Alts, mains, and character creation. Having now experienced multiple FF14 jobs, Garrett and Kyle look back WoW and ask: Who …
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Alts, mains, and character creation. Having now experienced multiple FF14 jobs, Garrett and Kyle look back WoW and ask: Who …
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Hm … For me neverplayed WoW but I have played FFXIV for a long time. I kinda saw my character O'Khyr starting off as a Hearer of the Conjurers guild helping keep the balance between Man and the Elementals, eventually becoming a white mage. Then during HW she needed to learn about the war becoming a Scholar and using historical tactics found within the Fagrskinna to keep people safe. During StB, she picked up black magic and combined it with her white magic with a stylish flourish. Helping soldier morale with skillful and inspiring heroics, before ShB comes along, and the Red Style of magic just wasn't enough and she begins leaning into Black Magic for the whole expansion. On the side she has been learning Astrology since far back as HW, and seeing as how the answer lies in the stars. She's an Astrologian throughout EW. No deep lore, but my character does have a bit of an identity with her switching her main job in this order. XD
If there's anything I learned from this one thing between WoW and FFXIV, is that people don't want hard core raids with no story any more. The preferences seems to roll towards casual content and a good story.
One of the biggest issues in FFXIV is that every time a new expansion happens, they trim the skills, but makes it even more awful to play at low level. Summoner, for instance, sucks hard core to play at low level and feels completely different at 90.
I love that they talk in terms of "the class they want to be" and "switching" as if the idea is to pick "a job" and not "all the jobs" xD
I would have to disagree with you saying alt job leveling in XIV is not good. You can level an alt job from 1 to max in a few days. You just have to know what to do. It goes really fast. Plus, all jobs have lore that is relevant to the overall story.
Being one of the early ones to jump ship on WoW, I started on XIV during the second closed beta for ARR (2.0) as a male Miqo'te Archer. And it was an adjustment, because my first instinct was that he was exactly that. An archer. I had already gone through all of 2.0 after ARRs release as Bard before I picked up my second class, and then my third, and my fourth. But eventually I got them all, and maxed them out, and it felt amazing.
…I’m going to disagree with one point:
Leveling in early game.
AAR throws TONS of XP at you early game, to the point where the MSQ alone is boosting you more than five levels over those required for the quests if you only stick to one class/job.
Add to that the hunt longs of each base class, daily roulettes, and xp buffs form the rested and clan bonuses, you’ll probably have two or three classes at 50 or higher by the time you reach Heavensward without even grinding.
for the 1-16 in FFXIV, hunting log and levequests have been the go to options for me. Going back to sub lvl 50 is always a bit of a slog though.
Newer jobs post HW start 10 levels below old cap. So if 60 was the old cap the job for the level 70 expansion starts at 50 etc. Why you found DRK easier was because it started at level 30.
Also after years of pruning and condensing abilities, FF ends up with the abilities unlocks more spaced out. It would be good if they could frontload some more abilities on starter classes maybe with weaker versions of abilities they would get later
They should create a fixed system for account bound features which transcends expansions like SWTOR’s Legacy system where your alts are part of your family tree (and you can choose how that looks too for those roleplayers i.e making your alt your wife or adopted son etc)
For negatively perceived class/race combos could have interesting interactions. Maybe you are shunned by your own race for being a draenei warlock? They have distain for you. If you are a draenei starting as warlock instead of a normal trainer you instead get trained by a demon trying to corrupt you.
Actually WOW doesn't do talents well in fact they have tried to make unnecessary changes to talents each expansion which has backfired on them now because most people in scout classes for example, hunter, rogue, etc complain because our specs are not only not unique from each other in dps classes, they have become completely useless in many ways! For example, most of the things that make BM hunters unique are now in the Survival talents which makes no sense, in fact we asked them early on in WOTLK to keep bm and surv hunters the way they are mostly because they got the bm hunter right and I also asked along with thousands of others who supported me in the forums, that if they were going to make a new melee tank that they use BM hunters as melee hunters because it fit perfectly with the lore!
I dunno which is which because I'm new to this channel but whoever has the black hair must have gigantic balls of steel to have a voice like that! LOL
Reputation grinds with WoW is bad across different characters.
If they would make the grind account wide. Tired of grinding as a warlock, continue as a warrior.
The need of add-ons takes the experience from WoW away.
Garrett's like me when it comes to our characters. When I got my free fantasia, literally all I did was change my eye color, and then later down the line, I bought another fantasia to change it back. Honestly, I don't know how fantasia addicts do it.
Having played MUDs before, and then Runescape, when I started playing World of Warcraft, it always annoyed me that I was stuck to a single class with my character. I missed the freedom of choosing what you wanted next for your character, wi!hout the extra baggage of "but you now have to re-do all this".
It felt very arbitrary that my character couldn't just pick up a bow and arrow and start practicing with it until he became a skilled user, as it always felt like your character was part of that "had talent" rather than "worked hard" trope.
It felt specially unfair when they started reworking and removing abilities from my classes just because I happened to be in a different "spec".
I could understand your character being locked to a single class in an RP server, for RP reasons, but in regular servers it should've always been the option to swap.
In fact, you could always swap, it was just put behind a paywall!
the specs and talent points are the epitome of "Illusion of Choice" there was only one maybe two way to play each spec, and the rest were simply no viable. which is why I laughed at people whining about the new talent trees because it stripped away the illusion and showed the true talent trees.
You are right in wow you have a class.. "This is my rogue", "This is my mage".. you only see the character as its job with a means to an end.
If FFXIV, you have a character that is easier to relate to and get attached to, You no longer think of them as nothing more than their job, they are you in the game and you happen to have multiple jobs (if you choose to do so). With little to no penalty to swapping between jobs.
Swapping between jobs doesn't mean forgetting about your old character/job, logging out and starting fresh with nothing. No bags, no money, no skills etc,. Which is part of what makes FFXIV job system far superior in terms of immersion and respect to your time.
Also in wow you could find your favorite job, like shadow priest for example, level up that char, grind out all the gear and all the rep etc only to find the very next expansion has completely nerfed your spriest into the dirt and not only is it no longer fun to play, its not even viable at all, so now you have to go make a WHOLE NEW Toon, on a different job, level it up, grind it out and HOPE they dont nerf that one.
To paraphrase:
Wow player: " This is my warrior"
FFXIV player: " This is my character"
16:45 As someone who lvled up all jobs in ffxiv (pre endwalker) I can agree with the level grind "up to a certain level".
I found that doing leves from 1-20 was by far the fastest and most efficient way to lvl up to 20-25. With a sprinkle of fates here and there.
Also , as others have mentioned, "The hunting logs", which are available for each and every job.
(There are leves you can do all the way up to max lvl but I wouldn't recommend doing it that way.
I don't understand how you can go from complaining about a the lack of diversity in 'stuff to click' as one job, and then whine about how there's too many buttons and it's overwhelming when you do a different job…and then somehow fail to mention that your base jobs start at level 1, and RDM and SAM are both special jobs that start at level 50. DRK starts at level 30. RPR starts at level 70. Of course you're going to have different complexity with these jobs…you're miles apart on each of them. Not even WoW had such complexity at level 1. You don't even unlock talents until what, level 15? Complexity my ass.
The whole joy of FFXIV is that YOU, as the Warrior of Light, are one character who gains achievements, unlocks special stuff, and gets skills/bonuses/etc. Your hard work is rewarded by making it so, if you want to start something new, you aren't punished with the entire newbie experience all over again like you would be starting an Alt in WoW. When you unlock flying, YOU unlock flying, not your job. When you get a new special-event mount, that's YOUR mount, not the job you were on when you won it. WoW's 'complexity of narrative' when you pick your faction/race ends basically at level 10. There is fuckall special about whatever you picked, and in the end it just boils down to whether you're Horde or Alliance. The story isn't even about your character, it's about you as the player getting to observe the NPCs' story taking place. There's no foundation for your involvement, there's no memory about you being somewhere…most of the NPCs can't even be arsed to remember you by name. It's obvious that when they do stick your name in there, it's just a code holdover, not anything that shows the NPCs remember who you are or what you've done. Maybe it's unintentionally forgetting that the player character is part of the game and is getting all this shit done, or maybe it's a side-effect of how WoW doesn't actually make you experience old content, so you can just jump into Shadowlands without having ever set foot in Northrend. I just remember how much I resented being a murder muppet in WoW, and how nothing I actually did made any damn difference anywhere, because I was just gonna do it again on 18 alts anyway.
FFXIV shines in this; you have a whole story that you actually do need to go through to get to the end-game (and for me, I could never fantasia into a different character…my WoL is who he's been since level 1 and it's who's been in every cutscene. It's who I made friends with. It's who the NPCs call "friend." I couldn't even get an alt up because it felt wrong to me. This person isn't the Warrior of Light, because my main already is.) You DO have to do all the content, it's ALL relevant, EVERYONE does it, and everyone is STILL DOING IT. You don't have to worry about getting to Seat of Sacrifice and not be able to get through it because no one's running Shadowbringers anymore. Sometimes even the dialogue options change if you went through an area with a certain job unlocked or not. Estinen talks to and about you differently in Heavensward if you've done the DRG job story. The DRK story takes you back to these once-off characters that you interacted with earlier on. The only time, in all of my experience in FFXIV, where it seemed like no one gave a shit about who you were or what you'd done, is when you went back to do crafting/gathering job quests. They almost never acknowledge your exploits as the WoL, and even when they do, it's way later on, like into Stormblood. It's like…hey, beetch, that hammer you're using was made by the Warrior of Light. O-oh…you've never heard of it. Consequences of getting to level crafters/gatherers without being forced to have a DoW/DoM job leveled first, I suppose.
12:45 the ONLY reason I tried and I still keep FFXIV playing every now and then is the job system (even if I'd have loved something like FF Tactics' system even more).
With that said, I personally find that any sort of immersion gets disrupted as soon as I switch job from max level to, say, level 10 and therefore I go from being the chosen hero back to a nobody for the same NPCs. Also, glamour aside, my character stays the same and that's kinda boring.
STILL, way better then having to re-do unnecessary and obnoxious grinds on WoW, for that matter and there's nothing better than a change in combat style to keep the experience fresh.
In an ideal world, I'd go for:
1) fully account-wide systems (with opt-out feature for those weird people who like grinding the same thing over and over on multiple characters);
2) even further options for race/class combinations, each providing a reworked starting area from one of the previous expansions and THEN the choice for a fully fleshed out narrative arc in one of said expansions. For instance, Nightborne starting out in Suramar, then playing through the story of Legion up to and including the final fight with Argus.
FF14 is an RPG first and an MMO 2nd
Honestly, FFXIV gives you so much XP that I've personally never had any real issues leveling any of my jobs since Heavensward. Back in 2.0 it was REALLY hard to level because you didn't have all the crazy leveling bonuses that we have now or all the crazy different ways to level. Also, you HAD to level multiple different jobs to get their cross-class skills or you were just not as effective because you could be missing super important or useful skills and SWIFTCAST or PROTECT. Hell, there wasn't even a cross-world duty finder so you were only put in queue with your local server and queue times were HORRIBLE if you were a DPS (I'm talking an hour plus wait to get into ONE DUNGEON). Now, all you really need to do is some guildhests and the hunting log and you can easily make it to level 15 where you can spam dungeons or POTD. Hell, come patch 6.1 you'll even be able to run the ARR story dungeons with the duty support system so you won't even have to wait for queues as a DPS.
The thing with expansion jobs in FFXIV is that you're expected to have a basic understanding of how the game works before you start using them. Sure, a lot of people grab Red Mage and Samurai as soon as they hit 50 if they bought the game because they can get them right in Uldah before ever starting Heavensward but even by level 50 you're expected to understand that you should READ YOUR TOOLTIPS and then spend a little time organizing your bar and practicing on a training dummy or killing some mobs. Going into POTD is probably the most optimal thing to do AFTER you've at least read your tool tips so that you get an expedited leveling experience where you can see how your abilities work together and tweak your bar to your liking as you fight enemies around your current level. Now, aside from the 3 jobs added in Heavensward which start at lvl 30, the pattern for FFXIV expansion drops are that they are 20 levels below the new max level defined by the new expansion. This system has worked out great for those interested in playing the new jobs right away because their level isn't so low that you need to spend weeks of hard grinding to get it up high enough to run current level content with but also not so high that completely inexperienced players can just jump right into current content without first gaining at least 10-11 levels so they can start the new MSQ or the first new leveling dungeon. Of course, the BEST thing about playing multiple jobs in FFXIV is that you have a greater understanding of how the game works and you are instantly more able to learn newer jobs easier. For example, I was already playing Summoner and Black Mage by the time Stormblood came around so Red Mage really wasn't very complicated for me to pick up and play. I had also already played Ninja and Monk beforehand so Samurai was equally understandable for me. By the time we got to the newest jobs added in Endwalker, I had already leveled every job in the game to max level so Sage was like a new flavor of Scholar which I had already been using for many years as an offshoot of my Summoner and Reaper REALLY didn't feel like the other melee jobs aside from its basic 1-2-3 and aoe combos but even from just that base the rest of the job was VERY intuitive and fun to the point that it became my new main.
The one thing I disagree here is that in FFXIV you dont really start as a hero. Sure you are chosen by Crystal Mom, but otherwise no one in-game acknowledges you as a hero UNTIL you start doing heroic things. And its not that people really worship you or you become a mary sue, far from it, the WoL loses MANY times. In that sense ARR and Vanilla start isnt that different.
The key difference is on how it develops afterward. FFXIV, again, acknowledges your heroics in a more meaningful manner than WoW ever does, because ultimately WoW was always Metzen and co.'s DnD campaign the player was excluded from. They have never written for an audience, they just want an audience to clap.
But also FFXIV actually gives you characters to care about, characters that care about yours. WoW writers cant muster the fucks to care about the player at all. They are too busy with infighting and finding expansion fodder.
i didn't realize there was no tech tree till after ARR.. to me.. its like a fighting game.. u have ur set moves and u learn how to play it well.. and if its design well , which it is.. u dont feel the need for any building or customization.. plus they made it feel satisfying and so pretty to look at.. looking at wow abilities.. looks like some crappy ass kickstarter design lol
When I initially went to make a character in FFXIV, I was determined to make a Paladin, because that's what I was in Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft. That started me in Ul'dah, which I didn't really vibe with. So I went back to character creation and eventually ended up with a different character aesthetically to fit the Archer/Bard vibes. That ended up becoming the main I play to this day.
While I initially thought it a bit weird to see this 'Archer character' as anything else, I soon grew out of that. Sure, I wanted to go for that true Paladin aesthetic, but I soon learned to mix glamour to fit it for both my character and class . And I think that's the key take-away. You're you in FFXIV, and it's up to you to reflect that.
I do sometimes feel pangs of homesickness to 'the good old days' in WoW. Should I ever return, I'd likely continue the Beast Master Hunter I played most recently. I just loved its gameplay and the beast-tame 'hunt' <3
the most important thing is, because you dont have alt, you get a very special relationship with your character. you get to really care for it.
I’d just rather be one of many than the centerpiece character.
When I transmog (glamour in WoW) I usually go with “what would make sense for my class” rather than something that stands out. If I stand out then I want it to be something I did as a player rather than the story telling me over and over again that I’m special.
Legion felt great because it had felt like I had earned the recognition but that came from years and years of playing these characters and classes. It wasn’t something the game was hammering me over the head with.
Like I can sit down and say what it means to be a paladin or a druid in WoW is but whenever I ask a FFXIV player about how class/job identity works in their game every one of them tells me “it doesn’t matter, the WoL is special.” It matters to me, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking the question. And if you can swap out whenever you want part of that is inevitably lost.
It’s fine if that’s not as important to people but it’s one of the reasons I make characters. I don’t want to be special, I just want to fit into the world.
Once you play the game enough, you realize that "the low level grind" has lots of short-cuts that become available as you unlock them. There's the hunt log, the challenge log, beast tribe quests, leves, fates, daily roulettes, wonderous tails bonus for turning it in, clan marks, and others that I've probably missed. I've done alts on different servers and they go fast because I know all the shortcuts even without having things unlocked.
The biggest thing for me was realizing that Crafting and Gathering used the exact same Job system. I could be every crafter and gatherer. They had their own relevant stats, gear and actions. They had XP bars and quests that could be completed to level up. It made crafting so much more fun and dynamic, and gave reasons for making items other than simply market value or grinding xp. By the time I finished the Shadowbringers MSQ, I had all my crafting and gathering classes to 80, but the only combat class I had at max level was Dragoon! (Even now, the only other combat class I have maxed is Gunbreaker, although White Mage is up to 85 now)
I've soured on the WoW system personally. While I 100% agree that a single class gives you a great sense of character from an RP/Player investment standpoint, I think it's hampered by several design constraints. The "player retention mechanics" that forces you to re-grind for conveniences like flight; the challenge of leveling a Tank or Healer in solo play compared to a DPS class (and the relative scarcity of players in those roles), and talent trees that eventually get optimized and enforced in the endgame.
Those aren't insurmountable problems: Wildstar ensured every class had a DPS mode, and either a Tank or Healer mode, rather than having any "pure" DPS classes. Guild Wars 2 changed talents based on weapon load-outs, allowing a single class to play differently depending on the weapon you were using. Account-bound rewards are already a thing, so there's little reason not to allow alts to partake of those.
WoW has been in a leadership position for so long that it hasn't bothered to change the "winning formula", aside from trying to boost profits.
Yall have no clue yet…bozja, eureka, beast tribes, there are lots of ways to level. Almost everything you do in game gives you a good amount of xp. Just don't do side quests for xp! They aren't meant for that.
The fact that job swapping is canon in lore thanks to the shadowbringers trailer says a lot
FFXIV Jobs balance is so much in another level compared to WoW that I'd take that over the illusion of diversity from different specs any day.
Old video i know but the game in HW and before had job abilities from other jobs and you had to choose which ones. They killed that and some abilities that let them do unusual things.