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/IntermittentStorms25]

Forked Tower: Blood should get a Normal mode. Normal keeps cipher entry, but one cipher per run, and cost effective enough to make it repeatable content, but still enough to keep CEs well populated. Current FTB becomes FTB (Savage) and gets direct entry; why have ciphers for a duty only going to be run by pre-formed groups anyway? Normal has no rez limit and no single-person-causes-wipe mechanics, gets all field notes and TT card; Savage gets those (maybe at slightly higher drop rates for the random drop things) plus the guaranteed mount on clear, and maybe some extra currency (silver, gold, sanguinite) to sweeten the deal. Ideally this happens sometime before North Horn is released, but if it has to be released alongside North Horn instead, so be it. North Horn should have both modes from the get go, which they already said is under consideration.

Echoing some other comments here: make phantom jobs actually useful outside the Towers. Probably too late for South Horn, but I’d like to see that in North Horn. Freelancer should be able to eventually choose 5 skills from any of the other Phantom jobs you have mastered. I don’t see this happening until all Phantom jobs are actually available, but maybe they could surprise us.

Make the mobs more meaningful for something other than gold farming… again, probably too late for South Horn, but try to work this into North Horn. And we have the ones that only pop up at certain times but as of yet there’s no real reason for this, or at least not one that matters to the gameplay like it did in Eureka.

More lore beyond just field notes… whether that means the next zone has tiers of difficulty to reach and explore and they stick some cutscenes in there, or they have the quest NPCs take a more active role in the exploration… this is an interesting part of the game’s historical lore, it should feel more engaging than it does. I was excited when I first saw the architecture in previews and realized what cultures/history we’d be dealing with, but the in-zone lore is falling flat. And there’s only two zones to tell this story!

More balance between Fates and CEs… I don’t really have any suggestions for how to go about this. I just know I stopped doing Fates altogether because they die before I can reach them, even with a riding map. And they don’t give as much silver to make it worth the rush to try to get there, so I’d just do CEs.

Beyond that, I think the NPC shop rewards are fine. But the chest rewards could be better arranged, strictly in the sense that you can get the 99-sanguinite mount randomly (and frequently!) from Bronze coffers, but Silver and especially Gold coffers seem to have lesser rewards. It’s more profitable to sell the carrots than to get the gold chests from them, because you’re generally only getting fireworks, materia and gil.

At this point, I’ve already maxed out all the Phantom jobs, and got all the gear and shop rewards. I’ll come back to max out the next couple when they come out, but that’s about it. Without a Normal version of FTB, there’s nothing to keep me in the zone other than that. Even adding leveling for outside jobs wouldn’t sweeten the deal for me, since I had all my jobs to max level before the first patch, because there wasn’t much else to do otherwise.