Rate of Leveling and the New Player Experience

[Olor]

Changes to old content definitely need to be made, and accessibility is the key word.

Yeah. I've gotten far enough in COP now to reforge my artifact and relic gear - but I stand by my original call to remove gates like this. I have no problem needing to finish COP to get the COP trusts and the COP rewards but it really put me behind (and discouraged me from playing) to find that I could not upgrade my gear because I hadn't finished an unrelated quest line. These kind of things need to be eliminated. There are enough rewards for doing the content without locking unrelated content behind it. (Current rewards for COP = being able to do hardmode fights, several trusts including 2 of the best ones, and the rings).

These are the things that make being a new player suck, not exp gain (although 75-99 is very crummy, especially when you're melee and no one really wants you till 80+ in abyssea). New players want to be able to play with others - and all they can do is pretty much solo for months... that sucks.

I personally think things like AF quests are fine and important, I just don't like having to ALSO do all of COP to upgrade the AF I quested for.

I remember reading about some changes to atma a while ago, can anyone tell me if you still unlock the atmas as you used to or has it been changed now? If you still have to unlock them all I guess I won't be getting into aby at 75.

They had abyssea campaigns where they gave you Atmas, I don't think that it was permanent.

I personally don't think they should just give all the atmas out, but I would like them to make the atma drop 50% without red light. Cause I'd be happy to go out pop monsters and slaughter them to help newbies get their atma, but I don't have any jobs that can proc red reliably. A player shouldn't have to level a very specific job (essentially NIN or WAR only) to get access to Atma. Just making atma a 50% drop without proc would help a lot, since then anyone could help a new player get atma, not just someone who already leveled a red proc job.

And then, once a new player had a couple atma, they could get other atma themselves if they needed to... but right now if you're not NIN or WAR your ability to get atma is pretty much nil.