Blade & Soul is the most easily pick up and play, yet I feel offers the least in terms of overall content. If you aren’t particularly interested in PvP, then I suspect you may become bored over time. That being said, it is a free game, and can be played all the way to endgame without costing you a cent. Combat wise is where B&S stands out; boasting a fairly visceral and engaging experience. If you prefer action combat to tab targeting, then you’ll definitely enjoy this.
FFXIV, on the other hand, offers a much greater degree of variety. Aside from the wealth of dungeons, you have a rather robust crafting system and a much improved PvP scene (granted, this is only available at lvl60.) It’s designed for casual MMOs in mind. Therefore, you wouldn’t have to worry in that regard. If you’re more interested in a solid story worth investment and a more traditional party styled gameplay (tank/healers/DPS), you’ll enjoy FFXIV.
Not having played WoW, I’ll refrain from comment there. To answer your question directly though. While both BnS and XIV are fairly good for casuals, I feel XIV does a lot more to accommodate players and just has a stronger presence overall. So that would be my vote. I suggest you check out MrHappy’s videos on youtube as he covers both games, which might help you decide.
BnS is decently casual friendly. You can play it and level and after a certain amount of time you are max level. With very little effort and thus time you can reach a decent equipment and are near to no burden to your group while being able to play all content (not 4 man tho.. that’s more hardcore shit anyway). On the other hand progression after that takes huuuge amounts of BNS Gold/time, but since a fair amount of money is made on daily basis with dailies and crafting, even as casual you wont be completely unable to progress.
WoW basically.. is not a game anymore imo. It is the definition of casual.. but it’s so insanely casual that it shouldnt be fun anymore at all at this point. You log in, are spoon feeded everything and log off. Dunno.. that would be the most casual option by far, but i’m not sure if that’s what you want. It should be still fun for some time.. but imo it’s a dying game and only complete casuals or people who dont want to quit because of the amount of time they already put into it play it afaik. Could be wrong here but well i dont really care for WoW anyway.
That being said, you’ll find the best raid scene on Gilgamesh and a lot of recruitment for statics done over on the XIV subreddit here. So mayhaps give that a glance. As for B&S, your concerns are actually my very own. If you aren’t able/willing to put a solid 4-6 hours almost daily into the game, upgrading your weapon for the endgame content will be next to impossible. At least until they slow down releasing new content or make some sort of reasonable catch up option.
Blade & Soul is probably the better choice in the end, still. But what they do for the casual/mid-core levels in Silver Frost will really be a deciding factor for me.
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