I LOVE Dalriada for how painstaking it was. I have fond memories of all three raids, and I really wish people did them more often again. Id love to relive them. The first raid especially was so freaking cool, though the third was just as fun.
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Dalriada was never hard it just excessively sandbagged by square balancing it based on the assumption people would bring the easily accessible “80% DPS up” essences, but in true 14 community style they instead decided to all bring lost bubble and overwrite each other while complaining on the forums that people shouldn’t be expected to buy or farm essences and they should be given for free
Due to this the bosses felt like they had 4 times much health as they should, because we should have been doing 4x as much damage
Like most forms of content, Exploratory Zones would not survive without a relic.
Glam, mounts, and minions are not incentive enough to grind and we see this through Variant and Criterion which are objectively easier to complete from start to finish. Very few people except the Eureka diehards would put effort into a rewardless EZ. People want to progress their character and anything that does not progress your character quickly falls to the wayside retaining only a niche audience.
It seems that the only exception to this rule is Ultimates, but those come with a certain level of prestige and unique ornate weapons that EZs and Criterion don't give.
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I dislike EZs. I think they are mindnumbing and poorly designed content made to appeal to people who yearn for the days of killing boring monsters on repeat.
But if they bring one back, they have to put a massive reward like relics behind it or it will be a waste like Criterion.
They exchanged exploratory zones for Criterion "Run me 12 times" dungeons, and Island sanctuary. Safe to say, short of another peek at 7.0 content that we are not getting an exploratory zone for the forseeable future, and that would likely mean we're getting another welfare relic in 7.0 with it.
Bozja/Eureka were fun in Groups of people. Most of the hate I see for them come from solo grinders that get slaughtered by the Red chocobo. I personally wouldn't mind getting another similar zone but of course the dev team has already doubled down on their own flawed ideas.
They can still be options for progressing the relic from a separate questline. The questline doesn't need to be tied to the zone itself and force people who otherwise wouldn't interact with it into there. Whether you got your updates outside Bozja or not, you still had to do it up to a certain point to progress the storyline. Let them stand on their own with decent rewards and a design that appeals to players who like that content.
The relic had nothing to do with exploratory zones until SB and if the zone has to be tied to it for it to be sustained then the content itself likely isn't worthwhile. Relics are their own thing and didn't need those zones to exist and those zones should be able to stand on its own without hijacking another expansion questline/grind.
I agree that incentives need to be there to keep players filling up content but exploratory zones can do that without the relic system being part of it. I'd prefer exploratory zones to exist as their own thing rather than a subsystem of the relic questlines.
No. I want them to bring back the ARR style or Relic quests where you had specific objectives and each weapon had its own history and lore tied to them.
I rather they evolve exploratory zones to be more diverse areas and activities that don't just involve FATE farms. I don't want another Bozja or Eureka repeat
^when are people going to stop pretending that Bozja is only fate farming
Bozja has the best collection of casual battle content and it isn’t even close, 4 large scale raids and CE’s don’t even need you to farm skirmishes
Sure skirmishes are Fates in the classical sense but they are only a tiny part of Bozja
Because that's literally all you do for like 80% of the time in Bozja which is still a huge boring margin. I constantly praise it's only saving graces with its raids but doing Fate Farms is so mundane and boring to get to the fun parts that it's like why even bother designing the zones like this?
How about adding daily quests or have open public dungeons or heck bring back the whole Hyrstmill thing from 1.0 where crafters and combat classes can work together to build resources and help defend bases. Like literally anything besides just Fate Farms in these zones.