Bozja 5.5: Improved Rewards from Castrum Lacus Litore

For all the doom and gloomers out there that feel like they can't get in or have given up on relic, the reward incentive is going to help with this and get people through it so they can get to Delubrum Reginae.

As for what rewards, we need to check patch notes for that when they release later. In the meantime, it'd be nice to propose rewards for Lacus Litore here so that the developers can possibly add them there given 5.5 isn't coming til' April.

To start, I would actually like a guaranteed gear enhancement drop from the end of Lacus Litore for those who want to attempt to get Sword of the South(and Haste buff being good for certain jobs as well). It'd ease the coin grind considering coins are currently going to go towards getting the Law's Order Gear.

It's all well and good, but this should have happened much, MUCH sooner.

would rather the augments arn't changed, they are fine as is considering eureka was a LOT more painful to get them (Cassie ear ring drop rate anybody?) if you spend the entire day grinding away and exchange all notes for coins you can earn about 1 augment per day which considering they sell for 6-7m gil in most worlds is fair.
making the augments ALWAYS drop from castrum would completely tank the economy and actually give a lot of people even less of a reason to go into castrum (why go in castrum if I can just buy the augments for 10-100k gil?)

What I would like to see is either:

1) implement a system where you can join a random castrum queue from outside the battlefront. (this means that even if you are in a dead 30/72 instance people can still join from outside of that instance!)

2) Give something like 5 memories per castrum run. (sycrus tower only takes about 2 hours of re running to get all the memories anyway, no reason castrum should give a pitiful 1 memory!)

3) Have castrum have a small chance to drop the platings and such that you use for the final augment step on the armor, I don't see many people sticking around 48 man savage constantly to get all of those untradeable drops for a full set just for an extra +5 haste. (single run of 48 man savage looks like it will take 90-120 minutes even once people are comfortable with it and a very high chance of failure, way too long!)

It’s simple really. They need to look at the rewards you could have gotten if you didn’t do castrum and make it worth more than that.

Look at it this way. If you run castrum and you die say 4 times (sometimes it’s not even in your control if you die or not). That’s about 10k mettle lost. What do you get as a reward for your trouble? About 30 coins and MAYBE but not very likely an upgrade material.

Now in the time it takes you to clear castrum you could have run probably 3-4 CEs and a bunch of skirmishes. So about 50k mettle and and about 25 coins.

See the discrepancy here? You’re on average giving up 50k mettle and losing 10k mettle to boot for about 5 coins and a CHANCE at a decent reward.

Just make castrum give a considerable amount of mettle and more coins and it’ll be golden. Yes there’s still the chance of losing out if you fail it but since more people will have the incentive to go in, the chance of failing will be much lower.

In the live letter they announced a hot patch for Castrum. They didn't say when but it's coming.

Increasing the rewards is not going to change anything.

Are the rewards available from other sources? Players will continue to do that other content since there's little to no risk of losing mettle compared to Castrum.

Are the rewards unique? They'll wait until mettle is irrelevant to their personal progression then go back to farm what they want and quit again.

As long as that penalty remains, Castrum is dead content.

They just need to make Castrum up 100% (have a cd for a successful clear, perhaps?), and not have it be a per instance thing. I can't tell you how many times I've been in Bozja, in a full fate/castrum party waiting for it to pop. FCmate says "Oh it's been up but only 4 people are in it." Not in my instance, though!

No amount of rewards are going to increase clears if the hurdles for actually getting in are this convoluted. All I can think about is how hard this is going to be post 6.0. You can technically still solo and push through the Eureka relic grind, and complete the zone. BA is still content people do form time to time (I've even seen PF for it), but the Bozja instances? Dead on arrival.

I think the biggest and most obvious actual reward change is a relative boatload of mettle, especially if they are going to increase the Rank cap or add more Mettle checks in the future. Doing Castrum shouldn't just be a gamble on how much mettle you might lose, particularly if you aren't at max rank already. Make Castrum the best way to get from R10 when you can get in the door umtil R15 when you hit cap.

Other than that, the biggest needed change is just a better way to get in the door in the first place. The queue system needs to be fixed because, regardless of whatever rewards you put in there, if just getting in is a painful struggle then the amount of people doing it will only be a fraction of what's needed.

Put every relic item in there. If you're on the quests you should get a memory for each. And increase the droprate of the armor upgrade items.

It's not 5.5, it's an upcoming hotfix.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

It's all well and good, but this should have happened much, MUCH sooner.

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It's a bit baffling why it's taken so long. I was expecting a patch back with 4.4. Really wondering what they have in mind for this hot patch.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

It's not 5.5, it's an upcoming hotfix.

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Lets hope it's immanent.

There's no 1 single thing, they need to do a few things to make it more appealing (because now that it's needed for people to progress we vets have to run with people who were too lazy to care about learning the fights months ago and are looking for a carry. Not a problem when it's just a few but when half or most of the people are looking for a carry and keep dropping to AOEs or enrage on the FIRST BOSS or can't pass the last boss it's pretty damn disheartening).

Here's my fixes ...
1- Make it drop 60 coins. The amount of coins you need to full upgrade your gear is STUPID high compared to the snails pace you get them and a BAD Castrum run is a slower coin generator than the fates.
2- Actually increase the drop rate of the upgrade parts to not be stupid rare. I've cleared over 30 times and only have had the upgrades drop twice.
3- Make it give out 3 gem things instead of 1. Cause it takes longer than the ARR raids when you factor in that you have to be in Bozja and wait for it. OR make it something you can que for outside like the new one and keep it at 1 gem.