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.

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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.

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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

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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

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Originally Posted by ServerCollaps

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

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Okay fair enough, my point is more so to elaborate on how huge much it takes overall. Like if you were to try and be a completionist about it.

And I am personally noticing this, and I am not even that deep in the hole yet when it comes to gold and silver. Only 64 critical engagements so far and 57 fates according to my achievement tracker.

And this has felt like a second job in my opinion. Its just so time consuming.

Like maybe they should buff the silver rewarded at least gained from CEs.

At first I found the CE's fun but then the phantom jobs really disappointed me. The map was too easy to traverse and I found nothing to be threatening since most mobs are line of sight. There is a constant rush of fates and CE's spawning that you pretty much either keep your constant eye on the map or else you miss out since the fates are already dead within 20 seconds of spawning. No 1v1 Critical engagements really was a bummer since that was interesting back in Bozja. After a couple of days I was already burned out and haven't been back in there since. I just find no apparent reason to going back in there.

doesn't change my opinion on fields operations : boring as hell. still the same fate farm + grind random mob (two thing where ff14 isn't good at). again multiple currencies to get, like if there isn't a currency tied to a content someone and their mother in SE office explode. while we're talking about currencies, who thought it would be fun that everything cost an arm and a leg when the earning rate is low ?

phantom job are meh, i like the idea of once you get them you don't need to farm again unlike logos but they feel really bland and only a few of them feels really good. ans who is the gamedesigner who think that putting immunity to some of those skills to almost every monsters was a good idea ?

map exploration is a good step in the right direction tho, having chests and things hidden in the wild is really cool.

no opinion on forked tower, i probably won't go in there because i don't want to have to go to a discord only for this and wastes hours and hours of my time like i did with baldesion

The Forked Tower Raid is the dumbest shit of all time.

it costs a hefty entry fee.
when its open it is only for like two minutes so people are stuck in fates or CE.

nobody seems to give a shit about it because everyone just want to far atmas.

why is it not just like Bozja where you register for it like Castrum or Dalriada


such bullcrap...

Could have been way better but it's decent for what it was, I feel like bozja was better implemented overall.

I think the silver chests are fun, especially when someone runs the mobs near it and then 5+ people can move in to check the spot while the mobs are distracted. The rest is pretty mid, CEs are too repetitive, fates are whatever, phantom jobs are too safe.

Haven't progress far enough to unlock forked tower, so can't comment on it. But overall, it's *okay*, definitely feel a step down compared to bozja. My biggest gripe is the phantom jobs, it's a worse version of lost actions.

It's just a pipe dream, but I wish at the final stage of CE, they have update/overhaul the system so that phantom jobs can act sorta like mini blu mage (as in, have a simple "rotation")

I feel like the sheer frequency of the CEs this go-around has caused them to become dull a lot quicker and unlike Eureka/Bozja there aren't any particularly busted abilities/effects you can use to make them go way faster.

My main criticism for CE's is that there being no level restriction and also them giving all exact same reward really removes any sort of feeling of progression or rarity. My main gripe is how the game is actively punishing pre-made groups from entering the forked tower however. This was solved with Bozja content but somehow they not only went back to BA style entry but also made it worse by having the instances only having half the player cap that Eureka instances had.

I liked the story premise, join the old man's "one last adventure". Focus seemed to be on the WoL and him going on a real adventure, something the game hasn't really done well in a long time. But shortly after we arrive to the island we meet Exposition-Bot and the rest of the story is just fed to us "Go here and look at that place" and "go pick up a rock". We don't really explore the zone as opposed to being told go here, do that.
It would have been much better if it was the WoL and old man venturing around the island. Getting to the keep you investigate it and WoL could talk about their experiences in other Amdaporian ruins. Or in the city you could talk about how eerily silent it is. And be puzzled at the Karnak ruins since you've never since something like that before.

On the grind, I think it needs a pay-off that isn't the tower. In Eureka the pay-off for a zone was getting the relic, in Bozja the pay-off was CLL/Dal and the duels. And while OC has the tower, it's certainly not something people just do when available. This means that all this grind, getting and leveling jobs, getting and upgrading gear, just becomes something you do because it's there as opposed towards a goal.
Either they should have had a normal mode and savage mode for the tower, or they should have had something besides the tower. This is especially since some jobs like PH.THF and PH.RNG almost only have use in the tower (steal can give extra gold, but outshined in cannon meta).
One thing they could have done was let you get a dungeon key (key item) after x fates/ce, then join 3 other players for a 10 min dungeon. This dungeon would have a semi random layout, enemy placement and modifiers (more Chalice Dungeons design from Bloodborne and not Deep Dungeon flat style). Clear the dungeon and beat the boss, giving you some bonus silver and +1 upgrade items.

I actually enjoy most of what they put in there, but the big bad points are:
1. Forked Tower is almost impossible to get into. The amount of people in an instance means you will always have those who are only there for grinding atma, getting achievements, new people in general, etc, which takes away from those who want to try it. And even if you get people on a Discord server to run it, people are having difficulty getting into the same instance.
2. Just look at gold farming on PF, don't need to say much more about that.
3. Because of how the CEs are, some of the phantom jobs feel pointless. I know that they are technically made for Forked Tower, but having them actually be useful for the rest of the area would have been nice.

Personally, enjoying it a lot. FFV's job system + the War of Magi lore is a real treat for me. The critical encounters are super fun as well. Playing as a healer, it was a fun challenge trying to raise people and learn mechanics at the same time. I noticed by the end of the week that the fights are becoming easier for everyone since people are learning, mastering their phantom jobs, (Phantom mastery bonus is doing a lot.) and gaining gear. Its nice that farming gold can be done in parties or solo as a tank, and its a overall nice vibe to see a lot of people playing together. It wasn't too long ago I was finishing up an achievement in Zadnor, and 7/10 times there was no one there but me if I decided to play earlier in the day and not the prime hours. It might be a little fast and repetitive, (I mean all grind content is like this, so its no surprise.) but I will for sure go out of my way to master all phantom jobs because I am overall just enjoying the content in full.

I still think eureka is the best iteration of field zones, mobs aren’t particularly threatening here until you’re gold farming specifically in a party and the CEs are always up so there’s neither reason nor time to chain mobs during downtime. I like having to physically go to the ce, even if the journey isn’t as eventful as eureka. I don’t know that I’d want the return of sleeping dragons, but I don’t think longer tethering and more alert mobs would hurt.

The phantom jobs aren’t as dramatic as the action system, but people also seem to be using them a lot more than they were in bozja.

CE difficulty I think is probably at the upper end of casual drop in drop out, some such as the commander urn aren’t difficult but when deaths start to happen it snowballs fast due to the relentless pace. I imagine this will only get easier as people gear up/master jobs. Forked tower I think would benefit immensely from being able to enter an instance as an alliance or full 48. I expect this too will get easier as the content dies down (or maybe not, it is 2/3 of the instance cap all trying to enter at once). I don’t like that there seems to be ways for one person messing up to instantly evict the tower, I really don’t expect this will help draw the more casual crowd toward it. CLL, DR, Dalriada and even BA all struck a better balance in this regard where usually a death only takes yourself out except for double meteors in ozma which is still pretty spooky if the supports aren’t alert.

War of the magi is cool, hope it stays that way.

Overall better than bozja probably with some kinks that could be addressed or compensated for in north crescent.

Fates die too fast. I arrive, manage three hits and get... three silver... that's not even worth the effort of traveling there.

CEs are good, but could give more silver.

Atma RNG was a nightmare.

Phantom weapons are 75% ugly or boring. Yes, I know we get upgrades later, but rn they look kinda lazy. They also look kinda random, like they simply used what drafts they still had lying around from older concepts.

I am disappointed that the chests make rewards from older content worthless. Why did we not get new interesting loot? Recycling is okay to an extend, but the drop rate is so generous with pretty much everything that everything becomes just more inventory trash.

New hairstyle is meh. Nobody wants it. I wouldn't care if we got hairstyles more regularly, but we don't. The last one we got was from Chaotic, which was 6 months ago. So we are going for another couple of months without a good new hairstyle, not cool.

I meant to farm a set of gear for one job, but it's too expensive. I suppose that's just not for me then idc.

I accidentally sold Aetherspun that will be needed for +2, that is idiotic interface design. Fuck that.

Fortune carrots are ultra rare. I used one and I got... materia. Trash game design.

Idk what Fork Tower is, nobody queues, people say it's not worth it without watching guides and gearing up, so I am probably just not gonna do it at all since I don't want to watch spoiler videos just so that I won't contribute to wipes due to bodychecks (from what I've read).

Phantom jobs look like an afterthought. Maybe this will look different with upcoming patches, but I am not hyped atm.

Overall, it's okay, but after I got my phantom weapon, I am not motivated to do any more of it.

Edit: I wish there were more quests. Most quests happen right in the beginning when I want to just get inside and try the new content. It was good cinema, I just wished there was more story, especially with phantom jobs.

Way too fast paced and hectic to take a breath, it's fates into fates into CEs then fates on a loop. Everything spawns back to back but only one thing at once so the area turns into a gigantic zerg train running from one side of the map to another. And you better be fast because those fates are dying in 10s. It's bland and tasteless. CEs and even fates are just DDR and gotcha mechanics, feels extra bad. Literally learn the dance or else.

Phantom jobs have interesting job identities but they're all over the place, and mostly designed for Forked Tower so 80% of them are terrible outside. I dearly miss the experimental and customization side of lost actions and logograms and how they interacted with older systems (reflect, dodge, etc).

Pot fates and carrots just feel like an extra bad gamba. No thanks.

The Atma relic step was terrible. I'm finally free of that nightmare.

Gold farming is very potent to level up phantom jobs and make gold coins. Too bad gold farming meta now makes it so that parties are asking everybody to use cannoneer for those except perhaps one thief. It's really frustrating. But it's definitely more chill than the regular rush train hopping from fate to CEs even though there isn't much gameplay behind. It's a basic grind gameplay, like in eureka.

Forked Tower suffers from 72 people instances. I haven't been inside, so I can't judge if it's fun or not. Judging by how they design their pve nowadays though and seeing how CEs and fates are, it's probably just terrible DDR again with bosses in the middle of a circle arena. How original... but I hope someone proves me wrong there.

Phantom jobs and perhaps the gear upgrades are the only sense of progression in the area. Bozja already lost a lot of it as a step down from Eureka since it was just artificially cut into 3 areas per zone. This one didn't feel like my level mattered for anything anyway because you level by spamming CEs and fates, which are level agnostic. Since you spend your time running everywhere on the map and mobs are mostly designed not to get too much in the way, you essentially discover the whole map at once, and immediately get access to everything at once. No progression at all.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Forked Tower suffers from 72 people instances. I haven't been inside, so I can't judge if it's fun or not. Judging by how they design their pve nowadays though and seeing how CEs and fates are, it's probably just terrible DDR again with bosses in the middle of a circle arena. How original... but I hope someone proves me wrong there.

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Most of what I've read is that it's considered harder than BA and DRS and has plenty of body checks and hard enrages. This is ignoring the nonsensical nightmare that getting in with a premade is.

Not tried it yet, not sure when I will,

But it's actually serious that only 1 given FATE or CE spawns at a given time, and if it relatively faster paced than Eureka?

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Originally Posted by Valence

Phantom jobs have interesting job identities but they're all over the place, and mostly designed for Forked Tower so 80% of them are terrible outside. I dearly miss the experimental and customization side of lost actions and logograms and how they interacted with older systems (reflect, dodge, etc).

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All they had to do with Freelancer was let you take abilities from mastered jobs. Something like 4 ability slots and 1 trait slot and people could use that to build their own job. Instead we get a weird heal and treasure number detector.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

Not tried it yet, not sure when I will,

But it's actually serious that only 1 given FATE or CE spawns at a given time, and if it relatively faster paced than Eureka?

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At most I've seen 1 fate, 1 CE and 1 pot(bunny) fate up at the same time.

the entire content reeks of mediocrity, there is nothing to be found in OC that is not already in the game in a way, and it failed to iterate on the things that made previous Field Operations so interesting.

Phantom Jobs only upside is that there is no limit to using them, compared to Logograms or Lost Actions, which required some modium of farming to keep available. However, very few of those skills actually interact with your kit, meaningfully change what you do or offer any kind of customization. Its a second set of cross class skills you equip.
Giving people that mastered a job a permanent damage and healing buff is a cool idea though, I have to admit. Some phantom skills have interesting effects, but not enough to distract from the simplicity of the combat system. Which is a missed opportunity, considering that this could have elevated the gold farming in this area.

The CE's are just your typical "boss in square or round arena making you dodge AoE" kinda fights that we have aplenty in this game. There are a couple where there are groups of enemies that need to be nuked down instead of a singular boss, but they still follow the same kinda design. The only somewhat interesting CE I played was the turtle one, and I really wish there were more fights like that. CS3 have shown us that they can do more and design something interesting, but chose to instead give us more of the very same stuff we get from anywhere else in the game.

FATE HP scaling is busted, that so far is known. Some of those fights could be interesting if they weren't to quick to explode. Which they need to though it seems, to funnel you quickly into the next CE, and to warrant what little reward they give. Unless you are goldfarming with mobs, you rush over the map constantly chasing the next FATE or CE circle. You could of course completely forego CE farming to instead focus on FATE's, but with how unrewarding some FATE's are, I don't see many people doing that.

I have no opinion about atma droprates to be honest. The PVE side of this game becomes more stale and boring by the patch, thus I have no reason to desire a PVE weapon, so I shrug whenever an atma gets dropped into my inventory. My own RNG was round about 8% droprate, based on the amount of CE's I did. I have not done a single DT FATE.

The social aspect is diminished. Its still cool to see people traversing the map to help lone stragglers that were defeated with a res, but 90% of the things I see in shout chat are, and I quote, "lfg ce". with how fast paced FATE and CE spawns are, there is very little time to talk to your fellow adventurers, unless of course you chose to forego a FATE or a CE.

The fact that we have no CLL/Dalriada instance is baffling to me. I have no opinion on Forked Tower as I have not yet entered it, not sure if I ever will.

Overall, to me, the content is a "it exists" / 10.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

Not tried it yet, not sure when I will,

But it's actually serious that only 1 given FATE or CE spawns at a given time, and if it relatively faster paced than Eureka?

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Yes. A fate approximately spawns 1 minute after the last one was cleared, but they queue up one after another so you will never have more than one at a time on the map. If people are busy clearing the CE that's up, then the fate will wait and no other will spawn until said fate gets cleared.
CEs also only spawn one at a time.
Since there is no progression inside whatsoever (the knowledge level is only a gatekeep for forked tower or endgame mob farming for gold coins), as soon as you step in OC you have access to everything and just have to follow the rush train of 60-70 players, that jump between fates until a CE spawns, then resumes.
Oh and of course as people have complained about everywhere already, the fate scaling is borked so they die under 10s so you better be fast.

Really enjoying it, as someone who also really loved Eureka.

Love the lore and having rewards to grind for outside mindlessly doing dailies and then logging off. Getting a lot of gameplay out of this. I am enjoying levelling Phantom jobs and am getting a enjoyment out of some of them like Oracle.

I like the aesthetics and lore as well which is nice after not liking Bozja's environment very much.

I have my relic already but still a lot of other things to grind out, so I'm happy for sure.

I haven't gotten involved in the raid zone, but from what I read they should make some changes there for sure.

My issues compared to Bozja:

- Combat classes cannot be levelled.
- The 48 player content at the end looks very savage.
-> Would have been better to at least do it like Delubrum. One version for normals and one for those who want to know.
- Apart from seeing the Fates and CEs and doing the story, I can't think of any real reason to enter the zone.
- Even the Atmas are better farmed in the normal Dawntrail areas, because the types are firmly assigned to the areas (and you can level up along the way).

I like it so far so ill probably go back and have fun in there leveling up phantom jobs and knowledge after I finish with the relic. I'm almost there getting the demiatmas from dt fates to finish my first main ninja relic and ill be freeeee lol its been day 6 and I still haven't finish it yet xD (been off and on taking breaks in between lol)

Got the airship with the grind system. Dropped it

It sounds like Forked Tower is difficult content. I'm casual as heck so I would've strongly preferred a Castrum or Dalriada to a DRS/BA. Maybe I'll try it once I max all my jobs and gear, but I don't know. I don't want to join a discord.

I kinda miss the progression of earlier zones, but I assume the point is so new players coming to the content late aren't immediately left behind not being able to use their mount and missing every FATE/CE.

The treasure chests are much better than lockboxes IMO. Even if the stuff inside is still the same garbage, it's nice to have a reason to sneak past some high level mobs and it feels good to find one. And I love that you can open them up while mounted.

I'm enjoying the phantom jobs and some of the abilities are neat. I hope the North Horn adds more, but also gives more opportunity to use the max level ones we have.

Gold farming seems dumb. I wish SE would stop trying to make exp chains a thing. It's nothing like FFXI, this game isn't capable of recapturing that, FFXI is a million times slower so you had the opportunity to chat and have fun, chains in FFXIV are a perpetual grindfest that will give you hand cramps from spamming your three cannon buttons for hours with no breaks. I can't believe this is the intended way to get three of the jobs and upgrade the gear. There should have been a Castrum that gives a bunch of gold for clearing it.

So I stand corrected on gold farming. There's a solo strat you can do that's pretty good if you don't want to deal with the PFs. I kinda like they have that as an option.

I think the content is good and enjoyable, but... I have problems with lag as PS4 player when there are many players around. The critical engagements are fun but I'd prefer to see the attacs to go off before I take leathal damage. At least I get the rewards after the fight and now I can (with low success) evade some of the attacs. These same problems have been for the whole expansion but now it's more of a problem. Haven't tried the tower yet but I can't see myself clearing it if the game is still like this... I think there should be more action interaction with the stones.

There should be more than just South and North imo. Bit weirded out there are no suggestions to heal/change Archive back.

And before someone comes yelling "Just buy a PS5 or new PC", not possible at the moment.

Obnoxiously low Demiatma drop rates, difficult to see what I'm doing in CEs, FATE bosses tend to die before I can even get a hit in for credit...

It's about as good as I expected it to be, which is to say not at all. A 3 hour session today yielded 4 Demiatmas... one of which I don't need. RNG is atrocious, unenjoyable content and no guarantee of progress for time spent is not a good way to keep people invested. As a very objective oriented person running around killing things and praying for RNG to bless me is not my idea of fun. Feelies are cool and all but when I'm looking for diamonds finding cubic zirconia along the way does not make me happy.

I'm having a lot of fun so far, though I can see the fate/CE core loop getting tedious down the road, and the grind might be a little much for me. I've been doing 2-3 hours with friends on a couple of weeknights, and we've really loved the zone itself. Sneaking around, finding survey points, experimenting with new phantom jobs, it's all been nice. I wish there were more story content, and I'm concerned about how forked tower is going to go once we get there, but all in all there's pros and cons. I will say I greatly appreciate the QoL designed into the phantom jobs vs other battle content systems, which felt cumbersome to deal with without offering a lot of meaningful impact on gameplay.

Oh, but the snapshotting on that one boss with the rotating AOEs.... I'll admit that has my fc flustered.

i thought i liked it but when i realized im locked out of gold coin farms bc i haven't leveled warrior or sage in a long time i got the ick and i feel left out unfortunately, sucky feeling and now im starting to think this game isn't the game for me anymore.

i understand that people will always move toward the most meta compositions for efficiency when a game allows there to be such a thing, but it kills the fun and sense of belonging for me especially now that im an adult who can't commit the time to level all my jobs every x-pack anymore so i stick to the ones i want to play to maximize my enjoyment in the time i have to play, which has shot me in the foot for this content..so now I have to either mindlessly grind mobs by myself slowly or give up entirely. This might be the last expansion I play this game for at this point :/