Castrum is dead. Please do something, Squenix

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Originally Posted by Zakon

Good god I hope not. Added bolds/underlines for emphasis. I can barely stand getting to rank 15 as it is. I mean I did Castrum quite a while ago for the first time and I was a much lower rank than my current (13).

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R15 is a grind :) I know i've got 6 characters at R!5 but then again I'm crazy and freely admit it.

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Originally Posted by Zakon

Good god I hope not. Added bolds/underlines for emphasis. I can barely stand getting to rank 15 as it is. I mean I did Castrum quite a while ago for the first time and I was a much lower rank than my current (13).

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There are a fair amount of things they can do to make Ranking up faster.

I would not be surprised if 5.4 or 5.45 added weekly Challenge logs that rewarded Mettle for killing 30/60 4th Legion enemies, 30/60 Wild Life, 10/20 Sprites and 20/40 Ashkin and clearing Castrum 1 and 5 times each week.

The next zone will more than likely unlock at Rank 11, have higher tier rewards for Skirmishes and CEs, Rank 20 will complete the zone's story plus unlock the Raids and Rank 25 will be the new cap.

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

How do you think Rival Wings still keeps going? Discord Communities. They literally are driving that content. Otherwise, SE would see that entire piece of content become flat dead and nobody would ever do it again. The fact they're trying to distance Discord Communities away from the game and label it as a 3rd Party is concerning. If anything, XIV should see to work with the Discord Community since Discord's practically the best currently when it comes to communication software built for gaming.

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I don't want to speak for anyone else but I hate having content that you have to join a server for outside of the game just to get in. Sure, I used it to get a HoH top floor clear when that was new and I've done raids with it. But with things like BA and Castrum it makes it extremely annoying.

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Originally Posted by XIPOTATOX

You can get the fragments for the relic weapon outside bozjan from certain area's from fates. 100% drop rate

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They meant the <Forgotten Fragments of (x)>, not the memories. Castrum has many exclusive fragments locked behind it (the deep essence abilities, for example.)

The problem with that is that those fragments are only really useful for one-on-one duels (which have a pile of RNG in the way of even getting in) or the Castrum itself. They're not really necessary for just running around killing mobs.

SE absolutely needs to add in rewards. I was in a instance where both times Castrum showed up, everyone was like "Not worth it" and all the people who hadnt done it were SOL. It was the same in the next instance. There needs to be more rewards, immediately. Hotfix immediately.

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Originally Posted by Endeleon

SE absolutely needs to add in rewards. I was in a instance where both times Castrum showed up, everyone was like "Not worth it" and all the people who hadnt done it were SOL. It was the same in the next instance. There needs to be more rewards, immediately. Hotfix immediately.

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And it's not even hard to do.

1) Add Mettle to boss kills. A LOT of mettle. Castrum should be the best place to level 10-15

2) Add some sort of 'New player" bonus.

3) Add more coins so it's worth it.

• Have clusters and memories drop from kills inside Castrum, same rate as mobs outside in relation to their rankings (Bosses being equivalent to Star rank mobs).
• Completing the raid gives the same High Mettle buff as being near a successful Duel to help people recover any mettle loss.
• Gain additional temporary (30 min) buff to cluster/memory/fragment drop rate outside of Castrum for successfully clearing the raid.
• Increase field notes/augmentation drop rate from personal spoils. Maybe toss in some lockboxes too.
• IVth Legion Glamour items.

Adding experience to each fight would be a first step to make people come back to this. At least it would be a nice incitive and alternative to farm exp and coins!

Just left Bozja.

60 person instance out of a max of 72, so you can't say there weren't people there.

4 people queued up for Castrum on it's first round, 14 for the open invitation.

Everyone left once the instance started. Your system is broken FFXIV developers. Fix it.

Add 20+ lockboxes for Castrum clear, easy fix.

I wouldn't do it just for the sheer annoyance of having to sit through opening all those boxes just to vendor the prisms.

Seriously, who keeps thinking the prisms are a good idea?

Apparently it's so dead I can only do it twice an evening every time I do Bozja. /shrug

Rewards could be better, though.

OOL which castrum?

Can we just have something that's NOT FIREWORKS? Yoshida, I would love it if we could have Gil, Tomestones, or Clusters for that matter. It'd at least make it better than having your inventory clogged up with fireworks that aren't even great.

Agreed with the fireworks. Give less chests if you have to but make the ones we do get worthwhile.

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Originally Posted by jamjeeshoul77

No one runs it anymore. Making fates give coins was a HUGE mistake. It has rendered Castrum incredibly useless to the point that no one queues for it anymore. Why did you do this? Did you not foresee this happening? New players now can’t complete the story and people who enjoy Castrum or want to finish the achievement for 50 runs are SOL. You should not have to join a discord group in order to complete story content in this game. I don’t know what the solution would be, either drastically upping the drop rate of boxes, making it give exp, or just plain making it doable with less than 10 players...just please...DO SOMETHING

PLEASE DO SOMETHING

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so force people to do something they dislike? options are good

FFXIV Team dropped the ball with the Castrum raid? Wellz I'm a little shocked but not really surprised at the same time. This is what happens when you keep trying to make everything accessible for everybody without taking in the consequences of such actions into account first. :/

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Originally Posted by Shinklet

Nah, hard disagree, big group content has always required voice coms or an external factor in some shape or form, in every mmo ever.

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Completely untrue. I raided in huge 70+ people raids plenty back in the 90s in EverQuest without any voice communication at all. We communicated in game. Wanna use voice in Savage with a set group who know each other, fine, but it's ridiculous to expect that people are randomly going to get in voice chat for what is purported to be content aimed at casuals. Especially women like myself. I do not get on voice with people I don't know and I know many other women who won't as well due to the harassment we've gotten over the years.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

Completely untrue. I raided in huge 70+ people raids plenty back in the 90s in EverQuest without any voice communication at all. We communicated in game. Wanna use voice in Savage with a set group who know each other, fine, but it's ridiculous to expect that people are randomly going to get in voice chat for what is purported to be content aimed at casuals. Especially women like myself. I do not get on voice with people I don't know and I know many other women who won't as well due to the harassment we've gotten over the years.

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Seriously. Requiring Discord to even have a chance to get a Castrum complete is like requiring Discord for the Nier 24 man raids. It simply shouldn't happen.

Savage content? Sure. It's some of the hardest stuff in the game. Proper coordination is extremely important.

SE should have put Castrum in the DF and be done with it. Trying to get 1/3 of an instance to do something is . . . well it's challenging if there aren't REALLY good incentives.

Likewise, we shouldn't have to "instance hop" to try to complete what is a soon to be mandatory piece of game content.

If they just made Castrum give EXP people would still eagerly be doing it.

As it stands, if you die (and you probably will at least once or twice) you lose mettle, and running the entirety of Castrum doesn't award any mettle in kind, so I see a lot of people just not wanting to do it because of that. Just give a nice mettle bonus at the end, and boom, it'd help a lot.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

Especially women like myself. I do not get on voice with people I don't know and I know many other women who won't as well due to the harassment we've gotten over the years.

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double that for trans & nonbinary folks. i get on voice with randos and it's guaranteed misgendering for however long the content takes

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Originally Posted by Kewitt

And you shouldn't be able to hold more than 6 required for the quest at one time.

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this is a terrible idea and you should feel ashamed for suggesting it

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

Completely untrue. I raided in huge 70+ people raids plenty back in the 90s in EverQuest without any voice communication at all. We communicated in game. Wanna use voice in Savage with a set group who know each other, fine, but it's ridiculous to expect that people are randomly going to get in voice chat for what is purported to be content aimed at casuals. Especially women like myself. I do not get on voice with people I don't know and I know many other women who won't as well due to the harassment we've gotten over the years.

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I quit just after plane of power, which was a full on raid expansion. I ran 5 clerics (all the retired ex-guild members) on 5 computer. All i did in all of those raids is
1 - have cleric follow main
2 - find a corner, all face wall
3 - wait until tank pull count down
4 - press 1 on each keyboard, 1 second part for every 10 second.
(repeat for 30 minutes)

of course you don't need a discord for that!

I ran it 6 times already in 2 days. I noticed that there is a castrum queue right after we finished castrum. No one joined that one because the main group just did one. People run castrum every other one.

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Originally Posted by Gobio

I quit just after plane of power, which was a full on raid expansion. I ran 5 clerics (all the retired ex-guild members) on 5 computer. All i did in all of those raids is
1 - have cleric follow main
2 - find a corner, all face wall
3 - wait until tank pull count down
4 - press 1 on each keyboard, 1 second part for every 10 second.
(repeat for 30 minutes)

of course you don't need a discord for that!

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I was an enchanter. We had class specific-chats set up to coordinate our mezzes and charms, clerics had theirs to coordinate chain heals, etc. The main raid chat had instructions going out constantly from our raid leader. And we had our group chats for further coordination. And we would shoot the shit in zone chat or shout.

I had a face a wall a lot but that's because the lag was atrocious if you didn't, not because we weren't engaging. Not sure how you raided without communicating with your fellows. And it was a lot more engaging that sitting and listening to call outs.

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Originally Posted by Gobio

I quit just after plane of power, which was a full on raid expansion. I ran 5 clerics (all the retired ex-guild members) on 5 computer. [...]
of course you don't need a discord for that!

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Well no, if you are controlling all five characters then there's not much need for "the player of each character" to use Discord to communicate with the others.

I just came back to the game after a 3-month break and started Bozjan this weekend, today I got to rank 10 and then I joined my first Castrum instance. Only 8 people joined, we didn't even try to run it and everybody left after 5 minutes, how am I supposed to clear this content if nobody wants to do it? Yesterday, when I was LVL 9 I saw in the chat two failed attempts to gather people for it so I came here to the forums to see what is happening and I found this thread. Not getting too many hopes about clearing this after reading, I don't understand what Square was thinking.

Something does need to be fixed. I’m tired of people leaving too

Castrum needs more and better rewards.
Like meddle and more of these coins.

I've done it a few times in week 1, 2 but it gets boring really fast.

It seems this will be a problem. This is the last bit of catch up I need to do after resubscribing. I grinded out level 10 in a couple days, but it seems to pop incredibly slowly, and if it does it doesn't fill. If it gets a sufficient amount.. people leave, because there are too many of us new players. Quite annoying. Hopefully I can get this done tonight, or this weekend. Seems like pretty bad design for this story mission. You either do it early patch, or you never do it. For that matter, Borzja in it's entirety is bad design, honestly sucks, but that is another matter entirely.

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

It seems this will be a problem. This is the last bit of catch up I need to do after resubscribing. I grinded out level 10 in a couple days, but it seems to pop incredibly slowly, and if it does it doesn't fill. If it gets a sufficient amount.. people leave, because there are too many of us new players. Quite annoying. Hopefully I can get this done tonight, or this weekend. Seems like pretty bad design for this story mission. You either do it early patch, or you never do it. For that matter, Borzja in it's entirety is bad design, honestly sucks, but that is another matter entirely.

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Personally I don't think Bozja is bad, but all it really is is Fate spam. I'm glad they separated the relic from this type of content this time around, but I do think that Bozja suffers from a lack of incentives to actually do the content within, so it's sort of a double edged sword. I was hoping they would address the Castrum issues, but it looks like they're waiting until the next zone releases or they aren't going to do anything. They would have benefited from fixing things earlier. I'm currently at rank 10 and getting Castrum done is pretty much an impossible task as things currently stand.

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

Personally I don't think Bozja is bad, but all it really is is Fate spam. I'm glad they separated the relic from this type of content this time around, but I do think that Bozja suffers from a lack of incentives to actually do the content within, so it's sort of a double edged sword. I was hoping they would address the Castrum issues, but it looks like they're waiting until the next zone releases or they aren't going to do anything. They would have benefited from fixing things earlier. I'm currently at rank 10 and getting Castrum done is pretty much an impossible task as things currently stand.

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Okay, dude, you caught me. I am about to go on a rant, because I am already incredibly annoyed after spending probably 30 hours in this trash.

Let's start: The new player experience has got to be some of the worst for any content I have ever seen in FFXIV. You get thrown into a zone populated with worthless mobs, and you get one MAYBE two fates at a time, until you unlock level 5. You move at an incredibly slow speed on a fairly large map with no teleports anywhere in-between until you have leveled up enough to do the story mission. Even then, the teleports you unlock are extremely far out, no matter what you still have to move at a 2 mph around this map, again, populated with worthless mobs. Oh? Am I ignorant to these mobs actual purpose? That's the new player experience, you are gonna be ignorant. It's SE's job to inform, make this content enjoyable, or at least rewarding. If I want memories I'll go to a HW zone and do FATEs, complete waste of time here.

The FATEs oh yes the FATEs.. all you do, with no reward other than mettle, exactly what I want! Mettle! Mettle that apparently is so important nobody wants to do Castrum. One wipe DONE. Everyone out. Story requirement, by the way. Go do some big boss, also if the zone was populated you have a problem. Players get locked out of content... Anyway.. You do that, you get more mettle! Mettle you can use to level up and get locked out of Castrum! Don't do Castrum? What's the point in all that mettle?! You'll never get to the next zone! "But.. but.. lockboxes!" Yeah! Exactly what I wanted lockboxes! So I can get my 80th indigo star! or my 15th black checkered umbrella! HYPE! Screw that. "Buuut duels!" I couldn't care less about Yu-Gi-Oh.

Borzja is dog poop trash, only reason to do it is for the future content - which will be equally as garbage, but hopefully more rewarding. At this point you can't even advance. Oh I should add "find a free company and do it!" I don't want to join a free company to do BORZJA. IMAGINE joining a free company to become near obligated to do trash content. Yeah, nah, I'm good. Worthless. I've spent probably 30 hours in this zone doing FATEs, and registering every hour for one failed Castrum after the next once I hit 10. "just do it bro".

METTLE! DUELS! INDIGO STAR!

Castrum is Dead, Castrum remains dead and we have killed it. Yet its shadow still looms :P

Honestly I do think this is a problem that needs to be addressed. And I think the best way to solve it might be to offside the mettle losses and add Lockboxes and Memory rewards based on how well the party did. Like a total of 6 bitters and 20 of the FATE ones assuming all three bosses (Door Bosses, Adramalech and Lyon and pet) are cleared, or have the Fate ones be obtained from clearing the bosses and the Bitters be based on how many prisoner are free of their bindings instead of their mortal coils.

Failing that they could put it and Baldesion Arsenal on the DF/RF

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

Okay, dude, you caught me. I am about to go on a rant, because I am already incredibly annoyed after spending probably 30 hours in this trash.

Borzja is dog poop trash, only reason to do it is for the future content - which will be equally as garbage, but hopefully more rewarding. At this point you can't even advance. Oh I should add "find a free company and do it!" I don't want to join a free company to do BORZJA. IMAGINE joining a free company to become near obligated to do trash content. Yeah, nah, I'm good. Worthless. I've spent probably 30 hours in this zone doing FATEs, and registering every hour for one failed Castrum after the next once I hit 10. "just do it bro".

METTLE! DUELS! INDIGO STAR!

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Oh, I'm not saying it's good. I agree with you 110%. But I personally don't mind it, mostly because it's mindless. Castrum though...that's a bit of a sore spot for me. They could have, and should have, handled all of that better. They could have handled Bozja as a whole better, really. But for what it is, a glorified Fate grind, it is about as casual as it gets. I can just listen to music/watch Netflix and come and go as I please. I like THAT I guess. Castrum can jump off a cliff though.

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

Oh, I'm not saying it's good. I agree with you 110%. But I personally don't mind it, mostly because it's mindless. Castrum though...that's a bit of a sore spot for me. They could have, and should have, handled all of that better. They could have handled Bozja as a whole better, really. But for what it is, a glorified Fate grind, it is about as casual as it gets. I can just listen to music/watch Netflix and come and go as I please. I like THAT I guess. Castrum can jump off a cliff though.

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Sorry, I was just really annoyed at the time of posting. Wasn't really directed at you. Just had to let off some steam. Like I get it, some people like this kind of content. I've seen people defend it in chat, but like, for me, it's a means to an end. I'll do it for the gear, and rewards. That's about it. I wish they had made the zone fun, but unfortunately they didn't. Castrum itself, is okay as an instance. Decent raid, but the way it is implemented is definitely just AWFUL. I don't really understand why they have it limited to every hour a pop, and players in zone or whatever, but it's arbitrary and needs to be removed. As we were discussing in the other thread, they need to up the rewards as well. I can get more coins in less time grinding FATEs in there. Considering that hour long wait - if you even get in and can clear it.

I think they overestimated the value of the Haste gear tbh. Probably after the high prices of Skoll's Claws and Cassie Earrings in Eureka, they figured we'd happily farm Castrum 50+ times trying to chase that full Haste set. Unlike Eureka however, it's simply a small dps boost and doesn't affect your survival rate at all, so unless the dps checks in the Savage mode of next stage are so high that even dps lost actions aren't enough, it's not worth the effort.

Mettle isn't worth it because Bozjan exp is largely worthless after rank 10 right now and reaching 15 just means a higher penalty on death.

Regular exp would have to outweigh the equivalent of doing Fates and Skirmishes in that same time.

Memories aren't worth it because they decided faceroll HW FATEs should rain them down on us.

Dropping more fragments doesn't help that much, they're already very cheap on the mb. Clusters wouldn't work since you can farm them anytime.

They've locked themselves into a corner really where they have to buff the rewards to silly amounts to make it worth looking at. Almost everything in Bozja including the Relic is handed over on a plate already.

I'd rather farm Castrum for memories over FATE's, personally.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

I'd rather farm Castrum for memories over FATE's, personally.

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Imagine being a game dev and rather than encourage players to do your new content, you encourage them to do 4 year old content instead - and not even the good stuff.

For that matter, we already had to grind these same FATEs for HW relic, so.. what exactly was SE's thought process here? I can understand, maybe they wanted to get players to work on their old relics at the same time, admirable, but they have made these FATEs more rewarding for memories than anything Borzja could offer. It's nonsensical, in my opinion. Also, coins. I can do FATEs in borzja, or the big bosses, because of the amount of time inbetween Castrum qeueus, EVEN IF you could get enough players to do it, there is no point. People can just continue to gather their coins through the zone, at a MUCH higher efficiency. Better than even registering for Castrum and clearing it.

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

Imagine being a game dev and rather than encourage players to do your new content, you encourage them to do 4 year old content instead - and not even the good stuff.

For that matter, we already had to grind these same FATEs for HW relic, so.. what exactly was SE's thought process here? I can understand, maybe they wanted to get players to work on their old relics at the same time, admirable, but they have made these FATEs more rewarding for memories than anything Borzja could offer. It's nonsensical, in my opinion. Also, coins. I can do FATEs in borzja, or the big bosses, because of the amount of time inbetween Castrum qeueus, EVEN IF you could get enough players to do it, there is no point. People can just continue to gather their coins through the zone, at a MUCH higher efficiency. Better than even registering for Castrum and clearing it.

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The FFXIV Developers love to "revitalize old content' by making current relic hunters do old stuff. Has happened since 3.0

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

The FFXIV Developers love to "revitalize old content' by making current relic hunters do old stuff. Has happened since 3.0

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AFAIK, Eureka weapons didn't seem to involve doing old content in any way shape or form.