Crystal Tower - Development: 5+ months, shelf life: 3 months

[Wolf_Gang]

Crystal Tower - Development: 5+ months, shelf life: 3 months.

I think SE needs to rethink Crystal Tower's placement in progression.

The difficulty and loot were great for Labyrinth of the Ancients. It fulfilled a role in helping newcomers
catch up at a time when FFXIV was gaining a chunk of it's community.

but if they're going to continue unlocking restrictions on coil and tomestones with the following patch, it will continue
to prematurely cut the lifespan of the content.

Then there's the Echo buff, which fulfills the role of CT 10x times over and completely eliminates the gear checks.

Now you'd be hard pressed to find a CT group in party finder these days. However, there's copius amounts of groups
forming for first Coil, 8 months after it's release. And people are going to continue farming 2nd coil months after patch 2.4

Crystal Tower needs that same level of replayability.

Practical solution:

• Drop weathered i100 Armor upgradeable to i110
• Also Drop Oil/sands of time and unidentified Allagan pieces
• share same Weekly loot lock for both

That way even after the patch 2.4 people will still want to run the instance. but what CT2 really needs is a promotion in relevance: Make it the same level as coil.
Unlock soldiery in 2.4 and with echo buff, people will catch up. There's no need to have a less relevent raid under coil months after it's release. I fully support
making older content easier (e.g. Echo buff) to bridge the gap of new players and old, but I think it's a waste of resources to retroactively add weaker raids like CT.

[Airget]

Adding higher tier drops would have a negative effect on the new content, a better way to go about it would be to increase the number of drops in a CT run to entice new players to gear up using CT rather than gaining the bare minimal to do Coil.

An option that comes to mind would be to add a second chest drop for each boss in CT so now each run would act as 2, so for each group a potential of 8 equipment drops would now come from one run offering a quicker option to gear rather that saving mytho to gear up.


The amount of mytho earned could also entice more to do CT, since soldiery drops it does offer a means for a group that isn't as well geared and perhaps unable to get through HM dungeons with their current gear to earn a bit of soldier to help them out but maybe bumping the mytho earned from 100 to 150-200 a run would entice others to do CT rather than speedrunning Brayflox.

Another option to entice players with this second chest is that they could define this chest as a drop based on the party composition so while the first chest would drop anything from it's loot table, the 2nd chest would always drop something which could be used by a member in the party(of course downside would be if it drops something that said player already has)

Hopefully they do figure out something like they did with the soldier/high allagan gear, they did a good job balancing out the gear distribution this time around by having soldier be i100 and high allagan/upgraded weathered gear be through coil.

[Ninix]

I'd say the shelf life was closer to 3 weeks, really.

[ApolloGenX]

Theme park rides don't last long ... =-/

[LexSunfire]

i'd imagine the way they'll keep CT relevant is the same way they're trying to keep FATEs relevant... make it part of the relic weapon quests. or add it to the roulette.

[Wolf_Gang]

snip.

I think you missed the point. None of those options make CT relevant after patch 2.4

The gear won't have a negative effect because the Echo buff and unlocked Soldiery will completely undermine it. The idea is that people will still run CT2 when 3rd coil is released, if they can obtain similar loot to coil2.
Having the weathered, upgradeable mechanic allows them to still drop gear weaker than coil2, but still make them useful in the long term. So rather than groups farming an unlocked 2nd coil for gear, they also have the option to farm CT2 to get ready for 3rd coil.

[Doo]

Glad I don't have to run Crystal tower ever again. Trying to deal with trolls, work with 23 other, players that leave as soon as they don't get/get their drop, tanks that aim the dragons tail at everyone, tanks not clicking towers, killing skellies on the first tile, etc. I agree though content becomes obsolete quick.

[RoninDarkchild]

The problem is CT was released out of order...... CT was supposed to be at launch. It was supposed to be the gear BETWEEN Dark light, and Coil.

Darklight (low tier tombe) > CT > Allagan/High Tier Tomb.

It was delayed. So by the time the gear was released it was outdated, because everyone farmed coil for 4 months.


Only way to really fix this is to fix the order CT comes out in relation to the next coil. Or release them at the same time. The CT gear needs to be better then the "current" dungeon gear, so you can then go into Coil for the gear, and use tomes for gear that is even better that that.

Example: Myth gear (low tier)> CT > Regular Soild/Melded > High Allagan/Full upgraded Soildery

This allows ppl to work toward gear superior to the low tier tomes that can tie them over till they can get gear from the high tier tomes every 2-3 weeks. I coudl farm the hell out of the low tier tomes that have no farm limits. Go into CT get a piece of gear every week. Get pieces of gear that will make me more powerful then the low tier farmed gear. And already have two pieces of CT gear by the time I buy my first High tier tome gear.

And it needs to be all out at once to fix it to the way it should have been. Youre gonna keep running into this problem IF you keep releasing CT AFTER the latest Coil.

If it launched the way it was supposed to, CT part 2 would have been the first patch. NOT CTPart 1. CT is currently ONE full update behind.

[Shai]

Theme park rides don't last long ... =-/

Pirates of the Caribbean says hello.

[ApolloGenX]

Pirates of the Caribbean says hello.

Really? No Haunted Mansion?? REALLY?