IME it varies by person, but it also varies by the protag in question. there have been a lot of really terrible warriors of light here, so a lot of people tend to dislike them on principle, but i don't think you'd get the same reaction playing shepard or durge, for instance.

da, but in ffxiv the warrior of light is literally the chosen one and can theoretically max out every job in the game (as opposed to picking one and rolling alts for the others), and there's a tendency among some players to incorporate everything they've done in-game into their ocs; so if someone's not great at oc-building, their wol can end up a master murder machine who's also a brilliant healer who's also indestructible and also runs the world's best forge-bakery-tailor shop-woodworking studio-greenhouse

Yeah, this is the main issue. Any endgame RPG character can be a godlike master chef, but XIV also has all its major NPCs love the PC in a way that can easily be read as romantic, and a few have a guilt complex for always sticking the PC with the most dangerous and traumatizing tasks all the time so they constantly express deep concern over the PC and are always thinking about them. The game writing is also really good at making you, the player, really care about your PC.

So while WoLs can be played well, it is really easy for not so good players to exploit them for easy ships in casts, try to make them the main character of the game, and get huffy about WoL not being loved enough (or god forbid questioned) by castmates and non-castmates. Especially when XIV is uniquely good at making you fall in love with your blank slate, so it's easy to get self-inserting and no IC/OOC boundaries. They can really be Bad RPer Catnip.

Honestly? Throw out the game content you've completed and just start from building a character and what skills make sense from the standpoint of a character and backstory you'd want to play. Personally I'd consider just making a FF14 OC who isn't the WoL at all, but that's just because I think chosen one narratives are boring

not to burst your bubble, I'm just a highly jaded in-game rper and I don't rp 14 on dreamwidth. but the moment I see anything about an ancient in an FF14 oc I get wary. people who focus on ancient stuff have a really high hit rate for being fucking weird about emet-selch and/or hythlodaeus.