So how is everyone feeling about Occult Crescent now that it’s been a few days?

I played it day one and after 6 or so hours I had three atma. I took a break because honestly I thought it was quite boring. Nothing you do in there carries over outside of OC so I have no interest in knowledge level or phantom jobs. I just wanted the relic for glam purposes. Today I had a lot of free time and after 12 hours and no atma to show for it I’m just going to sit this relic out. The thing I like about Cosmic Exploration is how you can see your progress, there’s no RNG involved, I don’t know why they didn’t do something similar. How is everyone else feeling about OC?

I really like it thus far, though I will say I do take breaks cause it does feel like it gets tedious. but the CS fates are truly a joy, I have fun with all of them

FATES and CE

- Overall pretty good.

Fates need a fix with the scaling.
DPS need some survavibility : if your heal is not used to the fight or you have no heal in your party (you do with people available), you're gonna die from raid-wide attacks, even if you avoid all of the mechanics. And once you begin dying, it's a festival of rez/die again at next raid wide (I mean, our best potion give you back 11k live usable every 70 sec). This lead to an overrepresentation of the tanks in this content, because they're more tanky and they have better healing tool.

- Relics

I'm on the fence on Atma grinding : on one side it's a grind, and the time it takes is ok. But it gets frustrating when you don't progress during 6 hours. I don't mind the 30 hours grind, but I do mind feeling like this has been a total loss of my time.

- chest on the map

I like that, they give a purpose to just strolling around can bring you things. Not a fan of them giving you Eureka, CLL and Dalriada rare mounts like it's nothing (even the one I don't have). I don't know, are you trying to kill the few everlasting content left in your mmo. It's weird.

- Fork Tower
There is the whole fiasco about making all the party of a premade enter the same instance : it's a nightmare for organised runs, and seems to difficult to do in pick-up : the content needs organisation and planification. I'm not sure not having a normal version and more difficult one was the right choice. Most people are just not interested in doing more difficult content. There is an argument that it will be easier with time, when people get the zone gear upgraded, but did you look at the cost needed for that? Most player won't do it, and we all know how it will turn out : people without the gear will be gated out. I feel they should have gone the Delubrum Reginae way, with one Normal and one higher difficulty. Especially since there are hints part 2 will be gated behind the fork tower (Fork tower is central in the story, I don't see how they can continue the story without people clearing it).


Overall it's a mixed bag. I have my fun for now, but I feel that to many things only have interest if you're planning to do the high difficulty raid. The main grind for now is not the relics, it's the upgraded gear : a few pieces are BiS, but the upgrade are interesting only if you plan to do the tower. Fork Tower is also the only place where Phantom jobs really matter and you can test them to their full extent. Eureka and Bozja/Zadnor had many things that made them intersting for every type of player. Once your Atma step is done, most of the interst of OC is for High End Players (and completionnist).

Wasted potential. Because SE fails to, yet again, expand and improve upon previously established game design that actually worked well.

My main gripe is with Forked Tower and the Phantom Job system:

Forked Tower being gate-kept behind tedious requirements is such a baffling choice compared to the accessibility of CLL and Dalriada in Bozja. Like, this is such a basic design flaw that i'm just flabbergasted how anyone in their right mind thought this was good enough to implement.

Then they decide simplify the one system that made Bozja and Eureka stand out, and it's their overhaul of the Lost Actions and Essences. It's like that 3 story house you bought just turned into a studio apartment. You can't mix and match your actions anymore, they're fixed. The absence of Essences mean you can't run fun experiments with different builds, nor will you be able to change the playstyle of your job in interesting ways.

Instead of expanding on what were fantastic, much needed, in-depth exploratory combat elements, they decided to take 2 steps backwards AGAIN. It's like they switched out the original devs in Bozja who knew what they were doing, and replaced them with interns without giving them proper guidance. Critical Engagements feel so underwhelming, and it feels like such a chore to grind out because you don't have different tools to approach the same encounters now. It's like cooking the same meals every day with the same ingredients: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

There's also that cursed netcode that makes the game's snapshotting incredibly dumb to build movement mechanics around in such tight timeframes. That one CE with those spinning AOEs, for instance. So many people die to it, not because they don't understand the mechanics, but simply because the game decided they were on the orange puddle a split second before they moved out of the way. Most of the game is just moving out of the way instead of interacting with the environment and npcs in interesting ways.

Compared to how much I enjoyed Bozja, despite it's overall dreary atmosphere, OC feels incredibly underwhelming right now.

the map is pretty but everything else is meh

Having all the chests to discover is great, but the loottable of the chests is rediculous. All drops from the chests are literally worthless. Even the new mount is worthless. They made the drops of the previous areas worthless, they failed it super hard here

The CEs are fun but too tedious and long. It feels like such a chore to do the same battles that take 5-7 mins each over and over and over.
Getting the gear also takes too much time i think. Having to do 200 CEs and farm ~2000 enemies for a single set of +1 gear also sucks.

The tower is a big step back from the bozja designs. You cant enter it with a 48 premade, it excludes all "casuals" etc. Why isnt there an enjoyable normal mode version and a 48 hard mode one, that you can enter as premade,

The worst of all things is, that you have to walk to every CE on the map x)

I rate it 3/10

Its too fast paced and fate scaling needed fixing back when Bozja was fresh.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ServerCollaps

Getting the gear also takes too much time i think. Having to do 200 CEs and farm ~2000 enemies for a single set of +1 gear also sucks.

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Even if you are frugal with your silver, 200 CE is not enough for just the gear and its upgrades.

Each gear piece is 4,000 apiece, so 20,000 for a single kind of job (tank/healer/melee dps/etc).
The upgrade material in silver is 1,600 apiece, but three are required for an upgrade so, 4,800.
Upgrading all five gear pieces to +1 requires a total of 15 of the silver currency upgrade material, so that is 24,000.

Each critical engagement gives 200 silver for completion, so doing 200 of them is 40,000 silver, meaning your short 4,000.

But that isn't all. Lets say you want to actually move your mount faster around the map so you can quickly get from place to place, that is another 3,000 silver.
Then you learn chemist is desired for Forked Tower because of its rez and elixir, that is another 1,000 silver.
Likewise for gold farming, you learn there is demand for cannoneers who are at least level 5, so another 1,000 silver spent.
Might as well pick up time mage at that point just because it also contributes to your overall freelancer level, so another 1,000 silver spent.

Alright you gotten all of this, and you want to do the fork tower, that is another 600 silver just to get a potential spot for one run of it with a cipher. But you also want to do it with your buddies, so you need to get more ciphers as the more you give the more weighted your spot will be, so lets say you farmed and now have a total of 5 ciphers, meaning that is 3,000 silver in price or 15 CEs. As ciphers contribute to a bidding war process to keep your spot and not get ejected.

Meaning 240 critical engagements done. Potentially more if you wanted to do additional runs in order to get your one set of gear you bought to +2, meaning getting much more ciphers to guarantee your spot.

Then lets say for whatever reason, after all of that, you want to get set of gear for each kind of dps and for healer and for tank. Well knowing what we know and not factoring in all the other stuff, and assuming just trying to get to +2, no extra runs of fork tower, the collective total would be another 264,000 silver. So another 1320 critical engagements. And god help you if you actually want to upgrade each of those to +2.

As for the gold, yeah its about ~2000 enemies. Though if you wanted each kind of gear and upgrading those, thats more like farming an amount of enemies in the five digits.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chasingstars

The upgrade material in silver is 1,600 apiece, but three are required for an upgrade so, 4,800.

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its 1.200. The gold upgrade is 1600

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ServerCollaps

its 1.200. The gold upgrade is 1600

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Yeah, but that is 1,200 per upgrade material, same with the gold version. It takes 3 of each to upgrade a single gear piece. So when you want to upgrade, say a pelt of fending, that costs 3,600 silver and 4,800 gold to +1. To get 3,600 silver is 18 critical engagements if you ignore the normal fates.

https://i.ibb.co/XrkMcYLT/upgrades.png

i dont get your point, thats what I wrote in my initial post xD Thats 200 CEs and 2000 mobbs