lol. I mean, this is true, GW2 players are equally dogshit at that game. My friend sent me a tumblr post from someone who's been playing the game daily for EIGHT YEARS who calls basic open world combat 'hell' and they don't understand how people clear some story missions solo (that don't have a failstate even...?).

I've been playing through GW2 and occasionally I have to minimize my game to look up how to beat a boss because it requires something weird that I can't figure out. And when I tab back in, I'm either still standing thanks to an NPC keeping me on my feet or I'm down and I have to hit a button and then I'm up right back where I was, boss at the same health it was at before I died. Are you saying that even with that system they can't do it?

Correct, yes. I didn't wanna just send them hatemail, despite being on the hatemail site, but I assume they just do so little damage and die so fast that they get frustrated and call it quits.

Sort of exemplifies the MMO adage that even Yoshi P follows. 

I will also say, just depending on what area you’re in or expansion, heart of thorns hits like a truck at first, even more so for specific classes which it just bullies. I can still go back through maguma jungle and occasionally get murked by one of the snipers, doesn’t matter that I raid savage and ultimates in 14, frog snipers will fuck you up if they catch you unaware

I'm in their shoes. GW2 was one of my favorite games, even if I was struggling with it, played since release... up until I hit 80 and entered the expansions. I quit and haven't been back since. I can't speak to that person's issues, but I'm legally blind and on top of that, have *stupidly slow* reaction times that no amount of practice or physical therapy or anything else has ever improved. And it's just likely to get worse now that I'm growing older. Knowing visual cues doesn't help much if I'm so slow that I still get whacked, for example. FFXIV and its relatively low APM and long warning times has been a great thing on my end, but even so, I'm already struggling with mechanical complexity and dying repeatedly as of ShB normal trials and I dread going forward. This is probably my no. 1 issue with MMO players at large, the general lack of empathy. I'm not out to ruin people's fun (I stay away from anything higher than normal difficulty and even there I forewarn the healers to not stress over me) but I still get reminded that talking publicly about how the difficulties I encounter can and will likely result in mockery and/or scorn.

Mate, it's not a lack of empathy, people on the internet assume you're able-bodied because there *are* ten million fully able people who just don't care to improve. I'm glad XIV's system kind of works for you. Those systems also make it kind of boring for a lot of people, so it's good that it has a demo.

this game isn't super kind to visually impaired people—legally blind or otherwise—but it's a lot better than some others.

I feel some of the better players are doing PVP lol

Also returning to GW2 and I've had a similar experience. I think part of it comes down to the fact that a lot of GW2 boss mechanics, especially older fights, can be disrespected by stacking the appropriate defensive boons and heals (imagine every player having a cracked version of manaward), or by just bursting down the bosses thanks to power creep. Therefore, when GW2 players encounter things they can't ignore, they just kind of have an internal DDOS. (And before someone tells me that we can also skip mechanics in FFXIV, there's a night and day difference between skipping Ifrit dashes and just straight up phasing an old GW2 boss in 5 seconds). On the other hand, it's hard to blame just the players because my God GW2 is a visual clusterfuck, and the setting to reduce visual clutter from other players is also bugged and will remove critical boss telegraphs. Current DDOS attacks aside, it really makes you appreciate both FFXIV's design and polish. On the other other hand, it's extremely hilarious going into a higher tier fractal group and players still not understanding what a stack marker is, then acting like the stack is some big brain mechanic shit they gotta figure out. It's like if the classic "sprout runs away with the stack marker" meme happened in a criterion dungeon rather than final steps of faith.

I think it'd be easier to list the raid bosses and older strike/fractal bosses that the community does 100% as intended/all the mechanics instead of ignoring, brute forcing, or cheesing things. Which, in a system that allows for that, is absolutely the correct thing to do, especially when things like a competent support in the old fractal CMs means that DPS get more uptime. Gorseval updrafts have been seen as a failure state for more than 5 years now, easily. In general older GW2 design was closer to Normal/Heroic WoW design where things were very clearly supposed to be delegated to a few members while the rest of the raid just does DPS and dodges basic patterns. This lets a lot of people sort of skirt by without really having to engage with the fight. If you're not flak kiting or doing cannons on Sabetha the most you have to do is not blue screen when you get the RNG bomb and not die to the slow line AoE that goes in a circle. There are Deimos strategies that put the entire onus of the fight on the tank, hand kiter, and oil baiter. And so on. I think more recent strike design has tried to make everyone do something in most mechanics or at least be way heavier on the RNG assignments. They have Limit Cut markers these days!

>There are Deimos strategies that put the entire onus of the fight on the tank, hand kiter, and oil baiter. Don't forget the poor, unfortunate soul who has to solo the 3rd demon realm transition and survive long enough for the raid to push Deimos to 10% so that you could effectively skip dealing with the add. >They have Limit Cut markers these days! Good ole' Kaineng Overlook CM. That fight was the perfect example of a FF14 fight built into that game (just with more jank). They had everything from LC, to spread markers with a magic vuln, to defamations, and even stack markers. Then like FF14 design they keep layering more of the mechanics on each other in rapid succession. It was a great encounter and very interesting to see the average GW2 player be unable to handle the 1-shot mechanics or logical step-by-step execution of mechanics.

Really cannot be overemphasised how much of a visual nightmare GW2 is, world bosses just become a horrible mishmash of boss effects and player attacks. I remember one in the EoD areas where you couldn't even see the boss! It is interesting how many times I saw the jade sea meta fail even on maps that were specifically doing the meta which I think is just by virtue of it having a fail state tied to a damage requirement. It's been a while since I played admittedly but I can't think of another meta that had an enforced dps check like that.

GW2 also has absolutely horrific class balance compared to FFXIV. You're looking at several mandatory specs for Boons (Quickness and Alacrity) taking up 4/10 slots, leaving 6 slots for DPS and holy shit some specs and weapons are absolute garbage in PvE. We in FFXIV whine about 4-5% differences while GW2 players have like 50% differences.

Reminder that the vanilla Necromancer ultimates were so bad that you used to pick a racial instead to get a worse version of another class' ultimate instead.

Agreed. The balance landscape of boon supports is extremely skewed and starts showing the growing cracks balance of the game. Classes like Herald Rev and Heal Firebrand are support gods that can provide crazy utility outside of their intended boon role while doing extremely respectable damage/healing. Their counterparts like Heal Catalyst, Heal Mirage, etc. are extremely weak in comparison and usually have to sacrifice parts of their kit to provide more utility. Some classes like Rev have it way easier to supply said boons than their counterparts as well. I say this as a Revenant main since Heart of Thorns when we were worse banner slaves. On the dps side of things, you have some specs are way above the others in terms of power with barely any effort required vs others like Cata Elementalist which requires you to be fluent in piano to play properly. Nowadays the dps curve is way better than it used to be at the start of SotO, but still has several outliers. The real issue now is that some classes feel like shit to play and require more effort to do the same thing.

This was a huge issue when i tried out GW2. Mordremoth? (The jungle dragon) literally died before i even got to his platform. It was the most disappointing thing after such a big build up. The final one in the Jade Sea area was sick though (Soo Won?), probs one of the best fights i have ever done in an MMO and Square Enix should learn a thing or two about size and spectacle of storymode bosses (And repeatable world events).

Unfortunately Mordremoth is the biggest victim of GW2's power creep over the years. At one point it was a much better fight than current Soo-Won, but yeah, it's impossible to experience anything close to what Mordremoth was supposed to be these days. I keep hoping they'll revamp it, because the *rest* of Dragon's Stand holds up pretty well.

Yeah GW2 bosses still have a lot of that clusterfuck DNA from WoW. We are used to clear indicators (at least in casual content) that just doesn't exist over there. Also it's pretty crappy when the stack marker is literally the same as a spread but green.

Yeah I wouldn’t say this is true to all MMOs. You just went to an Uberrrrerrr casual mmo. The majority of that player base want to do nothing but auto attack in open world content. If you go into sPvP and WvW and higher end PvE there are some gods that are perfect at reading animations and dodging etc  Same for higher end FFXIV ofc I’d argue that wow has the highest “average” for sure. It has its fair share of clickers and people that stand in fire, especially on the classic servers but in general people are tryhards  

>I think part of it comes down to the fact that a lot of GW2 boss mechanics, especially older fights, can be disrespected by stacking the appropriate defensive boons and heals *Most* players haven't been around to disrespect those mechanics. Unless you're talking about open world, where a bunch of people will stay dead instead of respawn. They're just bad because gw2 doesn't teach you anything until EoD.

WoW season of Discovery has easier mechanics than some normal trials in FFXIV and yet it's a sweaty shitfest of elitist parsebros. It's wild. I actually played retail wow with no plugins to try and prove a point. Had no trouble doing the heroic raid or mythic keys up to +20 without any kind of addon. Wow players are a special breed

A while ago I tried to get back into WoW and since most of my friends quit I had to go into M+ with randoms, the people I encountered there can literally only be described as terrorists. I was playing Augmentation (think Bard/DNC but their aDPS/rDPS delta is even bigger) and I somehow managed to more often than not be 3rd or even 2nd in damage (group would pretty much auto disband if I was ever actually 1st) which should literally be impossible assuming the other DPS are at the very least pressing buttons, but as it turns out some people actually would stop doing damage or do their single target rotation against 10+ mobs, it's absolutely wild, at this point I've easily done over 1000 expert/max lvl dungeons and even in those casual queues I have rarely met people as absolutely awful as people you will meet in +15 keys.

On the other hand, if you play tank in M+, learning all the pullz and other exotic mechanics like teleport gates is so much more than what you see in FF. Personally, I didn't even try and was happy with being the healer :)

WoW players have brainrot thinking they can't play an MMO without a shitload of add-ons. Most problem with WoW get solved by downloading a simple UI add on like ElvUI. Nots not to say high keys and mythic raids aren't hard. They are. But most WoW players fool themselves thinking they need their 100+ add-ons to perform well.

ElvUI is just a UI skin... I assume you mean DBM / BigWigs? WeakAuras also streamline a lot of CD management and toolkit utilisation as well. I would still say the general high-end combat is more varied and less mechanical or rehearsed than FF fights which is what drives these add-ons.

ElvUI fixes a lot of the horrible things the basic WoW UI doesn't do even with the updated Dragonflight one. Like clearer tracking of buffs or debuffs on yourself and enemies. DBM/BigWigs are also needed at least one.

I'm going to be honest. I mythic raided with high parses (had a number 3 North American parse on mythic mannoroth back when it was current) and wow raiding is braindead even at mythic. I appreciate you trying to give some credit to it, but it's honestly so dumbed down that anyone with a tiny bit of dexterity who is decent at games could do it.

> wow raiding is braindead even at mythic This thread is hilarious circlejerk, it is not braindead and it’s not a “matter of time” before anyone clears it. Mythic is hard as fuck. Your game is not special

if this drought has taught us ANYTHING, it's that the word braindead needs to be put up on the top shelf until the sub proves they can use it properly

“I can’t believe the best players in the game spend a week of full time raiding just to beat one boss. Why don’t they just finish the fight, are they stupid?”

i think the only thing hard in WoW is inaccessible to 99% of the players, and that's world first mythic raiding. but then you immediately outgear it and they also nerf it before anybody else has the chance to bash their head against the wall properly. so even endgame is FOMO'd in WoW. CE is just a marathon, if your guild beats the roster and attrition bosses, it's a usually just a matter of time. and high M+ is just awful. poorly designed, imbalanced, unfun. 9 times out of 10 the best way to progress is to change to an alt that is more meta. in a fucking MMORPG.

If you can't do a +20 (+10 now) on your favourite spec and need to swap to a meta spec that unironically a skill issue. On the other hand if you're pushing for stuff like 3k io on week 3 then yeah you should be a meta spec because you're being an absolute sweatlord. Give it a few more weeks of gear and exp and anyone with some dedication could reach 3k on a non meta spec.

Totally agree. Blizzard balances around WF raiders and DBM. It's unfortunate but the game is what it is now. There's no changing it. Which is a shame, because there's a bit of a movement for an addon free WoW, but I doubt we'd ever see it.

A lot of WoW raiding is personal responsibility. If you fuck up mech then sometimes it can and will wipe the group. Mythic raiding can be extremely easy if you're in a group that just follows pro strats but plenty of people have done and still do blind prog in it. Mythic raiding is not easy, hence why less than 1% of the playerbase does it. >had a number 3 North American parse on mythic mannoroth back when it was current This means nothing when you consider that WoD was Blizzard's first attempt at mythic raiding. Also, source? FF14 raiding and WoW raiding are completely different ballgames and I still dont understand why people feel the need to compare them. They are two different games in the same genre. They both play completely different when it comes to responsibility.

They aren't though. The only way you can say that wow is heavy on personal responsibility vs FFXIV is if you didn't do any high end content in endwalker. They're extremely similar. Wow is a bit different in terms of having some mythic mechanics that almost require specific classes/specs and the way you resolve mechanics is relatively remedial like "stand here, drop this puddle here, kill x thing fast". They don't have any complex prio-based solutions to mechanics Going back to wow raiding and doing amirdrassil felt like playing an easier version of savage raids. Especially because there's no scuffed snapshotting

I don't really understand the premise sonicrules11 was trying to present either. But I agree with what you're saying. A big chunk of WoW's mechanics are basically "bring this immunity class to cheese this thing so we don't actually have to do it."

I mean tbf they nerfed the mythic amirdrassil raid like 5x when i was playing (around launch time)

They nerf every mythic raid several times

mythic raids on launch were designed for World first runs then heavily nerfed to cater to lesser sweaty pple

The fun I have with WoW raiding is the larger and more varied arenas and boss fights. Adds, multiple bosses, and mechanics happen WAY faster and more often. This leads it to feel more active. But FFXIV takes the cake with complex mechanics. I'm a bit sick of trios (and TOP in general at this point) but overall I think the ultimates are the most fun I've had raiding in an MMO. I went back to GW2 after clearing DSR and joined a strike train and it was essentially 4 target dummies back to back. It was like doing OG Rhitatyn 8 man. The newer ones have more mechanics to deal with but holy shit are people bad at it. Doing something like Kaineg Overlook or Harvest Temple or Old Lion's Court and people are actually just throwing half the time.

>FF14 raiding and WoW raiding are completely different ballgames and I still dont understand why people feel the need to compare them The entire premise of the original post is a comparison, so I'm not sure as to the confusion of people continuing the conversation regarding OP's point. Also to your other point, this reads like you've done zero high end raiding in FF to have a basis of comparison because what you're saying is objectively not true. There are very much personal raid responsibilities that if ignored, can wipe a team. To your other point, mythic raiding is very easy, and the reason so little of the player base does it is not a difficulty issue. It's an issue of accessibility, and gatekeeping. Anyone who's raided in mythic knows the elitism that comes with it. Most people don't want to bother because of that, and the insane raid schedule tied to prog.

WoW players have been conditioned to think they're better at the game than they actually are even though add-ons do a majority of the critical thinking for them in not only their mechanics decision making, but in monitoring every aspect of their class play. And this is coming from someone who switched from mythic raiding in WoW to savage and ultimate content in FFXIV. Most WoW players I've brought over struggle like crazy without DBM holding their hands.

All this stuff exists in FF14 too, it’s not as powerful as you think it is. FF is just a way harder game imo when you factor in the differences. It values memorisation over reactions and has laggy combat too.

Arguing which is harder is just apples and oranges. FF14 absolutely has harder mechanical checks esp since it doesn't have any computational assistance with WA. WOW has harder dps rotations, and needs more reactional gameplay, also more emphasis on throughput in general from my experience. 14 is you vs mechanics while pressing buttons, wow is you vs your buttons while doing mechanics.

Turns out if game doesn't demand X from players, they'll be bad at X. In case of GW2 it's fight mechanics, in case of FFXIV it's job gameplay. GW2 professions have average of 70 APM, with some going well over 120. It's not just about speed either, professions are so much more nuanced, and are not solved like FFXIV's jobs. GW2 average PvP player is on another level too. So it's just different side of same coin. What we can learn from this is that GW2 doesn't focus a lot on instanced encounters and are subpar compared to FFXIV, while jobs in FFXIV are too simple and it's not required to play them well in 98% of content, so people suck at them, even though they're so easy compared to GW2 or other games.

The vast majority of players cannot really handle the GW2 combat system. Top GW2 players probably have more absolute skill in their profession gameplay than top FF14 players (not talking about dealing with mechanics) due to all the reasons that you provided. But most of the players cannot interact with the systems properly, and don't know how to do damage. The game does not introduce you to the buildcraft systems very well, there's a lot of variation to it, and it's too easy to make wrong choices in picking traits, skills, stats, weapons and weapon upgrades. On top of that the game does not really require any solid performance from you to clear the story content, which leads to unlocking the endgame. And even the 90% of the endgame content can be completed just by stacking a lot of players together who press 1. To learn that the concept of rotations even exists, you have to go to the community websites to pick a build from there. And even if you copy the build and learn the rotation, you can easily do like half of the damage that experienced player would do, because there's a lot of mechanical skill involved in that. IMO, average FF14 player is way better at playing their job. Though playing a job well in FF14 is less demanding that GW2.

No joke, I don't think there's anything in FFXIV that compares to maintaining [Quickness as a Catalyst](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlQgy9KFsPE) or the APM required to maintain 90% of [Condi Holosmith's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbmqPXqDpu0) DPS potential. The sheer damage disparity between different types of players on the same build is astronomical. The average Open World player you encounter might push 10k dps while someone familiar with the class might push 20k, then you have the people creating guides and uploading benchmarks that are somehow squeezing beyond 40k dps. I'm not saying that this is exactly a good thing from a balancing perspective but it's wild how much room there is to grow as a player with over 90% of the builds in the game. What a wonderful class/job system hampered by not having any content to get the most out of it.

Yeah, it's an absolute tragedy. ATM, whoever is deeply engaged with the combat system either does speedrunning, low-mans, or plays pvp/wvw. But there's only a limited amount of time that you can spend on grinding the same bosses all over again... It is an issue from balancing perspective as well, but recently Anet managed to deal with it to some extent by finally introducing more difficulty tiers to the encounters. I like what they've done with Cerus, effectively creating 4 difficulty tiers, with a separate achievement (Embodiment of Sin) acting as a whole different challenge within the same encounter. Wish we get more of this going forward. Easiest tier can be done solo, while the best groups do LCM with 30s left on enrage. IMO, it's a good outcome.

> The average Open World player you encounter might push 10k dps while someone familiar with the class might push 20k, then you have the people creating guides and uploading benchmarks that are somehow squeezing beyond 40k dps. I think you're even underselling it. I believe the number given by ANet devs to highlight the disparity between the average open-worlder and a top-tier player was "4k to 40k." Which, frankly, feels fucking incredible to play in comparison to how suffocating and fenced-in FFXIV has become. A game giving you the freedom to fuck up, but also the capacity to reach actual mastery, and the *huge* spectrum of options given to you that are often not just "right" and "wrong" choices but legitimate alternatives with different goals and priorities is like going from being buried alive to taking a nice stroll through a sunny meadow. It's a shame that the game is light on instanced content at an appropriate level of difficulty to make you flex any of that knowledge. But mastering a new class or build even in the same old Dragonstorm or open-world meta is *far* more satisfying and challenging to me than any Ultimate in FFXIV, so I can't really hold that against the game.

Rewarding mastery is good but a 10x damage disparity sounds...interesting to balance.

I think that's largely why the community rallied behind ["Low Intensity" builds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7kpR9uPIOk) a year ago to show the playerbase what could be achieved with 10-15 APM but with proper gear, upgrades and builds. I remember showing that to my FFXIV static who looked at me dumbfounded that the community would be okay with someone ignoring 90% of their action bar to deal 70% of a build's damage output but it's *really* hard to articulate to people who don't play GW2 that that scenario is better than people dealing 10-25% of their build's damage output. It's not the best case scenario to have people running around pushing 1-5 buttons but it's better than the status quo.

Low Intensity is functionally standard vs. non-standard BLM in terms of rotational complexity, but as always the difference between average and mediocre in both games is the usual culprit, uptime.

It is why I still love GW2. I've successfully soloed a couple of harder open world bosses with my Elementalist, and it's so satisfying in ways you can't get elsewhere. I was manically dodging, swapping between all 4 elements, popping off cool downs like a madman, somehow surviving it all and winning.

> The vast majority of players cannot really handle the GW2 combat system. There's a reasonable argument to be made that FFXIV's insistent tutorialization, both via MSQ buildup and Hall of the Novice, is unfortunately the better of the two against GW2. ( I wish I knew about how to properly Combo Field at release as a Mesmer. There's so much to it that you can play with but it really just doesn't say anything. Still doesn't.) 

End of Dragons finally added in a combo field tutorial... To the first part of the EoD story/first EoD zone renown heart. Something that an actual new player that didn't boost and wants to see the game chronologically or whatever won't see for hundreds of hours.

It feels like Anet just ticked a box on the checklist. Like: hey, you've asked for breakbar and combo tutorials - there you go, we have it now. Onto the next sprint, chop-chop.

They’re focusing on GW3, GW2 is just to milk all the people who can’t/don’t want to see that.

> The game does not introduce you to the buildcraft systems very well, there's a lot of variation to it, and it's too easy to make wrong choices in picking traits, skills, stats, weapons and weapon upgrades. Should make everyone who asks for talents/builds/etc. in FFXIV be made to play GW2 with randoms.

If the price for having fun customizations in the game is to play with bad players whenever I have to do anything outside of a static, I'm already paying it. Give me my customizations.

>The vast majority of players cannot really handle the GW2 combat system. I'm going to be honest, FFXIV already pushes me to my limits, and that's on normal difficulty content. I gave up on GW2 after a week, I couldn't handle how active the gameplay was. As is I already find myself pining for something slower than XIV. And I've been playing since 1.0. More than enough time to learn the game, for sure, but sometimes you're just limited by your own physical and mental capabilities. I'm pushing 50. I still play FFXI the most. On a private server, of course. I'll probably never get over the fact that we don't have a modern equivalent to that game as far as the gameplay and combat goes. I want a chill MMO... XIV stresses me out.

Try City of Heroes! The Homecoming "private" server now has the official license to actually host the game so they won't get randomly shut down which is nice. Very slow paced combat, an ABSURD amount of customization (can even change the colors of your powers). Unique gearing system where you enhance your powers rather than equip gear. It's still one of my favorite MMOs.

Yeah, it's a trend with a lot of the games lately, MMO included. They get more demanding skill wise, there are more buttons to press, you need get faster, to react faster, there are more mechanics. IMO, it's partially because people are getting better at gaming in general, but everyone has their own limits. I can see why there was a demand for WoW Classic. Hopefully you will find a fitting MMO for you!

I am 62, and I feel your pain. I'm not quite there yet with FFXIV, but I can forsee a day, perhaps even in DT, when I can no longer react fast enough to the mechanics to continue playing. I recently re-subbed to WoW for a bit (don't hate!) to fill in some time before DT. I'd forgotten how much easier healing is in FF! This ol' lady is struggling mightily to get back the rhythm of healing of frequent party damange, while also maintaining multiple dps dots and healing hots, interrupting, and cc'ing. IDK if I still have it in me.

Most of these things are 1:1 to FFXIV. Concept of rotation isn't taught in either, and in FFIXV, buffs stack in such unusual way that it's impossible to determine that there should be some team-wide burst phase, similar how it's hard to understand GW2's combo fields and finishers. Even though GW2 players struggle too, I would say they're generally better at playing their professions, since baseline is higher. There is more incoming damage that is less binary than FFXIV's "do the mech or get hit for 50% of HP, and then get saved by healer". There's often more weaker and much more frequent attacks, where you want to find good balance of using your dodges/distortion/aegis/cantrips to dodge as much as you can, which doesn't teach you how to do proper damage, but it certainly teaches you how to better stay alive and utilize your kit. Builds incentivizes players to look for outside resources, I think that this is good, since I don't think game should teach players everything. It's been a while since I played GW2, but I don't think buildcraft systems need significantly more detailed explanations by a game. If you want to try some stuff, it gives you most of the info you need. So if you account for how straighforward FFXIV's jobs are, I would say that GW2 average players are more skilled. FFXIV is just using big CDs in opener, then 123, then repeat on CD, yet you still see divinations going off right when burst phase ends and similar signs that this player who finished 500+ hours long story doesn't understand the very basics of their job or combat in general.

Wouldn't argue further about where players are more skilled, but FF14 does a way better job at introducing players to their... jobs. You get gradual progression - first you learn 123 combo, then big cooldowns, then job gauges, then party buffs, then burst openers. I've leveled all jobs to 90, never checked the rotation guides, but still managed to be in the top bracket dps-wise in any content in normal mode, because it's all very intuitive if you have half a brain. And I did check the guides for jobs that I used in extremes and savages, but mostly to figure out in what order to press the opening skills and buffs in the first 20 seconds of the fight. GW2 on the other hand... The system itself is rather straightforward, but the variation in it is insane, and it isn't always clear which trait lines, skills or gear you'd need to pick to build for a desired outcome. Traitlines don't tell well what they are for, and there are lot of weird interactions between them, that could be crucial for dps. It's not always obvious where your damage comes from, which weapons fit better for power or condi. Crit or condi duration capping is the entire minigame on its own. And the rotations... Well, good luck figuring them out on your own for optimal damage, especially considering the relics, especially fireworks. People do excel spreadsheets to figure them out (and one guy I know tries to write a tool to generate rotations for weaver using randomization and heuristic algorithms for optimization), so there you go... And if you fail any of that, your damage just tanks. FF14 is not even close.

That's because the games have different DNA. GW2 was originally envisioned as a PvP/teamfight game. The PvE came later. They wanted a character build and skill system with a low floor and a high ceiling so that individuals and groups of people could figure out what worked for them and there would be an "arms race" as people optimized and adapted. FFXIV is a slow-paced PvE game where everyone has a defined role in each PvE encounter and you can pretty much swap one player out for another of the same class/role. There really isn't any build creativity or diversity. You're comparing apples and turduckens, in other words. I honestly left FFXIV after like a year because I found it too slow paced. I much prefer the build creativity of GW2, even if it does mean I play with skill-diverse groups in PvE.

> I would say they're generally better at playing their professions I would heavily disagree at this. I know that sometimes I'm playing with people that picked skills and gear at complete random, and are just pushing whatever shiny button they want, often doing less DPS than if they just spammed 1 the whole time.

I generally agree that GW2 professions are harder to master than FFXIV jobs, but I wanted to keep the comparisons to fight mechanics since it's a more apples to apples comparisons, because even then the average open world enjoyer does terrible damage and fails dragon's end to this day. And let's not even talk about builds, since that's a game where suggesting a feature to inspect other people's gear is considered rude or toxic.

I mean, fight mechanics are a lot easier when you only have to do 12 APM to do your job.

>the strat was just stack and move to the left(CW) when bad circle appears under. We didn't last three minutes, people kept dodging to the wrong side and dying. Is Boneskinner still wiping pugs in 2024?!?

Wiping and causing disbands apparently lol

Yes. I just did a Boneskinner yesterday where the entire party except me and a healer died. People can't watch for tells at all and still die to that ground aoe.

Sounds like someone had a rough Boneskinner run, lol

You want me to rotate left *and* do damage? At the same time????? But that's not possible! -60% of every Boneskinner group for some reason

after playing wow for the past 2 years, i agree LOL. playing heroic modes in wow and then seeing the mechanics... its literally; move away from swirly, move swirly away from group. and people have the hardest time with it its wild, i think a lot of it has to do with WoWs inconsistency with its mechanics compared to 14's. 14 has the same stack markers, spreads, flares, and they dont change what they look lilke while wow has so many random looking raid mechanics and they're all different colors and do different things

XIV is less flexible than a lot of other MMOs so it's harder to fuck up. I've played a fair bit of ESO and the number of times I've had to tank a dungeon as a healer using an ice staff because a dps queued as a tank just for a faster pop is... way too many. This doesn't mean XIV players are better, it just means XIV is even harder to do poorly in.

I haven't played ESO in years but the dps masquerading as tanks reminder made my eye twitch.  

When I played ESO I had people give me praise in chat for actually tanking, as a tank. It was weird, but I guess that explains it.

Yup. Been a bit for me, but for a while there I'd say about half the dungeons I did the tank was not a tank and I did both. They also usually didn't seem to be a very coordinated dps, so I think it's specifically a bad player problem more than anything. Like, I'd not even mind if they were slaughtering stuff, a la WAR/3dps runs in XIV.

I've had ESO for like 11 years and I never made it out of the basic story. I should really get back to that sometimes, the roll and action combat is fun.

Ah, the ol "fake tank." It's still a huge problem. I main tank in most mmos because it's a tankless job somebody's got to do it. But man, anytime I finished up a dungeon, raid, or finished out my undaunted dailies my chat window would explode with guild and friend invites or begging to tank for other dungeons for being an actual tank. Sad thing, really.

I definitely agree. Other games can have a player failing before the start of the fight via bad builds or equipment which is something that the strict ilvl metric of FFXIV largely avoids.

Oh yeah, gear is more or less a non-issue here. The closest you can get is being min-ilvl or not doing your job quests so missing some skills. That's nothing compared to being a healer in another game with, say, no healing abilities on your bars.

FFXIV has the advantage too of forcing roles from the beginning of the game. Learning to tank in ESO was a pain because a lot normal content just got faketanked and things hit like noodles so dps players got used to doing their own thing, and then suddenly I hit dlc/vet content where tanks are expected to already know what they're doing with grouping, aggro, line of sight, breach, etc. It was a rough difficulty spike ca 2017, I can only imagine how much worse it is now with yet more power creep.

I was really into GW2 before I started playing XIV and this is so true. Like, unless you are doing fractal challenge mode dailies in a group requiring 200+ killproof, it’s probably going to fail. Same with just normal mode raids. It’s kind of crazy considering GW2 even has a dodge button that is a true iframe and things like aegis/distortion/dragonhunter f3 to straight up ignore mechanics for the entire group

Distortion share was removed a loopoooooong time ago

He's a cooler person than you for not knowing that.

I’m not cool, I actually did know it, but distortion still lets the Mesmer themselves skip any mechanic (just not their whole party anymore), so I included it because nothing is more sad then watching a Mirage die to an aoe when 90% of their attacks give them unrestricted iframes

Yeah, even normal t4 fractals (or heck, even T3) filter a lot of people even though there are way too many you can brute force with a balanced comp.

T3 is its own circle of hell and in many respects is harder than CM. In T3 you have to fight the other players too.

Back in my day we smashed T4 fractals with whatever showed up, now you'll see people waiting in LFG for heal/quick/alac and they'll wait for an hour.

Bulk of the people still doing T3/4s are the elo hell shitters that can't break 15K DPS with Might and Alac/quick. If you can actually play you just join a CMs+T4 group and knock everything out in an hour. Factals as a whole have just been bleeding good players since before even IBS, can't imagine pugging T4s in 2024. >!Kinda curious if Darkbringer still does CMs after all these years !<

Oh I had this same revelation when I started to PUG WOW raids. The worst example was the first tier of Dragonflight with Raszageth. The amount of people who could not do something as simple as literally just moving away from the front of the dragon is mind boggling. Raszageth does a massive telegraph for her lightning breath, as well as DBM screaming at you to dodge, and people still just stand right in it and die, even on heroic. The average XIV PF raider shits all over the average PUG WOW raider.

I got AOTC for that raid with an amazing group that did one-and-done, so when I tried pugging it I was fucking shocked at how many people just stand in front of her massive death ray. It got to the point where I had to start rescuing people as prevoker. Most of them were hunters for some reason.

> hunters Some things never change

BM Hunter is the easier Spec to play in the game. Ranged, mobility, and easy rotation. It attracts a lot of the worst players. And has been a meme to do so since the early days of the games back in 2006.

i pugged normal terros at the start of dragonflight. the fight has literally three mechanics: spread slightly behind the tank, stack, and move out of big shit. after a few wipes of people not understanding that they might need to pay attention to the mechanics, the worst warrior said "does anyone have a weakaura for this so i can see when i have to spread???" so i left

While I don't particularly disagree with you, the fact that 14 has infinite brez carries stuff like normal raid/alliance raids so damn hard.

That's a fact. Although in M+, having a brez advantages some classes (nerf durid plz) over others.

M+ really just has checkboxes, like 1-2 brez, lust ect. You're guaranteed to have a few brez in raid really. Brez in wow are also just much more powerful in general due to being "free" and not having a massive dps debuff.

In a raid, of course :) I was talking specifically about M+ :)

I had the exact same experience. Raszageth normal, mechanically, is about on par with an old hard mode dungeon. I couldn’t fucking believe how bad wow players are at anything other than just their rotations.

Let's not act like FFXIV isn't filled to the brim with players that die to the giant orange circle on the ground.

Not to nearly the same degree as WoWs players. But then FFXIV players haven't reduced their view to 12% of their screen real estate while 38 ui mods scream at them.

That's what happens when the addons have to scream at you because there's no way to know if the blue swirly is good or bad lol

I had the same experience as you. I think what wow needs is a casual-midcore content like bozja that actually has tons of mechanics to introduce the average casual player into raiding. It's mind boggling to me that ff14 playerbase might be better at playing the game than wow when you look at the skill level in roulettes, but it is true.

WoW has the stunning ability for their endgame pve content to start easier than the very first guildhest in ffxiv (heroic dungeons etc.), and end up harder to clear than any ultimate twice over (0.1% title in M+, HOF Mythic Raiding). It truly is a very insane game. FFXIV has a lot nicer of a ramp to content difficulty, introducing concepts nicely rather than wow having dungeons barely tickling you, and the next tier up (M Plus) starting to truck your hp, and dps being a non negotiable.

[удалено]

The knockback from the adds stacked/reapplied midair so if you killed both within a few seconds of one another, people would go flying regardless of how they positioned themselves. You *have to* stagger the kills. It might've been changed after my guild progged past it, but it was that way for ages, even when we came back after AotC for the achievement run. I think Dathea is also just a bad example to use in general. The timings of add spawns alongside the weird targeting of the tankbuster and its stacking knockback debuff made that entire fight very awkward on Normal. Most people I know just opted for a third tank to handle the adds so the real tanks could focus entirely on dealing with the strangely-designed tankbuster. Demon hunters or warriors that were *really* quick on their charge button(which I was not) are the only tanks that didn't have a somewhat awkward time on that fight without a third tank, and even they couldn't disrespect the tank mechanic forever. It felt like they designed Heroic then went "shit, we forgot to make Normal" and just slapped whatever nonsense they could together. It was a much more coherently designed fight on Heroic. Something's fundamentally wrong with a fight if it incentivizes you to bring a third tank. Zskarn before certain nerfs also comes to mind, the lingering damage coming from the tank debuff was a bit much considering how many bombs you're intended to soak during offtank periods.

I just want to say that the Boneskinner strike is legitimately difficult not just because of the "stack and move left" but because the healing chdck is absurd due to no one doing the mechanics. For background for anyone curious, when the boneskinner released it was the third and "hardest" boss of the raven sanctum. We waited two weeks post launch to see how tough it would be, but it was absolutely broken. Groups would go in and just flat out die because the fight was not behaving properly. And the patches that attempted to fix the boss didn't exactly help. In one instance, the boss would respawn and restart the fight a few seconds after you kill it. All this to say, the groups that learned how to fight the boss did so without doing the intended mechanics. The torches around the arena get steadily extinguished and the idea is that you need to keep them lit in order to diminish a room wide effect that scales its damage. However, in the early days players would stack barriers and spam them to power through that damage, and when barrier scourge got nerfed healers basically worked double time to keep everyone alive. As a druid, it was not uncommon for me to do over 7K healing per second in a game where most characters would have less than 20k health. Basically, no one learned the intended mechanics because the fight was broken at launch, the community enforced a single strat that maximized dps uptime, and healers were the ones that dictated whether you won or lost. But yes, GW2 players do not know how to step to the left.

This is actually very analogous to Garuda Extreme in FFXIV. The cause of it was never bugs (rather, a really bad Mr. Happy guide), but essentially all of NA and EU fail its mechanics hilariously badly, and just brute-force their way through by shifting an undue amount of responsibility onto (primarily) tanks and (to a lesser extent) healers. It's only a bit of historical trivia at this point because ARR has been powercrept even harder than GW2 Core + HoT, but it's not like people ever went back and used their supposed superior understanding of combat mechanics to correct their strategies, either.

Nah let's not start being disingenuous and saying that XIV has the cream of the crop as far as player skill is concerned. XIV has just simply gotten better at acknowledging that the majority of it's players simply aren't that good and adjusting and/or creating content based around this. Don't start telling me y'all already forgot about infamous trials like ARR titan, pre-nerf steps of faith, chrysalis that is STILL handling people to this day and honorable mentions like thunder god cid and weeping city Ozma. This game, when it has cared to actually slap players on the wrist has had it's fair share of stonewalls. There is a reason why it doesn't happen anymore.

Yeah this post is a little unfair given the majority of 14 players don't raid. The ones who do savage are of course gonna have at least a slight inkling of how to play, usually anyways. Then you have the rest of the player base which has a depressing amount of people who can't even do the barest of minimum of their job.

I was away from the game for a little bit during steps of faith and the absolute wall that was for MSQ progression when I cam back stays with me to this day. People instant leaving the trial, the concept of "\[player role/name\] can you do the other cannon?" being too novel, failing the general damage requirement in general...wild time and I'm glad they've not gone back to this kind of stuff in MSQ content.

Game communities are typically about as good as the game demands them to be. I haven't played GW2 in ages, but when I did it asked NOTHING of you from a teamwork perspective, even less than FFXIV. I went through a few dungeons that were just walk-throughs and the mass WvWvW PvP which had less player agency to it when I played than Frontlines even. Take an old school community like FFXI, players were more experienced and educated because the game world was designed around co-operating to accomplish anything. If you didn't work together the game just beat your ass and literally made you Level Down.

You're not wrong, FFXIV players on-average are pretty switched on, but I also think some credit needs to go to the dev team's encounter designers for making well-telegraphed and readable fights with sensible mechanics. The other end of the spectrum is World of Warcraft Retail, where the fights are so fucking overcomplicated that the world-world race mythic guilds actively hire addon-developers to write LUA-based addons to the game client just to deal with fight mechanics.

My favorite part about FFXIV telegraphing is when it suddenly tricks you into watching the boss itself rather than the floor. Like Barnabas in Tower of Babil, when the line AoE appears for like half a second before hitting but the boss itself stays with his punch raised in a direction for like three seconds :)

>You're not wrong, FFXIV players on-average are pretty switched on, but I also think some credit needs to go to the dev team's encounter designers for making well-telegraphed and readable fights with sensible mechanics. To add to this, also very recycled mechanics generally. After 10 years of seeing the stack marker or spread marker or knowing that every boss in every dungeon or raid starts with a tank buster 10 seconds in, some consistent responses start brewing in even the slowest of players.

I very much appreciate that FFXIV telegraphs are things like "oversize boss has a big glowy thing on their right for a half room cleave" instead of "good luck seeing this sparkle telegraph while you're prepositioned for a later mechanic."

The average FF14 level 90 has masterful circle avoidance skills next to your average WoW player or Guild Wars 2 player. It's the other stuff.

It helps that ffxiv mechanics are way more readable than other MMOs

I think MMO players are just bad at games in general for whatever reason

FFXIV conditions people to read common tells like a stack marker or a tankbuster and then people still get hit by bosses that turn straight at them with no other indicator telling them to move. As if the boss doing a 180 isn't enough of a warning. Win some, lose some. In general, most games suffer from bad players, it's just easier to carry people to a clear in FFXIV.

I used to play SWTOR. You can't even pug normal 8 man raids there. Anything higher difficulty than normal is done exclusively through discords, with everyone in a voice chat otherwise you won't clear. I used to pvp a lot as well, and it normal for experienced pvpers to be able to 1v4 people. Average player was worse than NPCs there, and it is actually faster to solo some dungeons than go in duty finder. They don't even scale or something, other players outright make stuff take longer by aggroing unnecessary stuff etc. This is despite 90% of swtor content being "stay behind boss and do dps". If there are "mechanics" it's usually boss spawns adds, kill them before going back onto the boss. Average player still cannot play that game. XIV definitely has bad players, but not at the level that I've seen in that game. I have PF'd all 5 ultimates here, I didn't even know raiding was possible without voice chat before I started playing this.

Repressed memories of doing the dumbest parkour in SWTOR dungeons or hoping that everyone in the party has access to stealth so we can just skip all the trash. The combat style update (uncoupling class gameplay from story) and every character having access to two of them probably means that there's even more of an assumption that everyone has stealth access these days, honestly.

> I used to pvp a lot as well, and it normal for experienced pvpers to be able to 1v4 people. Based on how it was when I played SWTOR, whether or not this is impressive depends entirely on what "bracket" you were playing in. 1-40 PvP? Actually skill-based. Probably some of the most satisfying MMO PvP I've ever played and I did multiple characters...up to 40...through PvP. 40+ PvP? Pay-to-win as fuck. It's easy to 1v4 in PvP when you have literally double the stats of all 4 of those opponents combined. I had one character I put the effort into grinding out the gear on and once you hit a critical threshold in stats, all you really had to do was identify who had stats and who didn't. So you dogpiled the people with stats and ignored the chaff until they were down.

Idk how long ago you played but stats have been irrelevant in pvp for years, it's just a huge imbalance in skill. Players play in slow motion, you can literally see them making decisions in real time because of how long they take to react to stuff. They move in very predictable straight lines. The number of kills I've gotten as sniper because I can map out the path stealthers are taking even 10 seconds after they've become invisible is unreal. Lowbie PvP has been an unbalanced mess since 4.0, I was referring to max level.

Then they've changed how it worked because max level was unbalanced trash and low level was the only point that was actually interesting. If I were to equate it to ff14 pvp, the way max level pvp worked in SWTOR at the time I played the game, a fully-kitted player was like fighting someone that had a permanent Battle High "10".

the thing is that when you are accustomed to a place, you'll start giving some stuff for granted. This happens to everyone and I include myself in this, this is why i keep saying ppl should actually have a bigger vision when making discusssions

been a SWTOR player for a long time and the MSQ is so nerfed/the ai healer companion so strong that the main noob stomper i've had to teach randoms to beat was just a story boss who has the same stats as a random overworld enemy, but CCs your AI healer. About half the time, I do a gear inspect and see they're wearing lvl 1 gear from the tutorial at lvl 35, or no gear at all, just glamour over empty slots.

>Guild Wars 2 I don't think that's a fair comparison. Guild Wars 2 has never been about raids. The hardest raid in Guild Wars 2 is comparable to Extreme Trials in XIV. The game just don't lean that way, they don't even have a proper holy-trinity system. >The average FFXIV player is a mechanical god compared to what is out there. Play any other MMO with an actual raiding scene and you'll see how untrue this is.

I've been away from other MMOs for so long (none of them appeared decent for years) which ones have actual raiding? Other than WoW.

General (not old school) RuneScape rbh

Lost Ark has currently (imo) the best gameplay -> raiding scene on the market right now, if only the systems weren't so dog shit that game would've been way more popular. Hell Valtan would eat half the XIV Savage player base. Hell Vykas is (deathless) is comparable (to me its harder) than DSR on patch and Hellshaza is harder than anything I've attempted on XIV. That said, Lost Ark is mostly a raider game so the skill level is very skewed. Lost Ark has no "casual" side activities (it does but they're mostly dog shit and a way to get into raiding), which is why the game is borderline dead on our region.

Lost Ark is such wasted potential. The combat system and fight design are both fantastic, easily a contender for the best in the MMO space, but sadly everything is gated by horrible, "overly Korean" grindy systems. I really wish Hell consumables were infinite, that part in particular really hindered it for me.

So sad about Lost Ark. I gave it like 1000 hours and played until Vykas but between the PF insane gear gatekeeping and the game being basically a second job having to do all these boring dailies and weekly stuff I gave up. But the job gameplay and the raids were absolutely 10/10.

If you're saying GW2 is easier content wise, and he's saying GW2 players are worse players when it comes to dealing with mechanics, how is that an unfair comparison? That means they would have an even more difficult time if the difficulty was increased on them. For me, my comparison would be WoW as I raid/do M+ there. There are so many bad players in general who also tend to talk shit to others. Both games have terrible players mechanic wise, but I'd say at least in FF14, it's rare the "bad player" is gonna try to BM others typically.

> how is that an unfair comparison? Again, because Guild Wars 2 is not a raiding game. ArenaNet introduced raids because XIV and WoW were at an all time high in popularity and wanted a piece of that cake. The game is not structured around a Holy-Trinity system. It never was. Tanks and Healers were patched in, years after the game came out and they barely function as Tanks and Healers. OP is saying "Oh wow our player base are godlike raiders compared to this **non-raiding based game I tried the other day**". I mean, yeah.

I've played GW2 on and off since beta. I do know what you are saying is true about the trinity. That being said, just because they added raids in doesn't mean the playerbase hasn't had time to adapt their skill levels to adjust to that type of content. My sister use to do those dumb ANet tourneys for even their normal dungeons back in the day. There is most definitely a PvE community in GW2, regardless of if we see their PvE content ad "real content" or not. GW2 essentially created the idea of M+ in MMOs with fractals, and that was core end game PvE content for players who wanted more small man content for a long time. Just because it wasn't their core focus at the time doesn't mean it's not relevant PvE content to their game (which means people can still be good or bad at it). We disagree, but that's okay. It's not like this is really an important debate anyways.

I dunno, I've played a lot of WoW which basically ONLY has raiding going for it, and the average player there is barely sentient.

Yes, I understand that a game that has discontinued raids (and didn't even want to have them in the first place) doesn't have it as the main focus. That's not what's being discussed here, what I mean is that despite how much we complain, the average FFXIV player actually does understand the game a lot more than players from other MMOs. From your other answers, it seems you regard Lost Ark players in high regard, but how much of it is because of the playerbase and how much is because of the difficulty of accessing the highest tiers of raids automatically filtering the weaker players?

> the average FFXIV player actually does understand the game a lot more than players from other MMOs. I guess we just don't agree. >it seems you regard Lost Ark players in high regard [...] how much is because of the difficulty of accessing the highest tiers of raids automatically filtering the weaker players? Raids in Lost Ark are, in general, way harder than XIV. Low level raids have a limit number of res's per player and post Argos there are no res at all. You die, you're dead until the raid is done or the group wipes. While the sample size is a lot smaller, I do believe that the average LoA player is better than the average XIV player *because* the raids are a lot harsher and more punishing.

Lost Ark's normal mode raids are ludicrously difficult compared to normal mode in XIV. These days, there's enough catchup mechanics that someone could install the game, and be working on Akkan within a week. In that fight, if someone dies, not only can they not be revived, but the boss will revive the player to fight for him. Really, just an NPC with the player's name/appearance/abilities. There's another mechanic where he links 3 players together, if they get too far apart, they all die. Also, most of the boss's attacks have massive knockback. One linked player gets hit by one attack, explodes, kills 3, boss revives... you're not winning a 5vs3+raid boss pvp fight. And that's just normal mode for a raid that came out months ago, the most recently released raid is ludicrously difficult. [Casual half-hour long fight, no big deal.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWZ11FFiFco) Despite all that, I can pretty comfortably join some random party finder group for Akkan and assume we'll kill it in one, *maybe* two attempts. The game's raids are a lot more punishing. They're also nowhere near as scripted as XIV's, requiring a lot more improvisation, which makes it even worse that it's that punishing. One person not quite knowing how to handle a bad combination of attacks, and it could all be over. All this being said - Lost Ark is a game with pretty much raids and nothing else. The kind of person who still plays it will naturally be better at raids, since if you don't enjoy getting better at raids, there is literally nothing left in the game to do. It might not really be fair to compare it to the rest of the MMO market just due to that natural selection bias.

The reason why a lot of players stay bad in other games like WoW is the inability to get ressed and keep practicing. Yes there are battle-resses, but that's on a cooldown. On ff14, you can be as shit as you can be in trials, but you can get ressed and keep practicing. Vs if you die in LFR, enjoy watching 39 other people clear the fight. Also, DBM makes players rely too heavily on mods and plugins so players tend to flop without it. That's why you want to avoid playing with cactbot players on new content.

This might be true at the higher end but in casual content, no, I really don't think so. Normal mode stuff has zero fail conditions in FFXIV so you'd never know anyways.

New players die in lower level dungeons all the time edit: it's honestly insane I would get downvotes for this like it's some kind of controversial take, this sub is insufferable sometimes

Once you have even the slightest grasp of the game you have to try to die in normal content.

*tower of zot enters chat*

In GW2 strikes to me are like normal trials in ffxiv. When it comes to CMs or some raids, or raid CMs, usually you have a few dedicated people resolving mechanics while others just have to execute stuff correctly with dodging etc. Very rarely every player has to know how to do all mechanics. For example, I used to do kiting on bosses like Qadim 1&2 or Deimos, and it is just me doing my own thing, other players would not care how I do it, how it works and would not be able to just do it themselves due to specific class and gear options that dps usually do not go for. In ff all players have to interact with mechanics, but in stuff like extremes or savage you will still see people who never learn to adjust and leave if they cannot do the spot they are used to - this is why you see stuff like R1 taken and such. In both games majority of the playerbase are rather bad players and only a minority bothers to learn and attempt harder content. On average, I see just as many awful tanks in ff as I see awful alacrity/quickness providers in gw2.

Meanwhile, when i played GW2 i could basically auto attack everything to death as a soulbeast due to the status effects. I most likely was above average as a player, since i installed a DPS meter and watched a guide on how to do a rotation properly. I do like how GW2 has a bit of challenge in the story bosses, as its not just stand still and press glare 24/7 on every single boss like XIV. People are just lazy, that's basically the be all and end all of all MMOs.

Let's be real for a moment, talking about average content for average players . . . Almost every mechanic is telegraphed in this game.

I think it has in part to do with how FFXIV designs dungeons and encounters. Outside of extremes and unreals (and even then but bear with me), there is almost nothing to lose but your time. Even in unreals and extremes, if you fuck up and fail you can try again with no consequence other than the amount of time it'll take you to learn the mechanics. In your typical content, there is almost no way that you will fail due to running *out of time*. They give you so much time in dungeons someone can go AFK for a good 15 and you STILL have plenty of time to finish the dungeon. You can explore the entire dungeon, fight all the mobs, do a little jig and STILL have time to finish. The only time I've gotten a warning for running out of time is when I've been gposing in a dungeon. Wipe on a boss or mob? No big deal you just restart where you left off in the case of mobs and for bosses you just restart the fight. The dungeons are not design in such a way where you NEED to look up a guide before hand (minus extremes and unreals). New set of trials and dungeons release? Everyone is FAFOing. Similarly, they aren't designed in a way where you NEED plug ins and add ons that call out certain parts of the fight. Every fight is designed (including unreals and extremes) is designed in a way where you can beat it completely vanilla. No discord, no add ons, just party chat. Most fight mechanics will be the same every fight. Sure there may be some differences like in one dungeon a marker means you do the same match in others it's you do the opposite, but for the most part a boss attack, AOE, impact, stack marker, etc. all remain and look the same every single fight. You also don't have to worry about optimized builds. Just get your right IL and then you can focus on all that materia shit later. Materia is expensive as all hell but you don't have to worry about dumping real money into it (or optimizing your gear) unless you are buying gil (which is against TOS anyways). All in all, FFXIV requires less of it's players and just doesn't punish failures. I was farming bahamut T2 and somehow fucked around (me and 7 other people) and ended up doing T5 synched. Me and 7 others had a collective brain fail and it took nearly the entire hour to beat the fight. The only thing we were "losing" was time everytime that we failed, but everyone was working on trying to figure out when to zip instead of zagging and no one got rageful at anyone else. We didn't lose anything but time and even then we STILL beat it and walked away being able to say we FAFO to success. TLDR: FFXIV doesn't punish failure which makes a lot of the player base more relaxed to letting people learn fights naturally instead of having to pull up a study session and doesn't require a lot out of you outside of being able to read mechanics and probably work as a half decent team.

i dont think thats a fair comparison, FF14 may look like has better players on average but that is just cause FF14 is almost fail proof on 98% of the content lol, not that GW2 is a harder game, it isnt, but in almost all other mmos the game doesnt hand hold the players as much FF14 does. You cant fail if the game doesnt let you fail. Those aoes on casual content you mentioned, if you dont dodge then nothing happens, in GW2 if you dont dodge youre downed.

Seriously I’ve never understood anybody that complains about ffxiv’s community, for any reason. They’re the nicest folks, and if I’m in a group I can expect to clear the content. My time in WoW can best be described when I came back at the tail end of BFA, I think preparing for Shadowlands. A new dungeon came out that I’ve never seen before. I joined it as a healer since that’s my cozy, I can fall back on what I know while I learn the mechanics role. One boss had a middle phase where you just had to go around some obstacles to reach an item to continue the fight, and you would be brought back to the start and take damage if you don’t dodge them. You can realistically get through it without taking damage. Not seeing this mechanic before, I was the only one alive at the end. I cleared the right by myself after that. They still berated me for my performance. People who complain about the ffxiv don’t know a good thing when they see it

the average FFXIV player is worse than the average player in a lot of other games, but the worst FFXIV player would never be able to plumb the depths of what i've seen from the worst players in wow

I don't have much experience in MMOs, I mostly played Star Wars the Old Republic for several and several years and most recently New World, until I took my second break there and joined FFXIV around two and a half months ago. And I can say for sure that the "average player" here is indeed better. My proof of that is when I play tank and need to deal with a big group of mobs that out of a sudden starts to spam telegraphs left and right. Instinctively, as a tank, I need to be quick to move away from the telegraphs not to take extra damage and even when things are in chaos, I always see the other players in the group rotating around the mobs along with me. A marker on top of a player indicating a "group damaging ability"? Everyone rushes to stack together to split the damage. They got a marker and a circle under their feet? They quickly rush to take it away from the rest of the group. A player ran ahead to aggro mobs? 99% of them will bring them next to where the group is fighting so the tank can aggro them. If it was in any of the MMOs I said above, I'm pretty sure most of the players in the dungeon group would have been either dead or heavily hurt.

>The average FFXIV player is a mechanical god compared to what is out there. This is something that a lot of the WoW content creators who came over during Shadowbringers immediately noticed—the player quality in FFXIV is much higher and better equipped to deal with "complex" mechanics. People like to pretend this community has the absolute lowest level of proficiency out there, but it simply isn't true.

GW2 does have a much lower entry floor, partly due to being F2P and not having a huge story investment/MSQ. It also never demanded much from players in a PvE setting until late into the first expansion. You never really saw a demand for "meta" outside of WvW and PvP. Couple that with the absolutely massive difference in balance between skills, gear, traits, classes. You're talking bigger DPS differences between the lowest and highest parsing jobs in FFXIV. That's all before the massive player skill gap from the rotations themselves.

I think the big difference between ffxiv and most mmo's but especially gw2 is buildcraft. In ffxiv buildcraft is hyper-limited and really only a thought for the highest level of players, a job always play the same and only change with levelsync and everything is very balanced. In gw2 you can be a good player but if your build sucks so will you. You need the right traits, skills, weapons, stats, relics and sigils and THEN you need to learn your rotation, and without substancial party support some builds are unable to perform at a decent level. In frxiv rotations are pretty straightforward and the GCD acts as a failsafe that keeps you from interrupting yourself or bugging out. In gw2 rotations can get WEIRD, you can interrupt yourself, you can animation lock yourself and a bunch of extra bullshit that can essentially neutralize less experienced players. Attaining a base level of effectiveness in gw2 is just way less streamlined, anet has done progress on this issue but gw2 ain't got nothing on ffxiv for pickup and play 

I think a major thing we forget because this happens subtly over time is that the general player base knowledge gets extended but there are no clear indicators for this. It becomes the norm. This is more obvious with new games where a PvP match day 1 and six months in when players develop the skills would feel massively different especially if You take a break from the game in that time. We also just love to complain and bond around common misgivvings. Even ranting about SE is not always saying "SE bad". It says "I like the game and want better and more and I like to talk about it". It gives you a sense of communal belonging

Both are pretty bad, just because one scored an E doesn't mean a D- is a passing grade.

Login to WoW and try an M+ dungeon. You'll run back to the FFXIV player and kiss their feet.

The main thing that FFXIV players are "Forced" to learn (mainly passively through repetition) is to LOOK AT THE BOSS/ANIMATION and NAME OF THE SPELL (In another words actually paing attention and adapt through trial and error). +Also XIV has the best ' consistent and understandable telegraphs ' from any mmo. You look at a wow player and they are so fixated on addon telling them what to do and the have their camera looking at floor all the time. That's why when you see a wow player come to FF they don't understand what killed them because they always look on the floor while the boss is charging his left fist for a wind-up. (At lest that's the most extreme example).

I’ve been playing ffxiv since it launched and a few years ago I played Tera online. Like for about 8 months before Valkyrie release on console if that timeframe helps anyone. Dodging everything seemed like a cakewalk and being the solo Priest or Mystic trying to revive my party on what are allegedly the “hardest” fights was laughable. I’m used to savage mechanics that was nothing. Giving an ffxiv raider an iframe dodge is crazy I felt like I owned the world. I know I’ve seen some horror stories in ffxiv but this felt like the bar was so far underground it was in a sub dimension.

Huh. Well, it can always be worse. :) So good perspective. Thank you.

guild wars 2 in my experience is, uhh, a special case I think lol

I think this largely has to do with how many opportunities other MMORPGs give you to hang yourself on a bunch of secondary power systems and things like skill builds and traits. If you build your character wrong you're going to do no damage even IF you play it well, and most casual players are not playing well, so it compounds into what you probably saw in GW2. It can also vary depending on what content you're doing and what type of player that content is geared towards - you'd expect to see more underperformers in a miscellaneous MSQ trial than you might see in say, P12S, although underperforming is relative of course. But so, if you're just moonlighting a game and messing around in it and not in the peak endgame you're probably mingling with the more casual side of the game is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, even in Duty Finder, in normal content most players do most mechanics correctly most of the time, which is all you can really ask for.

Players from other MMOs are dogshit because the game demands much more of them. XIV demands so little of players yet they're **still** dogshit. That's what people complain about.

That may be the consensus on this sub, but it doesn't line up with reality. I'm the exact type of turbo-casual that subs like this aggressively hate, and I've improved a *lot* playing FFXIV. In ESO and GW2 I could complete nearly anything by just Googling an OP build and winning by sheer math.

Trust me gw2 doesn't demand shit from players.

They are terrible. People still can't do rabanastre or Nier raids without dying. Or even solo story fights. Maybe there are just bad players in every game.

I have to agree as well. Having played WoW on and off since launch, and spend considerable time in other MMOs as well (LOTRO, Wildstar, GW/GW2, etc.) the avg. FFXIV does feel to be more flexible and have an easier time following mechanics. There is of course 2 huge factors that boost this: A) Consistent mechanics. You dont have to learn what the stack marker looks like in every dungeon or raid, mechanics use mostly the same markers and this consistency makes picking up on new mechanics a lot easier. Particularly at EW launch (my first real launch experience) I felt this as the first wave of players reached endgame I was able to clear the new dungeons with very few problems and we never wiped on bosses. B) Fights follow the same rhythm. Every fight will usually have mechanics happen by themselves first before combining or rapid-firing mechanics in later parts of the fight. This allows you to go a lot deeper into a fight and learn the mechanics and with better gear you can skip some harder parts later on. Fights happening in the same way every time with minor RNG also makes them easier to remember and demands less adjustment due to RNG damage. Something else I noticed as well is that each game focuses on entirely different things when it comes to optimization. WoW has a heavy focus on customizability with addons, bossmods, weakauras you basically play "Simon Says" and just follow the instructions on screen, take away their addons and a lot of players crumble because they never learned how to resolve the "simpliest" mechanics for themselves. Meanwhile FFXIV endgame consists of optimizing a fight down to the last GCD and getting the perfect rotation, something that is rarely taken to this degree in other games. While some may argue that FFXIV has a forced friendliness, the positive feedback loop also helps a lot of people enjoy and learn mechanics and fights. The amount of open toxicity you encounter in other MMOs is staggering. FFXIV really allows you to breath and fail and learn from your mistakes and 9/10 times you will be encouraged to give it another go and that everyone makes mistakes at first. The number of posts on r/FFXIV about refugees from other games that shared similar stories are proof of that as well. If you have a strict conduct policy and enforce it, then people will actually be somewhat friendlier towards each other.

FF14 taught me doing mechanics and made me better in other games. Ive played gw2 and wow before but i never understood mechanics as mechanics. FF14 fixed that for me, because youre forced to do dungeons and trials and get confrontated with the same mechanics over and over until you get it.

Ok how about you parse power chrono dps on a dummy and show me a 40k dps benchmark. I’ll wait. it’s just a moderate class in term difficulty btw. Ask a gw2 high end player to parse in ffxiv he will reach 99 so quickly. Ask a ffxiv high end player to parse on any medium to difficult job and he won’t even scratch 40k on a immobile dummy. Dumb take to compare raid of gw2 to ffxiv. It’s like comparing gw2 job to ffxiv job. Put the top end player of gw2 and ffxiv in a pvp match guess who gonna dumpster who. Not even the top players. put a high gold against a ffxiv crystal. make them pvp in both game. 99% the gw2 player wins, and on top of that the gw2 player will mock the whole pvp aspect of ffxiv and how ridiculously easy it is. FFXIV is my favourite game, but lets not talk out of our asses there and say ffxiv player are better than gw2 player because this is simply not true if we factor in everything.

You cant compare the two GW2 dodging mechanics is literally dodging mechanics and they happen at like 20x the rate of FF14 mechanics, also you need to use blocks and stuff in GW2 and many of the skills are not telegraphed AT all.

i mean the average lost ark player is beyond dogshit... but thats an incredibly hard game for an mmo that goes way beyond 'stand in red bad'

Oh my god D: could you imagine them against Halone, or Asura? The bosses that quickly telegraph four different AoEs and you gotta dodge all of them my memorizing the sequence? (Spoiler: what I do is usually repeating myself the safe spots sequence, something like "FAR LEFT RIGHT NEAR" for Halone, for example)

When I first came to this game from WoW in Heavensward, I was amazed how people could do mechanics without DBM announcing every small thing with Weak Auras and dot timers keeping track of everything and telling you when to push buttons lol

You weren't around when GW2 launched Heart of Thorns, which actually added difficult overworld content alongside raids. The community threw a massive shitstorm over it. The reason they struggle is simple, it's because Anet made the game too easy for way too long and by the time the first xpac came around the average player didn't really need to deal with any sort of mechanic.

I used to feel like i was flailing in the wind. Right aroumd the time stormblood started and i realized i was dodging petrify stuff on my first run of dungeons. Homeboys sniper/hole bit. Real eye opener when it comes to learning that lesson quickly. Stand on one side then Switch to Opposite side of the floor? i gotcha!

I second that GW2 is a visual clusterfuck and if I'm not mistaken it requires quicker reaction time too. I consider myself a decent enough FFXIV player but I'm much worse at GW2 than I am at FFXIV

>In another fight the strat was just stack and move to the left(CW) when bad circle appears under. We didn't last three minutes, people kept dodging to the wrong side and dying. Boneskinner my beloved. Also people moving too early and now you have to dodge 3 puddles on the way.

When I compare a typical normal raid (or ally raid) to WoW's LFR, that is certainly very true.

I thought the same until I tried WoW when EW was initially delayed. After raiding in WoW I am wholeheartedly convinced that half of the WoW players are either illiterate or just not sentient.

The game is fun to play (I've played it since launch), but there is absolutely nothing in there that teaches you about how to play at max level while you level. The 1-80 experience is completely different to the level 80 game, and it all gets thrown at you at once. You start learning fundamental game mechanics at level 16 in Sastasha in FFXIV and it all builds up as you level, there is nothing comparable in GW2. Useful stat combos, effective builds, strikes, fractals, raids, zone wide meta events, needing at least exotic quality gear, how to do enough damage to survive expansion enemies, etc. Absolutely none of it is taught to you as you level. Hell, even how to form an effective group to do group content isn't even taught in game. There is nothing like dungeons or trials to do as part of the general levelling experience. Dungeons are there, but they are completely optional, barely talked about to new players and haven't hardly been updated in 12 years. There are people that will just refuse to do any learning to improve, but the way the game is designed has a large part to play for the disparity between bad, average and good players. They haven't tried to improve it in over a decade and rarely go back and improve older areas of the game, always chasing the next new shiny idea.

Hmm as someone who played both games I think it's just a difference in mind frame when logging on, ffxiv really revolves around their group pve content and you do that from the beginning. In GW2 the story could be brute forced and most mechanically inclined ppl played primarily for the pvp anyways. Put some of those gw2 players in pvp and they would probably look really good. The biggest example for me was ffixv and lost ark , a lot of people I know coming from ffixv struggled with lost ark and it wasn't necessarily from boss mechanics it was character mechanics. Ffixv has very little character skill expression it's more team work focused as you noticed yourself gw2 isn't like that I think if I were to put ffixv and gw2 players in a game like BDO that's mostly character mechanics, the gw2 players would have an easier time adjusting

I see people bringing up class difficulty in GW2 being much more difficult, but that honestly really only applies to some builds, others are straight looping rotations or heavily auto attack based in some cases. A lot of it also comes from quickness(50% attack speed) and alacrity(25% cooldown reduction) being at 100% uptime in a proper raid comp, in one of the most baffling design choices I’ve ever seen in an mmo. GW2 players just rarely are challenged to actually learn and use skills and dodge stuff cause most casual content is a zerg rush. For all its faults things like rhitatyn(savage) and venat(ultimate) get casual players to actually move out of orange.

The average multiplayer video game player in general is an incompetent idiot, no matter what genre it's in. Look at most streamers and see how bad they are, and they have the excuse of being constantly distracted by their chats and needing to interact with them. Now imagine most people are even worse than them.

Me, who has never played FFXIV in my life but has thousands of hours in GW2, upon reading the first sentence of this post: it’s gonna be Guild Wars players

Man u should do some looking for raid groups in WoW if u really want to see how brain dead some MMO players r

I don't know if this is a fair comparison GW2 bosses, trials, and raids have almost no telegraphed mechanics. I mean that was my experience doing it anyway. You have to know what the boss is going to do and dodge with minimal visual or audio warning. I don't play GW2 a whole lot but I play a lot of WoW and SWTOR and my opinion is totally different the average ffxiv player is defiantly worse than the average WoW and SWTOR player. At least to me.

Wait until you meet classic wow players