Everyone talks about the hard content in these games but easy content is important too and we don’t really talk about that. I know I only specifically mentioned normal dungeons but I stand by my statements in this video even if they were for heroic and mythic 0 as well.
source
u should compare with mythic 0 not normal tbh , mythic 0 fits what u are describing much better , normal dungeons aren't even considered content
Can have more of this good insight! Really love the insight, and not a "wow vs ffxiv", the premise clearly explained.
Looking forward for more!
Spot on, this is whats called a secondary natural reinforcer in behaviourism 🙂
I think it's really cool to focus on easy content since that's what most people will be doing and experiencing anyway.
But I can't agree with you here. XIV's normal content is just staggeringly bad and unenjoyable to play. It's all wholly reliant on spectacle, with little else going on. Class design in XIV is laser-focused on super-ultra high end raiding and the parse-obsessed players that pitch a hissy fit if a class is 2% or 3% off from another, so that means that all classes have to be designed basically the same (unless designing and balancing those classes is going to be the majority of your work-hours), and it's also caused them to remove a whole lot of buttons that would give you cool things to do in dungeons and normal content where stuns, silences, and the like are actually relevant.
I think XIV's very slow GCD plays into this here, a lot. They have a lot of oGCD abilities, but they tend to have very long cooldowns compared to WoW. Compare an XIV Warrior's Upheaval or Fell Cleave to a WoW Warrior's Shield Charge or Shield Slam or Revenge. Compare an XIV Warrior's Inner Release to a WoW Warrior's Avatar or other similar 1-minute buttons. The buttons that are fun to hit, you don't get to hit very much. And everything in between is miserable. And then you add aggressive item level syncing, which screws with your carefully tuned GCD timing with skill/spell speed to the mix and it gets worse.
XIV is really weird. The better you get at the game, the worse the casual content feels. Not because it's bad – it's actually quite good for the reasons you expressed – but because they have "ruined" everything outside of top-end raiding by the obsessive way they design the game and balance it. This is especially true for content below the level cap, as they have very clearly not spent much time considering what it's like to level fresh characters. They've let the very few dictate overall design for the many. It's a terrible decision and it's one of the top three or four complaints I have with the game, and why I inevitably get bored and take lengthy breaks. I've always come back… but for how long? I don't know. Endwalker has made a lot more errors than Shadowbringers or Stormblood did, so I think it will depend heavily on what they do with the next expansion and design for it.
As an example, I played Wrath of the Lich King Classic for about a month, after I'd heard they had created "fresh servers" where outside gold etc wouldn't be allowed in. Rolled up a tauren on Maladath and got some good old nostalgia vibes in. Thing is, though, around level 16 or so (basically, as soon as you've got Improved Revenge online), I was enjoying the leveling process simply for gameplay's sake. It was a fun loop of charge, wait for big revenge hits, repeat. It didn't matter that I had to kill 20 bears to get 3 bear asses, the basic flow of combat felt enjoyable and it only improved as I finally got Shield Slam, Sword and Board, etc. I also came to really appreciate "was that a boss?" in dungeons instead of huge, big spectacle fights that are designed to take a pretty arbitrary amount of time and work off very rigid scripts. XIV's dungeon bosses look and sound great, but I don't know if I'd agree they play great. If the content is going to be so casual that failure is pretty much impossible, I'd also prefer it to be a brief experience. You can kill a typical dungeon boss, even the final boss, in a WotLK dungeon in like… 10-20 seconds, depending on your group. You're probably looking at 90-120 seconds for a strong group in XIV, in no small part to so many bosses having forced downtime mechanics. These mechanics look and sound great, and maybe they're even fun to do once or twice, but on repeat visits they're tiresome and bland.
When I was leveling in WotLK, it was very common that groups would end up running the same dungeon two, three, sometimes even more times in a row. It was like a 12ish minute loop to clear through Shadowfang Keep, we got some useful loot for future leveling and a pile of XP, and it was fun… why wouldn't we go more than once if people are down for it? But I've literally never seen people in a group go "hey we should totally do it again!" for dungeons in XIV unless they were after something for glamour, a minion or trading card, etc. XIV's content, by its slow and scripted nature, wears out its welcome pretty fast. WoW's isn't pretty or flashy, but at least the gameplay is fun.
It's two different approaches to design, and obviously influenced by the game engines. I think I'd unequivocally favor XIV if they'd only just stop fixating so much on designing and tuning for sweaty bois raiding and instead focused on making classes unique and fun. If just going out in the world and killing bears in the woods is boring, then I think you've fucked up on a fundamental level and need to seriously reconsider everything you're building on top of your foundation.
Eh? On WoW no banger music during boss?
Thing about "easy" content is that it still needs to be challenging. Might sound counter-intuitive but being challenging isn't necessarily the same as being difficult. Challenges can vary in difficulty, but a well-designed challenge can be engaging even of it's not too difficult. FFXIV gets this balance well on normal difficulty, my only complaint is that there might be a level of difficulty missing. It's like there's a normal, but the next one is very hard instead of just hard.
I am trying dragonflight after a shadowland break from wow where i was playing ffxiv for the first time.
After spending hundreds of hours on xiv it feels like torture to go back to wow.
I really am trying to like it because the story/zones/and dragon flying is so good.
But the gameplay is just so…outdated i dont know how to put it, no class feels good to play, and the quests/normal dungeons teach you nothing important for your class or mechanically where as xiv story is do or die but done in an easy but engaging fun way.
I will keep trying to like wow again until 6.3 but i at this point I rather run praetorium 10 times a day.
Content in wow feels like its made on a conveyer belt with minimal shiny differences here and there to make the illusion its different. Also, blizzard has this awful mentality towards instances where they are made not to be enjoyed, but to be competitive at, its like they didn't give up on the idea to make an esport out of dungeons and listen to the pro guilds what they want. And, to top it off, there is the plague of addons that make bosses braindead to do.
FF, on the other hand, has way less dungeons and odds are that you will stick to 1-3 dungeons at a time to do over and over again. But they take much longer to burn you out, because they are tailored in a way to keep your attention and to give you joy and satisfaction. Sure, the formula is always the same with every single dungeon: kill mobs to progress the dungeon, kill boss to progress the dungeon, rinse and repeat. But it works flawlessly.
I think WoW suffers from having a ton of mythic levels ontop of the normal story mode. Because there is so many tiers they have to make the easy content more tiered and that simply doesn't work for every mechanic/ dungeon/ raid imo or to be more precise there a lot of content that extra tiers can feel like bloat on . They can spend a lot of time making a "cool" mechanic work on the easiest difficulty only to find out it doesn't really translate to something that works in a more casual setting. Some abilities just don't scale up or down at all and can only really function in a set range of difficulty but they kind of feel like they are obligated to try to do so just to make the tiers different.
To use the lazer example you used from FFXIV if the decided to literally cut and past the same boss into WoW you would probably run into the problem of what tier does each mechanic on and if you have to tier the boss it would likely make a lot of the mechanics a joke on the easiest difficulties or make the tiers feel samey. I know this is a more extreme example as the games have two very different mechanics and design philosophies but tbh I think that they run into the same issue with in the WoW scheme as well. Where a boss feels just what ever until a certain tier or stops being good at a certain level where a mechanic goes from fun to obnoxious.
Fax!
FFXIV likes to punish you for repeated mistakes.
WoW either doesn't punish you at all for messing something up, or you're turned to ash with one fell swoop, possibly wiping the raid.
Waitaminnit, are you saying normal content in wow is even easier than 14? Wow
Is it just me or does 4:55 Look very similar to the endpart of Paglthan in XIV?
I personally like that casual content in WoW doesn't really require you to know every mechanic by heart. I suffer from big performance and social anxiety and I feel much more comfortable going into new dungeons in WoW compared to XIV. In XIV I feel almost forced to watch a guide before every new dungeon so I don't fuck up and die all the time.
In wow I just go in and I can see the mechanics on normal difficulty without having to fear that I instantly die and get taken out of the fight if I mess them up. Once I've done it a few times I know what's going on and I can move on to heroic, m+ etc.
I think getting taken out of a fight for not knowing the mechanics on normal difficulty is counterproductive cause if no one got a battle rez you're just laying there dead not learning anything.
I do certainly agree that XIV dungeons feel a lot more satisfying cause the mechanics are more diverse and fun. I do enjoy WoW's dungeons for being less stressful tho.
(I should mention tho, I play WoW since 2011 and in XIV I'm only at Stormblood so far so I can only judge this based on the content I've experienced so far in XIV)
The problem with wow is they make this grand awesome dungeon that people don't experience. They just rush through hugging walls or what not to skip stuff. It feels like they move 100mph through it. Besically every run i get.
imo ffxiv has better bosses but wow has better trash mobs .
to me dungeons will always be boring. FF has this thing that trash is just there to be pulled wall to wall and some cool bosses. You really dont have to think to do dungeons and thats what makes them boring.
Casual content is fun in XIV sometimes. Even players that have cleared the most difficult content can be caught off guard and die lol. AoE damage on easy classes like Summoner. Dancer, and Reaper is just super satisfying too.
As someone who has been playing XIV for 9 years, and only recently started playing WoW with Dragonflight, I think the main difference is just that WoW puts more of the difficulty in playing your job. In XIV jobs are largely static (outside of ranged physical), and after a while are just muscle memory to perform. In WoW it seems most if not all classes have procs and other RNG mechanics inside the job to be reacting to. So XIV content needs to lean more on the fights themselves giving you interesting things to do, whereas in WoW the jobs themselves feel more satisfying to play, but the content (so far) doesn't do anything interesting.
Also I don't know which of these two methods is better, assuming one even is. After playing so much XIV, WoW's approach does feel refreshing, but that could just be me appreciating something new. Especially after XIV has been consistently dumbing down jobs since HW (which I miss dearly).
I agree completely! And I didn't think that I actually did until I did start playing WoW again. And when I really think about it, I don't think I've had a satisfying "Normal mode" experience in WoW since at LEAST MoP!
thats actually insane because i legit fall asleep playing dungeons in FFXIV. ppl complained about FFXIII being hallways buts that all ffxiv is, boring long hallways where the mobs are more of a threat than the bosses are. maybe it's because i've been playing xiv since heavensward and its just the same shit every year. i've also never really played WoW so i dont have a frame of reference for that, but xiv is incredibly boring to me. you dont even have to think you can just follow someone else for the easy to find safe spots. same with the INSANELY boring 2 min burst window design for every job it's so bland to play.
I really couldn't agree more with this. FFXIV is my main MMO, but with the release of Dragonflight I decided to start playing WoW again after not playing since the end of BFA (I never did any hard content or anything like that, I just enjoyed questing and stuff). I decided to make a new character to sort of refresh myself on the game as well as getting a blank slate look at the new talent trees. I'm at the early 50s now in level, and most of that was gained through questing. There were a few times I jumped into random dungeons just to shake things up a bit.
In these dungeons, I genuinely had no idea what I was doing or if I was even playing well or not. There was no real indicator of if I was doing anything wrong. I wasn't sure if I was playing well or if the bosses were just easy/had very few mechanics. That coupled with the fact that dungeons (at least, the early xpac dungeons anyways) were very open for exploration and yet everyone just optimizes a route out of them made them frankly very boring. It was fun to know that I was teaming up with other players, but the actual content itself wasn't really satisfying to me at all, save for maybe getting a piece of loot or something.
Meanwhile in FF, I still enjoy getting early dungeons/trials/etc. The only downside that I have with FF is that level syncing takes away abilities. Other than that, I feel like the experience in more casual content is leagues better than in WoW.
1:35 – 2:26 I think your point actually highlights what makes healer an outlier & boring in current content for FFXIV. All jobs have 2 points of engagement in content – the mechanics of the fight and their job gameplay. When I play a DPS, I don't have issue with boredom at all because the mechanics are enough while playing my job. I feel rewarded for playing correctly because I don't have sustainability to handle mechanics and can have an internal rotation to focus on while hitting the enemy, giving a sense of fulfillment.
When I play a tank, I don't have an issue with boredom because the mechanics are enough while using my defensive cooldowns. I feel rewarded for playing correctly because it means I can keep my survival extremely high while being engaged in a core rotation to beat the enemy up and best position the enemy for my allies.
However, when I play healer, I realize the role isn't given much to do when your tank and DPS is competent enough to keep themselves alive by doing the mechanics correctly. Most, if not all the damage, comes from avoidable mechanics in easy content. If you're a healer and you happen to get a Warrior who can just heal themselves to full without you when over 90% of your skills are meant to heal, you start pondering your existence to the team. When your party plays well, you don't need to utilize half your healing skills, which results in not having anything to do but press the same 1 attack skill for most of the run. You don't feel any fulfillment in "executing the mechanic correctly" afterwards because your core gameplay loop is largely missing as a result and replaced with lv 4 gameplay for the most part. Therefore, easy content is not satisfying because healers are lacking something.
For tanks and DPS, there is an inherent learning curve and improvement curve. For healers, it feels really weird. There's clearly a learning and improvement curve for healing, but sometimes you don't need the improvement in healing at all because other jobs perform well enough to make you obsolete, which creates this weird sensation of stagnation and boredom. So all you're left with is only 1 point of engagement as opposed to 2.
My personal take is if healers had more frequent and slightly more variations in DPS skills to use, I would enjoy playing as a healer more by having a proper core gameplay loop to fall back on when no one needs healing for correctly doing the mechanics. Otherwise, bosses also feel like just a glorified trash with a bigger HP bar. Healers have only 1 AOE DPS skill in trash that they use for the most part, so there is barely any difference if you don't need to heal other than pressing the Single target DPS skill instead of the AOE DPS skill. In fact, sometimes healing during trash might be more intensive than the boss itself when tanks don't realize the importance of mitigating trash…
i think the biggest problem wow has is that they didnt increased there own community responsebility. wow does everything the same since a long time, players are used to it and see the same mechs over and over again for years with slight changes. in ff the devs actually take the community brains of learning stuff arcodingly and put old raid mechs into normal dungouns as easier versions, the devs think"you should know this mech at this point due to that raid/that dungoun before" and pushing a aha effect on the players thinking "wait i know that shit!" or i saw that somewhere already" but never overusing this mechs in content. i know mythic + is the raid you need to play to get a challenge, but you can say wow is the raid game for raiders, while ff is the casual + hardcore fraction that want to offer a universal gameplay and enjoyment for young and old, casual player or raider, hardcore tryhards or fishing rpers. for me is the greatest enjoyment to go to gridania and see a band performing one of there tracks while a bunch of ppls dancing there or going into ultimates/savage raids and learn all the different mechs while getting ass slapped hard on them(and die). i dont have that in wow, aside the fact finding a group to do mythic+ raids after day 2 is harder than setting up your hud…while ff is 2 buttons, select duty, find ppls in partyfinder for your duty…and you find always ppls, some toxic ones, some no minders and some dont care teachers that teach you everything from start to end…
In 14 Savage raiding, i know when i make a mistake, i know when I was at fault, and where i can improve or practice.
In Wow.. the best i can tell you is Good Luck. Hope a healer is nearby.
The music. Is the main difference, if I'm about to chill I need music to vibe.