Current fixes to Forked Tower is not good enough

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Originally Posted by Raikai

I like the fix. May even make me attempt to find a party on Aether for it if I decide to renew my sub in the following week (I'm just returning for a month I was gifted with, to check the updates).

It doesn't excuse the lack of a normal mode, though. Sometimes I just want to do something like CLL... you still play with others in sort of a challenging way, but don't necessarily need to go all the way as hopping to a different Datacenter and outsourcing the party finder to a Discord Server. Hopefully the actual ingame PF is having a healthy amount of movement after the update. Didn't check Aether's myself, but Crystal sees almost no action.

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Unfortunately all I've seen so far on Aether's PF is the same one or two premade groups that are looking for fills for specific times. Nothing where a more pick-up type of situation is trying to develop organically. Though maybe this weekend when more people will be off work.

I'm a casual player who only plays the game during free login campaigns and subs for maybe 1-2 months a year at most, and even I managed to clear FT. The fights after the first boss (since it's very easy) are honestly no harder than an extreme trial in difficulty and will be so much more easier to learn now that the time to enter the Tower has significantly been reduced due to recent fixes! The worst part of FT before the fixes was having to spend upwards of an hour "instance progging" (if you were really unlucky) then another 40 ish minutes in OC waiting for the weather, only to wipe to snowballs at boss 2 and then having to spend another 30 minutes before being able to re-enter the Tower. These fixes are a godsend in comparison, and will definitely making learning FT so much better and accessible!

Forked is really interesting from the perspective of how it shows the evolution of the game

It has 4 bosses and 3 “puzzles” (hallways, bridges and lockwards). All of the puzzles really give that old BA feeling of using unique jobs to perform certain tasks, dealing with dangerous hallway traps and dangerous trash. It’s really well designed and feels like what people liked about BA.

But then the bosses are just so………generic, they are such perfect encapsulation of DDR boss design, like look me in the eyes and tell me you actually like dead stars as a boss

I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to deal with forked, if you don’t like DDR bosses you won’t like forked’s bosses and that’s perfectly valid

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Forked is really interesting from the perspective of how it shows the evolution of the game

It has 4 bosses and 3 “puzzles” (hallways, bridges and lockwards). All of the puzzles really give that old BA feeling of using unique jobs to perform certain tasks, dealing with dangerous hallway traps and dangerous trash. It’s really well designed and feels like what people liked about BA.

But then the bosses are just so………generic, they are such perfect encapsulation of DDR boss design, like look me in the eyes and tell me you actually like dead stars as a boss

I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to deal with forked, if you don’t like DDR bosses you won’t like forked’s bosses and that’s perfectly valid

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Well put, and I think this has further compounded the frustration many of us feel.

Same thing happened with variant dungeons. SE demonstrated they still knew how to design interesting mobs. Then you reach the boss and it's the same old shit.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Forked is really interesting from the perspective of how it shows the evolution of the game

It has 4 bosses and 3 “puzzles” (hallways, bridges and lockwards). All of the puzzles really give that old BA feeling of using unique jobs to perform certain tasks, dealing with dangerous hallway traps and dangerous trash. It’s really well designed and feels like what people liked about BA.

But then the bosses are just so………generic, they are such perfect encapsulation of DDR boss design, like look me in the eyes and tell me you actually like dead stars as a boss

I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to deal with forked, if you don’t like DDR bosses you won’t like forked’s bosses and that’s perfectly valid

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So essentially criterion?
Why can't we have interesting trash and hallways in normal dungeons? Idk

Tbh...

I think having Forked Tower is fine.. Setting aside the fact that the developers seem to have an inability to reflect and act properly on their own mistakes.

But honestly... I think the issue is that they have pretty much diluted every other piece of side content, or neglected it outright, which does lead to a very... Empty experience overall. So what they've ultimately ended up doing is trying fairly hard to funnel players into content that they don't want to be doing. Like, a lot of people just don't realize how much of the games experience they have actually abandoned and diluted.

In many respects it's literally the same issue that Endwalker suffered with..., the only difference being they've shifted satisfaction from 1 side of the player base to the polar opposite... Which is really not good (Even setting aside my own personal interests), as even after 12 years they still don't really know who they are exactly designing the game for.

Yeah, I was hoping to see some word about them making some sort of change(s) to reach a better compromise between organised runs and PUG runs given they considered a normal mode. Lightening up on the rez restriction so everyone gets to use all 3 lives rather than wipe = kick would've been nice. Maybe increasing the immediate reward(s) for beating a boss given the higher risk and organisation required would encourage people to at least dip their toes into Demon Tablet (800 silver on clearing the entire raid seems a little stingy given the ease of completing CEs/FATEs compared to the whole tower). Maybe a chance to find ciphers in chests so people will feel less like they're wasting their silver/gold on failed runs.

As it stands it just feels like there really isn't much for me this expansion. I dipped my toes into extremes and cleared Vali 23 times (Fun fight, got the wings drop rather early so it didn't get old) and ZJ 77 times, at which point I got so fed up I haven't touched the fight again or any other extreme+ content. Maybe in the future I'll do FT, given the mount doesn't expect 99 runs, and it'll likely become much easier as strats are ironed out and power levels increase. But discord prog, scheduling and raid plan homework isn't what I wanted from this content and it's just frustrating, especially as OC feels bare-bones and unfinished without an actual real endgame to utilise your maxed out jobs. I've decided to just do some dailies today and unsub because I'm just bored.

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Originally Posted by Username69

Maybe in the future I'll do FT, given the mount doesn't expect 99 runs, and it'll likely become much easier as strats are ironed out and power levels increase. But discord prog, scheduling and raid plan homework isn't what I wanted from this content and it's just frustrating, especially as OC feels bare-bones and unfinished without an actual real endgame to utilise your maxed out jobs.

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This is pretty much where I’m at as well. I’ve looked at the raid plans, I’ve watched some video guides, but I know myself. That’s way too much to keep in my head. I only learn through constant repetition and with the rez limit/wipes, as well as having to wait for weather to retry, or worse, having to reschedule altogether because doing more than one attempt might not be possible with 47 other people’s schedules, I feel like this is out of reach for me. And it does make the zone feel pointless without a story mode for the Tower.

I’ve been quite vocal about the fact that I was looking forward to more dungeons along the lines of Bozja’s: CLL, Dalriada and DRN. Spicy at first, but usually clearable within a single attempt. And most of all fun. Even if I do manage to do FTB, it’s not what I’d consider fun, I’d just be doing it for the drops that should be in a Normal mode content, like the field notes and the card, and to just be able to explore the tower. Studying 20 slides of a raid plan for just one boss isn’t fun. Making a mistake and wiping the raid in about 20-some different places it could happen isn’t fun. And the 3 rez limit isn’t fun. Getting through it isn’t going to make me feel accomplished in any way, it’s going to stress me out and then I’ll be glad it’s over.

And before someone chimes in and says “not everything is for you, try something else,” I have attempted, and in many cases completed, just about everything this game has to offer except Ultimates. I cleared and farmed Chaotic, I have a fully maxed BLU spell book, I’ve done the deep dungeons up to a point, crafting, gathering, society quests, the list goes on. But for battle content specifically, I’m not really comfy beyond Extreme level, and this is the first expansion I’m clearing those on release. The rez limit and wipe mechs alone put FTB in Savage or above territory for me.

I kind of wish they would remove the kicks you out if you wipe portion of it. Forked Tower is fun but right now with the amount of time it takes to get a party waiting in Discord (at first i waited like 4 days 5-6 hours a day just to get a party the first time), get in and organized, changing data centers if your party is elsewhere it's a lot of prep work only to go in and wipe half way through the first boss. I get it's supposed to be part of the challenge but it really adds nothing and becomes an annoyance in my opinion. I think it would solve so many issues with the community as well not wanting randoms and such, It would lessen the risk making it a bit more relaxing and approachable and I would say it would even remove the need for a normal version as well if people could just focus on the content and be able to work on it without some massive hurdle. Other than that though it's not bad content I'm enjoying my prog on it so far.

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Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

This is pretty much where I’m at as well. I’ve looked at the raid plans, I’ve watched some video guides, but I know myself. That’s way too much to keep in my head.

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You don't have to, it all comes with practice and prog. You generally have the raid leader who has more experience making callouts (Yes they can and will make mistakes themselves they are also players trying to prog and clear / reclear the content). It's why communities around this content thrive because there are people willing to take the lead and help with callouts to remind people / explain to people what to do. Reading a guide helps because it prepares you for what you have to do, and then seeing it in person and making the mistakes (not just your own, you can learn from other people making mistakes in the runs too) is part of the experience.