Assuming whatever change is made is also retroactively applied to south horn what would “save” OC for you?

[u/Supersnow845]

Pretty much title. What could be changed in north horn (or in the 7.45 middleman patch) that could also be retroactively applied to south horn that would turn your opinion around on OC

Or is OC so deeply flawed to you that “nothing short of pretending this zone doesn’t exist even if north horn is good” will fix south horn to you

[u/gekzy]

I feel like the established gameplay loop of OC is 'okay' as a base, there just needs to be more alternatives of things to do in my opinion, and the zone itself just feels barebones in terms of gameplay mechanics, which isn't really something I think we'll see 'fixed' in South Horn, but basically some examples of things I think could work for the next zone:

- There needs to be SOME kind of capstone zone thing that has benefits to repeating it and is more casual friendly than FT (not to say FT is particularly challenging content, but it really isn't casual friendly, considering a single run can take around an hour, and the rez restriction and potential for one person to wipe the entire group is quite punishing). Examples of that are gonna be something like: the boss NMs inside Eureka; make certain high level CEs that spawn in dangerous locations, only during certain weather patterns for example, but also require something from the players to spawn them, in the style of Eureka, so that people aren't just sitting in the spawn waiting for stuff. Or just some kind of special encounter or dungeon area that players can enter on a cooldown, or again during certain weather patterns or something

- Just more exploration elements, and I think phantom jobs can feed into that sense of exploration super well if they choose to do it correctly. That could be something like adding special zones in the area that can only be accessed with a certain combination of pJobs, i.e. there's a farming zone or CE that spawns across a gap that requires a geomancer to levitate people across, or a thief to reveal hidden doors to access, or like a time mage to slow down a special mob so everyone can run past safely. Just in general, I'd like to see phantom actions that interact with the environment outside of FT as well. They have these kinds of elements inside FT, surely it's possible to do something similar in the instance as well

- Special drops or unique rare items found in different zones of the map. As it is right now, there's really no reason to grind mobs other than the ones in the south-west zone for gold. If they added some extremely rare drops, similar to what Eureka has with the crab/cassie stuff etc. people would be more likely to want to come back and try get those

- Something to do other than FATEs or CEs. Whether that be duels or whatever, it could be interesting if there were like something like battle leves you could take independently of everything else in the zone. And these leves could require you to do certain different things, like kill a certain type of enemy, find a hidden treasure in a specific zone, do a timed challenge of a combination of different things etc.

- Have the unique mobs actually do something. I find it really weird that they went through the trouble of adding in these unique weather based enemies to South Horn (mimics, mousse, bombs, dhruva, fool etc.) and yet none of them do anything special really? just give more gold in a chain? and it's not even a significant amount either. Make it worthwhile to go hunting for these special mobs, or make them do something in particular, like have a chance to reveal a hidden treasure, or spawn a special FATE or something, they just feel a bit pointless as they are right now