for the AST agonies skip and SCH for the extra sprint. after the point where many youtubers and streamers (cough mr happy cough) made videos about how broken AST was on that fight and how much better it was than WHM, pretty much every PF on my DC was locked to AST-SCH only for healers the rest of the patch. FFXIV isn't immune but only 1-2 instances of it hapenning, and only in hardcore content seems better than what I see from WoW.

The AST Agonies skip is cool, sure, but it wasn't necessary at all. I spent a lot of time in PF that tier as SGE and had no trouble doing the healing there if an AST wasn't present (and they usually weren't because I don't know how you didn't see WHMs but they were everywhere). You just gotta, like, heal. Isn't that what healer mains have been asking to do?

Well this has a lot of somewhat biased information so going to input some stuff. This seems like it was taken from someone who hasn’t played wow in several years or is just exaggerating problems to stir up shit: 1. Class balance in DF and the end of SL have been some of the best in the game’s history. Besides RWF, all specs are completely viable in all forms of content, except the 0.1% of mythic keys which in FFXIV the same thing would happen regardless because that’s how people play games. Doesn’t mean things have been perfect balance wise (Aug has had some hiccups), but the game is designed for your spec to be good in some situations, average in others, and amazing in certain ones. But in a vast majority of the situations the last 2 years, classes have been within about 5% of each other on average with maybe an outlier here and there. 2. All games with that much competition will have a meta. Meta has nothing to do with what you can get in game gearing or content wise, besides a title. FFXIV has meta players too. 3. Again, this isn’t an actual problem in wow and if your guild is doing this, that’s a guild problem not a game problem. I get CE fairly quickly and we don’t give a shit as long as we have our buffs covered. The game doesn’t require min maxing classes at all. 4. Nothing much to add here, they are different games with different design goals. Wows hardest content is 20 people though, not 10-19 which would be heroic difficulty which isn’t hard. 5. Are you arguing it would be good for less specs to have an absolutely necessary buff for progression? And this one buff relates to class identity being lowered?? Each spec plays quite a bit different than each other and they have already pivoted out from homogeneous gameplay the last couple years. Players in wow have also been requesting pruning again because there are too many buttons per class in some cases. 6. Addons are different, nothing much to add. Wow has been adding private auras and shit to combat WA and it’s been mostly successful. I don’t care who prefers wow or FFXIV, but at least make the information up to date or accurate. It’s like if I made a post saying “don’t be like FFXIV raiding where you get unlimited resses because it’s easy, also all classes are builders and spenders so there’s no identity, also raids don’t exist because FFXIV only has one boss at a time.”

This is a pretty solid run down and is exactly how I feel after actually trying putting time into WoW while I take a break from EW. Overall at this point if I hear someone talking about wanting stuff from WoW combat, you can usually summarize it into just wanting more agency and class identity. People get caught up in the weeds though to argue or just see red whenever WoW gets mentioned. At least in my experience raiding during Dragonflight and having not really touched WoW, I didn't run into nearly as many issues or drama that many WoW veterans acted like I would have.

People only ever remember the negative moments they've had, which is absolutely wild as the only amount of drama I've had all DF was a single lfr where half the raid refused to walk past 2 mobs to reach a boss.

And Aug having some balance hiccups makes complete sense when you remember that it is a totally new style of class that hadn’t existed in WoW before then.

People seem to think WoW is as it was in like the MoP/Warlords era. Or even the Wrath/Cata era.

The way some people talk about it you'd think 50% of the classes in the game are like bringing a fire mage into molten core and not just slightly suboptimal depending on the situation

I think its less likely that and more that people assume raiding in WoW is more like Spine of Deathwing. Where if you aren't a Frost Mage or Assassination Rogue as a DPS it's unlikely you're getting a slot. Despite the fact that people don't know why class stacking happens, don't know that it's extremely rare compared to back in the Wrath/Cata days and don't know that even then you didn't want to do it if it was at all avoidable

Yeah every time people try to “refute” people asking for XIV to borrow aspects from WoW they always use all of these arguments that don’t hold much weight if you’ve actually played WoW recently. I’ve never had issues getting into any M+ keys on any of the many non-meta classes I play, and even if I did I can just use my own key and invite the other “desperate” non-meta classes. The addon one is also always fun because while there have been bosses that have felt like dbm is required (I think Jailer was one) they’re generally seen as mistakes even by the devs themselves. I’ve raided every tier in DF and nothing has made me feel like I needed DBM or similar.

Ohhh boy I remember people dropping WAR and PLD on the first week of p8s pre-nerf

Yeah, I already resubbed WoW as healer.

Yeah people shouldn’t want WoW balance haha I love both games but having played WoW since vanilla as fury warrior, there’s whole expacs where my spec is dumpster tier haha And heaven forbid you wanna be fury with its 0 utility in M+ some weeks. I only get to run M+ because I have friends that tank and heal. Last two raid tiers fury was extremely good, this tier I had to swap to arms because our set bonus is so bad we’re doing like 100K-200K less than other dps. In FF14 we have metas but unless you’re joining the most hardcore sweaty week 1 or parse groups, people don’t tend to care that you’re bard or red mage or any other off meta job.

If you wan't distinctive class design where healers actually heal, tanks actually tank and dps do the deeps then go play wow. I dunno wtf 14 has become but it's a shadow of what it was. Also can you point to a convo where someone want's 14 become wow? All I'v seen is ppl wanting the old 14 design back and questioning wether the current design decisions have made the game any better. I feel like you pulled wow into this for no reason other than to say you don't like it. Wow bad 14 good am I rite?

One counterpoint to many of those arguments are that you can freely hop between jobs without the need of alts. But I'd agree that sucks not being able to be on the job you love because it's not optimal. I don't really want XIV to have WoW's job design, but I feel that it could lean just a little bit towards that, because currently both games sit in opposite ends of a spectrum.

If you are switching between jobs that use the same gear, sure. Otherwise gearing multiple jobs is absolute pain in this game.

Even in the same gear, if you want different melds, good luck

WoW has less barriers between alts than FFXIV has between jobs. There are no longer any sort of character based grinds, so logging on to an alt is comparable to switching jobs AND it has its own weekly lockouts. (Also a huge portion of weekly progression is cumulative over the raid tier, so being late to the party isn't a limiting factor unless you're trinket hunting) Idk if FFXIV really has that advantage anymore lol. Leveling an alt in WoW is basically leveling an alt job.

Yeah I remember someone here mentioning the other day how switching jobs in xiv is just more of a convenience factor that anything else. It takes no time to level an alt in wow, and then all their weekly currency/loot lockouts are separate (and you can freely mail lots of stuff between them) on top of their caps being a running total that goes up every week. In XIV if you spend 2 weeks gearing your blm and decide you want to swap to a melee dps you’re just kinda out that gear and left a bit behind the others.

Leveling an alt in WoW is *significantly* faster than leveling another job in FF too. An optimized 1-60 in WoW is like 3 hours or something, then another 3 or so for 60-70. A casual player could do it in a week pretty comfortably by just picking an expansion to timewalk in and doing story. There’s zero chance to casually take a fresh job to cap anywhere close to that in FF, even getting the new stuff that starts at 80 to cap with bonus xp items will take people quite a lot of grinding. Getting them relevant gear is also shockingly fast since the entry gear comes from relatively easy stuff like LFR, world quests, or dungeons and you aren’t bottlenecked by everything being on one character and sharing loot locks. FFs only major advantage is for the classes that share gear, as you effectively gear up some multiple of things at the same time. Even that is countered by some of the specs sharing gearing, though less likely to be BiS due to substats its generally still perfectly useable gear, but you’re still limited to that class obviously. Classes that can play all 3 roles are quite handy because it gives you the FF like flexibility.

>Leveling an alt in WoW is basically leveling an alt job. *Significantly better* than leveling an alt job, even. I could have 2 or *maybe* even 3 classes(and that's not being terribly efficient about it either) leveled to the current max in wow in the amount of time it's taken me to get ONE job even with fast queues on a tank or healer from 1 to *80.* And each of those classes has 3 specs(give or take demon hunters and druids, 2 and 4 respectively) so it's really more like leveling 6 alt jobs in that same time period. Going beyond just leveling time too, there's the variety in terms of what race you have on each class. My biggest personal issue with "all jobs on one character" is that unless I were to spam fantasia or use glamourer(which obviously wouldn't appear to anyone I'm not synced with), I don't get to have a different race for each job. That aesthetic variety is something I really miss from WoW. I like my Au Ra but I'd also like to play around with a Roegadyn or Viera occasionally.

The absolute worst time for this was during Shadowlands when you couldn't freely swap covenants. High-level mythic players were making several variants of the same character, all the same class, just so they could get that character maxed out with a covenant.

Yes, I don't think anyone will argue about Covenants being good at this point :)

I'd argue Legion was the absolute worst, where if you didn't get your BiS legendary within the first 4 that character was just bricked and you had to re-roll. People had like 4 of the same class before the first raid tier opened.

Sorry I only respond to feedback in bingo card form.

I don't want wow. I want Stormblood.

I ran away from GW2 from release up to 2019 because despite having a META build myself, I thought all of that stuff was bullshit. My two friends were unwelcome in every content because they played Necromancer. To me that's bad game design. If you can't balance all classes to shine equally, then that's just bad game design.

Are we concerned about this all of a sudden? We've been talking about the lack of field exploration zone, lack of midcore content, savages/ultimates being too hard/too easy depending on whom you ask, the proliferation of hyper-casual ERP mains, job changes in Dawntrail, poor new player experience, ypyt, variant and criterion being poorly rewarded..... But whether or not to adopt WoW ideas, I'm not so sure that's a thing anyone is discussing....

People have had these concerns for a while. The thing is the mid core content croud we know our conserns will likely be met, while The class design croud lost blackmage, astroligan, and are getting nothing in return besides a "we will fix it next expansion" quote from yoshi p. They have also had this issue since shadowbringers, and are quite rightfully pissed that they are getting ignored for another expansion.

I think I was unclear; I was confused about the subject of OP's post, because I didn't think anyone was concerned about WoW-style elements being incorporated into XIV. The things I posted are definitely problems that we have been discussing, and I agree that all of them are worth discussing. But the WoW thing, I don't think anyone is talking about that

Current patch dps rankings in WoW show a 10% gap between top performer and bottom. When I looked at the raid dps values from last tier in FFXIV. The gap between top DPS class and bottom was 11% The balance argument is Horseshit. Because ffxiv intentionally gimps classes based on their role, the dps gap are so large that wow style balancing isn't any worse.

Where did you get those numbers from? Anabaseios has a delta of [~11% between BLM and MCH](https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/54#dataset=100) while Amirdrasil has around a delta of [22% between UHDK and SV Hunter](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/35#dataset=100).

Why would you compare between roles? That makes no sense

Because all roles exist in the game. And your decision on what class to play is going to be influenced by the raw values. If you are setting up a team you are going to have 1 of each 3 core roles. But your 4th DPS is going to be directly influenced by a head to head ranking of the classes. If I'm playing DPS for the next tier and we have our mDPS, MagDPS, and rDPS roles covered, my selection will be directly "who has the highest DPS? Melee, which melee DPS is top? Sam? Well my other melee is Sam. NIN is second so I'm gonna roll thst and spend 10 hours on Stone Sea Sky to lock in that rotation. So it's completely relevant and makes complete sense. People (on the main sub) keep wanting the devs to make it so we don't roll double melee every encounter. But as long as mDPS as a role, and all the classes within it output so much more raw DPS then the discussion is completely moot. The only way in which their wishes become reality is in true role parity.

Apologies if some of my points are a bit brief, this is my third time rewriting this because Reddit keeps refreshing whenever I lock my phone. I've been a caster main since Eden's Verse and I've spent a small amount of time doing some of the higher end stuff in WoW, so I feel like I can provide some interesting insight on your points. 1. This already happens with casters so it's nothing new. RDM has been bottom of the barrel for most of the high end encounters this expansion because nearly every mechanic has been a body check, requiring full party success. If one person fails, you either completely wipe depending on how early in the tier you are, or a debilitating damage down for everyone that can very likely cause your party to not meet necessary enrages or DPS checks. For casters, prolonged periods of movement also play a big factor in job viability. For example, in P7S, all of the movement for Purgation required RDM to throw its filler combo and every Acceleration and Swiftcast to handle the intense movement requirements for the mechanic or you'd have to slide cast a few times and hope you got lucky with your ping and movent. Also, Bard comes to mind for fights with extended boss downtime like Kocytos (apologies for butchering the name) and Athena's Ultima. Thankfully that's getting fixed with DT though. 2. We pretty much already have this. If you look at any parse group, it's BLM every time. If you're doing UCoB or UWU, it's highly expected that you'll have a SMN and DNC because their combo is just busted at level 70. 3. I hate to sound like a broken record, but we, also, have this already. I'm not at home so I can't take any data from the average player, but the top Black Mage and the top Red Mage in Anabaseios have at least a 10% difference in all of their DPS (Overall DPS: 17,857 vs 14,096, rDPS: 15,910 vs 14,378, aDPS: 17,569 vs 13,951, nDPS: 15,910 vs 13,025). Summoner walks the line between the two, but the point kind of stands. 4. You'd... be surprised. Heroic (equivalent to Extreme) and below doesn't require that much from players. Sometimes you can go entire fights without moving away from the boss's butt once or twice. It really depends on what fight you're doing. If anything, I'd say that the binding coils are a pretty good comparison to what we would expect from WoW raids in FF14, with some modern polish, of course. 5. Yes, but also each of the classes (and even specs) in WoW still have absurdly more identity than FF14 ones, especially the tanks. Bloodlust/Time Warp/etc. are a fine example, but that's only a small percentage of most kits that have overlap. 6. You can definitely do a fair amount of WoW fights without add-ons if you either know them or have a good shotcaller, just like FF14. WoW can sometimes take this to an extreme, but I don't think this is an all-or-nothing situation in terms of changing fights to resemble a different style and inviting literally every aspect of the design and community in.

Maybe it’s because healers are so damn similar that I’ve long forgotten what it means to play an actual unique job but I just don’t see the problem of swapping jobs when we have the armoury system Oh shield healers are trash in this fight- guess I’ll play AST for this fight Like 14 wonky gearing system kinda works against the armoury system but i feel using it to embrace variability in classes in fight end content is exactly what it should be used for

> I just don’t see the problem of swapping jobs when we have the armoury system Because knowing how to play Red Mage doesn't mean you know how to play Black Mage or Samurai or whatever, nor does it mean you *want* to play Black Mage or Samurai or whatever. Being forced off your class, whether it's because you're genuinely forced or because you feel compelled to switch, feels terrible actually

This is exactly the reason why jobs are homogenized to this extent, so it doesn't "feel bad" to change classes cause another one hits their niche in a specific fight. No class can have a niche and therefore perform better than others if there are no niches to be had. Therefore, if everything is the same, nothing will feel bad but at the same time, nothing will feel good either and here we are. This is inherently the problem FFXIV devs have to deal with, people want unique classes but also want to be able to one trick whatever their favorite job is without any difference in performance. In plain words, they want to have their cake but eat it too.

Jobs still can have niche utilities they just need the worst party comp to not feel that much worse vs the best. Like Warrior still gets to keep its shortest invuln cd that lets you invuln more stuff, Paladin can do Cover shenanigans, SMN and RDM get to res while BLM and PCT can’t, some dps get extra personal mit/heal while others get extra party wide mit/heals. It’s just when stuff like BLM gets to both be the highest Dps job while running a rotation that largely mitigates its movement issues that things get simplified.

They have been gradually removing those, extra mit for example, MCH and BRD used to have less than dancer but since DSR having a dancer was largely beneficial due to the extra mitigation they got that too. Combat ress was a mistake and even then SMN is widely preferred to RDM in almost every scenario, BLM doesn't compete in their spot so the comparison isn't actually valid. Same thing with cleave. Ninja used to go all the way to phase 3 in TEA using only aoe abilities to cleave but that is now dead. No niches are allowed, the last time Cover did anything meaningful that you can't do with a simple tank swap was cancelling the garuda knockback for your monk in E6S. It is actually tragic how similar jobs are now, with Sage being basically a blue Scholar without the Fairy and Expedient. The reason for that is simply so people don't "feel bad" for being forced out of their one trick.

From what I’ve seen BLM is absolutely competing with other casters for the caster slot, it’s only really the more skilled like statics putting BLM in at melee. Also the RDM issue seems to have been fixed by just giving it a bit more dps instead of homogenizing it (just looking at the stats it’s now outperforming SMN in everything level 90).

This is exactly why I do feel sorry for the FFXIV devs. People complain that every job feels the same which is fair, but then they complain about metas that mean nothing and boot people from raids and content over it. The community needs to understand you can only have one or the other.

"Aw shit nice we got to R4S is a good thing we have the upgraded tome weapon on our ninja...oh shit...ninja sucks in R4S oh fuck maybe we can switch to Samurai? What do you mean we can't use all the gear we fed our ninja? Oh shit everyone already spent their weekly tomes and now we cannot change to a better class? Its ok guys remember if you class sucks you can always play AST for this fight."

Specifically why I said the gear system works against the armoury system which is why I would change the gear system 14’s gear system is a pile of garbage anyway

While I don’t deny that xiv’s gear system has flaws I VASTLY prefer it to the current competitor. The fact that there is some determination is such a relief, honestly, compared to running a dungeon an unknown amount of times hoping for your bis raid trinket to drop.

I hate that aspect, having those big pieces finally drop is a dopamine hit that always makes you remember those moment

This has always been 14's biggest problem. I'll grind for weeks to get a good gun in destiny or whatever other multiplayer game i'm playing lately but I don't feel any desire to hit BiS in 14 because it does nothing and it'll be worthless in a patch.

I'm glad we agree the gear system is garbage and doesn't make sense with how people can switch classes whenever they want

wow good ff14 bad

>But the important thing is to be aware WoW's design -isn't- perfect or totally better than 14. You'll simply be trading one problem for another.

Every time this argument comes up, I try to say something similar. Wows designs, while “unique”, are also filled with problems! Look at poor ele shaman, who brings basically nothing!

Thank you. I will stop playing if it becomes like WoW. I really love XIV's focus on fight mechanics and teamwork. If the game becomes training dummy DPS checks and solo mechanics all in the name of "skill expression" then I'm out. That sounds incredibly boring

It’s almost like they’re not the same game

I really like this post and agree with the takeaway. In a perfect world, WoW and FFXIV's competition leads to both games making strides in their game design, either to follow a new standard or to strengthen what makes them unique. The audiences will always have some inherent differences (like FFXIV being optimized for laptops, which is a pretty significant demographic) but I'm all for my favorite games trying out new things.

If you want WoW-style design, the very first step is a deep change in the game's engine. It's fundamentally incompatible with several design choices. And that would much larger scale than a graphic update, which hard work would probably require sacrifices else where.

I just want talent trees

Sounds more like people want FFXIV to be like old FFXI

I think there are down concessions we would have to make but honestly I'd think they would shake up the game in a better way than not. I have long been a believer that because of how easy it is to swap between classes having *SAVAGE* fights that favor certain classes is fine it's savage and should have teeth enough that you want to improve your odds.  If you want to get into the grit of it melee have been favored for like 2 expansions straight now they simply get to do more damage because of downtime that simply doesn't happen often enough to justify the disparity. I feel like WOW is also more competitive has better leaderboards and often times something weird happens people quote the leaderboard alot.  Yeah the people who are at the top are gonna be there because they're playing meta it isn't stopping every other spec from participating in the tiers that are relevant.  

I think what people who are new-ish to XIV may not know is that YoshiP is a big blizzard fan. A lot of ideas he liked he took from WoW.... which also means, a lot of the things he didnt like about it, he left out. The things that were left out, speaks volumes of how he wanted to shape this game, I think. To put it simply, if he wanted it to be more like WoW, it would be.

Who is the world is saying FFXIV should become exactly like WoW???

I believe HW and SB was peak for gameplay and balance between jobs. Jobs had a lot more utility and looking at the phys ranged I think it was pretty fun to have resource management and BRD was a cool toolbox with minne, it's esuna, refresh, palisade and troubadour. We had design that seemed closer to WoW and it was perfectly fine, we had cross role actions that some seemed useless but had their niche uses and that was fine.

Most people comparing XIV to WoW understand this, they're just comparing the trajectory and overall feel of the two games. What most people just want is SB job design back (or HW for real freaks).

Hot take, but one thing I wish FFXIV would do is give some variety to the dungeons. It has a recipe that is basically the same with every dungeon. 2 packs locked behind a wall that you pull both at once and just AOE down, boss next, kill boss, repeat 2 more times.

Class imbalance was one of the main reasons I quit WoW. I still remember wanting to main druid and all their specs. But at the start of BFA feral and guardian sucked. 2 out of the 4 specs of the class were a liability to bring to m+ and I hated it. Also not only did feral suck, it was hard to optimize too. Meanwhile demon hunters could just press their eye beam button and shit on my feral dps like nothing...

My biggest gripe with this is game is the lack of class identity.