Feedback on my first week in Occult Crescent

I wanted to take some time to provide my feedback on The Occult Crescent. To say this content was made for me would be an understatement; I love an MMO grind and challenging encounters. Within this first week of release, I have mastered close to five Phantom Jobs, I have unlocked and tried all of them, finding some really interesting ways to play both solo and in a group. I appreciate the currencies having distinct methods of acquisition and the rewards are split across both in a meaningful way. I'm actually quite surprised at how much I enjoy the new Phantom Jobs and this content. I haven't left the zone since the patch came out, nor have I touched any of the other patch content and I think that speaks to the strength of this content.

The random treasure chests I find, while often full of items I've already received as a veteran player, serve as a nice way to break up the gameplay loop. They often stop me in my tracks, causing me to go in a different direction from my objective to pick something up, and then scrambling across the rest of the map to try and make the FATE or Critical Engagement in time - praise be the riding map!

I feel like each of the Phantom Jobs are distinct enough, and I would love to see some of their mechanics, abilities, and playstyles incorporated into the game outside of the zone. I feel our overworld could do with a bit of a revamp, and I'm sure many people would agree. There are definitely things within The Occult Crescent that could be taken into the overworld, for example, off-speccing or bonus actions, and the Ability Wheel. I feel these are a really good way to combat typical button bloat and job stagnation by giving uniquely spec-able abilities that someone could apply to their existing job and really change the gameplay on a whim.

One thing I would love is for the base camp to allow changing glamours so that my glam wasn't ruined by white Mickey Mouse gloves when purchasing some Phantom Job equipment. I feel like the bunnies, the carrots, the magic pots — all of those additional features are quite nice. They don't overstay their welcome, they don't get in the way, and they serve to complement the existing systems within the zone.

All in all, I have to say, without even trying the Forked Tower, I'm happy with this content. Critical Engagements are varied enough, and there are enough of them that it doesn't feel like you're just doing the same thing over again. The content is being heavily played, but it's only the first week, and people are really hammering it. It's safe to say the community has been a bit starved for this kind of content for a while, which is why people are going a bit crazy, myself included. I've never not gotten raised if I asked for it, which continues to be a real strength of this community in outdoor content.

One critique I would give is that the initial questline was a bit esoteric, especially the initial steps to find specific unique structures. I didn't complete that quest until I had found every single available survey point on the ground, which meant I was able to blaze through the rest of the quest. While this was good in the long run because I was able to finish it and get on with the content of the zone, I feel like there was a bit of frustration I experienced. I looked in the most obvious places for the survey points and found them, but they weren't the ones I needed. The ones I needed were in places that weren't necessarily where I would expect to find a survey point, but that's just me. Perhaps an Aether compass style "there's a survey point nearby" might have served to make that content a little bit more palatable, but it was a very short thing, and it can't hurt me any more.

The Atma grind for the most part was fine, but one of them was difficult due to a lack of FATEs and Critical Engagements in the particular area of the map where they were spawning and dropping. Thanks to the community for the handy infographics on where these were dropping!

I really enjoyed the learnings that have happened from Eureka/Bozja, as well as Variant and Criterion Dungeons with some of the UI elements and the Ability Wheel, which was a particularly nice touch. I'd really like to see where these UI elements go in the future.

Obviously, I enjoy this game, and I feel like the sort of drought of this type of large-scale field content has been felt by me and I'm sure the community at large. I hope that the dev team takes on this sort of content more often and really uses it to refresh the overworld. We could do with some of these systems, some of these overall changes, and just to feel like the world should feel dangerous.

I don't think we need something as drastic as a Diablo-style world tier system with harder content, but I feel like there just needs to be something to get people to go into the world. The Atma grind also being available in the world is great, but it comes almost a year after the expansion launch, where most people, myself included, will have completed most of the short content if they felt like they had nothing else to do. Then you're doing FATEs to level a job that you've probably already levelled because it's been a year since the expansion, and you're doing shared FATEs for rewards that you probably already have.

So yeah, those are my thoughts on this content. I really enjoyed it, and I want to see more. Thank you.