ffxi vs wow pt 1

Learning Curve.

Well, I started with FFXI. This made WOW extreamly easy to learn. Basic macro's in WOW take a little more work then FFXI, but that it. With a simple drag and drop interface to put your spells on your casting bar, WOW is a lot easier to figure out what your are doing. Not to mention, in WOW, by the time your level 20, you have most of the same spells/actions you will be using at endgame (slight exaggeration, but not really). FFXI, you either have to type in your commands, or set up your macro bars by hand, and change them depending on what your doing.

As far as communication and transactions, they are about equal.

Easy of use gives the mark to WOW.


Leveling to max level.
FFXI has 75 levels and needs just over 845,000 EXP to cap. WOW has 80 levels and needs a bit over 26,105,000 EXP. So from that, it looks like FFXI has a huge advantage on leveling speed. But the numbers can be misleading.
From level 61-75, base XP for FFXI solo is 300 per kill (this is the most you can get for a single kill with no bonuses). With some effort (and EXP rings), you can pull off a little over 1000 EXP on a single kill, but this can only happen on a rare occassion. Also, don't forget that every death in FFXI will cause you to lose EXP. Depending on your level and the way you resurrect, it can cost 10% of the levels needed EXP. Losing 4400 EXP because you died at level 75 and didn't get a raise, means you add in another 15 kills to make it up.
From 70-80 in WOW, getting 1000 EXP per kill is quite simple. If you log off for the night in a city, you will get rested EXP bonus, so it is not much work to pull it off.
Another benefit to EXP in WOW is quest XP. In Outland (lvl 60-70), most quests give around 10K EXP. In Northland (lvl 70-80), getting 20K per quest is quite normal.
To give a (not very accurate, but gives an idea) rundown of kills. FFXI would need 2817 kills. WOW would need about 26,105 kills. But when you add in the HUGE number of quests available in WOW that give the same EXP as 10-20 kills, and take away the EXP loss for death in FFXI, it really brings the gap down.

Lets look at kill times also. In WOW, at 78, most of the mobs giving 1000XP take about 20-30 seconds to kill. In FFXI, most jobs can't even solo a mob that will grant them 300 XP. Those that can, it will normally take upwards of 10-20 minutes. So killing max XP mobs in FFXI is a really bad idea.

The idea for soloing XP in FFXI is to find the "sweet spot" for your job. On average, most jobs can solo 2000-3000 EXP per hour. BLM can pull off closer to 10K per hour (thank god, since they can't get parties much). BLU, SMN, and BST can all pull off 8-10K at certain levels when played correctly.

In WOW, if you want to solo XP, you go find things needed to kill for the quests you are working on, then take care of business.

So if your goal is to solo XP to max level as fast as possible, WOW is the winner hands down. With all the quests involved, it makes the grind seem a lot less tedious. If you want to solo XP (or party smartly), and have a game where how you play can tend to change every few levels, then FFXI wins out by a small margin.