Cosmic exploration and Occult crescent

Lately, I've been doing some Cosmic Exploration. I'm not a craft oriented player, but I like gathering enough so I choose to concentratre on those 3 relics. And I must say... I'm surprised, because everything I complain about fighters relics has been done mostly right with crafting relics. For more context, I'm part of the people that think the DT relics are a failure, and still failed to capture what older relics meant and why it was pleasant to farm them... And surprisingly, the tools relics did procure that feeling.

I can't help to wonder why the fighters relics, which are relics for the core gameplay of the game, got done so dirty compared to the crafters and gatherers ones.

First of all, there is the fact that tools relics are still prestige weapons : getting one is still an accomplishment that means something, and that ask you to work for it (I'll never shut up about the importance of long term objectives in MMO, even in XIV that doesn't want to be too time consumming : it's important to give players that want to spend more time in the game to have things to do, even if that means most players won't do that). Relics are 100% linked to the relic zone, while still giving you a long term objective. We don't have the full cosmic exploration yet, but from where we are, we can guess that we'll need 15 to 20 hours to get a full relic, which is fine, especially with the bonus making the subsequent one faster.

Then there is the kind of grind it propose : Every activity you do makes you progress toward your objective. If you achieve the activity, you get points. RNG is still there, but the whole progression is not based on it. Most of the time, the rng will determine if you'll get silver or gold. Sure it will sometimes make you fail your activity (especially with fishing), but you'll have a constant feeling of progress. RNG has it's place in a mmo, for rare mount drops or thing like that, but farm based on RNG (the atma one) are awful. If you have a bad RNG, you'll just get frustrated and it's not gonna be fun.

The whole thing about rng is to know when to use it. Use it to determine the bonus of completion, or for a one time drop, and it's fine. Use it for a repetitive activity, and it gets frustrating. The worst use of RNG is still the timeworn artifacts in PotD : not only did we have an awful rng farm, but that farm was in a content that was mostly dead : that brought the worst of both word : not only it took forever to enter, but after that, you weren't even garanteed one item, which made whole thing look like a huge waste of time.

But cosmic exploration, I feel like RNG has been done right. You'll sometimes have fail an activity because of it, but most of the time, you'll still get some progression despite it.

Now the second place where things have been done right is the pacing. Granted, the nature of craft and gathering helped a lot. But overall, we are not in this constant rush, which is nice. You can take your time, have some off time where you can discuss with other. I always felt that the charm of exploration zones came from the other people you met and spend a little bit of time to work together for a similar objective. Peers that like you engaged in this time consumming activity, and more than the gameplay itself, it was those people that brought variety to those activities. This might be where Cosmic exploration has some room to grow, because doing thing alongside each other is different from doing things together. Overall, I feel SE limited communication to a minimum, and to me, they should stop that. The infernal rhythm of OC is part of that. Eureka and Bozja both had their down time, which made the whole thing breathe. That's what cosmic exploration has, and OC doesn't, even if it's mostly due to the kind of content it is.

So I wish they will take inspiration from the Cosmic exploration for the next relics. I don't know why they don't feel everyone has to have the relics with tools, but they clearly don't bother with that, while it seem to be important with fighter relics. Maybe it's because the fighting is the core gameplay of the game, but this lead to this weird situation where it feels like the side content get more care than the core content. Cosmic exploration relics feels far more satisfying than normal relics.

Even worse, exploration zone are bad for farming relics, and this was already the case during ShB. Bozja/Zadnor options was systematically the worst choice. The content linked to the relic feels like the secondary option to get thing done. 7.4 one time step still suffer from that. I mean you need to do 240 CE to get all the items needed. That's 115k of OC xp, while the total needed to get the current 15 phantom jobs to max lvl is 237k. And that's considering you don't do ANY fate between the CE. Completing a CE takes between 5 and 7 min in average, and it takes nearly as much time for another to spawn. The time needed to complete that objective just has been designed to ignore completely the content it linked to.

In the meantime, Cosmic exploration do the things exactly how a lot of us have been asking the relics to be. So please, take inspiration from that for the future, it can be tweaked, it can be upgraded, but please take the general design of progression of tools relics for weapons relics.

The combat relics should adopt the cosmic relic system of “the more you do the easier each subsequent relic becomes” rather than every one after the first being a glorified tomestone weapon

IDK maybe it’s just me but when I see a zeta relic or even a physeos relic I go “wow that person did some grinding” even if they massively nerfed the actual grind. When I see a current DT relic I just assume “oh that’s probably your 9th relic you bought with tomestones after doing the (not long) grind once

The tomestone grind wouldn't be so annoying if i wasn't forced to run the same two expert dungeons to farm them efficiently. The alliance raid tome rewards are a complete joke and need a massive increase. Same with normal mode trials and extreme trials. Give us some diversity in how we can tome farm square!

I like having all the options for the DT relic tho and I don't think I've ever thought I'm impressed with X relic even on current patch because they've always been the casual path to gear everyone up who don't do high-end content. It's not really challenging content overall, and it's just very repetitive and time-consuming task, and no one I've ever met has actually wanted to farm 10k paste for each weapon instead of tomes.

Also, I'm tired of EXDR since I'd been doing Mistwake for 80+ for the glam pieces that I gave up on them so now I only do Capped and Leveling once a day too. Then I like that we can even do DT fates since I'm still working on my Shared Fates progress and even PT got a bit more active since we can get paste from them too. The OC is what it is as forever since people still join to get demitatmas and the few others are still there to farm for gil or to do FT1.

There should be alternate paths for relics, yes, but I'm not going to act like one grind is more "impressive" than another because its still all grinding in the end. It still takes tons of poetics to make even ARR and HW relics, and light-farming still sends one into the same places we'd be getting in roulettes anyway. Farming junk in Eureka and Bozja isn't much different than farming for tomestones, one is just "outdoorsy" instead of being endless hallways, and the currency you need thousands of goes into your inventory instead of its own tab.

People really do over-inflate the "effort" of earning these things, when most of them are "do something else in another monitor" content depending on which step you're on with only a few steps requiring you to wake up and pay attention.

I'm REALLY not sure what people want from relics. The steps are not so different from HW or SHB relics, it's just grinding. When there was a tomestone grind, which, by the way, by default lets you pick the activities you want to grind them, people complained too.

I guess people will always complain no matter how.

Grinding Cosmic tool is mindless and boring, woohoo if we get the choice of 12 different missions to do them, when roulettes are more varied than that (well, except expert).

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

The combat relics should adopt the cosmic relic system of “the more you do the easier each subsequent relic becomes” rather than every one after the first being a glorified tomestone weapon

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Only if the content required is actually fun because if it's just to emulate CE that literally becomes stale after the first area, idk about that.

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Originally Posted by Pricia

I'm REALLY not sure what people want from relics. The steps are not so different from HW or SHB relics, it's just grinding. When there was a tomestone grind, which, by the way, by default lets you pick the activities you want to grind them, people complained too.

I guess people will always complain no matter how.

Grinding Cosmic tool is mindless and boring, woohoo if we get the choice of 12 different missions to do them, when roulettes are more varied than that (well, except expert).

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Some people want something on par with pre-nerf Zetas, some people want something on par with Mandervillous or even easier, and some people want any number of points in between. It's not rocket surgery, and someone always complaining because everyone wants different things isn't a groundbreaking conclusion.

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Originally Posted by Reginald_Cain

The tomestone grind wouldn't be so annoying if i wasn't forced to run the same two expert dungeons to farm them efficiently. The alliance raid tome rewards are a complete joke and need a massive increase. Same with normal mode trials and extreme trials. Give us some diversity in how we can tome farm square!

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you can get tomes by playing pvp, doing treasure maps, do hunts, roulettes, ex trial farm, farm OC...almost everything gives tomes with an okay-ish rate

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

The combat relics should adopt the cosmic relic system of “the more you do the easier each subsequent relic becomes” rather than every one after the first being a glorified tomestone weapon

IDK maybe it’s just me but when I see a zeta relic or even a physeos relic I go “wow that person did some grinding” even if they massively nerfed the actual grind. When I see a current DT relic I just assume “oh that’s probably your 9th relic you bought with tomestones after doing the (not long) grind once

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This would have been the best choice IMO... You retain the value, and you don't devalue subsequent relics too much as you would actually have to go out of your way to collect them.

I do agree on the second point... They aren't notorious grinds in the modern days... But if someone comes around with multiple or all Zeta, Physeos or Resistance relics, you know they worked for them.. That they did a solid amount of grinding... I view the Phantom weapons as only being marginally better than Manderville.. But after you've done that initial step they are just... Glorified tomestone weapons...

I can't actually motivate myself to collect them all this expansion, for the simple fact that in the next expansion they will be Poetic weapons. . . Which is kind of ironic because I would in theory be the target audience (being a collector myself), yet it's only pushing me away because there's no justifiable reason to bother going out of my way to do hunts.

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Originally Posted by Reginald_Cain

The tomestone grind wouldn't be so annoying if i wasn't forced to run the same two expert dungeons to farm them efficiently. The alliance raid tome rewards are a complete joke and need a massive increase. Same with normal mode trials and extreme trials. Give us some diversity in how we can tome farm square!

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There's a lot diversity and many ways to get the necessary Tomes. There is no need to do everything in the most efficient way possible, especially if you aren't having fun. In the end you yourself chose (and force yourself) for the unfun things to do instead of things where you're having fun just because you get done with it a tiny bit faster.

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Originally Posted by ACE135

There's a lot diversity and many ways to get the necessary Tomes. There is no need to do everything in the most efficient way possible, especially if you aren't having fun. In the end you yourself chose (and force yourself) for the unfun things to do instead of things where you're having fun just because you get done with it a tiny bit faster.

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None of tomestone obtaining methods are fun. You could make something fun out of it by adding something like a compendium of "do 5 duties that we pick for you at random and you have tomes instantly capped". Instead it's monotonous grind that's best to be dealt with asap and as efficient as possible.

Tome grinding isn’t fun because casual content in this game isn’t fun (unless you are one of the people like me who enjoys cosmic)

Tomestone grinding wouldn’t be considered such a monotonous task if the average dungeon wasn’t completely mindless on its best days then anything that revolves around repetition of casual content wouldn’t be loathed so much

I agree farming tomes isn't really fun, your choices are: running the same roulettes daily for roughly 700 tomes a day, or spam hunt trains which nowadays are all just speed trains so good luck if you have a slower PC or spam expert all day.

On top of that, why is the first relic not free? You farmed 1200 paste, now spend 1500 tomes, no, just give me the weapon and subsequent ones take tomes? And to add to that, we're now at 21 combat jobs, 1500x21 PER STEP is a LOT, if they keep adding 2 jobs per expansion and they keep insisting on tome farming, which in itself is not the problem, just the method of farming them is, then they really need to lower the amount needed.

Then you also need tomes to get pots, it's just constant tome farming at every angle, give us something new to do. Casual content remains a one and done type situation that square refuses to add any longevity to and when they do its peanuts like the deep dungeon challenge log. 5 sacks a week, wowie!

At least I don't want to shoot myself in the head when I run tome content, unlike fates. It's bland, but at least it's not nuclear waste levels of slop.

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Originally Posted by Ankhira

On top of that, why is the first relic not free? You farmed 1200 paste, now spend 1500 tomes, no, just give me the weapon and subsequent ones take tomes? And to add to that, we're now at 21 combat jobs, 1500x21 PER STEP is a LOT, if they keep adding 2 jobs per expansion and they keep insisting on tome farming, which in itself is not the problem, just the method of farming them is, then they really need to lower the amount needed.

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I almost wonder if that was a mistake, because I don’t remember it working that way for any of the previous stages. I went to turn in my paste fully expecting to get my first weapon and buy the arcanite for the second, and was like what?

I still think the best relic grind imo was Eureka. It had you interact with the zone in a meaningful way. Yeah you were still doing the same Fates and mob farming over and over, but you were earning currency for the relic, plus gear sets, and with 4 zones to spread it out, it didn’t feel monotonous (looking at you Occult Crescent!). Bozja was good too with further refinement of the special actions, I just didn’t like the setting as much.

Everything else is just a tome/Fate grind. So many complain about having to run the same old duties for tomes, but every other relic grind did just that! ARR was ARR duties and Fates, HW was HW duties and Fates, EW was pure tomes and people hated that. But in DT, it’s just the same tome grind disguised with a better UI. lol

I’m just disappointed that Occult Crescent didn’t live up to the enjoyment level of either Eureka or Bozja, and you can tell the devs know it too, since the relic barely requires you to interact with the zone at all. Sad, because it had such potential from a lore perspective. It really needed at least one more zone (for a minimum of 3 total), and some Normal mode repeatable duties like Bozja’s CLL, Del Reg, Dalriata. Fate grinding and gold farming the same zone for how many patches now is just so tedious.

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Originally Posted by Ankhira

On top of that, why is the first relic not free? You farmed 1200 paste, now spend 1500 tomes, no, just give me the weapon and subsequent ones take tomes? And to add to that, we're now at 21 combat jobs, 1500x21 PER STEP is a LOT, if they keep adding 2 jobs per expansion and they keep insisting on tome farming, which in itself is not the problem, just the method of farming them is, then they really need to lower the amount needed.

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You're not expected to get a piece in every class. For most people, getting probably one to two would be enough as they are maining those jobs.

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Casual content remains a one and done type situation that square refuses to add any longevity to and when they do its peanuts like the deep dungeon challenge log. 5 sacks a week, wowie!

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True, methinks that the pivot towards such content would be a better way to attract more players.

Having started playing during Endwalker, I don’t view relics as a prestige item or a marker of effort or commitment. To me they’re just an alternate route for equipment progression. Since I leveled all jobs to cap in EW I enjoyed having easy access to a good weapon for each one. I’ve got all jobs leveled to cap again in DT and (before I realized I was burnt out on FFXIV) I was planning to get all relics to stage 4 as a better and more congenial way to equip jobs for 8.0.

As for the different ideas discussed here … I like my tomestone relics because they’re convenient, but I’d be willing to go for an accelerating progress system like Cosmic Exploration. There are 21 combat jobs and I think it’s a reasonable assumption that if someone gets two or three relics they probably want all of them; no sense making them grind excessively for the extras.

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Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

I still think the best relic grind imo was Eureka. It had you interact with the zone in a meaningful way. Yeah you were still doing the same Fates and mob farming over and over, but you were earning currency for the relic, plus gear sets, and with 4 zones to spread it out, it didn’t feel monotonous (looking at you Occult Crescent!). Bozja was good too with further refinement of the special actions, I just didn’t like the setting as much.

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I agree with that. Basically, Cosmic exploration is Eureka for tools, with a few ameliorations. This what pushed me to create this thread. Cosmic exploration has a far better relic progression model than OC, and it's wild to me that despite having a good model developped at the same time, they went for OC as it is. But second post in the subject and it devolved into another "tomestone bad" thread. Farming tomestone, farming other things, it's farming anyway : What's important is how they dressed the farm, how satisfying is the overall progression. Cosmic exploration achieved to make it satisfying, and Occult crescent failed.

In term of other possibilities to get the items, they should not allow the relics items/currency/xp to drop elsewhere than the relic zone. BUT once you finished one, you unlock a vendor that allows you to buy those items/currency/xp, at a rate where it's still slightly better to get those in the relic zone. That would kinda keep the one step thing, while then tomestone for those who want it. Once the current expansion finished, the memo needed would become poetics, automatically making them faster to get.

Maybe combining that with a bonus on the roulettes they want to push people into. Once a month they would updates the roulettes, and those with the bonus would give more uncapped current tomestone. That bonus could stay all year long, so it could drive people to the roulettes they want people to do, since it seems that both ShB and DT relics have been used to push players into certain type of content.

The entire time and reward system needs a ground up revamp. Grinding tomes is almost a sentence, I’d rather grind Atmas than fines at this point.

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Originally Posted by GraceHorizon

Having started playing during Endwalker, I don’t view relics as a prestige item or a marker of effort or commitment. To me they’re just an alternate route for equipment progression. Since I leveled all jobs to cap in EW I enjoyed having easy access to a good weapon for each one. I’ve got all jobs leveled to cap again in DT and (before I realized I was burnt out on FFXIV) I was planning to get all relics to stage 4 as a better and more congenial way to equip jobs for 8.0.

As for the different ideas discussed here … I like my tomestone relics because they’re convenient, but I’d be willing to go for an accelerating progress system like Cosmic Exploration. There are 21 combat jobs and I think it’s a reasonable assumption that if someone gets two or three relics they probably want all of them; no sense making them grind excessively for the extras.

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Relics are deliberately mediocre, even as a catch-up option, until X.55. 7.41's are the same ilevel as weapons from Doomtrain EX, which released over a month prior, and both are only 5 over a crafted weapon. In terms of convenience, it's hard to beat just walking to the nearest market board.

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Originally Posted by GraceHorizon

Having started playing during Endwalker, I don’t view relics as a prestige item or a marker of effort or commitment. To me they’re just an alternate route for equipment progression. Since I leveled all jobs to cap in EW I enjoyed having easy access to a good weapon for each one. I’ve got all jobs leveled to cap again in DT and (before I realized I was burnt out on FFXIV) I was planning to get all relics to stage 4 as a better and more congenial way to equip jobs for 8.0.

As for the different ideas discussed here … I like my tomestone relics because they’re convenient, but I’d be willing to go for an accelerating progress system like Cosmic Exploration. There are 21 combat jobs and I think it’s a reasonable assumption that if someone gets two or three relics they probably want all of them; no sense making them grind excessively for the extras.

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Yeah, and this is why so many players have been complaining about that. FFXIV is a mmo that always tried to respect your time, but it's still a mmo. As such, it used to understand it was important to give players that wanted to dive deeper into the game some kind of long term objectives. Relics were that : When they removed the relic grind, they removed the promise of the mmo genra, which was you could spend as much time as you wanted in the permanent virtual world. The promise to always have something to do. I can understand you not wanting to have to farm too much to get a decent weapon, but as some said, there are easy enough option for that : the market board, the 780 weapons that just ask you for doing 7 time (then 4) the last fight of the raid tier. Making relics glorified tomestone weapon more than what it is, it's the reason some people call FFXIV a "ORPG".

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Originally Posted by GraceHorizon

There are 21 combat jobs and I think it’s a reasonable assumption that if someone gets two or three relics they probably want all of them; no sense making them grind excessively for the extras.

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This logic makes no sense to me, why should you be given easier paths to get more just because “they want them all”

If you Want all of something shouldn’t you work to get all of it

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Originally Posted by CNitsah

I can't help to wonder why the fighters relics, which are relics for the core gameplay of the game, got done so dirty compared to the crafters and gatherers ones.

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Oh but this goes for EVERY OTHER CONTENT in this game that isn't PvE.

For some ungodly reason this team loves to undertune and undercut what should have been considered the bread and butter/core gameplay of the game.

It's apparently OK to make fishing of all things a "hardcore" challenge that requires you to be alert for fishes that can only be caught during minute-long windows at 4 AM every few weeks or months.
It's OK to make crafter and gatherer relics require engaging with the expansion's current side content for those jobs even if that requires countless hours of dedication.
Island Sanctuary's spreadsheet simulator took a whole patch cycle's worth to be completed.

But PvE progression?

No, that one needs to be QUICK AND EASY. Can't have the players waste time engaging with the main gameplay loop of this genre of game when they should be gathering, fishing or crafting instead!
Combat during MSQ must be minimal outside of duties. Combat only gets in the way of the text reading and cutscene watching you know?
Relics must be progressed through duty roulettes or re-running duties from 7+ years ago that give nobody any trouble. Why include more friction in maxing your combat relics? For prestige? HAH! Prestige is pointless! Unless you're a gatherer or crafter, then prestige is awesome apparently.
If you really must have challenging PvE then go do your weekly raids. But the reward structure and stressful body-check-driven design will be put in place to make sure you don't dare and find ways to engage with this any more than maybe 1 hour per week. Aren't you happy those pesky raids won't get in the way of all that time you will have for more fishing and house decoration instead?
You want more adventure forays? Eh whatever here have one more. But we'll try not to encourage you to engage with it for too long. Oh woops we made what should have been the payoff for the grind there a discord-exclusive duty... ah well who cares, go back to your gposing and fishing.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

This logic makes no sense to me, why should you be given easier paths to get more just because “they want them all”

If you Want all of something, shouldn’t you work to get all of it

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Yes, this is what need in DT how we need to make grinding the relics which are already not good at the release into a second job :confused:

Also, I do the DT relics for now for myself because I like to collect them for alt jobs and I don't care if anyone out there is thinking oh X person isn't a real dedicated ffxiv fan because I didn't have to grind like 10k paste for each one because other longer and more tedious grinds for achievement already exist like collecting 500k points in Cosmo or the opening the fate carrot chests.

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Originally Posted by CCheshire

Yes, this is what need in DT how we need to make grinding the relics which are already not good at the release into a second job :confused:

Also, I do the DT relics for now for myself because I like to collect them for alt jobs and I don't care if anyone out there is thinking oh X person isn't a real dedicated ffxiv fan because I didn't have to grind like 10k paste for each one because other longer and more tedious grinds for achievement already exist like collecting 500k points in Cosmo or the opening the fate carrot chests.

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Yeah I have never really understood why people get so hung up on judging other players "dedication" as they call it. I love this game and what others do with their time or how they reach their goals has never been my business. I’ve never looked at someone’s relic, mount, or minion and thought "wow, they worked for that" or "they didn’t put in enough effort". I just focus on my own experience.

That said, I still think the SHB relic system was the best. The first one was a big grind and extra weapons felt reasonable while still making you engage with the content. :) I wasn't a big fan of Eureka and after EW I'm kind of tired of tome farming. It's not the worst, but it's also not that fun.

I don't think Cosmic tools are any fun as it's a numb game of "craft 1000 times so you get a relic" job. Doing same thing over and over again. This is why we now have a lot of 3rd party things that speed up process and why everybody you check on cosmic is afk crafting 24/7 non stop. All using tools. Specially for that system to become a star on planet and have your name on it.