My Experience as a FFXIV refugee (switching from playing FFXIV to WoW)

About a month or so ago I completely dropped FFXIV, still adore the game in a sense, but in it's current state it's just not interesting to me personally as an MMO-RPG specifically. And a big reason why I made that change is that WoW (both Classic and Retail) has exactly what I feel like FFXIV is missing.

The biggest part for me is easily that every class feels extremely unique where in FFXIV all you really need to understand is the class type, most jobs can begin to feel super samey once you really start playing them.

Classes and class identity is a very major thing for me as an RPG nerd, and WoW delivers so fucking well on that end, even in Retail which shocked me since I saw so many WoW fans claiming that Retail's class individuality is not very good, really shows the gap between WoW and FFXIV.

I basically exclusively played Red Mage through all of FFXIV's expansions, and Red Mage I feel is one of the few classes that still feels unique despite how homogenized everything in FFXIV is.

RN with WoW I play primarily Feral/Guardian Druid in vanilla classic and Shadow Priest + Retri Paladin anything after that. All of them have been SO FUN, I feel like I actually have to learn whenever I try out a new class too. It's also so so nice to see ACTUAL pet jobs and dot jobs, which FFXIV has not had in forever. (rest in peace old Summoner...)

Also, COMMUNITY!!! This was something I was kinda nervous on since I've heard so many people talk about how toxic WoW players are but... no? Yeah I've met shitheads but they were pretty typical shitheads. Though tbf from my PERSONAL experience, most times a gaming community is called "toxic" it's thanks to one specific group of pieces of shit (unless it's an FPS game, when they're called toxic it's usually true LOL)

Basically all people I've met on WoW have been super fucking chill, super willing to help you out and give you tips. They're also a lot more talkative and sociable than the average FFXIV player. It helps that Classic's general way of functioning encourages players communicating more (can't remember what expansion that changes in but generally yeah less people talk in Retail but they still chat a lot more than FFXIV)

I do admit I miss FFXIV's streamlined plot, and FFXIV's story will always no matter what hold a special place in my heart, but unless Yoshi-P and the team commits to another ARR tier rework, I doubt I'll be coming back anytime soon.