IMHO most important thing is that you shouldn’t think about if you have money for an MMO. The biggest thing is do you have the time? WoW is much faster to get to the end game and it’s much more clearly constructed instead of the multiple class system. If one doesn’t already know an MMO or knows someone who plays it, i’m not sure if they are worth it as they require so much time to understand the different kinds of mechanics and then the grind is also pretty real. Maybe when a new game comes out there is a easy way to get in to a community that figures out things together.
Both of the games have same mechanics. Automated group finding, tab-targeting combat and a major focus on PvE. You go in to an area and complete quests in hubs. When done you go back to the city and then to the next place. For someone who isn’t invested in either one of the games i would see that FF14 has more value. The early level content for WoW is so much sped up at this point that it’s more about trying to get to the next place to level rather than actually killing mobs. I’m pretty sure that for someone that hasn’t been playing wow for a long time and went trough the raids it is really hard to understand what is going on with the story as you are blasted past it extremely fast.
WoW is much easier to approach. FF14 has strange mechanics that at least i wasn’t used to. Main things are the single class one has multiple classes and you need to be proficient in multiple ones to open the possibility for the high tier classes. I managed to get to the advanced classes by my own, but i had to do a lot of head scratching. Also, the crafting in FF14 is interesting but pretty strange at start.
All in all FF14 is more different than most MMOs i had played before. The setting and class structure is interesting and more varied. For me pretty much everything seems more interesting than it does in WoW.
