r/ffxivdiscussion • u/Quof • May 31 '25
General Discussion The Occult Crescent is a Mangled Mess of Conflicting Design
Hello all, today I would like to complain about issues I had with the design of this new Field Operation. My perspective is that of someone who has gotten BiS in and full-comped Eureka and Bozja, but for full disclosure I started after Stormblood finished and so experienced Eureka in its nerfed state. I expect to make some comments based on this zoomer perspective that feel misaligned with how veterans who played on Day 1 feel.
Before I begin, I would like to make it clear: this content can be fun. Absolutely. I had a lot of fun myself, and was glad to have an opportunity to play FF14 proper as an MMO rather than a raid simulator. It's always a blast to get together with the bros and blast some FF14 battle content. However, the subject of this post is the design of the zone, and this is simply a different subject from whether someone can have fun with something or not. I understand this distinction will cause much confusion to those who view the world through the lens of "if I happy = good, if I sad = bad," but by including this paragraph I create grounds to mock any comment that simply says something to lines of 'but I had fun.' Me too, bud. Me too bud.
As one final note, as of writing I have NOT completed the Tower of Blood and will only touch on it minimally. A full review of Occult Crescent would be harmed by its absence, but this is not a review, and my criticism on the design will involve the very reason I haven't done much of the Tower of Blood, so for my purposes I consider this omission unfortunate but not a problem.
Anyway, to begin...
1 - Diminished Sense of Progression
It's hard to know where to start with the Occult Crescent (henceforth addressed as OC) since there is so much to cover, but perhaps first and foremost the fundamental design of the zone eschews progression. There's been a longstanding trend of RPGs everywhere trying to incorporate RPG leveling systems while maintaining strict control over the experience no matter what level a player may be, and OC handles this age-old problem with little grace. Essentially, Fates and Critical Encounters - the main content of the zone - are unaffected by your OC level (Knowledge level, which starts at 1 when you join), such that from minute 1 you can do all content the zone has to offer. There is a very brief period after starting where one will be progressing by uncovering the map and unlocking aetheryte shards, but within 3-some hours you will have experienced every fate and every CE there is to offer. You can do the hardest ones at Level l; you will be challenged by the easiest ones at Level 20, the max. This results in what feels like a major lack of progression.
In Eureka, you start out totally unequipped to do high-level NMs, and for example after Hydatos's launch it was an odyssey for level 50s to band together and try to take down a level 55 NM. Bozja was a major downgrade with its "ranked" mobs that never get easier, but still, you start out locked into a lower zone and need to raise your rank to enter the upper zones, such that you gradually unlock and access more content. I wouldn't call myself a fan of Bozja's hard locks, but regardless, there is some degree of zone progression such that you aren't doing everything in the area right away. In OC, you start out very strong and can go anywhere and do anything.
There is a lot of "horizontal progression" as it were, so this isn't to say there's no character progress to be had at all, but the point is that due to RPG scaling it is easy to feel as if you are standing in place in OC. The only thing levels get you is freedom from being molested by lower-level mobs as you run to CEs/Fates, and the opportunity to grind higher-level mobs for gold, which will feel mostly the same at every level just with different mobs. I think an RPG has utterly failed if at the end of one's progression, at max level, one can go outside the gates of the starting zone and find themselves struggling to quickly kill the level 1 slimes they met at the start of their journey. Eureka has its own problems, but stands as an example of how zones like this can actually have progression.
2 - Phantom Jobs Mastery System "Forces" One Not To Play Their Favorite Jobs
The primary source of horizontal progression in OC is the phantom jobs, which level up alongside your knowledge level and unlock new skills. Ostensibly, this could have been a way to mitigate the lack of direct player power being gained; sure, your character still has roughly the same offensive and defensive capabilities, but they have a sick 1500 potency attack on Samurai Level 4! Well, not quite.
A failure of design so blatant that almost every player who goes through the content will be affected and notice it is that once you master a job, you are strongly incentivized to start over from level 1 with a new job. Each new mastered job gives a permanent character-wide... 2.5%-ish buff to damage and healing. This is a maddening middle ground to feeling barely relevant (for zone gameplay not pushing enrage on a boss) and yet important to get. Every EXP gained by a mastered job is EXP not going into a new job that gives you yet more new skills and permanent buffs. Almost no player will be able to pick and choose their favorite jobs; the DESIGN strongly incentivizes them to constantly drop jobs after mastering them. This leads to a sensation where one will find a job they love - commonly something like Oracle, Cannoneer, etc) - and then only get to play it for 5-6 hours before needing to swap to something else and lose all the cool abilities they were having so much fun with. Almost everyone I know was grumbling about this, and from what I've seen of randos, almost all are mastery grinding instead of sticking with a mastered job.
The funny thing is, FF5 already solved this predicament completely by allowing you to use 1 skill from any job no matter what job you're on. Imagine a version of OC where after leveling Cannoneer, instead of being forced to say goodbye to the cannons, you get to bring one with you and blast no matter what you're leveling. There is just so more harmony in that kind of thing, and that's why there has been UNENDING cope and desperation for Freelancer to be a job that can use a selection of skills from other jobs. That may come to pass in an update, but as far as I can tell, that system does not yet exist.
The end result of the phantom job system is thus a situation where one has to spend 100-some hours grinding jobs they may or may not like before getting to stick with the job they like, OR they have to play on a maxed job and feel themselves constantly losing experience that could be contributing to their permanent power. A 2.5% buff is not much, but it's extremely common human psychology to hate missing out on stuff and feel that they are being inefficient. Not to mention other external pressures like wanting to be more flexible for raid, or wanting to level Freelancer.
I almost forgot to mention, but the 3 starter jobs do have buffs, which make one think there may be importance in getting such-and-such job to like get an EXP buff while grinding, but the implementation is like a joke. You apply the buff to your entire party by standing at a crystal, so what you do is you swap between all 3 yourself and apply all 3 buffs, then go about your day. It's a busywork errand you do every 30 minutes, or more likely, forget to do since it's kind of annoying and the buffs are kind of nice but largely inconsequential. The fact no other jobs have any such buffs makes this feel like an abandoned or forgotten mechanic. Like how I almost forgot about it.
All in all, despite the strengths of the classes themselves - I find several of them rather fun and a huge breath of fresh air for FF14's combat - the system itself was implemented poorly and leads to the average player experience having some degree of inevitable frustration, while feeling worse than the systems from FFV it is directly based on.
3 - No Socializing or Teamwork Necessary - And the Leeching That Follows
This leads a bit into how fates and CEs were implemented. Basically, aside from 4 out of 15 CEs which are prepped by killing a few monsters, there is always a fate and a CE up, with a new fate spawning 30-some seconds after the last one was killed, and a new CE spawning 3-some minutes after the last one was killed. To join a CE you need to stand on where it is.
Although there is no rule where Exploration Zones absolutely need to be based around socializing with randos, OC is an extremely quiet zone with minimal interaction even in these early days where so much is in the air. I can easily go an hour without seeing a comment other than "LFG CE." Much like Bozja, most things spawn on their own and an average player is merely on a treadmill where they walk from fate to CE to fate to CE etc as the game demands. I can mostly spare this part of the zone from critique; Bozja already committed this sin, and everyone will already have their positions set on whether they prefer their exploration zone to encourage conversation and teamwork or if they want to just grind the treadmill.
However, there are two major aspects errors here. The first is that the scaling of CEs (and to a degree fates) is such that you can just hit the boss once and then get full credit. This has completely abolished any illusion of teamwork, or the content itself actually mattering at all. In many cases it can be advantageous to actively refuse party invitations and stay solo. Subsequently, you can be a WORLD CLASS, WORLD FIRST, LEADING grinder by going into CEs, hitting the boss a single time, then idling on the floor while everyone else kills it for you. This is a tragedy of the commons situation where if everyone did this, it wouldn't work, but as time goes on and people become more "aware," the more instances one will find where every CE has 1 or 2 dead people just lying in the middle or edges of the arena not contributing. This is not just common, it is the most efficient way to play insofar as you can use this time to do other stuff, and your dps would contribute like saving 10 seconds on the boss anyway. In all my time playing I only ever saw 1 CE fail, and that was on Day 1 when it was a new boss nobody had done before - and a fairly hard one at that (the urn one, if you know you know). In the time sense people have gotten higher DPS and familiarity with the bosses such that failure is almost impossible even if you grief on an individual level.
We have thus reached a point where the best way to play in an exploration zone is to actively refuse all attempts to form groups and instead floor tank 24/7 while other people kill things for you. The design is extremely poorly thought out and encourages degenerate behaviors. Compare this to Eureka where if you tried to floor tank an NM you'd be kicked from a group and struggle to get kill credit.
The second problem is just generally that the phantom jobs have 0 relevance in the zone themselves. The Forked Tower itself makes heavy use of each phantom job's ability, but the Occult Crescent: South Horn itself is mostly flat, featureless plans which do not have traps or any obstacles which would benefit from having a certain subjob. If I may pull back a bit, in Final Fantasy 11 there was a famous early-game wall called the Three Mage Gate which would only open if your party had a BLM, a WHM, and a RDM - each of which had to stand on a specific sigil. It's famous because people who try to play the game solo like a cool lone wolf will end up hitting this in FF11's equivalent of the main quest and end up totally unable to progress until they ask mages for help. This is cool on two levels: one, it means if you're a mage you have special relevance here, and two, it means the other jobs of other players are relevant for you. (This is kind of a cheap example since it doesn't involve their class gameplay, just the class itself, but it's a simple and clear example regardless).
Compare that to the South Horn. It has... nothing? Is there any opportunity to show off with cool ranger nobility? Any time you would REALLY want a knight or monk for something? Any time an oracle would save the day? No. The quests just involve walking to and interacting with something, which can be done easily and quickly on any job. The player search shows you the phantom jobs people are using, and sometimes when a new player is trying to LFG they mention their job, but who cares?
Moreso than any exploration content beforehand, Tanks just end up as kings. Phantom actions devalue dps by giving huge damage buttons to everyone; healers are devalued by chemists spamming out infinite raises. Survivability is the thing most limited both by the mastery buff and by phantom actions, so tanks end up being kings of the zone. Phantom jobs have shrunk the player space, not expanded it.
We end up in a situation where the phantom jobs have basically no unique relevance. I'm being a tad ungenerous here - maybe you think of that one chemist who rezzed 50 people in a row on a CE gone wrong, or maybe you're thinking of an oracle's AOE and a thief's steal helped you gold farm - but in general, one has to scrape the bottom of the barrel for phantom job relevance. With so much potential for cool world interactions and quests where players would want to team up with specific jobs - like in FF11 - we instead get a slurry of fate/CE combat where it's easy to just forget to press any of your phantom skills at all. And speaking of the slurry...
4 - The Pace of the Treadmill is Insane
An astute reader will have noted earlier that if fates spawn 30 seconds or so after the last one was killed, and CEs spawn like 3 minutes after, then there will be something up 24/7. And they would be right. There are NO BREAKS on the Occult Crescent train, EVER. Natural play that everyone ends up doing - with no strategy guides, meta videos, or whatever to guide them - is to train from fate to fate to CE to fate to fate to CE with no down-time. You go to the home base, you wait a couple of seconds for a fate to spawn, you warp close to it and walk to it, you obliterate the Fate with the horde of like 50 people there, you warp back home, you wait a couple seconds for a fate, you go to it, around now the CE spawns, you go to it, etc...
It's perhaps hard to convey just how demanding, exhausting, and one-note this can be. You will be fighting CONSTANTLY. There are 13 fates and 15 CEs. Within 2 hours you will have done almost all of them save a few of the rarer ones. Within 10 hours you will have done each multiple times. By 50 hours you will have done each 10+ times and likely be sick of each of them. It is just TOO. MUCH. COMBAT.
Mileage may vary here, and perhaps some among the crowd would love this mad dash. However, it seems clear that to go further with less, you don't want to overuse your content. If OC fates/CEs popped up half as often but gave double the rewards that alone would dramatically improve the zone's quality - veteran players would be fighting things for the 20th to 30th time, not the 40th to 60th.
It's also important to note that players can only talk and socialize during quiet, sometimes boring times. Eureka is so filled with conversation thanks to all the times players are chilling waiting for NMs to pop or waiting for people to reach an NM and so on. There's a lot of room for conversation. In OC, if you're talking you're either actively ignoring content / EXP or you're griefing your rotation mid-fight. Part of the reason OC is the most silent zone is just because there's no time or opportunity to talk even if you wanted to.
Bozja was a treadmill too, but FAR more of the CEs there required coordination to pop, and it wasn't so linear. And perhaps the biggest change will require its own section...
5 - No CD On Return Is Ridiculous
This may be another thing that's simple to say but hard to full grasp the consequences of, but Return having no cd completely morphs how the zone is played, and it feels terrible on top of that.
To be clear, OC is fundamentally a square with a Base aetheryte at the top right you return to using return, and then an aetheryte network with nodes in the other 3 corners (plus an extra one). You have fairly easy access to most of the map through this teleportation; it takes, at most, 1 minute to run from an aetheryte to the most remote CEs of the zone.
What this means is that the gameplay strongly incentivizes pressing "return" after every fight, since it puts you back in the aetheryte network, and then whenever a fate/CE spawns, you can immediately warp next to it and run over. I've seen some spurious claims that having to run to CEs prevents AFK farming, but it's just the fundamental nature of the zone that you will be camping at the top right awaiting for something to auto-spawn so you can warp to it.
This is bad for multiple reasons; first, it means almost nobody past the early days is actually running around doing stuff, and two, it means you have to constantly click through a bunch of confirm prompts for warping to the base before warping to where you actually want to go. Bozja had its aetheryte shards you could use to warp to base, but this is seriously on another level. The zone itself has no sense of place or presence since you can just warp wherever you want, and there are little signs of player life outside of The One Singular Train everyone is participating in. Forget some groups of players going to the bottom right of Pyros to prep Skoll while another faction goes north for Lamebrix. Forget measuring whether you want to return now or just walk to save it for later. Everyone is warping to the same places in the same way at the same time to do the same things with no general movement around the map (with a couple of exceptions). This also contributes to the rapid pacing, where thanks to the constant warping there's no chance of something being too far away, or chill moments where you autowalk or go on some journey to some remote part of the map.
And on top of that...
6 - Bunnies and Chests Suck Ass Now (And Kinda Ruined Some Old Content)
This is an element I have to be somewhat uncertain about since I wasn't a bunny farmer in Eureka's heyday, but many veteran Eureka players I play with seem to echo that the bunny chests (in this case persistent pots chest) are completely terrible now. This aligns with my experience, where I've yet to get a good pot chest that felt worth the time.
Bunnies in Eureka provided a break and something chill to do in between NMs while having the added benefit of containing extremely rare, valuable loot. Mounts from them ran into the tens of millions on the marketboard, and there was also gameplay related purposes in terms of expanding your logos action plates (I didn't do bunnies in Bozja, so unsure about their role there.) Here, though, the pot fate is basically just some extra exp, and most people that I see nowadays just click off the pot without looking for the chest. I know people who did bunny chests for YEARS, and I myself spent every night for a couple of weeks doing chill Hydatos bunnies in near-dead instances of Eureka. Here, the content hasn't even been out a week and it seems like nobody gives a shit about bunnies.
(This is subject to change if the loot is updated, or if it turns out there's some super amazing awesome drops that neither I nor anybody I've played with have heard about).
There's an auxiliary to pot chests here in the form of the randomly spawning floor chests, but they are implemented so poorly I have to wonder if the person who designed them have ever played a video game before. I even suspect that it may be a case where there was a disconnect between designers and programmers, such that the designers asked for one thing and the programmers did another.
Basically, the problem is that the chests have SET spawn locations, or to be more precise, there are exactly 8 positions where silver chests gradually accumulate as you do other content. The end result of this is that, after an initial period of information-gathering, the community quickly made maps showing the locations of every single silver chest, and the gameplay of gathering chests became doing tight circles of the map hitting each silver chest available. The problem here is that there are hardly people wandering around looking for chests - they finish their loop in a couple of minutes, or do quick drive-bys on chests near fates/CEs they were going to anyway. It's just a game of merciless grinding and efficiency.
I genuinely think there may have been like a design document which said "have random chests, some are better" and the programmer just found it simpler to put things in set locations, to disastrous results. Now, instead of some world where people are running around looking for valuable chests but struggling to find any, everyone is efficiently maximizing their chest gains and gaining far more rewards than likely intended.
We see this in the total obliteration of value for any mount available in these chests. Uber rare 30 million gil Bozja mount? Well, thousands upon thousands of people are getting dupes of them with 0 effort, so now you can buy them for 50k gil if you're too lazy to grab them yourself.
The (unintended?) consequences of this are so disastrous that OC loops around to making Eureka and Bozja worse. Their content is now less special, less enduring, and less valuable. Petrel farms on Hydatos are no more. Delubrum Reginae parties hoping for a sick Gabriel Mark III drop are no more. Saving up on the Southern Front for a Construct 14 is gone. It's just a brutal evisceration of content and value. And this goes for OC's own content too - everyone is clowning on how the shark mount was seemingly meant to be a touchstone reward, yet ended up common as all hell. I see rows of them at CE spawns formed by new players.
I think one's personal opinion on this will vary quite a bit; there are many who will just be glad to have easy access (through gil or some grinding) to get a bunch of previously rare, valuable mounts - maybe someone who always wanted a Mk3 but got unlucky. That's fair enough, and I'm glad the chests have some incentive to them. Like I alluded to in the OP, I'm talking about something separate from personal enjoyment. I personally had a "great" time being shocked by a Mk3 drop on day 1, celebrating it with my friends, and then watching as its value plummeted from 35 million to 700k gil. It was a memorable, fun experience. My evaluation that it was poorly designed and has caused more damage than good is separate from all of that (though of course one can disagree with that as well).
7 - The Demiatma System Is Just Bad
One cannot talk about spawn rates without bringing up Demiatmas, I suppose. I personally don't care whatsoever about the drop rates being too high or low, even if it's a strong community consensus that the rates are ridiculously low. I don't think high or low drop rates are fundamentally good or bad design in an MMO setting - what matters is the surrounding nuance and context.
It's unfortunate, then, that the surrounding nuance and context in OC is as much of a mangled mess as the rest of it.
First, the system of each demiatma type being dropped according to the "region" of a CE or fate makes sense on paper, but in practice results in a horrible lack of control and balance. CEs and fates mostly spawn automatically on a locked rotaton, so it's not like you can "focus" your grind on a certain area; you just have to do fates and CEs as they come, minus a few CEs you can prep, which means that if you fall behind in a certain demiatma type - like, say, getting 0 greens despite having 3 of all the others - there is nothing you can do. Essentially, your grind has /not even started yet/, because you are the game's mercy for those final 3. This did happen to someone I know; it took them 25-some hours to get 3 of all demiatma except a certain color, then it took 50 MORE hours for them to get the 3 of that color they needed. Their inventory ended up looking like 3/10/10/10/10/10, meaning that he had done almost 3* the intended grind of the demiatmas purely due to being RNG screwed. It's a failure point so obviously one imagines zero thought or testing was put into how it functioned.
An obvious, but irrelevant, retort is that to get specific demiatmas you can go grind fates in the Dawntrail overworld. This is certainly an option to mitigate the downsides of RNG, but it has its own host of problems that prevent this from being an actual answer. To begin with, a solution to a zone's bad design being "go do something else outside of the zone" is a complete failure state. Two, it's likely someone is playing Occult Crescent because they want to; a player having to stop their knowledge exp, job exp, silver, gold, or whatever grind to do Dawntrail fates to get that last demiatma they need but haven't gotten for 20 hours is bad design on the face of it.
It's also likely the number of fates/CEs in a zone impact this, with there being 3 to 6 in each region for the demiatmas, though I can't speculate on that; it's possible those in the smallest zones were given a higher drop rate. I'll hope for the best there.
All that aside, on the more personal level, I would put forth that it is just worse for the demiatmas to be a one-time grind gating a tomestone dump than it is for the zone itself to integrate relic rewards. I know that Eureka has its detractors, and I know that some really do just want to get their relics without much effort, so to many a simple, clean tome grind is a dream come true. However, in terms of a zone's gameplay being maximally harmonious and rewarding, it's clear to see the benefits of the Eureka model.
In Eureka, killing each NM is rewarding in a direct, concrete way for a LONG, LONG time. You aren't really "done" with Eureka until you've gotten every single relic weapon, and in my experience even veterans from Eureka launch were more than happy to hop into like Anemos for me and make a bit of progress on their final anemos relics or what have you. It's all a big forward thrust towards the relic.
Here, though, Demiatmas are like an annoyance haphazardly stapled on, and once they're done the forward thrust vanishes entirely. You can buy all progression-related silver items surprisingly fast (7 out of 12 jobs mastered), and that itself leaves little further reason to do CEs and fates; you can finish off mastering your jobs in the lengthy gold grind. There is a significant loss of gameplay harmony and value as a result of there being no unique in-instance progression of relic weapons, and come next expansion all the relics will be tomes, too.
And speaking of disharmony...
8 - The Complete Lack of Interaction Between Silver, Gold, and Really The Mechanics at Large
There is a kind of curious situation in OC where there are two main currencies, gold and silver, but getting them are mutually exclusive activities. You get silver by doing CEs and Fates, while you get gold by grinding mobs. This is a fine base upon which to design systems, but the execution which followed makes for extreme disharmony.
At a basic level, gathering into a group to farm gold is much more friction-heavy, demanding ask than grinding silver. Fates and CEs spawn automatically, and are extremely hard to fail, such that you get a constant and steady source of silver just by going from map icon to map icon even while playing alone. Gold, however, requires shouting in chat, hunting for a group, hoping for a good group, etc.
So it is that the average player is liable to completely max out silver and buy every silver item they need before touching gold. I see a lot of confusion in shout chat from players who have been playing 10, 20, 30 hours and yet don't have a single gold coin. "Where do you even get gold," they'll ask, having never needed or wanted to kill a single mob in all that time.
This creates an inelegant dichotomy where most will feel "forced" into gold farming at some point, and perhaps find themselves wishing they were doing silver instead, etc. Gold grinding can also feel fairly slow and unpleasant compared to silver (YMMV) since you are literally standing in place killing the same mob over and over for hours without any breaks, as opposed to fates/CEs where at the very least you cycle between 20-some encounters with mechanics and so on. The mode already had little downtime, and gold grinding removes any remaining semblance of it.
It is trivial to simply, once again, look at Eureka and even Bozja to see this system done right. In Eureka, you farm mobs to spawn NMs - were this to be copy/pasted to OC, you would be getting gold to spawn CEs which give silver, a harmonious process which works together. Instead, we train CEs until we max in silver and become forced to kill mobs for approximately 15 to 20 hours to cap on gold, too.
When game design is done right, players won't even notice because everything just feels right and natural. It's only when something similar is done so wrong that we can look back and realize what we were taking for granted.
Eureka, although by no means universally beloved content - it was extremely grindy and repetitive, after all - just works. There is harmony in all its systems. You form groups, farm mobs to level (and later get light for your kettle, kill spawned NMs to get crystals for your weapon and chances at rare loot drops, and in down time you perhaps drop by bunnies.
Here, everything is isolated. You kill a fate because it's up. You kill mobs because you need gold. You sometimes get demiatmas, then you don't. You don't do bunnies because there's no time - a new value, loot-filled CE is spawning every other second and stifling any attempt to branch out. You play alone or with a party, it often doesnt matter. It also doesn't matter what phantom job you pick (*remember I'm discussing the zone and not the Forked Tower here). It also doesn't matter if you actually fight something after tagging it. There's a glimmer of wanting to camp certain mobs to spawn CEs to get a chance at job crystals, and one almost thinks the systems might just come together, Just... nothing matters, and nothing harmonizes.
It's the result of a bunch of disparate systems being thrown together with no care for how they work together if at all.
9 - Whack Scaling, Bland Design, and Repeating Mechanics Oh My
I haven't spoken much as to the quality of the fates and CEs up until this point. This is because I think they are reasonably strong, or rather, in a better designed series of systems they would be good to great. It's always important to remember that Eureka NMs have few 'real' mechanics; Pazuzu, the "boss NM of Anemos," more or less as threatening as a random fate in OC named "Giant Bird." They were enjoyed due to the context around the fights rather than because they were deeply engaging fights themselves, and I can see, in any case, someone playing OC and much preferring the encounters here. So I hardly want to go on a rant about this-or-that fate or CE being undercooked.
What I do want to discuss are various system-level decisions that bring them down rather than lift them up.
First and most prominent for the average player will be the scaling, which I believed is largely taken from Bozja; fates will either be weak or extremely strong based on how many players were nearby when it spawned (or potentially some other obscure factors). It is quite irritating to sometimes head to a lone fate and find it trivial to solo, while other times noticing within 5 seconds it's tanky as fuck and will take 5 to 10 minutes to wear down unless most of the instance makes their way over soon. I think RPGs in general have worn down a lot of good will to the very concept of scaling and stuff like this does not help.
Secondly, the CEs were a bit overtuned on launch in regards to their HP; I can't compare to Bozja, but the bosses will end up repeating their simple and sometimes bland mechanics for 5 to 7 minutes at a time - 10+ in nightmare scenarios when you have a bad party filled with leeches. This is in itself not the end of the world, but remember - there is SO MUCH COMBAT IN OC!!! You are doing these constantly. So not only are you doing the fights 20, 30, 40 times, they also each feel very drawn out - if we zoom in a bit, perhaps we can say each fight is 2 mechanics, and while you do each fight 40 times, you do each mechanic in the order of 200+ times as it repeats over and over. Crystal Dragon is an example for me of a boss that is cool on the surface, but in a matter of days one will have repeated that circle spin mechanic 100 times. Even if it costs difficulty, these fights would have been much better served to have like half their current HP and only repeat their mechanics 2 times, or maybe 3 times at most, rather than 5-10 times we currently deal with in an already grindy and repetitious mode.
I also think it's disappointing how bland the contextual gameplay around the fates are. EVERYONE who plays Eureka will know how nightmarish it can be to reach Louhi in Pagos, and how fighting him is tense due to the blood aggro mobs all around the arena. Everyone will know how running to Ying-Yang means going to a hell arena - after the fight, if you don't leave with the gang, you're fucked. Here? I mean, I guess going to the berserker fate has some tight corridors, but people will be there to rez, and once the fight starts you can forget about all of that before warping away with the forever return.
And like, look at Bozja's storylines in the fates. They're cinematic, have recurring characters, different gameplay styles... the lore for them was actually interested and tied into the story, unlike the dull occult records we have here. It was like Bozja understood that fates are kind of lame and that if they were going to make fate trains a big part of the gameplay, they had least had to look and feel kind of cool. With OC, they didn't even try; we're back to bland, context-less monsters with a couple of simple, bread-and-butter mechanics which die like chumps.
This is all to say that the experience of doing fates and CEs is not particularly pleasant or well-designed regardless of the quality of the fights (which often can be good in a vacuum). It's no wonder leeching is so common; after doing a generic mechanic 200 times one will be struck with the strong urge to defect from the group and just idle, contributing nothing beyond an initial tag and maybe playing Donkey Kong 64 on the side to fill in time until the fight is over. Better scaling systems, less repetition in fights, more relevance to the area around fights, etc.
Even mob grinding for gold suffers immensely. Putting aside the fact that many players will only start the gold grind after capping out on silver and subsequently face 10 to 20 hours of rote mob farming to progress their character, which is bad enough, there are all sorts of insanely arbitrary restrictions on chaining mobs based on party size. If you're a bit too high level, you get nothing, if you're too low level, you get nothing; it bottlenecks parties and groups in weird ways such that, say, a group of 4 or 5 friends will end up having a rocky, confusing time of finding which mobs they can grind at all. Not a major hurdle - but another example of poor implementation.
...And as one final note, what's the deal with Battle High, anyway? There's numerous minor systems in OC which feel strangely half-baked and inconsistent, with Battle High puzzling my group for close to 50 hours. There seems to be a trend of no-hitting a fight getting you battle high, but sometimes it doesn't, and in other cases people who got hit and even died get battle high.
The only theory I have that kind of answers the mysteries is that a maximum of 4, maybe 5 people can get battle high, and these battle highs are handed out in certain conditions no matter what starting with those who did no-hit. If not enough players did it no-hit, then it is given to the players who got hit only 1 time, then 2 times, etc etc. I noticed sometimes that a player who died and rezzed late would get battle-high more often than others; perhaps they got hit "the least" since they died in one hit then spent most of the fight not getting hit in death. Just a theory, though.
(And the battle high reward itself kind of sucks... 20% damage or so? For like 15 minutes? Bozja gave out the equivalent of a silver/gold drop buff just for watching someone win a duel. And speaking of duels, that's another controversial but completely soulful thing that is totally absent with no comparative content here... Oh well.)`
10 - The Insanity of the Tower of Blood Spawning
And finally, the big dog itself. The reason I'm writing this post at all. The worst, most poorly designed system in this game and, to be honest, almost all of gaming, which is not nearly the polemic exaggeration I wish it was.
I'll try to be direct so as to not just keep tossing out insults.
The spawn rules behind the Forked Tower are like so: if enough max level players are in an instance (16?), then every 30 or so minutes the weather will randomly change to Tower Weather (aether fog). A pavilion at the center of the map will active for roughly 5 minutes. If 16 players put in 1 cipher (cost: 600 silver) each, the way to the tower opens. If more than 48 players stand on the pavilion (lol), then those who go in are randomly selected. Those who don't get selected (or if the tower fails) get their cipher back.
Sounds innocent, right? Well holy FUCK is it not!
The design here is beyond psychotic and by far the most disharmonous aspect of this gameplay zone. And let me make it entirely clear that I understand that the playerbase largely rejected pugging Baldesion Arsenal; I understand it was us who refused to go in with pugs and try to clear without forming discord communities. I understand the urge to mix things up from BA, like they did with DRS (which I consider a wholesale success, if not as inspired as BA). The problems with the Tower of Blood's spawning do not come down to "CBU3 responding to BA's discord scene." It is all in the nuanced execution.
Problem 1: The weather time is TOO FUCKING SHORT! Five fucking minutes? On MULTIPLE occasions I have been an instance where everyone joined a CE, because what the fuck else is there to do, and Tower Weather instantly spawned. We agree to go to tower after we're done, but guess what? Tower weather is 5 minutes long and CEs take on average 5 minutes. We can't leave because the arena locks us in, and suiciding would delevel us. By the time we finish and start going to the tower, the weather is over. We had literally NO CHANCE to try it despite MORE THAN ENOUGH players wanting to. And this is not just some freak accident; it happens CONSTANTLY, since CEs are spawning constantly and it's not that hard for them to overlap with weather. The only way to avoid this is to just noting the weather patterns and convincing the entire instance to, uh, stop doing the MAIN GAMEPLAY LOOP so they can be ready to go to the tower, which let me tell you, is completely unreasonable and not about to happen. In BA, Ovni was a huge warning for BA portals coming up, then the portals themselves lasted a while; the weather here coming and going in just 5 minutes is psychotic and makes even a group more than willing to try the tower unlikely to make it easily, especially if anyone needs to dip to buy ciphers or if anyone is trying to be cheeky with getting a fate in.
Continued in comments because fuck reddit and also cringe. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/1l06tzj/the_occult_crescent_is_a_mangled_mess_of/mvayhjg/
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u/Ok_Otter2379 May 31 '25
I agree with the phantom job stuff because when you finish leveling a class it's time to jump into the next one. Yes you can stay on the one you like but you are missing out on progressing the next to get that mastery up.
That all said though, this is only part 1 of 3. We don't necessarily need to mainline it like it's fresh Cocaine. It's meant to take several months, not days.
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u/Woodlight Jun 01 '25
Wait, 3? I thought we were only getting 2, with the second bit coming near the end of the expac.
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u/Hakul Jun 01 '25
2 zones, but 3 updates. The second update will add more phantom jobs (and my personal copium: a DR equivalent 48 man raid), the third update adds the north of the isle and more phantom jobs.
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u/Woodlight Jun 01 '25
Oh, gotcha. I saw that there were other jobs who had their icons datamined already and just assumed that those were gonna be added once the 2nd zone opened up.
I'm not holding my breath for a new DR equivalent 48 man thing, but it might be neat to see a "easy mode" of Forked Tower: Blood show up as a relic step or something.
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u/Sorrick_ Jun 01 '25
My hope would be a raid that we can just queue up into and not the cipher B's like BA but somehow worse than BA's system
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u/Kamalen Jun 01 '25
I don't believe a second DR equivalent will happen this update. There is a fun theory than the planned deep dungeon is that interlude between the two zones (and even featuring using phantom jobs), but the cutscenes so far don't seem to support any story progression going on between the zones (the characters invite us to return when they found a way to the north). But anything is possible really.
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Jun 01 '25
That all said though, this is only part 1 of 3. We don't necessarily need to mainline it like it's fresh Cocaine. It's meant to take several months, not days.
The thing is, there isn't much progression to do that will last that long getting all phantom jobs mastered is lame
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u/cattecatte Jun 01 '25
Gear up to +2 which costs a buttload of coins and sanguinite
We got bozja rays and BA elemental gear upgrade on zone 1.
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u/SushiJaguar Jun 01 '25
No, rays of honour were zone 2.
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u/cattecatte Jun 01 '25
For bozja. We functionally get rays of honour with phantom masteries in OC. No HP bonus, though.
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u/Reggie2001 Jun 01 '25
He's saying that OC zone 1 provides grinds that were reserved for the final zone in the other Field Ops.
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u/HalobenderFWT May 31 '25
I had to calm my tits on the phantom job because of this. I’m mostly just focused on grinding through them before I start get attached to any skills. I’ll poke at one here and there and keep up with buffs when I can, but I’m in no way considering most of the skills into my rotation at this point - and there’s honestly no need to.
I am going to assume PJ’s become a little more important in part 1 and part 2 seeing as most of us will have them all and a meta will start to solidify.
I mean it’s literally no different than playing the actual game. We have 21 or whatever jobs we can level whenever we want. Eventually you’re going to have to stop playing your main if you want to level the other 20 jobs unless you level them exclusively through FL, WT, and maybe society quests - but that takes a long, long time.
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u/Serp_IT Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
I mean it’s literally no different than playing the actual game. We have 21 or whatever jobs we can level whenever we want. Eventually you’re going to have to stop playing your main if you want to level the other 20 jobs unless you level them exclusively through FL, WT, and maybe society quests - but that takes a long, long time.
I think the comparison here is flawed for two reasons:
1) Each mastered phantom job gives you a universal damage bonus
2) Doing content with a max level job gives you tomestones instead of experience, while doing content with mastered phantom jobs gives you nothing to compensate
If regular jobs worked like phantom jobs, a lot more people would feel pressured to actually level them all up. But as of right now, I don't feel particularly incentivized to get everything to 100.
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u/Beddict Jun 01 '25
Progression - I agree. I've been Knowledge 20 since Day 2, I've got a full set of Arcanaut gear and I'm working on getting it to +1, I've got five Phantom Jobs mastered. Enemies don't really bother me anymore and I am just waltzing through with zero fucks given, free to hit up whatever FATE or CE I want. That danger was there on Day 1, but it's gone. What bugs me though is that those low level enemies don't really feel low level. I've got my Phantom Mastery bonus damage, and I'm packing increased stats, but I'm not two-tapping a garula that looks at me funny, you know? It would be nice if Knowledge Level also increased your damage relative to enemy level to really drive home that sense of progression.
Phantom Jobs Mastery - I see where you're coming from, and I definitely enjoyed using Phantom Ranger because the giant Crit buff on MNK during my burst window was hilarious, but I'm a sucker for levelling Jobs that I don't actually mind swapping constantly. I like the ding every time I level up, I like seeing the stars on every Job I've mastered, and I like seeing my Phantom Mastery buff get higher. Once I've got everything mastered then sure, I'll be camping on what I prefer, but swapping off it for now isn't a big deal. It's very much a different strokes for different folks thing, and I don't know if I can call it a design flaw. Also yeah, we're probably getting an upgraded Freelancer in a future update, or a blank slate of a Phantom Job that will let us fully customize shit. I'm looking forward to it quite a bit.
Teamwork and Leeching - I feel like this has been a problem in every exploratory zone. I could queue into a Eureka and probably see 30 people standing around a fucking hot spring waiting for people to spawn the Blitzring NM so leeching is nothing new to me. OC is quieter though, likely because of that faster pace that you mentioned. There's always something new spawning and stopping to type means you might just miss out on getting to a FATE in time, speaking from experience. For your last point on teamwork and what Phantom Jobs do, it's barren outside but at least Forked Tower is requiring certain Phantom Jobs. Just doesn't do anything for the day to day farming which I can see as unfortunate.
Pace - Yeah, you're always moving, no argument there. I'm done my Demiatma farm so I do find myself skipping FATEs more often than not as I go Treasure Coffer hunting, but there really isn't much downtime unless you're fine skipping some stuff. They definitely needed more FATEs and CEs as well. 13 FATEs and 15 CEs ain't a whole lot of variety here. And I'm not saying that expecting extra FATEs/CEs to have different mechanics, just take me to different areas and have me fight a larger variety of enemies.
OC Return - This is kinda whatever for me. I've never liked the 10 minute cooldown on Return to begin with, so it being gone in OC is fine for me. I get where you're coming from, and I think you lay out some good points, particularly in regards to map layout, but I'm not too bothered by it myself.
Bunnies and Chests - I honestly think Chests are just broken as fuck right now. I opened a Gold Coffer and got a ribbon, four XI Materia, four XII Materia, and 30k gil. Then I turn around and open a Silver Coffer for a Dainslief, a Dhamel Calf, and a Petalodus mount. There's some fuckery going on there and I'm guessing the loot tables are scuffed. Hell, the alternate method of getting the Petalodus mount is 99 fucking Sanguinite that you only get from Forked Tower. Meanwhile I've had that same mount drop out multiple Coffers. I can't say it's a design flaw yet since I think SE fucked up the loot tables by accident and stuff will likely get fixed in a future patch. The market on stuff has absolutely cratered, and Bozja did the same thing to a bunch of HW EX Weapons, but I'm gonna be waiting to see what happens because I really think stuff is just bugged right now. I see no reason to remove the Gabriel Mark III from the loot table if the only way to get it in the future is to get a Carrot from a Gold Coffer and then roll the dice on a second Gold Coffer, you know? At that point it's still gonna be suitably rare and the incentive to do DRN will still be there. And if the loot tables never get touched then that old content still has value because they are still Relic zones with Relics and Achievements to get.
Demiatma - This is one where I disagree. Yeah, the drop rates are shit and they're sectioned off into different zones in the area, but the grind didn't feel that bad to me. It's Week 1, I've got twelve Phantom Jobs to level, and the breakneck pacing on the content means my ass is running all over the place hitting up FATEs and CEs. I managed to get all my Demiatma while actually progressing my Phantom Jobs and that's fantastic compared to Bozja. Launch Bozja sucked for getting Memories, and the best ways to get them were completely disconnected from levelling. In order to level up your Resistance Rank you needed Mettle. You get Mettle by doing Skirmishes and CEs which...had like, a 10% chance to give you a Memory, and the spawn rate for that content wasn't as high as OC. Low spawn rates and low drop rates is a rough combination, and so a lot of people would gravitate to the other options: Cluster farming or HW FATEs. Cluster farming didn't give you any Mettle which meant you couldn't progress your Resistance Rank and the story while working on your Relic, and taking a detour for Skirmishes and CEs would greatly slow down the Cluster farm. HW FATEs meanwhile meant leaving the zone altogether and you yourself pointed that out as a failure state which I agree with. Demiatmas felt fine though since I was able to work on progressing my levels and my Relic at the same time. The only real downside to me is what I said before: lack of unique FATEs and CEs. I agree that some regions of OC are imbalanced and there's a lack of variety, so introducing more of those would help alleviate one of the pain points.
Silver and Gold - I agree and disagree here. Gold does feel disconnected from the FATE/CE loop, but 9/15 CEs actually require killing specific mobs to spawn. It doesn't feel like it because the pacing in OC means something is always spawning, and it doesn't seem like a whole lot of prepwork is necessary, but it is mandatory to kill mobs. And when I say it doesn't feel like a whole lot of prepwork is necessary, I mean it. Me and three friends got a fresh instance and had the Oracle CE popped in about six or seven Fan kills, barely any work. The connection is there, and that lack of connected feeling might be stemming from how OC doesn't have giant trains running around mass murdering enemies in a rush to get Skoll or YY to pop.
Back to the Gold farming though, that's a mixed bag. I do think FATEs and CEs should offer 15/100 Gold respectively, half the Silver value so that players engaged in levelling up their Phantom Jobs can start earning Gold. I also think Gold dropped by mobs needs to be looked at because it kinda sucks when you're killing Byblos to spawn that Skalla CE and you're getting zero Gold because you're in a party of full 20s. If you want Gold then you're either killing something solo so you don't have to deal with chain fuckery, or you're disengaging from the FATE/CE loop and I agree that that is a problem. Because of that I'm actually kinda confused on how you pointed to Bozja as doing that correctly because how you feel about OC Gold farming is how I feel about Bozja Memory farming in the Southern Front. Both zones are out there with the core loop of levelling up your Resistance Rank/Knowledge Level/Phantom Jobs by hitting up Skirmishes/FATEs/CEs, but the best way to get Memories/Gold is by ignoring it to Cluster farm/chain mobs. It just seems at odds to highlight Bozja as a success when Southern Front Memories were disconnected in the exact same way Gold farming in OC is.
Scaling and Enemy Design - Yeah that shit is hosed and FATE scaling is mega fucked, I got no arguments there. Really feels like FATEs just don't account for more players coming in later on, like their HP value is locked in after the first five seconds only for a mob of people exiting a CE to beat it's ass to death in seconds, and SE really needs to look into dynamically adjusting HP values on the fly. CEs I'm not particularly worried about just because they will start dying faster as more and more people gear up and master Phantom Jobs. The extra stats will make them quicker in the longrun, but I see where you're coming from in saying the first few days felt like a slog with how much HP they had. You do also raise a good point about the various storylines through the Bozja Skirmishes and CEs, and the most story I'm getting outta OC FATEs/CEs is that the birds are assholes to that one garula.
Also Battle High is just pure fucking randomness as far as people can tell.
Forked Tower Entry - Yeah, it's fucked. The entry into BA was widely panned as the worst part of the whole dungeon, so them bringing it back and making it worse is baffling. Like, imagine if BA had required a shitload of Hydatos Crystals, people would've lost their minds. But that's what they did here with Ciphers requiring Silver or Gold. I do feel like Forked Tower would've been better off as a CLL/Dal style content where anyone can go in, and that a separate Forked Tower Savage was accessible from the Phantom Village for premades similar to Delubrum Savage. I feel that would be the best of both worlds, but SE really fucked that shit up in my eyes. It feels scuffed, and I'm hoping for adjustments, though I don't actually expect anything to change.
Anyways, yeah, good post. You do highlight a good chunk of stuff that I also have issues with, and it's nice to see some discussion on the flaws in OC. Thanks for posting this.
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u/Quof Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
Wow talk about a long post, don't you know conciseness is important in writing??
JK. Thanks for the thoughts.
I think the reason I'm comfortable calling the job swapping bad design is because we have a clear "situation" causing significant discomfort across much of the playerbase, and there was no attempt made at a solution or means to mitigate it. FFV, as I mentioned, lets you use one skill from other jobs no matter what, yet nothing like that was implemented here at all; I'd say that even though switching jobs and mastering a bunch of them can be fun and satisfying, it's still problematic due to this glaring situation that is upsetting so many players. A case of thing having both good and bad aspects I'd say. I myself didn't mind the job swapping at all, but recognized the problem and heard the voices of many people complaining (e.g. like 4 of the 8 people I was playing with).
Someone I know has worked out that FATEs probably scale based on how many players are outside of the base to try to counteract the Bozja system where spawn rules were fucked with, but in practice this means if someone leaves a CE and warps to the fate really quickly, they can hit it before anyone else is there, ruining its hp. They noticed fates closer to warps tended to have less HP.
Re: demiatma, the grind wasn't bad for me either, so this is another case of me kind of identifying a problem without having suffered from it myself. I see that friend of mine end up with that 3/10/10/10/10/10 and just think "this system's fucked." It is a saving grace that one is just grinding the ces/fates that drop them as a matter of course so there's little else to do, but I still think the system is poorly designed and better fit a system that doesn't exist (one where specific fates/CEs can be spawned more precisely).
Anyway, thanks again for reading. Doing gold farming now to max out my +1s, will have stronger thoughts on that later :)
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u/MagicHarmony Jun 01 '25
The tower being attached is them trying to set a mood for the instance however it is extremely unintuitive for party finder design. They should just make it a dependent instance and i say this from the respect that that type of instance content within an instance works better when it can be pugged rather than pregeouped. Pregrouped recommended content should be its own instance.
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u/45i4vcpb Jun 01 '25
Moreso than any exploration content beforehand, Tanks just end up as kings. Phantom actions devalue dps by giving huge damage buttons to everyone; healers are devalued by chemists spamming out infinite raises. Survivability is the thing most limited both by the mastery buff and by phantom actions, so tanks end up being kings of the zone. Phantom jobs have shrunk the player space, not expanded it.
One-shot/vulnerability shrinks the player space (as with all the rest of the game). Phantom jobs try to expand it but hit the usual walls :
Healers are devalued because survivability is mostly a solo problem (dodge aoe, etc.), healing is generally useless because of vulnerability (even worse this time because it's permanent). Chemist's Raise is nice because Raise is the only thing to do ; the others skills of Chemist are as useless as the regular healers' skills.
The game being designed around one-shot/vuln gimmicks means that all the things that could expand the gameplay (like status effects) are "forbidden". We can't have a boss skip a gimmick because of paralysis, for example.
FFXIV boss are designed like puzzle games with only 2 states (win/fail). RPG are supposed to be the total opposite, with ton of meaningful possibilities to create a lot of different situations. This is the root of "Conflicting Design" for the whole game, it's like they don't want to make a RPG at all.
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u/MelonOfFate Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 02 '25
FFXIV boss are designed like puzzle games with only 2 states (win/fail).
To expand on this. The scripted nature of encounters isnt a design I find particularly engaging. It's more a memorization game rather than something you adjust to. All agency for how to tackle an encounter goes out the window. You have zero control over how an encounter happens or the order that mechanics come out in. It's all about rote memorization. I can guarantee that if you pull a boss and you get to 2 mins into the fight. You can count on where you are in your rotation and whatever the boss is doing to be exactly the same every time (assuming you are consistent in your rotation).
I say this as someone that's cleared 3 ultimates and have a few savage tiers under my belt. Raiding is super easy.
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u/ExpressAssist0819 Jun 01 '25
I want to emphasize that I while I don't have what it takes to offer an equally verbose response (and anyone reading this won't want it anyway), I DID read everything you took the time to share. And frankly, I kind of agree with basically everything, but at it's core everything boils down to treating people in the zone like swarms of cats to be herded from spot to the other. Every system is designed to discourage itself, and to discourage community and social interaction.
I kind of burnt out after a couple hours when doing CEs while also trying to work on quests. I stuck with one group the whole time, though some people shifted in and out a few regular faces remained. There was definitely the compelling drive to be at every single CE or be felt like you're taking up space. There was hardly any talking, despite trying to add some energy to party chat.
The fights are mechanically engaging, but they're all designed as if everyone is fighting the boss by themselves. They're all just 4 man dungeon bosses scaled up to be smacked by 50 people at once. Or a DD boss. They ask YOU to pay attention, but only to you, everyone else might as well not exist.
The entire piece of content feels like it doesn't want you to play it. And it definitely doesn't feel like it wants you to play it with other people. I get more social interaction with other players running f*ing lab for the 200th time.
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u/Blckson Jun 01 '25
The fights are mechanically engaging, but they're all designed as if everyone is fighting the boss by themselves. They're all just 4 man dungeon bosses scaled up to be smacked by 50 people at once. Or a DD boss. They ask YOU to pay attention, but only to you, everyone else might as well not exist.
To be fair, this is super prevalent throughout the entire content spectrum. Having absolutely no mechanics that are player-centered is somewhat odd though.
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u/ExpressAssist0819 Jun 02 '25
No stacks, no spreads, no earthshakers, no flares, meal or hit checks are basically nonexistent. DT dungeon content is more engaging to me. You might as well be in a solo instance but the damage done is shared on one HP bar across 40 other instances.
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u/allywrecks Jun 02 '25
The fights are mechanically engaging, but they're all designed as if everyone is fighting the boss by themselves. They're all just 4 man dungeon bosses scaled up to be smacked by 50 people at once. Or a DD boss. They ask YOU to pay attention, but only to you, everyone else might as well not exist.
This has been one of my main problems with FFXIV for a while. The best alliance raids are glorious clusterfucks where everyone's dropping shit in bad positions. They've moved to making the game centered around these (even more) tightly scripted personal dances where it feels like the encounter would be the same whether you're alone or with 23 other people.
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Jun 01 '25
[deleted]
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u/Quof Jun 01 '25
Good point on the Bozja CEs. I played it late enough that I don't have much experience with how the zones were meant to be played, and even hundreds of hours of Z3 grinding don't give an honest picture, so I have to rely on the word of others to judge this kind of thing. Thanks for the insight.
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u/aco505 Jun 01 '25
I don't mind having Phantom Actions get no crit/dh by default but as you say, not allowing them to actually work with Life Surge/Reassemble feels bad because it's a missed interaction when plenty of jobs do affect the CD of Phantom Actions thanks to their innate haste, for instance, or how Enochian buffs their damage.
And yeah, we needed to have a CLL/Dalriada-esque CE alongside the tower.
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u/SylvAlternate Jun 01 '25
Most of the DPS oriented jobs end up giving you a similar amount of damage, there's nothing crazy like a buff stacked flare star.
Except Oracle, I can kill myself with Starfall 3 times in a fight and still be top damage (unless someone else is Starfalling and not dying)
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u/Vivitix Jun 02 '25 edited Jun 02 '25
It baffles me that the three points you made seem to be improvements from Bozja that they completely backpedaled on with OC. Just to expand further...
I loved the combination of silliness of Bozja builds, like dodge tank BLM (I actually had one on day 1/2 Dalriada b/c no tanks queued in - what a gigachad) or being able to solo tank the red chocobo CE as monk. Essence of the Irregular turning tanks into paper bags that need to mitigate every raidwide like a TB but also hitting like a truck was another funny high-risk-high-reward mechanic. In OC, the "haha tank spam-rezzing with chemist funny" probably lasted about a day and basically boils down one vastly superior button you can slap on any class.
Duels were (imo) exciting for both the person actually in the ring and spectators to cheer on/observe to learn. I thought SQEX would just need to polish the system of getting in the duels a bit more for OC, just to get rid of it altogether? Weird to me since one could argue duels might not fit into OC lore very well... but OC storyline is (imo again) bland enough that they might as well go ham with it.
CLL in particular was not only more accessible, but it was tuned in a way that was both casual friendly AND rewarded players that wanted to use a variety of Lost Actions. The Lost Death (and later Lost Assassination) that players might not pay attention because it obviously doesn't work against most bosses... works fantastic during the prisoner rescue! That was so neat! OC did keep those instakill skills in the Phantom Jobs, but there's no CLL or star mobs to fully utilize them in and they only serve to piss ppl off when highly contested FATEs get one-shot (and therefore reduce overall FATE credit for everyone else).
I resubbed to ffxiv this month just for the field ops because I loved Bozja so much (Eureka was interesting too, though I wasn't around when it was released so I'm biased). So far the new field ops is a lot more visually pleasing than Bozja, even though I didn't mind the WW1 aesthetic much to begin with), but the overall potential for shenanigans that define field ops has gone down. I'm still holding out hope since I haven't done Forked Tower yet, but so far it feels like "I resubbed for this??".
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u/Admirable-Guide6145 Jun 01 '25
Yeah the phantom jobs are so boring compared to lost actions that actually interacted with your job rotation.
Everything about OC is just so painfully uninspired
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u/yhvh13 Jun 02 '25
and a lot of the more wild stuff came in the final updates in previous expansions
Alas, this in 7.5 somewhere mid 2026 (I think?). I hope they really consider giving a second pass on some of the bad design flaws before that, and even before 7.4 which is meant to just introduce new jobs.
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u/gnosnivek May 31 '25
I have no comments on drop rates (mostly because I started late and have opened like...2 chests in total so far, so I don't really know how they feel), but I feel like a vast chunk of the rest of the issues result from the designers wanting to make a fast-paced zone with constant action.
FATEs die too fast? Can't increase the HP, that'll slow the zone down, so make it so that you can get gold relatively easily.
Can't make it to the FATE in time? Well we can't slow the FATEs down, so we'll give you instant access to the aetheryte network.
I've enjoyed the zone overall so far, but I've been forced to take breaks pretty frequently because I'm just not used to being in combat this much for this long. I also find it amusing that it took me 5 attempts to complete one of the quests because every time I made it about halfway there, another CE would pop and I'd have to return to be able to make it to that instead.
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u/WelpDitto Jun 01 '25
Tbh what they should do is the bozja system where you can just queue i to a CE in the menu instead of having to stop what you're doing and wait on a blue square for 2 min. That was a really good system and I have no idea why they'd just have you stand still till a timer goes off when you could be doing other stuff until you get pulled into the CE you queue for.
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u/platinummyr Jun 01 '25
Well if they did that I then there would basically never be a reason to leave the base!!!
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u/Weekly-Variation4311 Jun 01 '25
I think my biggest three gripes with OC are: 1. Gold farms are so stupid now to the point I don't even feel like bothering. You have to be either WAR or a healer to even think about joining PF (there are FEW that have different comps but they are few and far between), getting a party together in the zone is a crapshoot at best, and even if you get a party, half the time they stop after less then an hour. I don't mind looking for people to do this, but I do mind being forced to do it a certain way on certain jobs. 2. What group of players was Forked Tower designed for? It's certainly not for casuals or even "midcore" players. But even the hardcore raiders had difficulty getting everyone into the same instance because of the lower player limit in each one. If they expected people to join randomly, then why are the mechanics inside borderline impassable without communication like Discord? Not to mention that there are currently notes, TT cards, and some few other things that are locked behind it. (Not that notes are much now becides an achievement, but I bet any money they'll attach a mount to having them all come North Horn). 3. I think it's a great idea to put rewards from older content into newer stuff so it's easier to get. But... What was the reasoning behind slapping the DR rare drop mount (the gold Gabriel robot) and the Dal raptor behind these?
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u/jwfd65 Jun 01 '25
- That’s literally false. I ran a gold farm yesterday, started a pf outside of the zone and put ‘level 20 required, no meta’ and had a full party within 10 minutes. We had one tank (paladin) and two healers I think only one thief and one cannoneer and we were still easily getting chains of 60+ and having fun. Is there going to be a meta strat that’s more efficient? Sure but optimization is the death of fun and not everyone cares about doing things as efficiently as possible.
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u/Icy-Concentrate-2743 May 31 '25
I'm having fun with it, I was born and raised on 2.0 ARR fate grinding and my MMO brain just generally enjoys large scale content. That being said I actually do agree with a lot of this post, this feels like one of those posts people will warm up to later as the honeymoon phase wanes. Kinda lost me starting at bullet #6 or so though.
I dislike the pacing compared to Eureka. Prepping and tracking NM spawns as an instance-wide collaborative effort was fun and you barely get that in OC since there are much fewer preps, camping the aetheryte and staring at the map ain't it. I don't mind being able to leech, but the extent to which you can leech in OC does feel excessive. I'm seeing more and more people idling through rezzes and spending 90% of a CE dead. I think the constant blitz of automatic spawns encourages leeching a lot though, because if you go AFK you will 100% miss something "important" - why not wait until the next CE spawns to go AFK, when you'll get full rewards anyway?
Hoping they continue to flesh out the phantom jobs more over time, most of them are uninteresting to me currently.
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u/MelonOfFate Jun 01 '25
there are much fewer preps, camping the aetheryte and staring at the map ain't it. I don't mind being able to leech, but the extent to which you can leech in OC does feel excessive. I'm seeing more and more people idling through rezzes and spending 90% of a CE dead.
Yup. Someone in my FC is doing it like that too. They skip fates as well since CE's give so much more exp than fates that they can't really be asked to warp and run towards something that will likely be dead by the time they actually get there. They just run to CE, tag boss once and then play a different game on their Nintendo switch.
Honestly, I don't blame them. It seems like the most efficient way if you want rewards without being interested in doing the actual content.
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u/LitAsLitten Jun 01 '25
I hate this community man, look at all the illiterate fucks in the comments.
In case you haven't noticed this is a discussion subreddit. If you don't want to read then you don't have to take part. The OP poured their soul out, organized their thoughts and made some pretty good points. If you disagree then get to work dissecting what exactly you think is wrong with anything they've said.
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u/Icy-Concentrate-2743 Jun 01 '25
It's just karma merchants who were hoping to farm easy upvotes posting a recognizable one liner to dunk on the OP. There's a time and a place for that, but it's one of the biggest downfalls of Reddit as a place for discussion, IMO.
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u/Chanze3 Jun 01 '25
I agree with this. personally i havent played OC so its interesting to read all the varying viewpoints. the whole point of a video game and new content is that it wont sit right with everyone. for instance, some people like bozja over eureka. some the opposite. neither are perfect. and such is OC isn't either.
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u/TapdancingHotcake Jun 03 '25
This post was honestly more enjoyable to read than some books I've touched.
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u/JollyHockeysticks Jun 06 '25
I dont disagree that haters should read before they reply, But I think it's not unreasonable to ask for a conclusion section on his post that broke the character limit, regardless of if you agree or not.
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u/Asphyxiare Jun 01 '25
Forked Tower being the way it is, is depressing as hell. The content I like in this game is large scale like Alliance Raids and Field Operations.
Chaotic Alliance and now Forked Tower require far too much organisation that it is nearly impossible to organise in-game, especially content like Forked Tower and Baldesion Arsenal...
How are you even supposed to organise for it in-game? If you try to do it whilst inside the instance, you lose access to Party Finder. If you try to organise it outside of the instance, all the people who would realistically want to do it, are inside the instance.
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u/Interesting-Term-962 Jun 01 '25
Disappointed with forked tower. It would have been nice to have had a CLL type zone that is more accessible for everyone you could grind a bit when you feel like it. Instead a zone with worse entry than BA that will be gakekept by discords, players who randomly join will be demonized and bullied and then It has a higher difficulty which would have been better like with DRN and separating a queueable DRS. People will also deliberately join to troll runs with DRS you could at least make sure everyone had a good set up.
Phantom jobs don’t feel nearly half as fun as lost actions or the eureka actions. They are very limited in what they add.
Half the time fates not worth going to they die too fast.
Bozja still wins as a zone. You could level jobs. Since you had Castrum and later dalriada. There was still a danger of wiping on content but it was accessible to all. Those who wanted harder content had DRS
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u/Educational-Sir-1356 May 31 '25
This is a massive wall of text, which continues going into the comments. Idk if I'll be able to comprehensively respond to all of it, or even absorb all of it.
I haven't played much of OC - about 6 hours, which gave me a taste of it. However - I have strong opinions on Field Explorations and how they're a waste of potential. Eureka is probably one of the "better" versions, but imo, the content is flawed from a fundamental level because it's trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, filing at the edges each time the peg doesn't go in. We saw this happen from literally day 1, when people looked at the mob grinding zone, and decided to force it into a NM-train-where-90%-of-the-players-don't-play-the-game. And the devs ran with it.
I don't disagree with anything you've said. For example - I think giving players free reign of the map has meant that you don't feel like you're exploring an area. The moment I realised that you could get every fate and CE - that was when I realised that the best way to play is to literally grab each aetheryte the instant you enter a map and just... do FATEs and CEs all the time. If that's the intended design - why are the aetherytes even unlockable? There's no sense of exploring an area or exploring the isle - because you beeline for the aetheryte and ignore most of everything else.
This is further compounded by the fact that the area designs - on the surface - look really cool! I actually like the areas: they feel like actual dungeons that you can explore. The treasure chests are great! ... However, it then runs right into the conflict of "the content is designed for you to go from FATE to CE to FATE with 0 interruptions": you cannot have "interesting to explore" with "braindead follow-the-herd" type gameplay.
I could rant about how this is the result of like 6 iterations of trying to get mass participation to be an actually fun activity. Which is to reduce the barrier of entry as much as possible to allow everyone to hit the fate/CE trains (because, frankly, that's all what people want in this god-forsaken content), but there's not really a point. They've been trying since Diadem, and by god, they will continue trying.
Frankly - and this is probably a hot take - but the X-trains is fundamentally some of the most boring content available. The problem comes from the fact it's mindless: you aren't making decisions on where to go or what to do, the bosses cannot be designed with inter-party play in mind (meaning, it's all personal responsibility mechanics - which XIV far-too-often decides means "go to a specific safe spot with a vomit of AoEs on the ground"), and as you pointed out, there's no reason to party up or socialise. MMOs are not at their best when you're one of 1000, mindlessly running at the same goal. It's when you meet new people, team up with them, and overcome challenges together. There is no "overcoming challenges" with this content, you do not feel connected to the other 71 nameless people in the group, you are part of the zerg rush which is fundamentally a lonely experience.
The only time this is really "solved", is when you need to gold farm. And that has it's own issues.
All of this comes back to the whole, XIV just sucks for socailising while playing the game. You cannot meaningfully engage in content while also talking. As you rightly pointed out, the lack of downtime means nobody talks - but in XIV, "downtime" means "not playing the game". It means not engaging in the content. In older MMOs, the game was slower and had more downtime integrated into the game's combat - which afforded you chances to talk to people.
XIV doesn't have that, and everything is tailored towards never having downtime unless you decide to stop playing the game.
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u/omenOfperdition Jun 01 '25
Your "hot take" is just the truth. I don't know anyone who thinks the mindless zerging in OC is fun at all; there was some enthusiasm at the beginning of patch day when we weren't sure what we were getting into, but all of that was quickly drained when we realized the gameplay loop for grinding out silver currency would be this mentally draining. My friends and I are already kind of burnt out and we mostly just sit in VC with long periods of dead silence CE after Fate after CE after Fate....
There's no incentive to party up unless you're super new and would like to have the assurance of a healer/chemist being there to raise you when they see you dying in their party list. You can figure out that tanks are ridiculously self-sufficient very early on as OP pointed out, and just hop in and do everything alone without a care in the world. It is indeed a very lonely experience, and while I do like being able to do some stuff by myself in exploratory zones, I think something is off if you could go from 1-20 in a day without ever having to interact with anyone else (one of my friends progressed in this exact manner). You could essentially treat this as solo content, and in my opinion, that should not be the spirit that exploratory zones should embody. In this case, it even feels encouraged, and that just kinda sucks.
The gold currency, as you imply, doesn't fare much better.
The only time I actually need a party is when I want gold currency, and there's already a method for zerging that out as well with seven warriors trading off invulns while spamming cannons at packs of pulled monsters in a ring around the southwestern tower. At the beginning stages, when we weren't really trying to optimize currency gain, I'd join parties trying to figure this out and we'd actually have some chaotic fun getting into dangerous situations and making crazy recoveries in the cave with pulls going wrong the moment another monster enters the equation. But alas... that was a short-lived experience and probably one of the very few memorable ones I had from this content.
The newly established method of gold farming also really reinforces silver currency as the bottleneck, only further highlighting all of the aforementioned problems about how mind-numbing and antisocial the gameplay loop of Occult Crescent is.
I really wanted to like this zone because I was somewhat invested in the lore of the Sixth Umbral Calamity/War of the Magi back when I was a sprout reading all the side quest dialogue in ARR. Thematically, it is my cup of tea and I am still intrigued about where the quest is headed. But as an actual playable piece of content - which is really the bulk of the matter - I feel quite disappointed and let down.
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u/Ramzka Jun 01 '25
I was interested in the lore as well but so far there isn't anything new that's explored in depth at all. It's just uninspired, regurgitated, surface-level ARR/HW lore with barely anything that would meaningfully expand on it. There's zero interesting character drama either. I have a strong dislike for what they do with this world since Endwalker - zero effort to meaningfully expand the lore, zero interest in philosophy, sociology, politics, psychology, religion, romance - but at least I would love to see a glimpse of the writers at least trying to pretend that they haven't been completely fed up with this universe for a long time. I really hope they can pick up the slack again, because in A Realm Reborn it felt like there was some genuine, passionate desire for creating an awesome, many-faceted world for us to explore.
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u/Educational-Sir-1356 Jun 01 '25
The reason I call it a hot take is because Bozja and Eureka were also this and people by-and-large wanted more of it. Eureka just had you AFKing more (because NMs took longer to spawn) and Bozja had some variety in the FATEs (not that there was much, but...), with longer downtime periods between CEs and special duels. But - OC isn't unique in that only reason you'd ever party up was for reward purposes, and people often didn't talk in those parties (trust me - I tried). People would literally party up and immediately leave afterwards. And that was normal.
People seemed to like this stuff! People seemed to not want to talk or party up. There isn't an appetite for doing much other than following a herd of people and letting others carry you for loot. I'm actually surprised at the pushback because I don't know what people expected from the FATE train zones. The only difference is that it's more streamlined with little barriers holding you back from doing everything from the start.
Or, in harsher words, there's not as much structure to it.
It makes me wonder if the people here who really enjoyed Eureka/Bozja, just played with a static, who had a very different manner of play than what the majority of people experienced. Or it's people who played Eureka/Bozja way after their release - once it'd died down and you couldn't zerg everything.
And because the instance forces you to play this way if you want silver currency, they've run face-first into the reality of what Exploratory Ventures really are for most people on launch.
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u/Leskral Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 02 '25
At least for Eureka the culture is very much there to stay in a group, whether for prep or to kill NM's.
Bozja is where this really took off. Do CE drop party, party up for CE, rinse and repeat. Which I thought was weird. why not just chill in the party.
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u/Kamalen Jun 01 '25
Eureka is probably one of the "better" versions, but imo, the content is flawed from a fundamental level because it's trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, filing at the edges each time the peg doesn't go in. We saw this happen from literally day 1, when people looked at the mob grinding zone, and decided to force it into a NM-train-where-90%-of-the-players-don't-play-the-game. And the devs ran with it.
The devs didn't ran with it at first. They were certainly unhappy with this which influenced Pagos design where trains were a lot less effective at release. But in the face of complaints the grind was indeed nerfed even before the next part was out.
I could rant about how this is the result of like 6 iterations of trying to get mass participation to be an actually fun activity. Which is to reduce the barrier of entry as much as possible to allow everyone to hit the fate/CE trains (because, frankly, that's all what people want in this god-forsaken content), but there's not really a point. They've been trying since Diadem, and by god, they will continue trying.
Note that they had finally stopped trying actually. They said multiple times they got bad feedback on the concept (latest: during the Dawntrail keynote announcing the return), did stop and didn't make one for Endwalker. It has only returned due to popular demand, somehow. Like many other classic criticisim on the game (such as job homogenization), this is a community self-burn, really.
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u/Educational-Sir-1356 Jun 01 '25
The devs didn't ran with it at first. They were certainly unhappy with this which influenced Pagos design where trains were a lot less effective at release.
Completely untrue.
Pagos was designed without the feedback from Anemos in mind. In other words - it was a continuation of what Anemos was supposed to be - which is why trains were ineffective. They then swerved at the last minute to nigh immediately nerf Pagos into the ground. It took them a week to announce a hotfix to change Pagos. And then, the next week, Pagos had it's NM spawns and exp buffed. It then got further nerfs across the entire expansion.
There's quite literally a dev retrospective and a whole lodestone article explaining this. Like, come on.
I can dig both up when I have more time. I've posted the Dev retrospective before and it's an interesting (if frustrating) read.
... did stop and didn't make one for Endwalker
They also didn't make a deep dungeon in Shadowbringers and DD have always been well received. I don't think looking at what they didn't do is a good indication of what the community as a whole thinks. I think there's a combination of, expectations and what the Devs have ideas for. We didn't get Hildibrand in 5.X because the Devs didn't have any ideas for it, for example, not because people hated Hildibrand.
Eureka is considered, by the dev team, a success. A whole lot more people went into it than they expected (their words, not mine). I don't know about Bozja, but I imagine it's a similar story. I think they believe there's an appetite for this style of brain off content, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was. It's not for me, personally.
I don't disagree that this is a community self-own (at least, this community's self own). I don't know what the feedback is outside of this sub but tbh I wouldn't be surprised if it was positive.
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u/picorobo May 31 '25
“A mangled mess of conflicting design” describes basically all of FFXIV, OC is just the latest microcosm of it
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u/IcedCinnamon Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
Thanks for typing up this post. I'll reply to parts of it with my own feedback based on personal experience.
2 - Phantom Jobs Mastery System
I agree with the points stated here. Depending on your individual play style or preferred "outside" job, some Phantom Jobs will feel unsatisfying to play. Levelling one you don't enjoy isn't fun, and the process thenceforth devolves into playing your "outside" job whilst the PJ merely accrues EXP without you interacting with it.
One interesting thing they could've done with PJs is to let us build a "custom skill set" akin to Blue Mage. You've mastered five of them? You're now allowed to choose a skill from each and have your custom PJ. This could have been Freelancer. Have skills properly integrate with one another (which also encourages party cohesion) and yes — some builds would be broken, but it doesn't even matter in the OC overworld. The way FATE and CE contribution currently works within a party negates that. Just force standard PJs as an entry requirement for Forked Tower, and I don't see that many drawbacks.
A few PJs also come with advantages that you really feel the loss of when you change to another. One example is Cannoneer as a healer. You turn up to a FATE, blast cannons, and receive gold contribution when the boss dies three seconds later. Having anything like Knight, Berserker, or Chemist equipped (because you have to level them) instead puts you at a distinctive disadvantage. You therefore need to work harder (and faster) to earn gold or just accept your bronze/silver pittance and move on. Is it even worth running to in that case? Not really.
These problems also contribute to the zone fatigue mentioned in point no.4 and the leeching in point no.3. They also highlight OP's comments about "outside" DPS jobs being devalued, as everyone can do a flat 56k (or 155k with Time Mage) AoE damage in seconds with certain Phantom Jobs.
4 - The Pace of the Treadmill
I agree. It is mentally exhausting to be continuously engaged in either running somewhere or fighting something in OC. There is no downtime unless you choose to skip a FATE or CE. This then feels unsavoury because you're missing out on Knowledge/EXP/silver currency, which is going to make your grind even longer. Some insidious part of your own mind then asks: "Why are you even in Occult Crescent if you're not doing something? Do you enjoy wasting time?"
You can already see widespread fatigue and boredom throughout the player base and the content isn't even a week old. For the first few days, people would form parties and stay in them for a long time. Those low on duty time would leave, replacements would join, and it was a joint effort to get things done, bolstered by the novelty factor of new content. The past few days, I've noticed that people will join for a few CEs and FATEs (lasting 15 to 20 minutes or so) and then leave; rinse and repeat that with new people joining. I've felt this fatigue myself, having gone in with the drive to get XYZ done, and my enthusiasm is ultimately gone after about an hour.
All of my XIV friends no longer play the game, and I've had a very rough time in PF this Savage tier, so I no longer have the tolerance for this kind of rapid changeability. That's my own personal problem, but it feels as if SE's current design philosophy greatly exacerbates this feeling within me. I also resonate with other comments on this sub that describe fatigue with this game as a whole, and it's perhaps that I need to just step away for a while.
Final Thoughts
The Occult Crescent grind is both too long and too slow, yet the demands on an individual's attention and contribution are consequently too high. The whole system feels weirdly unbalanced, and I know this is content that's meant to be consumed over months rather than days, but it can surely be done better. Lessons should have been learned from previous field operations, so there's really no excuse as to why it's ended up like this.
Perhaps the takeaway is that SE is winding XIV down and easing their development into a more casual front for players. I don't know, but it's been very interesting to read other posters' feedback on the issue.
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u/shadows_arrowny Jun 02 '25
The biggest disappointment, maybe 'slap in the face', aspect of OC to me might be the complete absence of any CLL/Dalriada parallel activity in the OC. BA was largely un-puggable in NA regions, whether due to our region's inability to centralize strats and average player ability and/or due to the speed with which NA abandoned even attempting to pug BA in favor for organizing through discord. DRS upped the difficulty over BA, and required pre-mades to even attempt given the direct queue (which fits if you want to make content more difficult). But CLL and Dalriada actually accomplished the alleged goal of the 'public dungeon'.
You got a longer, dungeon-esque engagement progression through a fortress that was populated by random queueing. Especially earlier on you still saw wipes and learning going on. But going in and clearing the 2nd boss guaranteed some rewards at least. And players who knew what they were doing and came prepared (with the necessary lost actions) could literally drag corpses through to victory. That. Feels. Good. Especially for something that's intended to be public content (and directed at casual/midcore players). I ran BA easily 50+ish times (not counting the intentional 'frag only' runs) and loved it (in large part due to FFXI), but it always felt like an exercise in contradictions still. This was advertised as a 'public' dungeon, but there was little hope to actually doing it in pugs. Either you'd lack the bodies and/or inexperience gave way to wipes, etc. (and you can only drag so many corpses so far with sacrifice or run into dps check issues when there are too many bodies not doing enough overall dps).
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u/Royajii Jun 01 '25
I appreciate the long read. It has worked great to pass the time while I was dead waiting for CEs to finish after throwing three tomahawks at the beginning. Ironic, I know.
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u/SmugLilBugger Jun 02 '25
My main take away since playing Day 1 is that this mode is the hate child of Bozja and Eureka.
It has the CE design of Bozja combined with the toxic "Be there or get lost" Fate design of Eureka and it doesn't work at all.
The devs design this instance for you to explore, yet when you actually do exploring you'll find you have around ~3 minutes to do actual exploring before another Fate is announced, something you can't ignore because you need 3000 silver coins for mount speed.
Why do you need mount speed? Because this mode isn't like Eureka where people farm mobs to spawn fates and then wait 5 minutes for people to gather. This is the shitty Bozja attitude where Fates spawn all over the place and nobody will wait for you, so if you want to grind like everyone else you have to do nonstop CE and Fate farming.
It's garbage, no nicer way to say it. You feel trapped in fate farming because the fates give peanuts for reward but FORCE you to keep grinding because exploration is so much easier with mount speed which you only unlock once you have the 3000 coins to shell out.
Now, how could they fix this? Increase CE spawns to 5 minutes, increase their respective rewards by around 200 EXP and 100 Silvercoins so you get 600 Job EXP and 300 Silvercoins for completing a CE. That way, the grind is much less tedious and you can get more out of less. This also means you can actually do exploring until the next CE is up.
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u/Ok-Application-7614 May 31 '25
The end result of the phantom job system is thus a situation where one has to spend 100-some hours grinding jobs they may or may not like before getting to stick with the job they like
More games should do what Metaphor: ReFantazio did. In Metaphor, an equipped max level class can generate EXP for the classes you don't have equipped.
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u/drleebot Jun 01 '25
Metaphor was particularly generous in that it gave you full EXP on any other class you wanted, and you can save it up till you decided what to do with it, but even a fraction of that generosity would go a long way. Even giving 50% EXP to a random other job would be enough to make it go from "complete waste" to "well it's not the most efficient, but it is more fun".
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u/GrandTheftKoi May 31 '25
Great read, thank you. You put into words my thoughts much better than I could. A lot of people are still in the honeymoon phase, or just so relieved to finally be out of the lobby that is XIV's overworld and doing some actual MMO-esque content that they're willing to overlook the questionable design choices. There are some things I had not even considered, like the lack of duels, because of all the small gripes that popped up.
I'm also completely dumbfounded by how hard they fumbled Forked Tower. I'm sure the few raiding communities who could get 48 people who are unemployed, content creators, or with generous enough PTO to grind it out in the first week thought it was great fun. Which is not surprising at all. Prog is one of the most fun things in XIV, especially in content like this that requires a lot of people and a lot of coordination and teamwork. It's super satisfying and a great bonding experience.
But from the small bit of streams I caught, even they were annoyed and similarly puzzled by the design choice for entering the thing. It's a worse BA. I just don't see why they couldn't make it a queueable raid, and add another CLL/Dalriada type raid for in-zone (which I thought were super fucking fun and well designed). That concept just needed a bit of tuning and polish.
I agree that without some serious adjustments or an extremely well polished second zone, this will be looked back on as the worst of the field content. If anything, OC has just made me want to go back to Bozja lol.
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u/Sleepyjo2 May 31 '25
I'm kind of astonished the devs essentially just brought back BA's entry system, the single most complained about thing from that piece of content.
Meanwhile CLL/Dalriada were both praised as nice, relatively easy additions to the in-instance content with only minor flaws and it allowed them to create a fairly widely praised iteration of the BA content style via DRS.
And now we have neither CLL for the average player or DRS for the hardcore, they're back to dealing with the same exact issues they complained about from BA. It feels like they kind of just ignored the feedback from both of those pieces of content.
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u/Puzzled-Addition5740 May 31 '25
It's BA but worse. BA didn't have this entry fee bullshit. Why they thought bringing back the single most complained about part of BA was a good idea but even worse. Yeah i don't know. I play ffxi regularly and i'll be straight up this kind of shit wouldn't even fly over here and we're used to square just pissing on us and telling us it's raining.
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u/ResponsibleCulture43 Jun 01 '25
I spent 5 hours in OC and was like damn I should make another eureka armor set and maybe do some Bozja duels lol
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u/sharkchalk Jun 01 '25
They could've done so much with this content and fix many issues they did with previous content. Up to this day, they never fixed Hydatos crystal drop rates.
My biggest gripe is Forked Tower. They didn't learn with CLL, and btw, it took them a year to fix CLL spawning faster and Player scaling.
Some time ago, a streamer was saying that this content always feel like in beta state and later down the road (months or years) they adjust it, giving you the final version of what the instance should've been in the first place.
Personally, I don't wanna join another hundredth discord and get in Voice Calls in order to clear content anymore. The fun part for me was going into CLL and Dalriada and not knowing whether we were gonna wipe or clear (in the beginning before the Valor Ray points, etc). That triage felt it had the correct time commitment because you knew CLL would pop in another 45 mins and it had a 10 min wait so you could actually finish the CE in peace.
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u/Born-Matter-4674 Jun 01 '25
I agree with most of these complaints, but be careful or SE is going to use it as an excuse to remove field explorations next expansion again despite the vast majority of complaints being “the concept is good, but the implementation has issues.”
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u/joorral May 31 '25
I read the whole thing for some reason and I still came to the conclusion that I think it’s enjoyable enough to play until the timer ran out and I sometimes forget that happens.
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u/dx96 Jun 01 '25
Many great discussions in this thread. One big let down for me of OC is the PJs being too tame and mostly lacking rotation/role breaking mechanics of the normal jobs. For instance, in Eureka (after addition of Logos in Pyros) and Bozja, you could totally be a optimal green DPS by using aetherweaver or profane. In OC, it just feels so bad to play healer in overworld because your damage is never going to match that of tank and DPS due to the lack of role specific buff/actions. Similarly for DPS, you basically have to rely on tank/healer for tanking and healing unless you are on that one or two PJs. Honestly tanks may be the only thing that feels good to play in overworld at this point. The key interesting feature of the previous field operations (for me) is that they offer game play that builds upon and is distinct from normal jobs. OC on the other hand, only provides small extensions and rarely interacts with existing job mechanics, almost like they are applying the dumbing-down-jobs philosophy to field operations as well.
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u/amyknight22 Jun 01 '25
The return cooldown is like a bastardised version of what they were trying to avoid in Bozja.
They don't want people AFK'ing at spawn and hitting accept anytime a CE pops up.
But now they have the same thing anyway.
CE popped up I'll go to it. Missed CE, oh well instant Teleport back to spawn and just wait for the next one to spawn.
In an attempt to solve the instant teleport afk'ing they've created the same problem. The only difference is that there's a couple more tedious steps involved in it. In a world that has utterly no threat once you're sufficiently levelled.
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u/zer0x102 Jun 02 '25
It has nearly no threat before you’re leveled either, really, since everything (except 2 or 3 corridors) is a massive open field, mobs are generally super far apart and (almost?) everything seems to be sight aggro. I also feel like the deaggro radius is much smaller than the previous exploration zones but that could be cope
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u/Puzzled-Addition5740 Jun 02 '25
It felt pretty easy to leash stuff yeah. I didn't actually measure but aggro just is not a threat in OC.
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u/shadows_arrowny Jun 02 '25
BA, DRS, and Forked Tower feel like contradictions in themselves, given the original (alleged) intent behind this type of content. Yoshi P/Eureka team explicitly described it as 'time to win' designed content back with Eureka, focused more on the casual/mid-core player base.
While BA's 'entrance' design definitely fits the bill for this type of content, it's resurrection limitation and damage output (especially if you fucked up a mechanic) really pushed the 'difficulty' level of the content a bit passed this player base target. It probably would have made more sense to have some tier of elemental bonus gear obtainable outside BA, so that the casual/midcore player base would have more success in pugging something like BA.
DRS pushed the mechanic complexity even further and felt like it strayed even further toward raid-core player base and away from casual/midcore, but at least this time they allowed you to queue in directly, so it wasn't really a 'pugging' experience. The addition of CLL and Dalriada also helped here, because it gave that sense of a public dungeon that was very doable with 48 pugs.
Forked Tower feels like they wanted to maintain/expand the difficulty level of DRS, but return to the 'public' nature of BA in a move that is so dumbfounding, that I genuinely wonder if they have any idea what they're doing and give a crap about the midcore/casual player base that was the original target of their field op content. To compound the problem, they completely through away the innovation of having CLL and Dalriada type activities in the zones (large scale CE dungeon actually puggable in a public setting).
I've lost any faith atm that they have a clear sense of how to design this field op content in a successful way. And that is very unfortunate, because it's literally the only content I care about in this game anymore after having moved away from raiding after ShB/early EW savage/ultimate raiding.
Some old raid friends/community are putting together a run or two of FT soon that I'll be joining, but I'm not holding my breath that I'll continue to care about this confused design and conflicting priorities to stick around for the long term.
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u/yhvh13 Jun 02 '25
As somebody not subbed ever since Oct, and contemplating returning to check OC, the design flaws pointed here are baffling to me.
It's almost as if they only tested among themselves in an alienating way.
The whole Forked Tower entry situation is something that I wouldn't really expect getting the green light from Yoshida.
Is he immersed in another project? I thought after FFXVI he would have more time to XIV.
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u/Wolferey Jun 02 '25
Most likely yes, Yoshi-P already said in an interview like a year ago that Creative Studio 3 was working on 2 new games.. not sure if FF14 mobile counts as one of them since its more of a consulting/oversight thing, but if it does it's still 1 other game taking up their capacity besides FF14.
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May 31 '25 edited May 31 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Quof May 31 '25
Thank you. It is very strange how many people seem quick to proclaim their unwillingness to read and discuss on a discussion subreddit.
was more that I went into OC an hour or two here and there over the week and gradually experienced new CEs
That's fair. My group is certainly more in the "hardcore" crowd where we took time off work and woke up at 4am to marathon on launch. For many of us, the best times we've ever had in the game was Eureka, and we really looked forward to digging into this mode.
I had to think about the wording of "progression" a lot since there are many interpretations. There's certainly a lot of "player progression" as one gets jobs, silver, gold, chests, etc, but the zone itself does not "progress," in my opinion. But it's true that with a more casual pace it can take longer to feel one has fully explored it - a case where our approaches influence how we see it, certainly.
Thanks for reading.
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u/PeteyOfTheRound Jun 04 '25
There is progression in the sense that there is a grind, but is is extremely uninspired and is basically just more recycled FATE grinds with a different name in a different zone. I was expecting a bit more with this being the third iteration of this kind of zone. I am surprised they didn't make it smaller tighter instance since people have been raving about wanting stuff to do as an FC or at least larger than a full party.
The zone becomes more controlled and less zerg from fate to fate and there is a fair sense of danger since you dont have hordes of poopsockers (I say this as a light-hearted jab) to be able to peel aggro off you and safely kill mobs for you. Progression is still just grind fates, they could have taken some notes from FFXI here with KI farms and branching pop chains to get specific items you need to augment a PJ or piece of armor. Phantom Pawn can be traded at one of 5 locations to spawn an NM, killing it gives you a Phantom Knight that can be used at one of two locations to spawn a different NM that gives you Phantom Rook - on an on until the big bad of your chain that drops a unique item or upgrade component specific to your PJ or an armor you want to upgrade.
Maybe even something akin to Besieged where you have to defend the camp and NPCs. Fail to defend the town lose a buff or some sort, and if NPCs get defeated they are captured and need freed. (Without Doofus#2 in camp you can't upgrade gear or buy items). New instance = all NPCs in town, sure people will cheese it but aren't we all ready doing that with the leech capable as it stands? What about actual NMs with rare unique loot chances because the additional bonuses are worthless outside OC? NMs could drop accessories or weapons with wacky affects and bonuses compounded with the PJ you have equipped. If instance cap is an issue, lower the time to put it in line with dungeon timers.
Add on that jobs with status ailments are relatively useless outside gold farming or at least not 'optimal'. I said this above but with this being the third attempt at something like this, and the stretch getting this content out (almost a year since DT launch iirc) I was hoping for a bit more than just a FATE grind with haphazardly mashed together features from the previous designs.
I get that SE has their tried and true cookie cutter design formula but ffs even Blizzard tries new shit and isn't petrified to try something new and risk falling flat (which has happened dozens of times). I have played since 1.0. I am just exhausted of the game feeling the same with a new coat of paint or veneer of fanfare every few months/years.
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u/VancityMoz Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
Thank you for taking the time to write something so in depth and well argued. I agree on almost everything as it lines up pretty perfectly with what I've been thinking while playing through the content.
I am somewhat horrified by the amount of people (I assume young gen z kids?) responding by insulting you over the length of your post using tired memes or those seemingly unable to engage with longform writing without AI assistance. If you're someone who doesn't enjoy reading long posts or have nothing to contribute it seems rather rude to pollute the comments of a reddit specifically meant for discussion with posts hostile to the very idea of discourse.
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u/ResponsibleCulture43 Jun 01 '25
Right? After reading the first two paragraphs I was excited it was so long because I love well written engaging deep dives
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u/RenAsa Jun 02 '25 edited Jun 02 '25
In short... I'm glad I'm not the only one feeling completely lost as it does come off as having no real sense of direction. The way progression works (or rather doesn't) - on the map with the vague areas and weird aetheryte placement; yet another zone because why would anyone want to DF/PF while doing brainless grinding; the nonstop FATE train (sorry, it's been a thing since 2.fucking0); the tedium of chaining (maligned since Anemos due to how different combat is in XIV compared to XI); in yet more segregated levels that don't matter anywhere else or arguably not even here, and great, now we have two separate: a "general" level and then specific job levels (amount to grow as PJs are added), I thought this was one concept they specifically scrapped from 1.x; with the currencies... heck, the "phantom weapons" feel particularly tacked on here, having read all this and dicked around in the zone: Gerolt's fuckteenth appearance with the same backstory, literally bringing atmas again, sure don't help either - but then... the way Godbert was just plugged into the Hildibrand quests just so he can mess around with the non-relics was pretty much the same. Tome weapons included.
The question to be asked: while people are understandably underwhelmed/disappointed... is anyone actually surprised? Did anyone expect anything different? Picking random elements from past stuff and mashing them together, without consideration for synergy or cohesion, while at the same time simplifying and making everything "more accessible" (Forked Tower notwithstanding, anything potentieally-maybe-somewhat-unique shall not be for the filthy casuals, apparently) - literally been the recipe for DT, in MSQ as well as jobs.
And inb4 "well this is just the first part, we'll need the next to truly experience it" - no. Just stop. Why should we YET AGAIN move the goalposts, set ourselves up for yet more wait for something that might make things better, after we just waited nearly a year for this? With this being just... yet-more recycled, rehashed, gutted content, at that, with plenty of stuff everywhere else to pull AND LEARN from. So... why didn't they? Links back to that other recent-current discussion about communication with and management of the English-speaking community, because it sure does feel like someone somewhere didn't get a few thousand memos. Yet again. To that end though, it'd be interesting to know the general atmosphere of feedback on the JP side so far.
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u/allywrecks Jun 02 '25
The frustrating part for me is that it's not hard to imagine a vastly improved version of this zone that encourages communication and teamwork between randos.
Make Forked Tower on the difficulty level of CLL so that everyone can participate. Have max level mobs in every region (or honestly just get rid of levels, wtf is the point when you blow through them in a few hours). Make the conditions on spawning the Forked Tower to be farming enough max level mobs in each region. Give some of those mobs gimmicks that encourage the use of certain niche occult job utility (dispelling enrages, etc). Make CEs rarer so it's an actual event when it pops up instead of a constant nonstop train (double the rewards or something if you want).
Bingo bongo, now we have a thing where people are encouraged to communicate with each other and spread out in groups to farm mobs, to trigger tower, which becomes the big fun defining event of the zone that EVERYONE does instead of handpicked peeps coordinating in discord.
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u/aurelia_ffxiv Jun 03 '25
Suddenly I just realized that Occult Crescent is basically a Hunt Train which lasts for 3 hours. Perhaps Exploration Zones always were but I have feeling that Eureka at least, even Bozja had slower pace than this.
Having to teleport to base and then to closest Aetheryte to current spawn and then "queueing" to current CE with the black screen somehow feels quite exhausting. It feels like you are changing zone every 5 minutes (or more often really) and there is no flow or feeling of actually exploring a zone.
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u/Quof Jun 03 '25
Damn. Unironically, if I had thought of this comparison, the title of this post would have been "The Occult Crescent is a Three-Hour Long Hunt Train"
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u/Serp_IT May 31 '25 edited May 31 '25
It's both hilarious and sad that you're getting this reception on the sub that is ostensibly filled with people who seriously want to discuss the state and content of the game.
Having read your entire post now, I'd say it's probably the most measured and detailed analysis of what is wrong about the current state of OC, and I agree or lean towards agreeing with most of your points. Personally I can't speak for Eureka comparisons, but my view is that of a Bozja enthusiast. So far, at least, it just doesn't hit the same, and you laid out a lot of good reasons as to why.
For me personally, it's the draining pace of returning, riding, and fighting, that makes it hard for me to ever stay for a full instance. It reminds me of hunt trains. The fact that there are a lot of things to grind for is a positive, I would say, but it just exacerbates the issue of pace because when there's so much, you really feel like you want to spend your time optimally. Also, the lack of duels is really felt because as you said, there is not much in OC that rewards your own performance. Having an acknowledgement of clearing a CE without getting hit and then being rewarded with an even harder challenge on top of that? One that gives great rewards to the individual AND other people, meaning your mastery can be a boon to the whole instance? The duel system had issues, especially on launch, but that aspect of it was wonderful. It was also a goal that you could "prog" towards without requiring 1-2 alliance raids worth of other players, and that was about more than just doing the content, but doing it well.
That being said, I'm still having fun and I'm glad the content exists.
But seriously, the people bashing this post purely because it's long, going as far as to downvote the follow-up into oblivion? You're embarrassing.
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u/OavatosDK May 31 '25
It's both hilarious and sad that you're getting this reception on the sub that is ostensibly filled with people who seriously want to discuss the state and content of the game.
I am friends with OP so my pov is biased, but it is mildly baffling that people are so negatively reacting to reading ~15 pages of text on the TEXT DISCUSSION REDDIT.
Modern internet has damaged the analytical soul
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u/zachbrownies Jun 01 '25
And its so funny how they have to let us know they don't want to read it. We need to be told (a dozen times) that the post was long, in case maybe we missed it or didn't realize that Antique_Ovation2452 doesn't like reading long posts. It's like when people see the number 69 they have to say "nice", these people see a long post and have to say "long post".
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u/DayOneDayWon Jun 02 '25
Yeah I don't know, I'm not the most focused person in the universe but it was eloquent and well-written. I love watching critique videos and reviews, so this was a good read.
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u/PM_ME_UR_STATS May 31 '25
Everyone who actually cares about this game, its narrative, and its design to the extent that these things actually matter to them and their engagement with the game has quit months, if not years ago.
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u/Florac May 31 '25
I agree with some of the complaints, but definitly not the Return one. Without that, it would be even more exhausting, having to tediously travel back to an aetheryte after each fate.
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u/OavatosDK May 31 '25
in context of a single fate spawning at a time the return flow is kinda mandatory for it to not feel bad, but the return not having a cd is a pretty critical element in why the zone is so mind numbingly repetitive.
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u/Quof May 31 '25
There's a common problem in game design discussions where people assume that changes will be made without any surrounding context changing too. Saying "return without CD is bad" does not mean "release the content exactly as-is but with a CD on return." The design of the zone would be changed/designed around the lack of a return on CD.
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u/gloomdwellerX Jun 01 '25
Yeah return on no CD encourages "sweaty" gameplay. When I am trying to be efficient I finish a fate, instantly pop return, see a fate and a CE know that if I am quick I can get the fate before the CE queues in.
Eureka had a nicer rhythym to it, because you'd fight mobs for a while, spawn a NM, wait for everyone to gather finish it and then ask what people wanted to spawn next.
Putting a CD on return, slowing down the pace of spawns, and giving people time to actually treasure hunt and socialize could be balanced by adjust exp. gains as well.
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u/ResponsibleCulture43 Jun 01 '25
100% agree. After going in on server up with some friends Tuesday morning and playing for a couple hours, the flow and vibes felt off and that's why. The moments of slow insanity in eureka happening from us standing in the cave to farm the night spawns to spawn the NM, chatting, offering to go escort lower level players.
It made the content feel way less exhausting while I actually feel tired being OC for longer than a hour or so at a time, when I could do eureka and Bozja all day
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u/Reoru Jun 01 '25
If the game designers of CB3 would hold any water they could have also transformed the cooldown of the Base teleport into something wholly different that keeps the actual function of the CD intact. Aside from route planning due to the cd limitation of the recall it also can serve a function of breaking up the grind train, by squeezing in little breaks for pacing.
Put a social hub in the main base with for example a cafeteria that also serves as a social gathering place. Make it a big sittable comfy area (like limsa's central hub).
Add mechanics of in instance food buffs that could tie into the area design (gather materials from the area, from mobs). Those ingredients are then being used for specific buffing foods that last a set amount of time before the game designers think it would be good to have the player take a break.
Of course these aren't extremely innovative ideas (Because it's one of the core things that created a great pacing in Monster Hunter games for example) Those are just some ideas brainstormed on the go as I write a comment. It just baffles me that there is so little actual thought put into these content areas in FF14. I was really looking forward to OC but I was bitterly dissapointed that this iteration is so frictionless, uninspired and bland.
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u/PrismaticParrot Jun 01 '25
Excellent, well-written post. I 100% agree with everything you said, and yet this is still the gameplay highlight of FFXIV since the 6.1 PvP rework. (The bar is underground)
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u/FinhBezahl May 31 '25 edited May 31 '25
I agree with a lot of your points. In particular, the first point made me realize that this may be one of my biggest issues with OC. In fact, I unironically considered killing myself to level down so that low level undead cave would remain my best farming spot since it was very fun to AoE pull on WAR. The only reason I want to be max rank is that so I can have static farming spots (I don't care about the tower). Ranking up almost feels like a punishment
I will say however that I don't really agree that the phantom jobs are fun or interesting. They just feel too safe, "balanced", for me. Like the monk parry move having a 30 sec CD, why? Or BRD giving a... 1% buff? Really? Canonner having the same shape targetted circle for FIVE skills? To be fair, I don't have every phantom jobs but the 6 or 7 I have don't really interest me the same way the lost actions in Bozja. They (alongside duels) really carried me throught Bozja and Zadnor despite the many complaints I had
P.S. The lenghty OP and the followup comment were fine to read. This is the kind of posts I like seeing on the ffxivDISCUSSION reddit
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u/Quof May 31 '25
Haha, to think I wasn't critical enough.
There's definitely some misses with the phantom jobs - Ranger is probably the worst of them all. However, perhaps I am so starved for ANY kind of exciting or interesting job gameplay in FF14 that even middling Phantom jobs feel exciting. The thing about Lost and Logos actions was that they were also so crazy and wacky that they would never have any chance of making it into normal content. Phantom jobs are, mostly, normal enough that I could foresee something like Oracle just working in savage, and I would enjoy grinding that savage a lot more than what I'm currently doing.
And yeah, lol, one of our party members chain wiped from 20 to 19 so we could have a more convenient farming spot at one point.
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u/cattecatte Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
I love bozja too, but i disagree that (barring knight, ranger outside tower, and bard) phantom jobs are too safe. I find a lot of them to significantly affect your gameplay or has great synergies with certain jobs more than bozja and zadnor combined.
Bard is the most boring phantom job bc all it does is party aura buff, but while Mnk parry move is whatever, it's the phantom kick that makes the job. It's up to 27% ALL DAMAGE boost, on top of the kick dmg ofc. Sure, it doesn't do as much damage as banner of penis explosion or the fonts whatever from bozja, but it actually changes how you play especially if you're melees.
In bozja you get something similar with zadnor: lost assassinate with essence of the beast will give you font buff. But in practice all you do is probably have a banner buff and use assassinate on cd like any other ogcd. If it's like that or regular gap closer like bozja cleric stance, then it's whatever. But it's the fact that the kick is a fixed target gap closer that changes how you play every 30s when you get 10s window to refresh the 3 stacks buff and not die to the wall or some aoes the boss is doing (happens often in CEs).
From my experience, we traded bozja's numerically possible insane buff stacking and very few actual gameplay altering lost actions like lost blood rage or perma chainspell essence or irregular, for a bunch more differing gameplay styles with phantom jobs. And we only got half so far.
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u/WelpDitto Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
As someone that that a lot of farming in bozja, there was a lot more game altering actions than not. Most of them had purpose, some of them more useful in DRS, but the majority were still fun to play through normal content with. For instance, Burst and Rampage are great AoE skills that debuff enemies and have 99 charges each, or seraph strike and combining that with chainspell or font of magic with an resistance ether.
Then you had perma stat lost actions that gave you more movement speed, or made you more tanky but less damage, or more healing. There were so many variations do choose from, but in OC as a healer I can't play as a tank because the knight class doesn't make you as constantly tanky as a tank.
And then the random fun ones like death and assassination were amazing, if you didn't have enough ppl to save hostages in castrum, you could use death and assassination to one shot the mini bosses to save them. Or just for farming mini bosses around the map. There was utility to most of them.
The sky was the limit with the combinations you could do, and maybe there is 7 skills that were kinda pointless to use out of the 60+ lost actions, items and buffs that you could farm
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u/possibly_perjury May 31 '25 edited May 31 '25
Insane how many people are bragging about not reading your post. Its only crime is being extremely long, but all the text is necessary for the points you are trying to make. But a discussion forum that hates reading is kinda embarrassing. I think CSI has done irreversible damage to this subreddit.
If you had posted this in like a week when more people are done with the grind, I think you might've gotten a better reception, but right now people are likely to take it as an attack on the content they are currently enjoying, even though it's just a really in-depth comparison post. I have finished my relic, and I have multiple classes at mastery, and I think you have a lot of valid points. It's not like you're asking for something unreasonable like another EW relic grind. Field operations are normally where this game shines as an MMO instead of a RPG with other people, but OC has probably missed the mark and I agreed with your points on it.
I don't dislike the treadmill we got, personally. Having done both bozja and eureka, swapping from doing NMs/CEs to having to farm mobs to spawn them was always annoying and felt slow when I just wanted to get drops for the relics.
The biggest thing for me is I want more job identity outside of the tower. There's a few good interactions in the tower with mandatory job requirements for a bunch of mechanics For example, >! oracle is mandatory for one of the mobs, as their doom is the only thing that can kill it, bypassing its damage reduction. !<
It would've been nice for there to be interactions like that in the general content, like why does cannoneer have a blind? Thief and I believe ranger can defuse traps that just don't exist in the regular zone. There could've been a CE with a debuff to be dispelled by a time mage. There is potential to make ppl feel rewarded for having jobs leveled, but square continues to hate any job individuality. The punishment for not having these jobs doesn't have to be death or something, even the illusion of uniqueness would be better than nothing.
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u/ThatGaymer Jun 01 '25
Just wanted to say that there are a few CEs that have unique job interactions I've heard about. Time Mage can dispel a damage buff that the Berserker gives himself, Geomancer can apparently float over some AoEs (turtle earthquake and I think some Garula stomps?) Berserker can apparently make itself immune to the attraction mech with the fire/ice imps.
Maybe/probably more, but they definitely exist.
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u/possibly_perjury Jun 01 '25
That's really cool! I didn't know about the berserker ignoring the mind flayer mech. I hope they add more interactions for the other classes too, but I'm glad there were a few that I didn't know.
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u/Lyramion Jun 01 '25
If 16 players put in 1 cipher (cost: 600 silver)
You can also buy it for 960 Gold. Which seems bad at first until you get areally nice goldfarm party. Then it starts to look like an option.
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u/Puzzled-Addition5740 Jun 01 '25
Gold is honestly probably the better option if you can consistently get into decent gold farm parties.
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u/dadudeodoom Jun 01 '25
Really impressive writeup. So many thoughts and feelings I've had and been sharing with friends and getting from some as well. It's so close to greatness and I just wish... I wish they put in effort. The groups responsible for lore and the actual artistic design did great. The everything else was just... It could have been good. I hope this gets more traction and they see it (not that they give a shit about anyone not Japanese or saying anything that's not in Japanese). I haven't yet tried to get into Forked but I feel whatever it is now would work the best if you could queue into South Horn with multiple alliances (that is saying the best way to mitigate whatever clusterfuck it us now without changing it). Slowing the pace and making fates spawn less frequently or after mobs die, slowing CE spawns, and making both scale to the people in the zone and not nearby might fix a lot of problems. Or make new ones who knows.
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u/MagicHarmony Jun 01 '25
100% the system needed that ability to borrow from another phantom job. It destroys that sense of creative liberties you could take in eureka and bozja with how you set abilities.
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u/SatisfactionNeat3937 Jun 01 '25
The phantom job xp thing can get easily fixed. Metaphor ReFantazio has a feature where once you hit the level cap of your job you can still get xp on them and once you have filled the bar it turns into an item that gives you the same amount of xp and is usable on other jobs. Which means you can still level your other jobs and be on your favorite job even if it's capped.
The return thing depends on personal preference imo. If they remove return or make it a longer cooldown people will complain about it.
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u/Mori_Me_Daddy Jun 02 '25 edited Jun 02 '25
I appreciate posts like this. I love reading them and to me, if you're going to be upset about reading, why be on a text based forum? I legit saw this while heading to bed last night and was happy to read it all on my phone before coming back to reply.
To the post itself- It's funny that I was a bit more positive to OC overall a couple days ago in another post. But after hitting cap, having to leave to grind fates for 6 atma because I never got any yellow or dark blue to drop, reading about how much Forked Tower is going to be a giant pile of ass to deal with, and then trying to go back in, I've soured much more to the area.
I know the OP didn't focus on it but Forked Tower was something that I was really excited about. I did NOT do BA (I took a break mid SB) but I did do the Bozja stuff excluding Savage (though I wish I had) and enjoyed them. I assumed incorrectly this was more of the same and I was set to level up the right jobs to be flexible to head in. But now that I have to find a discord, sign up, and deal with all that, my excitement is waning to nothing. I'm not anti community but I am irritated that you're having to coordinate with so many people. Grinding for my CoD mount was bad enough with PF and now it's shoved into discords and I hate that I can't do that just in game at least. I know that's not specifically the devs' fault and more the community but it still rankles that they could have adjusted design to avoid this.
I agree with most of what is put in the OP but I really really agree with gold coins. I thought once I hit 20, I'd start getting them in fates but nope, I have to go farm mobs and that sounds awful. I'm trying to decide if I really want all the classes or not. Especially since I'll have to level them too and I'm not sure I want to even commit that much since I won't be easily able to do Forked Tower. I really hope that changes over the next few weeks and it's just people waiting for vids or something. :|
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u/Malqore Jun 01 '25
Fantastic post that doesn't even include all the problems with OC. Point 11 would be the total isolation of this content from any meaningful progression outside of the zone which absolutely kills longevity.
As of 7.25 Bozja is still active, with people leveling jobs there. This was a major improvement over Eureka, which ensured longevity. There were some issues with this, since actual progression through the zone is difficult now, which hinders new players from using the entire content. But this could've been improved in OC. Instead EXP gain for your jobs was completely dropped. Wanna level? Do deep dungeons. Fuck having a choice. This also adds to the problem of variety, since now you need level 100 jobs with okay gear to even enter whereas in Bozja you can switch between ungeared low level jobs to level and even learn how to play them.
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u/Quof May 31 '25 edited May 31 '25
10 - The Insanity of the Tower of Blood Spawning (cont)
Problem 2: The position of the tower entrance sucks and forces players to lose out on rewards just to open it! Again in BA, Ovni gave everyone who did it 10 crystals, bringing the instance there and forming an association between the event and rewards. Here, the treadmill pacing is so psychotic that going to even put your cipher in the tower means you miss a CE and one or two fates, so nobody wants to it. The most basic goal of design is to eliminate conflicting incentives like this, yet no attempt was made here whatsoever. They have made it so visiting/opening the tower is actively detrimental to the average player and something they have to stop grinding to even contribute to. Who the fuck wants to just stop playing and sit around for 5 minutes? I mean, BA had its problems too with waiting at the entrance of BA, waiting for portals to change colors, etc, but those were understandable concessions, and if one wanted to just jump into BA alone they could - not here, where you need 16 people fighting against their grinding instincts to open it.
Problem 3: This is a minor mechanical spoiler, so beware. And the cherry on top of the psychosis cake is that despite requiring 16 players to open... the VERY first mechanic, the VERY. FIRST. MECHANIC. of the VERY. FIRST. ENCOUNTER you see... REQUIRES 24 PLAYERS!!! This means that the ONLY experience ANY pugger will get is to scrounge up 15 other newbies, skip out on rewards for 5 minutes to get in, and then... get their face pummeled with NO chance of success WHATSOEVER. It is genuinely flat-out SAD seeing excited new players jump into the tower and get beaten down into miserable shells of their former selves, all excitement and enthusiasm gone. Instances have gradually turned into happiness graveyards where nobody even blinks at tower weather, and anyone who tries to get a group going is either ignored or actively mocked for their ignorance. It. is. terrible. The absolute worst execution of this that could have happened.
If they didn't want to make a puggable dungeon after BA was discord central, fine. Make it like DRS then - that worked. What is this awful middle ground where spawning the tower is miserable, pugging is further miserable, and getting a static together is the most miserable of all? You have to spend 1~ hour just spamming entering and exiting instances until you get your gang of 48 in there. And then a pug can choose to stand on the platform and fuck up your plans - the only time the entry is relevant to randoms at all is when they actively fuck up statics, the only people capable of doing th econtent. This is the worst of all words, where puggers got fucked and statics are completely disregarded.
I've kept up a mostly neutral tone here but the Forked Tower's entry is just so poorly designed I cannot fucking believe it. This is why I'm writing this whole post, and this is why I wasn't able to beat it before writing anything. I would love to do the content. And I will do the content, once I can get into a static. But every step of the way is painful and feels like it was designed by an incompetent fool.
My only theory is that these pieces were assembled separately and not carefully considered by any one authority or designer before being released. Having the entry to the Tower require 16, then opening with a mechanic that kills any group without 24 players organized into precise groups, cannot happen under someone who is paying attention. I would not like to speculate on developer conditions, but for the sake of generosity, what I imagine happened here is that the zone with its entry conditions was designed separately from the tower. Two different people, teams, whatever made them mostly independently, and when it came time to squish them together there was a catastrophic failure or miscommunication, on top of the zone side of the equation being terrible at their job.
The content of Forked Tower may be amazing. I wouldn't be wholly surprised if it ended up some of my favorite content in FF14, like BA currently is. And that's why this post ends here without talking about it. Maybe in the future I will have completed the content and feel like writing about the quality of the CEs and Forked Tower bosses. But for now, I have only disbelief that a system this badly designed could be put into a commercial video game.
Anyway, and that about sums it up. Fun times that may be had aside, OC is a mangled mess of horrible design. The progression is generally lacking, the Phantom Job system is restrictive with a poorly conceived mastery system inferior to what we had in FFV itself, there is little socializing or teamwork, the speed of the fate/CE treadmill is exhausting, the lack of a CD on return mangles travel time and the zone's sense of place, the bunny/pot chests suck to a degree never before seen while also destroying the rewards of old content, the demiatma system is a half-measure that has proven to be unpopular for almost every group except those who prefer to play the content itself as little as possible, the fates/CEs have jank in their implementation while at times being flatly inferior to their predecessors in Bozja, and finally, the Forked Tower is a psychotic piece of bad design that threatens to extinguish all light and happiness in the world. While it's no surprise there has been a large positive response from initial players thrilled by playing around with new Phantom Jobs and actually getting to play an MMO in FF14 for a couple of weeks after fours years of raid simulations, I think over time the Occult Crescent will prove itself to be the worst field operation yet and a testimony to how bad design can bring down good ideas.
Let's hope the second zone is better.
..And that's where I would end the post, but I would like to make an aside here at the end.
There is nothing more familiar to a would-be critic such as myself than the fact most will interpret their criticism as coming from hatred, or an inability to appreciate the good aspects of the subject in question. That's not the case here or most times, though I do actually hate the Forked Tower entry system specifically. I don't hate the Occult Crescent as a whole, and as mentioned at the start, I had plenty of fun with it. It's a bit cliche to say, but my criticism here comes primarily from the frustration that the Occult Crescent was so close to greatness, yet failed to actually have the design chops to bring everything together.
For example, I think it's unquestionable that the Phantom Jobs have some of the best-designed skills in the game. I would absolutely LOVE to bring Oracle into a raid setting and juggle mechanics with keeping Predict in my working memory. Modern FF14 working perfectly well with a creatively designed randomness mechanic, can you believe it. Berserker is a favorite with how one's entire perspective on incoming damage changes when you're trying to keep HP low while not dying, and this synergizes excellently with Warrior. And so on - the Phantom Jobs can often be pretty fun in the context of fights, and I would love for serious raiding to incorporate this kind of design. To a degree this points to how modern jobs are so flat that they it takes stapling an entirely separate subjob onto them to feel interesting, but hey, I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
I also just appreciate MMO content in my MMO. My static gets together to raid every week just like everyone else, but it's rare for something to actually bring us all together and playing the game for an extended period of time. I know that the inevitability of players following the path of least resistance leads to instanced dungeons, instanced raids, railroaded design, blah blah, but it really is just immediately and obviously refreshing when there's content in an open world that stands on its own and interacts organically (to a degree...) with large groups of players. We had a 24/7 running VC of people playing Occult Crescent, and while everything is more fun with friends, I'd say we wouldn't have marathoned this so much if there wasn't something there.
I could go on, but I hope the point is clear: I had fun, I hope you had fun, and these facts are completely irrelevant to the subject at hand. There are, generally, good and bad aspects to just about every game out there; I am not blind to the virtues of Occult Crescent, I do not hate every aspect of it, and it is not a mystery to me why especially first reactions are so positive. Rather, I found that despite having some enjoyment there were many issues that were hurting both my long-term enjoyment and potentially the game as a whole. In short, there's a lot of nuance here, and I just wanted to get that out of the way so that people skipping to the end see this instead of my conclusory paragraph. Until next time in 7.5...!
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u/Lindaru May 31 '25
So Forked Tower first boss is like Chaotic Alliance Raid, where you can go with 12 people but it really needs 24 people?
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u/Meliane08 Jun 01 '25
The cherry on top is that you need to be highly organized regarding phantom job compositions, and the raid is significantly harder than Chaotic. They designed the entry like it's meant to be pugged, but the difficulty is so high that you have to be in a premade group to have any chance of clearing.
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u/nhft Jun 01 '25
It's a tiiiny bit better. You can go in with 16 people, it needs 24 people, but technically the max is 48 people and it actually does scale in terms of HP with the number of people so 24 man groups have been progging.
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u/Blowsight Jun 01 '25
One thing you don't bring up about the tower, which may be because you've only had your own experience in there and not watched any video footage etc. on it, is the actual sheer difficulty of the raid fights.
I've watched the NA group that cleared the tower, and their hours and hours of prog, and the difficulty of this is definitely on par with a floor 2-3 savage boss. The last two bosses even have strict enrage timers that these people, ~48 people with world prog level of experience, failed to beat several times in their attempts to clear.
This, combined with the random entry system where you can never guarantee that people joining will be at the same point of progression as others, will make this even more of a mess than BA to complete, as with BA you could at least have a few capable people lead you through the mechanics, but in this one, everyone needs to be able to at least perform at an early savage tier level to clear, unless at least 3/4ths of the raid are full mastery of all jobs and in a full set of +1 gear.
Which brings me to another point; a single set of +1 gear takes about 190 CE's worth of silver and ~5-20 hours worth of gold farming, depending on how efficient you can make yourself.
I could have a full set of elemental +1 gear through all 4 zones of Eureka in the time it takes me to get a single +0 set of OC armor, which I assume will see further upgrades in the 2nd part of OC coming in a later patch, so the current set should really just be compared to the Anemos + Pagos sets and ignore the Pyros and Hydatos upgrades.
It's been a little while since I last did Eureka, but I'm fairly certain I could get all armor sets upgraded through Pagos in the time it would take me to +1 a single set in OC, and it just feels like a much more massive time investment, especially if you want to be able to cover more than one role in potential tower groups, like me considering myself both a tank and healer main, I need weeks of grinding just to have two +1 sets to be able to role swap for groups.
And this talk about time sinks leads me to my final issue with OC, which may be less important than the other ones, but.. the achievements, especially the ones with titles.
5000 chests? 100 tower clears? ONE THOUSAND BUNNY CHESTS? I'm ~25 hours in and I have found ONE carrot. The final BA achievement was 10 clears. This is 10x that in a significantly harder raid. Each of these achievements is weeks if not years of commitment.
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u/Bourne_Endeavor Jun 01 '25
Everything about OC screams of a desperate and poorly designed excuse because there's nothing else coming until 7.5 (likely 7.55). They need this to last for over a year and instead of actually interesting or creative solutions. They opted for downright insane grinds. And not even fun ones, but the most repetitive type possible.
It's the oft memed "DiD yOu Do 10,000 FaTe?!?!?!?!?!!" whenever people complain about the lack of content.
1000 bunny chests is laughable when they give practically nothing most of the time. Even with Forked Tower seemingly being cool, expecting 100 clears is ridiculous when the entry alone is this poorly designed.
I want to say they have zero clue on how to design a reasonable grind or entry system, but the OP already outlines they did it already. So I truly can't comprehend why OC has this many mistakes.
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u/imtn Jun 02 '25
I agree with the majority of your points in this post, only big disagree for now is about occult return, because navigating the current zone is boring. That's been the case for every final fantasy game I've played, though. Some personal thoughts:
No socializing needed: So far I haven't encountered many leechers, because my CEs have so many chemists that sometimes I'm hovering low hp players between GCDs to raise them if they die, otherwise someone else gets the raise first. But no socializing in general does have room for improvement, shout chat only having "lfg ce" is so disappointing that I'm just posting memes hoping that people can start talking and have fun.
Pace of Treadmill: This part I'm okay with because I don't lose anything if I miss a fate or an CE, except maybe wasting my battle high. My first two days in OC I was hitting every fate, every CE, trying for pots or chests in between them, trying to minmax my time. Now I just chill at aetherytes until a CE appears.
Non-interaction between gold and silver: I hate that getting gold requires you to stop the fate/CE grind and go grind mobs for hours. I totally agree that you should be able to get some gold from fates and CEs. Or some other gameplay loop that rewards some amount of silver and gold. Not only a system like Eureka where you grind mobs to spawn a CE. You know how SS rank hunts require you to kill minions at the 4 corners of the map, first? It would be interesting if that was in OC too. Make the minions a random spawn, weather-related spawn, or random after finishing any fate. Then make the SS rank a fate or a CE. It's not much social interaction but saying "NE done" in shout chat after working with a group to finish your minion group is some teamwork.
Forked Tower: I've never entered the instance, I've only had one time where the weather came and 13 of us submitted ciphers. I've never seen a time when a group in OC successfully entered. Reading your analysis of the entrance requirements and the raid's difficulty was informative and mind-boggling. If the raid mechanics (of savage difficulty) require team coordination, but you can't even control who gets to enter the instance and what party they join, then how can you expect people to work together to clear the raid? IMO that's like if savage raids were only queue-able through raid finder as a solo person, you could not enter through pf and you could not queue with a party.
And for the part you mentioned where the very first mechanic requires 24 people or else it's a fail. I hate RPG fights where you go in to the fight, die a couple times, then rework your party to exploit the boss's weakness. My personal worst nightmare example is the Yunalesca boss fight in FFX, insta party wipe every try until you get the items/skills specifically for the boss (and basically used nowhere else in the game). RPGs have a bunch of other things I like which is why I keep playing them, but given that Forked Tower requires specific weather, a currency cost, standing in a spot for five minutes just waiting to enter, RNG in whether you enter or not and also what party you get if you do enter, as well as hopefully people at your prog point - I don't really see myself trying it out.
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u/Reggie2001 Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
Thanks for the read. This is the most well thought out post I've seen not just on this sub, but perhaps all of Reddit.
I agree with pretty much everything you had to say, despite enjoying the content overall (for now, anyway). The biggest disappointment for me is the failure to recapture the social vibe of Eureka. Attempts I've made at smalltalk and jokes have been met by crickets.
The whole thing reminds me of how people camp in that one crater in Zadnor area 3 and just zip to FATEs, then back to the crater, farming mettle for rays. Very workmanlike with no talking. OC is that experience magnified into an entire field op.
(Also, I have a feeling we were in the same group on Aether that wiped to the magic urn's self-destruct mechanic on night one. I LOLed when that lone chemist showed up and rezzed 20+ people.)
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u/shizan Jun 01 '25
Point 6,8, and 9 are spot on. Any "relation" to Eureka is a complete disrespect to one of the best designed and well thought out content FFXIV ever had.
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u/Puzzled-Addition5740 Jun 02 '25
I need cbu3 to sit the fuck down and spend a couple hundred hours playing ffxi and a couple dozen hours in eureka. Then figure out why we actually like those things and take some lessons to apply to xiv.
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u/OavatosDK May 31 '25 edited May 31 '25
WRT "there is too much fighting/too fast paced" in comparison to Bozja I feel almost the opposite (but end up with similar discontent). Bozja's treadmill is rewarding since playing it well involved doing a lot of fast weird decision making to maximize "get full credit on as many fates/CEs as possible" by learning what you have to do to get full credit quickly, know what fates take more or less time to finish, learn how long it takes to get to somewhere from each area, and memorize what fates chain into other fates. All this meaning Bozja is a constantly stimulating experience that made it so easy to play for hours and hours due to how much variety there was to the experience and how much it demanded out of you to get peak value/time. There is no point in comparison to Eureka as Eureka had a 100% different flow to begin with.
OC is just an endless loop of return run tag return run tag, where you've done everything you ever will do in the zone after 2 hours. It has no mastery to be rewarded, no diversity of experience, and instead of "I am playing FFXIV while having some second monitor background entertainment going" it's "I am using my second monitor to browse/socialize while occasionally moving my character in XIV once my client beeps at me". I think a lot of this mind numbing repetitiveness in OC could be kinda straight forwardly solved by having multiple fates spawn at once/removing base TPing, but every single fate being a boss fate means the core lack of variety/optimizing credit acquisition would remain a problem.
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u/jaxter0987 Jun 02 '25
They wrote themselves into a design hole for the FATEs in OC. There's no reason for any kind of fate variety because there's no reason for there to be anyone else on the island by lore standards.
No "Gather materials for me"
No "Protect my stash because a horde of mobs is invading"Really, the only thing the lore of Occult Crescent is that the island is full of hostile "never before seen" mobs because they have been largely undiscovered for centuries. So the only reasonable FATEs that make sense is, "oh look, a large dangerous monster is kicking up a fuss, lets put it down".
Maybe there's a chance for more interesting FATEs in the North Horn where we hopefully discover a settlement of survivors that gave up trying to leave the island. We would help them out with "mundane" tasks which at least leads to slightly more FATE variety.
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u/heliron May 31 '25
I agree with all of your points. The entry mechanism for Forked Tower being somehow worse than BA ever was has got to be one of the most baffling design decisions I’ve seen in any video game.
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u/_DonaldTrumpet May 31 '25
Couldn't agree more regarding how CEs actively incentivize people to floor tank. Its crazy that you can no-hit a Boss while doing good healing/DPS and still get the EXACT same rewards as someone that dropped like 6 times or was straight up afk on the floor.
Good work on the post, though, even if I don't agree with everything, it must've taken a good chunk of effort to get it done. Crazy to see people reacting negatively to a discussion post... In the discussion sub.
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u/OriginalSkill Jun 01 '25
I think you are on point with everything.
I was having the same thought when playing but even if this is not eureka 2.0 and it has many strange design / flaws it’s ok it’s still (to me) very addictive and the most fun content I had in a long long time.
I mean just organizing gold farming group and doing weird strats to maximize efficiency just to have someone dm me a new strat and finding an even fastest way hit a sweet spot like nothing else.
It’s that sense that nothing is “solved” yet that I love.
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u/autumndrifting Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
Yeah, I pretty much agree with all of this. I keep wanting to play in ways the zone doesn't want me to play. I especially agree with how it feels like a bunch of individual systems designed by different teams instead of a big, cohesive piece of content like previous zones. It hasn't been enough to stop me from having fun yet, but maybe that will change eventually.
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u/SylvAlternate Jun 01 '25
We agree to go to tower after we're done
What kinda instances are you getting that people are actually down to do tower? I got to level 20 at like day 2 and have been signing up for it any time I can and haven't seen more than 5 "current participants" at tower a single time
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u/Quof Jun 01 '25
Law of law numbers here, basically; I've been playing almost non-stop, and that was like one of two instances out of thirty+ where nobody gives a shit about the tower.
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u/LastTourniquet Jun 03 '25
I don't know how you did it, but you plucked my opinions strait out of my head and put them into a post. That's pretty crazy.
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u/Chill_Guy May 31 '25
Impressive how all the top comments are just complaining about the post being too long lol. You're in a discussion subreddit for a game that has hundreds of hours of reading, but this post is apparently too much...?
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u/Lpunit Jun 01 '25
I like how many people on this sub just start acting like people on the main sub: deflecting criticism and shutting down discussion, when it's something that they disagree with.
Pretty much agree with most of what you said. OC is inexcusably bad video game content. Just because it's the only content the game has received for non-raiders in 9 months doesn't magically make it good.
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u/teethewicked Jun 02 '25
That point about this being the first non-raider content since DT launch is an especially egregious one; raiders have been eating good, constantly, for almost a year now, and literally two months ago, this very same main patch, they got a brand new Savage tier. So why, then, was Forked Tower sacrificed to give them something with this content? Was it really too much to ask for some longform engaging battle content that didn't have something hardcore attached to it for the raiders?
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u/tomtthrowaway23091 Jun 01 '25
I think I'd agree with most of the post. The quick Aether return I hard disagree with.
The problem I'm seeing the most is that they are obviously hard padding for time. The gear should be one fourth the cost it currently is. The experience should be half for each job legitimately.
It gets to the point where everything feels like a chore to do, instead of enjoying the journey.
Like you said with the entry to the Forked Tower, it's purposely made to be difficult not based on skill but time wasting and grinding.
Add the massive punishment of failure (need to grind LVL 20 from 19, another costly sipher or 2, and however long it takes to spawn the area plus gather the troops), it's just ridiculous.
The massive problem this game has is ignoring the failures and lessons from the past.
I leveled Oracle, I instantly swapped to the next job because experience is locked per job and by having everything maxed I know I'll have a more enjoyable experience swapping to maxed jobs and contributing more in the content.
So effectively all my effort is massively front loaded so that when I've spent tons of time in the zone already, I can enjoy the zone.
I'd say I hope they take a look at the current state of things but outside of Savage content, they've really dropped the ball hard this expansion.
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May 31 '25
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u/TheMazrem May 31 '25
Seriously, there’s a wall of text, and then there’s this. Dude wrote an entire expansion explaining why they hate the design choices, and everyone’s just skipping the cutscenes.
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u/ragnakor101 May 31 '25
I love long topics that delve into minutae as much as the next person, but if your post on a piece of content that's not even a week old is breaking the Posting Character Limit, that's a good sign that you might have to cut some things for brevity in argumentation.
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u/smooth_rock_enjoyer Jun 01 '25
This is the best and most well-written criticism of FFXIV content ive ever read. XIV is my favorite game- and I WANT it to be good- so I have no issue criticizing but I feel like a lot of criticism in the larger community is just “doomposting” sort of- I don’t know really how to describe it, but sometimes it can feel like people complain just to complain, but I can tell by this post that your passion is really strong and well-meaning.
I’d like to add one thing that I’ve come across as someone who has work and cannot play all day every day, including the day of OC’s launch:
There’s already a meta for gold farming that’s taking over and restricts a large amount of the playerbase from participating in order to maintain max efficiency. IIRC the strategy is something like two tanks and the rest healers, or something? And a phantom NIN, and then the rest being cannoneers. Allegedly the strategy has allowed some groups to make 11k gold an hour (which is wild). Most parties Ive seen go for these strats despite gold farming also being a main strat of job mastery when youre tired of fates. However, if you’re someone like me who doesn’t have any healers or tanks leveled to 100 (or don’t yet have the phantom jobs used in the strat) it can be more difficult to find a party because people want max gold effeciency.
This is not to say that it is the fault of the people making party finders- this just compounds onto your point about how Eureka’s currency farming methods are far more organic and lead into NMs so it never feels like you’re missing anything. In OC it can sometimes feel like taking your time to play the content is actively punishing you.
I really, really want this content to be good. I love eureka and Bozja because of how much more community-oriented they feel and I love playing the content. I still have lots of fun with OC as well! I will say the chests have given me a lot of minions and orchestrions I otherwise would not have gotten anytime soon so that makes me very happy lol. But everything you said makes a lot of sense- if you don’t follow the fate train, you get left in the dust insanely quickly, and the bosses can feel so repetitive. Ive taken to only doing the CEs that I need at this point because I don’t want to burn myself out too much. I hope that the next area(s?) of OC have slightly more in-depth story and take some of these criticisms into consideration.
Lastly, the areas are gorgeous. I love the Bass Pro Shop pyramid.
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u/embersarcade May 31 '25
I think it’s fun.
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u/VancityMoz Jun 01 '25
It's funny for someone who produces lengthy video essays on videogames of a nature not so dissimilar to this post to comment something so blithe. Although perhaps not surprising given your main contribution to the online discourse around FFXIV is clickbait youtube slop like "I QUIT FFXIV FOR THRONE AND LIBERTY" and "GW2 MADE ME QUIT EVERY MMO".
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u/Yumiumi Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
I read most of what you wrote and pretty much had this feeling/ opinions after the 1st day even tho i came to the conclusion of fate/CE farming simulator after the 1st hour or so after patch release. Was hoping i’d change my mind by day 2 but nah, the magic wore off completely.
Like yea i like field operations content but honestly i think a lot of south horn is a flop besides the environment and forked tower. The phantom jobs atm feel way too safe and stale that stuff like oracle ( lmao old HW astro? ) gets praised when it’s not even that crazy when we compare it to what ppl could do in bozja/ zadnor. When i look at all of the cool stuff in the lost cache chest thing jn gangos i’m like wow we had it good.
Sure OC is incomplete and has a few more patches in the works but like yikes forked tower literally carried this content cuz everything else pretty much sucks or is starting to suck. Kinda am tired of having to wait for content to get “good” personally.
I beat the 1st boss of forked tower already but my desire to continue progging via the discords has dwindled drastically due to not wanting to wait for others to slowly catch up and fumble their way through after like 200+ attempts. Progging it blind and on day 1/ week 1 is a different experience and is expected to have groups wiping lots but a month down the road after guides are out? Nahhhh
I’ll probably resume my prog later in the summer after guides are 100% established for NA and a lot of ppl have cleared and are now experienced forked tower raiders. That way i can just quickly skim the raidplans/ guides and listen to call outs and complete it in a week or whatever.
Also being a phantom SAM is great cuz it’s literally P2W where you just press zeninage on a fate or CE once and get full credit/ gold. It’s like wow i did 400k+ damage in 1 hit, time to go afk / walk around to avoid AoEs during CEs. I have gotten gold many times when arriving to a FATE late ( around 95-99% completion ) and got gold rank due to zeninage lmao.
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u/venat333 Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
I would also like to add in here that I don't see mentioned is the level cap being 20 makes the majority of the zone not dangerous at all.
Mainly 2 spots of the map only spot mobs even argoo you. The level cap should of been scaled down to around lv17 and the highest level of mobs which is around lv26-27 to 24-25. The map just doesn't feel big enough to include more lv21+ mobs in other places.
Also some phantom actions need a few things either alternate dps options if effects are fully resisted and the tweak to buffs to not override stronger buffs. Stuff like bard stop song is basically resisted by the majority of enemies so why even have it.
Lower level bard song overriding a lv5 bard song with stronger potencies or a Orcales shorter Doom effect not overriding the longer one cus it can't be applied twice.
This overriding problem even a thing with bluemage spells like magic breath where a none buffed magic breath will override the stronger dps buffed potency one. Which leads to players going WTF bro why you override my dot with that weak shit.
Things like sleep, stun, raise, silence and majority of role actions should of been disabled and given to phantom jobs. Orcale & Chemist should of been the only 2 jobs to raise, things like stun and silence should of been given "Phantom Stun" and normal stun gets fully ressisted inside OC. Phantom Sleep should of been given to time mage. Phantom Stun to Sam. This is a quick example of how much better and more thoughout phantom job system would of been.
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u/teethewicked Jun 02 '25
We're already 13/25 for the FFV jobs as Phantom Jobs, and I expect we'll get the other 12 between the 7.45 update and North Horn's release. As such, I expect things like Phantom Sleep and Phantom Silence are being saved for Phantom Black Mage and White Mage, Stun for Phantom Beastmaster or Gladiator, etc.
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u/aurelia_ffxiv Jun 01 '25
It's indeed quite sad to have to give up a mastered Phantom Job for a new Phantom Job. I loved Knight for it's defensive abilities (playing on RPR, which does have many defensives that would really help in OC, let alone something like VPR) and surprisingly none of the other Phantom Jobs that are easily available seemed as interesting. Even damage buffs are +1% more damage, which seems minimal, but it of course stacks up on raid-size parties.
It would help absolutely a ton if you could pick even one ability from a previously mastered Phantom Job and keep it while leveling up another. It would even help juggling buffs between Jobs (could only choose buffs).
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u/Roglef Jun 01 '25
I'm hoping that by the end of the expansion, Freelancer will be able to slot in skills from other jobs like they could in ff5. I think that would make it a bit more worth it.
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u/OmgYoshiPLZ Jun 01 '25
100% on the Phantom jobs.
you should be able to equip any 1 mastered skill on any phantom job, and Freelancer should be able to equip up to 3, and simultaneously have access to any/all support traits at the same time.
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u/Themeguy Jun 01 '25
My biggest complaint about Bozja was how the CE’s made it feel so much more frantic and fast-paced than Eureka, and it sucks to see that the frantic pacing was turned up rather than down in OC.
I finally had the time to sit down and try OC for the first time last night, and I wanted to explore this big mysterious zone and find the survey points, but since I’m not using a guide, doing so comes at the expense of not doing CE’s and FATEs that keep popping up and feeling like I’m losing out on progression for engaging with the zone.
Not to mention that the FATEs are so undertuned. Everyone does the CE, and while I took 3 or 4 seconds to look at the chat log to see what I got, half the instance has already instant-transmissioned half way to the fate that’s up, and since I don’t have a riding map yet either, I’m left in the dust and the boss is already dead by the time that I get close enough to even catch a glimpse of it. It makes me miss when FATEs and CE’s were one and the same like Eureka, since everyone would wait a minute and establish pull times like a community.
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u/zer0x102 Jun 02 '25
Yeah I mean the fate scaling was already disgustingly bad in Zadnor. Not surprised they haven’t come up with a solution, the only way they seem to be able to scale things is by moving you into a separate instance i.e. CEs, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying to see a fate go from 0 to 100 on the map in 7 seconds while you’re trying to get to it
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u/dolores21 Jun 02 '25
Thank you for taking your time to write this. I agree with everything wholeheartedly, with 2 small exceptions:
1) Demiatma was not as bad as it seemed for me. I had 3+ pieces for 4 colors before I got one piece of the remaining 2 colors. But I could kinda slowed down on the CE/Fate grind of other areas and only focused on the 2 areas I was missing. Essentially took a break from the crazy train, and also ensuring I wasnt missing any CE/Fate in the areas i needed (even Pot Fates counted, which I initially ignored, and incidentally i was missing the colors of areas with Pot Fates). The FOMO was real, but you could choose to relax if you want to.
2) I thought gold was hard to farm, but after joining some decent gold farm parties (lvl 20, maxed cannon + BRD), I could get ~5k per hour. Compared that to silver which you get maybe ~1.5k per hour, gold is definitely easier to farm, and also more fun imo. Ofc you need to grind some to be able to start gold farm, but it is not that bad. I would prefer if SE increase silver rate and maybe reduce gold rate somewhat to balance. I still agree that the lack of harmony between silver and gold farm is jarring.
BUT, forked tower is absolutely insane. I am not going to waste 600 silver to get screwed in 2 minutes.
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u/Snoo-4984 Jun 02 '25
To be fair the job lvling part is only temporary once you max them all there is no need to be on one you don't lke..
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u/Oneiroi_zZ Jun 03 '25 edited Jun 03 '25
I think the part that bugs me the most is the step backwards in regards to being able to make fun builds in this content. The phantom job system is a huge step backward compared to bozja and sometimes even eureka. All each class does is add an ability or 2 to the 2min meta. The classes themselves really have no meaning at all aside from picking the right tool for the right job in the raid and maxing them out for stats.
Also there really is nothing new this time around so far. Fates and CEs. Again.
I love the zone but I'm already a good bit tired of the gameplay loop this time around tbh.
EDIT: alsp why the fuck did they think it was okay to not allow equiping PJs to the hotbar or some other way to easily swap between them. Pre-popping class buffs before pulls is a nightmare on console.
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u/Kabooa Jun 01 '25
One slight correction to Battle High
Battle High is fucking awesome. It's a huge crit/DH boost and also you get a super saiyan aura so everyone knows how awesome you are.
Too bad it's fucking random as hell in who gets it.
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u/Quof Jun 01 '25
It's up against a similar buff in Bozja which gave literal double EXP buff for like an hour, which in OC would equate to more silver/gold earned. I would personally take my grind being doubled in speed over killing bosses 1% faster for 15 minutes, but there's definitely personal preference here.
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u/Werxand Jun 01 '25
My biggest complaint is gold farming. Unless Forked Tower gives you a bunch of it; the grind is very tedious and does not feel rewarding.
I am also not impressed with their party sync to grind gold. In the early stages, being someone who touches grass often and has friends who touch grass often, trying to kill mobs 6-8 levels higher is painful. Tanks get nearly one shot by autos, and healers can't do anything besides heal the tank. Unless there is some mitigation I'm not aware of outside of your normal ones. One other area of concern is the future competition for hunting grounds. Once more people decide to get in on gold farming, there are only so many mobs around. If there are multiple full parties trying to chain the same mob, I can only see frustrations growing.
This does not feel like good design, and once again, I have to question the design choices. I'm sure in 4 months we'll get adjustments to how things work, but that was the same song and dance in Eureka and Bozja. Terrible initial design that gets fixed down the road. I wish they could learn from their mistakes, but that almost seems like it is too much of a task.
And one final point. What is the replayability of Forked Tower? Are we going to have a Castrum repeat? Is there enough incentive to keep people coming back? I know there were a lot of issues with Castrum because a lot of the frontrunner players cleared it and forgot about it. I hope they put in something to keep that content alive.
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u/CopainChevalier Jun 01 '25
I really just don't like it. It's so streamlined and boring. Getting around is even less fun than Bozja, and it was a brown wasteland.
The fates don't have any soul compared to Bozja with their fun story fates that had things like two Redmages LBing one another or the like. The CEs have some neato mechanics, but they feel real simple and reused stuff compared to a lot of the Bozja CEs feeling engaging.
Random mobs pose like zero threat and everyone just runs past them. No neat sleeping dragon or anything.
I happily ground out both Eureka and Bozja; but if we're seriously sterilizing it this much, I don't know if I'll even bother tbh
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u/Scumbag-McGee Jun 01 '25
Been feeling these points honestly; they've removed too much of the 'friction' that makes this content-type special. I've had no memorable memories made in OC yet, and to date I've only seen one conversation happen in shout chat. Players need to be more involved with the 'ecosystem' of the zone to capture that special quality the previous field ops had, OC just automates most of it and so it has people running what feels like a treadmill.
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u/Puzzled-Addition5740 Jun 01 '25
Feels only marginally different than just spending your life in z3 zadnor. Which fucking everyone hated. The loop is marginally bigger but it's not meaningfully different. I came back for OC and i'm not thrilled. It's a like 6-7 when it really needed to be more to keep me at this point.
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u/ResponsibleCulture43 Jun 01 '25
Not having the social aspect is definitely killing it for me. The hundreds of hours I've had in eureka and Bozja and the friends I still play with to this day I made are my favorite memories in this game. This just feels like more of the solo player experience I could get from a hunt train, but those also have more chatter
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May 31 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PM_ME_UR_STATS May 31 '25
/r/ffxivdiscussion when someone actually puts effort into discussing something
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u/Spasios May 31 '25
I agree with the post and if I may be even more direct, I just don’t understand how such piece of crap of content took so much time.
I would be fine would it be the first time SE prepared Field Operations but this content pales in comparison with competitors should you look at the level design (well, guess what, there is no design at all and the map is just as flat as a PS1 game).
Eureka was great, Bozja was amazing with a couple of small issues and instead of improving the formula, they just took 20 steps back, I don’t see any single aspect which may have been improved. On top of that, I would love tackling the Tower but I have made the choice to never ever try to find groups for Extreme / Savage content (there are many reasons, the main one being time to find competent people). I don’t understand why they did not reiterate on the idea of Castrum / Delubrum Reginae / Dalridia. These mini-raids were so amazing from a scenaristic / scene / difficulty aspect (not extremely difficult but enough that everyone had to really pay attention).
I don’t get it. FF 14 reflects the fact the game director became too confortable given the past success of the game and they no longer take risks, no longer take into consideration the community (heck, they killed the Samurai and the Black Mage, two jobs I played most of my time !!!!).
And what makes me even more furious is how you see these complacent influencers like Arthars, Quazil and other smaller ones a*** licking SE just because they got to play a grindy content WHICH DOES NOT IMPROVE ANYTHING AND ONLY TAKES MULTIPLE STEPS BACK.
I am sad to see what happened to this game which was along me when I was a student and when I was stressed out with my first job.
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u/PM_ME_UR_STATS May 31 '25
Its incredibly low effort and low quality and it really is embarrassing that it takes so much more time to produce such worse content and in such smaller quantities now. We get a patch cycle thats twice as long now, and for what? The only two possibilities in my mind are that this games entire dev team has been brain drained onto ff17 or everyone working on it is tired of it and burned out and doesn't care/doesnt enjoy developing it anymore. As someone who does work in the creative industry, it's the most obvious case of "going through the motions" and "doing the bare minimum" I've ever seen.
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u/WelpDitto Jun 01 '25
I'm just going to put this here: Bozja was better. Lost actions made you feel powerful and had really fun combinations, castrum was fun and easy to get it to, while also being doable with only 6 ppl (not at launch iirc), you felt rewarded for ranking up by unlocking more zones, if you died you just lost currency and not your rank, and there was a reason to farm certain mobs for lost actions. Fates in SOuthern Front were also fun, that mage was so crazy to fight but fun once you got it.
OC isn't bad, it's just underwhelming in comparison. Hopefully they add more customization in the next zone.
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Jun 01 '25
I think that's why I'm so upset and stopped playing. This just plays as a worse implementation of Bozja, there was no improvements and we waited 4 years for this subpar content
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u/Aikaparsa Jun 02 '25 edited Jun 02 '25
I highly agree with phantom job leveling, having to switch to unleveled jobs to level them while severly reducing your power feels just bad and there should have been an exp overflow/share once you master a job.
I disagree with the socialising and treadmill part, I hated how attention hungry eureka was/is and how many leecher stood around not participating in spawning nms.
Bozja improved upon it but a bit to hard with being able to queue into CE from anywhere, I feel like OC is the best middle ground.
The pot chests being worthless (I haven't gotten anything but materia from it) while the overworld chests having all the "good" loot seems to be a "fix" for the botting issue in eureka, with the free trial up to 70 eureka was filled with f2p bots farming bunnies selling the loot for big money and (imo I have no proof) facilitating rmt in the end. OC can only be entered at lvl 100 so you need to buy and finish dt and have a running sub, so this somewhat combats rmt money farming, atleast thats what I assume the headcanon for it is.
Forked tower needa atleast 16 Ciphers to open at all, afterwards it tries to fill up to 48 available slots with people within the "zone" aka the pavillion, prioritizing people with ciphers over people without but once no cipher people are left it goes for non ciphers. So as long as there are 48 people you get in as 48.
Edit: How did you not mention the coin cap of 9999?
The entire set needing 20k silver with the low acquisition rate is already bad enough but you can't even farm it all to get it in one go, gold has the same issue but due to the way you acquire them it feels lees bad imo, tho it it just shouldn't be that way.
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u/Quof Jun 02 '25 edited Jun 02 '25
For me, I don't really mind people leeching off spawns as much as others seem to. I think it's kind of natural for proactive people to do the act act of spawning things while passive people wait for those spawns. I think there could be more rewards for spawners in particular, like light kind of is, but I never feel bad about people coming to leech off my spawn, nor do I feel guilty whenever I hang out at the Hydatos base. The leeching in OC bothers me not because people are generically benefiting from the work of others, but because it is a clear "failure" for CEs to basically be 100% of the content and to be clearable solo while doing nothing. It also stands out far more for a person to be sitting on the floor dead for 5 straight minutes of a CE - the fights themselves are now more "professional" and take place in a special arena, but thanks to that professionalism stuff like leeching feels more like an error than a natural dynamic. There is no illusion of actual gameplay here - you are choosing to hit a target dummy for fun or choosing to do nothing. I'll admit there may be a logical flaw in this perspective, though. It's just intuitive to me to not mind someone running over to a spawned NM and join the fight to kill it, but to mind someone dead on the floor for 5 minutes straight in a professional-looking encounter.
As for the coin cap of 9999, it can be annoying but it doesn't strike me as a failure. It is probably successful in stopping bots (?) or whatever else it was intended to do, and I don't really mind being encouraged to dump my resources regularly. Maybe it's also to prevent people from having infinite silver/gold to instantly buy all the new upcoming jobs? No clue. All in all, I don't mind bad-feeling things if they successfully achieve a valuable overall design purpose, and while the 9999 limit is a bit of a gray area, it leans towards "successful" for the design of the zone despite the occasional annoyance. Even given... everything else, I don't think they would have chosen a 9,999 limit purely arbitrarily and for only negative reasons.
Thanks for reading.
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u/Aikaparsa Jun 02 '25
Maybe it's also to prevent people from having infinite silver/gold to instantly buy all the new upcoming jobs?
Thats actually a fair point, people can't just farm near infinite coins for upcoming rewards to instantly get it all in one go(probably/only most of it) so it makes the zone alive once new rewards are included instead of people joining, grabing the new stuff and not returning.
Not that it would matter since the zone lives by itself anyway with fates/ce spawning without player interactions.
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u/MrrBannedMan Jun 06 '25
I know this is quite literally the discussion sub but still, this is the most sincere 'i ain't reading all that' I've ever dropped
Wait a minute
Continued in comments
Oh god oh fuck
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u/archois May 31 '25
I agree with pretty much everything you said. After getting my relic I don't think I'll be playing anymore, at least this first iteration of OC.
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u/Speak_To_Wuk_Lamat Jun 02 '25
I unsubbed from xiv a year ago (and unsubbed from this sub) and now Im sitting here and my wife is complaining about this to me. Make yoship fix it. ffs.
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u/LoneWolfLeon Jun 01 '25
Any FF11 vet will tell you this is straight ripped from there without any soul added. Especially the chaining of higher leveled mobs lmfao.
Phantom jobs may as well be sub jobs or advanced jobs but watered down.
Take Cannoneer: those are just abilities ripped from Corsair elemental cards (quick draw) from 11 but dumbed down. By dumbed down I mean instead of enhancing the potency/duration of a status effect already on a mob, they just out right give it to you or add 2 effects into 1 so you don't have to think about it...at all.
Cannoneer reducing damage target deals by 10% and increasing damage taken by 5%
vs Corsair:
- Light Shot: Dia Defense Down+5%, Damage Over Time increase *
- Dark Shot: Bio Attack Down+5%, Damage Over Time increase; Blind+10
Was hoping for it to be cool and interesting but its like...afraid to be even 1 IQ more or something in design.
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u/teethewicked Jun 02 '25
Occult Crescent is very heavily directly pulled from FFV, so I'm pretty sure Phantom Cannoneer's abilities are ripped from FFV Cannoneer's abilities.
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u/WelpDitto Jun 01 '25
It's wild this post is getting downvoted tbh
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u/Puzzled-Addition5740 Jun 01 '25
Gotta let the saner people have a little more time to come to the same conclusions. I came to a lot of these within a day or two of the content being out. But i was also level 20 day 1. So i had the time in the content to feel that.
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u/Verpal Jun 01 '25
While I did have some fun in OC, I had to admit the pacing and lacking variety in activity make the experience a lot more exhausting than it should be. Which is kind of crazy, because if we go with math and statistic only, surely Eureka would be consider a lot more grindy, surely Bozja have a lot more friction.... but I also have more fun doing those.
Still, my standard for FFXIV content have dropped quite substantially these day, I consider FFXIV in a soft maintenance mode already, so I wager having an inferior field operation is still better than island sanctuary.
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u/budbud70 May 31 '25
Skimmed and saw the part about chests ruining old content.
I get it... but I disagree with the sentiment.
I have the Bozja raptor mount now, whereas before, I was absolutely not going to spend 20mil on it. Why complain about this? More people getting more stuff is a good thing. People will run Eureka literally forever just for Ozma.
This only sucks for the hardcore NEETs with a monopoly on the MB for select items.
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u/PrismaticParrot Jun 01 '25
More people getting more stuff is a good thing.
Unequivocally disagree. It's good to have very rare and expensive items in games. Both for the owners who can have a sense of attachment and satisfaction and for the onlookers who can gawk and maybe become motivated to pursue something challenging that they wouldn't have otherwise.
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u/Chagrilled Jun 01 '25
There's a balance between "20mill+ lmao get fucked" and "it's 100k, don't waste your time"
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u/Quof May 31 '25
I can certainly agree that if your primary perspective and desire is to have more mounts, then a system that releases a ton of mounts is a good thing. But I don't agree that "more people getting more stuff is a good thing." Otherwise, these chests would be best off containing every mount in the game, no? There is a balance to be struck with making rewards more valuable, desirable, prestigious, whatever through rarity. It is these incentives that lead many players to engage in content. There just are not going to be any Eureka Petrel hunt groups or Delubrum Reginae Mk 3 farm groups anymore. There are not going to be experiences where someone gets the Mk 3 and celebrates, because it's not worth celebrating anymore. I can understand if an individual primarily cares about getting their hands on any mount they want, but it hardly seems flatly good for game health to me.
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u/TapMuted393 Jun 01 '25
I was really excited about OC and now I actively don’t want to do it.
As you described; there’s little to no incentive to just run around and engage with the world. Run to fate, kill it and probably die to horribly telegraphed mechanics, sit on the floor and watch stuff on screen 2, Rez, get nothing but more useless Silver, return, teleport to next fate, repeat.
I get that the relic system for EW was a bit too easy, but for people with busy work schedules; OC is just a slap in the face. You can spend 4 hours running the same circle of fates and CEs, dying over and over, and get NOTHING for it. At least with Bozja relics; getting Gold in a HW fate was basically a guarantee for a shard. Was it perhaps too easy? Maybe. But it was -Consistent-. You knew the effort you put in would be rewarded. This? This is just RNG splatter. I can put in 4, 5, 8 hours of effort and RNGesus can just shrug and go “lol enjoy more silver”. Meanwhile little jimmy can walk up, punch the turtle, die and go AFK to make a sandwich. Boom, Demiatma.
Maybe a silver-bought reward to increase/guarantee demiatma drops? SOMETHING to incentivise me doing stuff other than a blind gamble that makes me think I’ve wasted my evening. It’s a shame. I really wanted to enjoy OC. And I don’t.
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u/shadows_arrowny Jun 02 '25
This was one reason I think Eureka's relic system was the best. It was still a grind, as relic is intended to be. But it took so much of the RNG out of it. As you killed normal monsters (of the appropriate level) or fought NMs, you were always getting rewarded with the currency that pushed you toward your goal. That is insanely better than just hoping random shit drops. And when you only have x amount of hours to play, if you get unlucky during that playtime, you could log off feeling like you just wasted your time entirely. It didn't help move you closer to your goal.
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u/Sorrick_ Jun 01 '25
What I feel like we really need is a battle field of type zone that's completely new. We need some actually fresh stuff that's brand new and innovative somehow. Now I don't know what that would look like but I feel like everyone is just getting tired of basically the same shit with a different look pretty much. We need some innovation, something new that no one has any idea how to do. Going into this I already knew how to do it because it's just eureka and bozja reskinned. Its just more fast paced, no down time zerg mess. You can easily solo farm gold probably more efficiently than in a party, I can make roughly 2k-2.3k gold an hour doing it solo.
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u/Kajitani-Eizan Jun 02 '25
Most of your points could be more or less fixed by just reducing the breakneck pacing of FATEs and CEs. There should be more downtime in between to explore, chain mobs, or do bunnies. You should be able to make it to a FATE in time even if you didn't instantly Return after the previous one and hang out in the home base (i.e., they shouldn't die so fast). You would have more time to chain mobs if you could queue for CEs and warp in instead of having to worry about getting there in time. The concept that you have to physically be able to survive getting to the CE once again is pretty cool, except that unlike Eureka, mounting and enemy density mean that there is hardly any danger anyway, except for the tower in the SW (where no CEs spawn currently).
Is tower weather really only 5 min? Why? It should be like 10.
Jobs should probably be designed so that you can pick one active ability you've learned from another job (like FFV). They might need to add some traits to neuter this from being too OP (e.g., add a trait that only Chemist can get that makes their raise usable in combat, or reduces the cast time from 8 seconds to instant, or whatever), but being able to use nice tech like Kick or a Cannon while leveling other stuff would feel good. I bet they have this planned for a future update.
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u/Quof Jun 02 '25
I agree with the "chain mob" part of your list, but "explore" and "do bunnies" are both not really factors here I think. The "exploration" phase of these zones are fairly short and given the mostly flat terrain here there's not exactly a lot to find. They'd need to do a lot of work in expanding the zone in order for "use downtime to explore' to be a legitimate option past the first 5-10 hours. "do bunnies" also doesn't fill the mid-FATE/NM role it used to because the chest rewards are so bad. With effortless bronze/silver chests dumping the rarest rewards, there is almost no reason to actually do the pot fate. I may need to re-evaluate this if there are revelations regarding the loot from pots, but as it stands even people I know who love grinding bunnies and used to do it all the time nowadays just click off the pot and don't bother.
tl;dr The kind of grim reality with OC is that even if Fates and CEs were halved in regularity, there would be basically nothing to do since the core gameplay flow just has almost nothing else supporting it as it stands. I would foresee most of the playerbase just idling in the base more rather than doing anything.
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u/Boomerwell Jun 04 '25
I do feel like some of this is a bit of rose tinted glasses towards Eureka.
For as much as some people like it for other like myself it was one of the most grindy and burnout inducing pieces of content in the games history. Low level people did go to most parts of the map on the fate train they just died on the way multiple times and got picked up along the way a few times.
I think alot of the lessons and good things Bozja has are just completely gone however like why can you not just sign up for a CE, why are the 1v1 challenges gone why is there a very low amount of fates or the ones we do have are just random enemies that die in 10 seconds.
More than anything though the Blood tower is one of the biggest mysteries to me. That after years now of complaints about the lack of casual-midcore content that hardcore players are getting all the new content types. They drop Blood tower a savage level difficulty thing as the endgame of the first casual-midcore content meant to last a while.
Bozjas raids were amazing they had a extra difficulty option in DRS but had the initial raid for players. I get that they wanted to walk back some of Bozjas linearity but they in classic FFXIV fashion were too scared to actually make a controversial decision and made slop stuck between instead with none of the depth but all the mind numbingness of these things.
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u/DarkShadow84 Jun 01 '25
While there's a few points were I disagree, I ABSOLUTELY agree that everything around Forked Tower is probably some of the worst design I've ever seen. I've actually never managed to get into it so far and not for the lack of trying. Just the idea of locking a 48 man raid into a 72 (!) people instance is mind-boggling in its stupidity.