You wont be using 1 handed staves for very long, but if you have an open off hand there is no downside to putting a shield on. After level 30 or so all of your weapons become 2handed.

@@Munbalance thank you!

Hey, thanks for the comment! I totally get what you're feeling, the mechanics of FFXIV can feel a bit void of expression and are more focused on mastery of a certain class or individual fight. There's a little you can really do to stand out but I don't think that's the fault of the game design just rather the game is very good at telling you what you should be doing, which makes it seem like you're not expressing yourself. Assuming you're playing optimally on RO the same is true, there's just way less of a hands-on approach to the design and those developers are more than happy to just throw a random element attack at you to kill you if you're un prepared where in FF14 its more "hey look out for the attack that's gonna happen here, don't stand here!" until you get into savage+ difficulty content and the training wheels start to come off. A good example for RO would be the trend that certain players started to make a bunch of rebellion alt characters to run instances and if you want to efficiently farm content that's the optimal way to do it. You could do it with another class if you wanted but rebel levels so quickly and does not need to transcend and gets decent damage with very little investment so while yes you can use another class to express yourself, you're just being inefficient if you really think that hard about it. The same is true for FF14, you can do things inefficiently, you can play ice-only black mage or mechanist or use really low ilevel items to reach way too fast skill speed and ruin your rotation. However the game in general is much more willing to keep you on the right track because it wants you to succeed, where you could argue that gravity and RO wants you to fail, they want you to die so you spend money on the token of Siegfried for example. That being said there are definitely some classes that have more expression to them, tanks and healers mainly but there's a ton of different ways to play black mage for example, many different speed sets and there's even a completely alternate rotation that isn't completely terrible either. But I think the focus of FFXIV is the content not the classes as endgame fights are much more interesting and will require that you master the class you've chosen at least to some degree

@@Munbalance Love how playing MCH is considered "not optimal".. man they really did that class dirty xD i gotta agree tho

Every game has the meta style of playing at higher end difficulty that is the same style as everyone else. You can change one or 2 things about it, but at the end if you change that much you’ll be carried by the ones playing the meta style. That’s a true fact of every mmo or RPG. Players will always find a meta style and do hard content with. Even call of duty sufers from this where u see everyone running the same loadout of weapons so they can at least go head to head against other players.

How do you really feel though

unfortunately every system will boil down to that if the goal is to defeat an enemy. Whether by design or not, most people will generally gravitate towards what is most effective for that job.

I play both, what I like about ffxi is that every level I gain feels very impactful, making those mob grinds feel worth while even though partying up is fun. But I think my favourite thing about ffxi is the adventure, this evening I was gonna stand there and wait for an invite, i said fuck that and I formed a group myself, I'm new to the game, so finding camps in the dunes isn't something I can do just yet, we could find one in the dune so we got a boat to bubu something or other, went and found a camp there, had a very rough time, the guy who was pulling was going a bit to fast, but it went on for about 4 hours or so, and it was just fun even though we were struggling and not making the best xp, it wasn't a waste of time either. Game just always seems to have a cool experience to offer and yes, getting that first set of level 10 scale mail felt awesome cause I spent 3 days saving up for it, now I think ffxi would be in the perfect spot if it respected your time a little bit more but kept the challenge, now I don't mean in terms of traveling or leveling necessarily, but making gil and getting a mount a little easier perhaps, just I'm not a kid any more and the game is extremely time consuming so the way I have to play is break up my goals in to more smaller sessions to achieve them over a longer period of time compared to the people who play 12 to 14 hours a day, this is why ffxiv suits people, alot of us who grew up playing those games simply just don't have that sort of time investment available anymore.

No one cares

No one gives a shit