This red scrip system doesn't seem very casual-friendly..

[Rath]

Assuming you meet the gear requirements for unspoiled node. Ignore the folklore nodes as you do not need them.

It takes 5 minute to grab a node and get 16-24 scrips. If you cannot manage to do that 30 times in a week, why are you paying a sub? It does not get any more casual then that. Seriously all that you have to do to get gear for a miner or bot is to mine or harvest. You do not have to get an app, or leave your baby in the tub, or get up from dinner. You just grab a node if you are on the game and free. If you choose to do something else while you are on, then live with your choice.

This gear is not needed right now for anything in the game. There will not be anything that needs it for quite some time. They released it now so you have months to get the gear BEFORE they release content it is needed for.

Fishers on the other hand...have to rely on RNG

With NQ il140/150 tools and full trailblazers (blue scrip gear)
NQ belt and acc+ the materia you get from your 58/60 quests, and converting your old gear. You can eat NQ snurbleberry tart or HQ of a lesser food and reach 600 gathering and 600gp. Some may also need the FC buff, but that all depends on your melds. You can of course get HQ MH/OH and be good to go without melding. Since you can sell that materia for more then the tools cost now, that is a decent option.

[NaliaBrown]

Us fishers have to deal with RNG, in-game timers, and weather. And we actually have to worry about GP now, which is something that I'm still getting used to managing. I can't tell you how many times I've said "crap, I forgot to get more cordials!"

[ServerCollaps]

Im sorry, how exactly is this casual friendly? Do casuals have the time to go afk for 10 hours per week?

yes, that makes them casuals, else they would be hardcore addicted gamer without rl

[Kiara]

Great post OP.

I think blankdiploma summed up the thoughts that many of us are voicing nicely:

Good lord, where to begin.
It seems the SE has intentionally run DoL/DoH into the ground via a combination of a lack of rewards and the single most convoluted grind I have ever seen in a video game.

Let's recap: 1) Crafters have almost nothing to offer combat classes anymore. If you're not a culinarian, the best you can do is i180 gear that is EXORBITANTLY expensive. MAYBE pentamelded with rank V materia (which are several million a piece) it might be relevant, but even then the crafting of these items is gated behind an obscene timesink.

2)Speaking of the grind, everything is now gated behind this weekly scrip turn-in system wherein you will spend millions of gil for the privilege of spending MORE millions of gil to EITHER craft something this week or use your scrips to buy mats to sell on the AH to other crafters. I don't think non-crafters really have been exposed to how bad this is, so let's look at an example recipe:

Forgemaster's Hammer
3x Adamantite Ingot
Each Adamantite Ingot requires the following:
* Two items crafted from high-level mining mats
* Two items from high-level mining nodes gated behind a grind that requires you to farm 198x tokens from blue scrips that can only come from every-30-minute rare-spawn unspoiled nodes.

* FIVE items which require the following:
1) Limited weekly currency which can either be spend on these crafting mats or on progressing your crafter's gear, and is expensive to acquire due to mats required for red scrip turn-ins.

2) 20x items which can only be gathered by miners and botanists by spending THEIR limited weekly currency to acquire limited-use buff scrolls that give them a CHANCE to find a small number of these items while grinding on lesser nodes for 15 minutes.

1x Astral Birch Lumber
* Just as crazy as the above, except it also requires high-level alchemist-created mats because **** you, carpenters.

1x Adamantite Rivets
1x Hardsilver Ingot
* These two are easy to get.

3x Leafborne Aethersand
* Gatherer-only rare drop from reducing mats you can only get from irritating timed Ephemeral nodes.

1x Mastercraft Demimateria
* Everybody's favorite awful grind is back, where you get to spend hours levelling up Desynthesis for the privilege of getting to grind for items just so you can destroy them for a chance at getting one of these things.

And this is for a single item. Oh, and it's just a version of the Blacksmith MH that you could have saved up 3 weeks of scrip turn-ins to acquire yourself without crafting, except lower ilevel and with materia slots so you can have the privilege of blowing millions of gil on expensive materia to get slightly higher crafting mats. Oh, and if you want to just gear up each DoH class by doing the scrip turn-ins instead of bothering with these obscene recipes, you're looking at more than a year of grinding turn-ins every week. 66 weeks, to be exact. I'm sure this content won't be obsolete by then!

I had every craft at 50 when Heavensward shipped. I loved crafting in this game. I was levelling them all to 60 when this absurd bullsh*t dropped in 3.05. Now I don't know if I'm even interested in playing the game anymore. Does anybody else feel this is just way, way too excessive? Am I just raging for no reason? I just don't f***ing get it. I don't know how anybody could possibly look at the current situation and think "Yeah, this is fun and rewarding." There isn't even anything to do with high-level crafting except make shit for other high-level crafters... and food.
Ugh.

[Oreic]

I would be surprised if your kid wont survive without 1 min of attention

You severely underestimate the determination and energy of a curious child.

[Granyala]

Great post OP.

I think blankdiploma summed up the thoughts that many of us are voicing nicely:

Ahem... okay... that's insane. Frustrating insane bullshit and here I was thinking that 2.x crafting already was a ridiculous and unrewarding grind.
I'll just ignore crafting until they tone this mess way WAAY down. Thanks for the heads up before I started leveling to 60.

[kuma_aus]

Red Scrips DoL is very casual friendly.

It requires little to no effort, and takes very little total time. It is time gated, so you can't rush it all at once, something that is also casual friendly. For casuals that play 14 hours a week, they are on equal grounds as someone who puts in 10 hours a day.

You don't need 14 hours of in game time to cap out your Red Scrips, you need to just be on at every 30 mins.

You need a total of 8 weeks of minimal effort, logging in for 5 minutes every 30 minutes for 14 hours of a week to get the best gathering gear for 1 class in the game.

If you manage to get both BTN and MIN to 60, then you just need 7 hours in a week, spending 20 minutes in those hours to cap out your weekly limit of Red Scrips.

Plus by week 3-4 I'm guessing, you will have good enough Red Scrip gear to attempt Legendary Node Red Scrips as well if you managed to get the folklore. So this will cut down the total time you need.

People complain that this whole system isn't fun. But what did you find fun about BTN and MIN in the first place? I enjoy gathering so when I'm on, I do that. And once I see it's time to go to the red node spawn, I go there. I don't suddenly find myself not enjoying the game for having to spend 5 minutes gathering a rare item to help me get the best gathering gear in the game.

[Aeyis]

Red Scrips DoL is very casual friendly.

It requires farming for some 7 hours. In addition they also need to (hard) grind 11 hours to turn these scrips into materials via favors.
A casual that plays 14 hours a week does not have the time to farm 18 hours, I would think.


If you are talking just about gatherers, then no it's not a hard grind. But does still take away about 12-15 minutes each hour, for 7 hours of your playtime. For casuals who only play 14 hours that's a lot.
But even so that might be okay if it was just for gatherers.

Unfortunately these gathering materials are also needed for crafting. And using them in such a way requires 11 hours of inescapable grinding. Each week.

[PirateCat]

There are a couple of points that a lot of people seem to be missing here.

1. The existence of a weekly cap is casual friendly by definition. Its purpose is to balance things out between the people who have about enough time to collect that many scrips and people who would be able to get 5x that many if the cap weren't there. It does have the side effect of creating a sense of urgency to hit the cap, but that doesn't really change things for people on the low end of the scale for how much time they have. Someone who can only find the time to get 300 scrips a week is going to do that regardless of whether everyone else is capped at 450.

2. People are talking about the 11 hours of grinding favors as though it's the only thing you can do with the scrips and thus a required part of the weekly effort to keep current. For some players it will be, but the game does have the slower but less grindy option for those who want to go that route (though it's not perfect, since there are some items that can only be crafted.) I see this as equivalent to raids - a player who caps on the weekly timegated tomestone du jour and also raids is going to gear up faster than a player who just does the tomestones.

The system as a concept isn't terrible, the real issue is in the details. Just capping the scrips takes longer for a DOL than it does for combat jobs. A casual player can do a 30 minute dungeon via expert roulette 6 times over the course of the week and cap (not counting time spent in queue) as long as they have one DOW/DOM job at the level cap. A casual gatherer can hit the 9:00 and 11:00 nodes twice over the course of slightly more than half an hour (not counting any time lost by not logging in at exactly the right time) and cap after doing that roughly 7 times, provided that they have both MIN and BTN at the level cap - if they only have one, it takes twice as long. The DOL scrip grind is similar to what it would take to cap by running Fractal/Neverreap repeatedly without the roulette bonus. There really should have been something similar to the roulette bonus where doing something specific got you more scrips the first time per day.

The biggest problem with the favor system is the mechanic where you're using your limited resources to buy limited time durations of being able to collect the items. I would have been much happier with this if the favor items were considerably more expensive but unlocked the respective favor effect permanently, like the folklore nodes. It would still be a grind and a half to collect them all yourself, but eventually we'd get them trickling into the market because people happen to get a few while gathering birch logs or hardsilver ore or what have you.

[RiceisNice]

The Favor items are like the Faust of gathering/crafting. The RNG element of it can be absolutely frustrating when you get no items from a favor.

Actually I think I'd rather fight faust for every boss than do this sheet... At least I can mitigate that by gittin gud.