What Diadem should have been.

Concept- on-rails airship battle course with many different courses decided at random, with the possibility of adding additional courses as the game progresses. The destination is where you can collect spoils, gather etc before needing to return.

Scenario- As your light-full party ride a full fledged airship you man the cannons and fight off pirate ships and giant monsters, fighting in close quarters when boarded. Maybe even have an uneventful flight only to find a monster infested island.

Possible enemies- Giant Flying Octopus, Bombs, Dragons, Sky Pirates, Ixali Balloon Brigades, Garleans?, Pupu?

If your ship is downed you are automatically dumped into the survival dungeon; the evil forest. Where you have to fight through endless streams of enemies and then a boss to claim your runners up prize.

Guaranteed battle, random enemies, random destinations, random rewards, replay value, fun.

I have to admit, I like the sound of this.

This would make Diadem so much better. I like the idea of having the airship combat (already have cannon stuff in the game) and the idea, if you cannot finish the flight you land on a random island would be awesome. I think it would even work if it was half flight (flying to your destination) then fighting within that area.

Cool idea, hopefully someone see's this and consider's it either for the reworked diadem or for new content

Good idea, i like it, seems fun if executed properly

Mentioned this in FC. 100% agree this would be amazing. the only issue is gathering, how would that work? Just on the exit island so you would have a set amount of time to gather?

I was thinking there would be a reward once arriving and you would be given a limited amount of time to gather etc from the surroundings before having to leave(only so much fuel/supplies). So like a chest when you arrive or a clue to a chest you have to dig for on the island.

Alternatively you could be hauling cargo (hense pirate attacks) to a remote island village and they reward you when you arrive with their goods and allow you use of their resources. So people who want to just get going onto something else get their reward and gatherers can use up the extra time. Maybe some item rewards playing triple triad with the inhabitants for those with no dol. I think Exploratory Missions reset daily? So that and the randomness will contribute to raising the value of the rewards. I'm not sure would people prefer to roll it as often as they want?

There could be all sorts of random objectives that would warrant a reward.

The issue I have with the Diadem is that you cannot form a party of gatherers and go there to spend the limited amount of time available when arrive simply gathering from island to island without being potentially killed. I would of preferred that the Diadem had two options, to set off towards a set of DoW/DoM focused islands which rewards fighting ability or a DoL focused set of islands which has no fighting/only gathering.

Forming a group of DoW/DoM or a group of DoL, setting off to one of two sets of islands that caters to each group separately. A large amount of activities and features in this game focus on DoW/DoM from main story, trials, dungeons, fates, raids, PvP and more but very little in the way of 'group' DoL content...in fact I can't think of any outside of possibly FC workshop crafting but even that is more group content for DoH and less so DoL. I was hoping Diadem gathering would fill that role more so but as it turns out it is still highly DoW/DoM focused even if want to gather.

I think that is a shame and missed opportunity. Unfortunately because that is not the case with the current Diadem, you get a lot of frustration and anger in general between people who go there to gather and people who go there to fight.

Diadem should be a tier of content that's optional aside from savage raid. Right now if you want to get the max gear you have to grind tomes and 24 man raids AND/OR alex savage.

EDIT: Completely retracted.

UPDATE: So... tried showing my idea on reddit, shot down with each post. People really don't like the idea of random stats over materia even though the gear would be predetermined before adding the randomize bonuses so I need to take that into consideration. Though you can't have gear be instant gratification in an MMO or minimal work done otherwise content will be mowed over in a few days (hours even) and players will complain content was too easy and move away from it leaving other players in the dust.

At the risk of using unpopular opinion, I want to simply suggest the dev team borrow some ideas from XI's Abyssea. (Yes, I can already hear the booing, hahaha!)

Abyssea more or less was an open world instance, meaning you could enter solo or go as a pre-made so you can share time in there. Only there won't be a way to extend your time, once you exit you have to wait until a couple RL hours to pass to re-enter. Perfect for casuals and reasonable for even the hardcore players. You can still keep the whole FC workshop mechanic if you will, though from my experience I apparently know more FCs that have a house but don't have an airship at least give the airship users a free pass while those without will have to purchase a key item to enter. Max time for Diadem should be 180 minutes, if you want you could name one of the quests to reunlock this "A Three Hour Tour" as a reference to an old show named "Gilligan's Island".

Guess I can talk about loot:
Now for the gear, they can use a similar loot system to that of alexander where you trade in items for a piece of gear. Abyssea used seals that correspond to a certain gear piece, if I recall it's 8-10. Since there is a shorter lockout compared to savage raids and 24 man raids, it would be feasible to have more items to turn in for a piece of gear. Players will be competing with each other and not sure how the droprate would work.

The lore could have something like the adventurers could aid the people in Diadem in some sort of excavation expedition, where you return ancient bones and rare jewelstones from fallen creatures to NPC and trade them in for the gear of your choice. Lets also abolish NORMAL and HARD modes and combine elements in the same instance. Otherwise what might happen is people will prefer to do only HARD mode for the better gear as opposed to NORMAL, which was another reason people lost interest since people were far too reluctant to do normal unless it was for gathering. Bones would be for armor pieces and jewelstones for accessories and waist.

Normal trash mobs will be plentiful, while harder trash mobs and bosses will require some work and farming of items to pop at specific destinations. There would also be fates that randomly spawn, sometimes normal bosses, sometimes a hard one that reward the appropriate fossils. There could be sections of the Diadem for normal and hard monsters too so inexperienced parties don't get overwhelmed.

Now for the gear:
Lets say if you gathered eight diademic skulls, you trade that in for an i250 head piece. However, you can upgrade that to a i260 if you get a required number of fossilized diademic skulls from the harder content and trade for an upgrade token similar to how you upgrade tome.

Also, let Diadem specific treasure maps drop. Either it be by a trash mob, boss, or a gatherer. Nothing wrong with bonus loot, could be additional fossils/jewelstones , crafting mats, minions, Tier IV, V materia, and some gil. Also put in some hunt type monsters there to add to the suspense, you could give them specific pop conditions like weather, gathering a certain item or defeating a number of trash. Defeating it will reward tomestones and a random chance for a diademic item (A rank = diademic bone/stone, S rank = fossilized diademic bone/stone)

I think Diadem has potential, but it just needed to change it's execution. These are merely suggestions and I'm very thankful if the dev team went over these in consideration. However, I anxiously await what the revamp has in store.

Diadem: An area with powerful monsters, exploration, and loot. A place for players to flex ( or improve ) their gear and simply enjoy non-scripted party-content. While the basic framework is there, the execution of some of the features were mishandled. I won't touch on everything wrong with Diadem, but there are a few basics that I feel should have been in there from the start.

* Monsters should not be respawning.

Sense of progression / exploration and optional clearing of area was missing. This was something YoshiP supposedly promised early on -"you may enter and find that other parties have already killed most of the monsters / looted chests etc" - and backpedaled on it seems. While this may have seemed alarming to some players (and clearly, the devs? ) it would have given parties a goal other than "kill things, wait for respawn, kill the same mobs some more". I believe the main fear was that people would queue into cleared / half cleared instances. One way to alleviate this would have been to guarantee "fresh" instances for most parties - or for players to simply accept whatever they queued into ( lockout / reentry times might be adjusted for parties ). Although for some classes, such as gatherers, cleared islands might not have even been a bad thing!

* White crystals / Black crystals:

Totally obsolete as of now. You can avoid the black crystals easily, and the white crystals are almost never in a location that would provide an incentive to use the buff. Here's how you fix that: Make black crystals on islands inflict vuln up / weakness / whatever over much larger portions of the island ( or the whole island ). Make the team ( or member of teams ) find them to disable those debuffs. At the same time, make the white crystal buffs island wide and provide beneficial buffs like haste or dmg up. And have them good for 5-10 min ( or longer ) while players are clearing the island. If the devs were really feeling inclusive, they could even have certain DoL classes be able to interact / augment / gather crystal components.

* Airships:

I'm not sure about other players, but for a personal airship, our airships are pretty impersonal. Beyond outfitting and now dying them, we still only see them in cutscenes - just like the airships we once used to travel between the major cities. This was just another added disappointment, unfortunately. After learning that our airships were just another set of retainers, I waited patiently to fly my airship to the Diadem. However, after the initial cutscene, our airship is nowhere to be found. It's not even situated on our landing island or ( and this would be neat ) seen circling the area overhead. Keeping in mind limitations, I would be even more interested in being able to board it while mid-air and have access to a central cabin within the airship for the FC members / crew.