GoV Chests and Overall Revamp Proposal

After spending the better part of 6 -7 hours trying to farm the new skillup earring in the shrine of ru-avita I've come to the same conclusion that many others have - GoV drops are a massive waste of time. And yes, I'm sure there will be a few people here and there popping up to say about how they got the item they wanted in 15 minutes and just wait for the right kupopower or whatever - not even sure if the GoV peices fall under effect of those since Mystery Boxes: Frontier Lands was definatly up at the time. Unlike the fields areas where the boxes seem to be considerably more common (although it might have something to do with the sheer speed you kill them at since they're lower level), the only real hope you have of getting quick brown box drops is if you stick around and pray you get increases treasure casket encounter rate. This means that unless you want to start from square one, you're effectively locked in the zone for hours/days depending on dumb-luck.

Also because of the nature of the brown caskets, sometimes you lose out on a few of them because the hints are so nebulous that they'll spend 3 hints out of four telling you what the first number is. When you see a brown box around once every 10 kills (about the rate I was getting them in sky dong the 10 arcana kills page - sometimes more or less frequent) that's a big downer.

I get that they don't want to make these items super common (although if these pieces are the supposed solution SE proposed to fix defensive skillups I dont see why they wouldnt...) but the thing that bugs me the most is the random prowess effect. What reason is there to have to grind out pages to get a totally random buff that more-than-likely will have no effect on you - things like cure potency and ranged attack/accuracy are very specific to which jobs make use of them so what need is there to have a random roulette of buffs, each upgradable to higher tiers, in addition to field buffs like TH, crystals and caskets? And if we hadn't had a large amount of straightforward content like Magian Trials and Abyssea maybe this whole "random time-sink" thing would be acceptable based on past precedent much like random augments were before the implimentation of trials. But as of now this serves no purpose for drops or anything else.

So, I think as a solution, prowess effects should be selectable from the book. Now that they made the pages auto-repeat it makes running back and forth less desirable but that seems to be mostly from an exp speed standpoint. If you just wanted exp you could just do the pages repeatedly without returning to keep that up (and lets be honest, losing out on the one good buff for you while you have a bunch of other random stuff - has it ever really had a noticeable performance on your exp in book alliances?)

Now with the addition of Voidwatch though, perhaps prowess selection could be a decent way to buff up the party before taking on a fight - that way each job could select a pertinent buff that would stay with them as long as they were in the zone, and buff them to a point they deem satisfactory. Also anybody needing the field buffs could just select what it was that they wanted. I don't expect the items to be attainable within five minutes but it would cut the time down needed to get them dramatically - requiring a player to stay stuck in a zone for 2 days straight to have a better chance at getting an item or even to just *see* more of the chests is just backwards thinking.

I know a lot of people complain that abyssea made everything easymode but I think one of the reasons that it was so successful was because it got rid of a lot of the unnessecary progress-barriers and time-sinks that players had to get around to be considered skilled. As of right now, GoV just needs a simple fix to really make it streamlined and great alongside the direction of newer content.

Mystery Box kupowers do indeed affect GoV zones now. They didn't when GoV was first introduced though.

Rather then selecting prowesses (which would be annoying and overpowered), I'd rather have the ability to leave the zone without losing my prowess effects for that zone. Even if you can only 'store' one zone worth of prowesses, and lose any prowess there when you start a page in another zone.

I really don't understand how going back to the book to select your prowess effect is any more annoying than waiting to see if you can get another level of the stat boost you really need, or overpowered since you *could* get high level prowesses if you do nothing but stay in that zone for days but why should that be nessecary? Random stats being assigned when there are twenty different jobs is just useless so why not just streamline it to actually be beneficial. I spent around 8 hours up the shrine and I was only able to get chest increase level 2. Yes it's all luck based but there really isn't a reason to have random buffs assigned to you for the sake of balance. It'd be like buying food that gave Int, ranged accuracy, and hp+ in small amounts or something.

And if the chests are affecting the brown casket drops and sky is under "frontier lands" then I would hate to see what the drop rate is like normally.

While I do think that the drop rate on the rare/ex items should be increased, especially as they aren't really that gamebreaking, I have enjoyed the few zones where I have the option of also taking out low level mobs en masse instead to try my luck. Still no luck though on my magic skillup earring though :(

When opening the brown chests I've found that they are 70% of the time alchemy meds like Pro-ethers and remedies, sometimes Voidwatch Cells and other times consumables like bullet pouches, quivers, and ninjutsu tool bundles. Why should there even be medicine items in the boxes - isn't that what the blue boxes are for? And those are temps so they have the added benefit of not taking up space when you get them. Cells are okay to get I suppose but only because I happen to do voidwatch and even then you can get them rather easily for cruor. Also the junk logs and ores need to be removed entirely...

I would reccomend removing the meds and cells from the brown chests and making it item/job tools - that way 70% of the time yer getting bullet pouches and stuff instead, which you can sell or making it abit easier to alleviate the whole "ammo" problem cor/rng have going on - that stuff would atleast *sell* because lets be honest, not a whole lot of people use vile elixers and pro ethers anymore when a majority of the new endgame content (Voidwatch, WoE, Abyssea) provides you with more powerful temp items anyway.

Yeah, and not to mention most other meds are seriously pathetic, I used a hi-ether+3 and got 90 mp back, wtf?

I just want forbidden keys to work. You lose 2/3 of chests cause you can't open them.

Also, kupowers don't work in sky/sea, so sucks to be you if you want those items.

Thieves have the ability to use tools to get hints without the use of an attempt. Seems an unfair advantage to me. Of course because of that I don't farm these things on anything BUT THF...