Requiring Castrum Litore completion for the next Bozja area is a bad decision.

[Gemina]

You can beat CLL with less people than 24 (I've cleared in a premade group of 16 + 3-4 pugs that joined when it popped in the early days of Bozja release), if everyone's on point and don't die to every aoe, essence's up and uses lost actions to supercharge everyone's damage output. You may not be saving every prisoner, but that's not mandatory to clear. I wouldn't be surprised if you could do it with 16 people, 24 is hardly the minimum. You only need 8 for Lyon + some remainder to handle the mobs in the main battle arena.

Also, while the superboss of each zone wasn't mandatory to progress the story of the zones and reach the next one, they were mandatory for the relic progression, much akin to how CLL will technically be gate-keeping the next part of the relic. And just like how they made it so that people could still complete the relic due to the Eureka zone bosses being impossible/nigh impossible to solo or low man, I have no doubts they'll do something to CLL to make sure it can be low-manned to future proof it. Just off the top of my head, they have these insanely powerful NPCs running around called the Blades, they could fit them into CLL and give them absurd stats to mow down the bosses if the game detects the player count is underneath a certain threshold. Not to mention possible 100% echo. No doubt they have something in mind with the literal terabytes to petabytes worth of metrics data they likely have showing Castrum on a decline.

Finally, I doubt Bozja will fully die out anyway, since CLL is currently the only source for the deep essence & bloodsucker/beast/whatever the healer one is essences, along with dropping Forgotten fragments that are extremely annoying to farm from star or rank V mobs. Which if the 48 man savage version is hard enough that it mandates those essences & actions for everyone, means CLL farming will become mandatory for anyone not willing to sink hundreds of thousands to millions of gil into forgotten fragments on the mb (seriously, I saw Forgotten fragments of Transcendence up to 10k/pop on some servers which gives you a 1/3rd chance of getting the essence you need) to get a good stock of the essences they need, especially if the savage version has as much replayability as BA did.

I'd wager that a good portion of players inside Bozja are not aware of even half of what you wrote here. Especially those who need a Castrum clear. The coordinated effort required for clearing with fewer players is a tall order, and cannot be expected from those who need Castrum for the clear. If players who have cleared it are running it, why would they be willing to forego even one prisoner? It is also risky as the loss to mettle should the instance fail is massive. Anyone less than rank 15 will feel this hit hard.

Just because it can be completed doesn't mean there are not fundamental problems with Castrum. I agree that I don't believe Bozja will die out. Bozja has incentive such as leveling and cluster farming. Castrum has little to none.

[Driavna]

I'd wager that a good portion of players inside Bozja are not aware of even half of what you wrote here. Especially those who need a Castrum clear. The coordinated effort required for clearing with fewer players is a tall order, and cannot be expected from those who need Castrum for the clear. If players who have cleared it are running it, why would they be willing to forego even one prisoner? It is also risky as the loss to mettle should the instance fail is massive. Anyone less than rank 15 will feel this hit hard.

Just because it can be completed doesn't mean there are not fundamental problems with Castrum. I agree that I don't believe Bozja will die out. Bozja has incentive such as leveling and cluster farming. Castrum has little to none.

Incentives for Castrum, if devs are not overhyping Delubrum Reginae 48m difficulty, are lost actions and chances for upgrades. Once the latter is released Castrum should get more attention. Anyway, the main factor of failure for Castrum is players not using DPS essences/items and actions. During one of the live letters, Yoshida requested players to use them and was also pointed out again for Delubrum Reginae 24m too since matched parties are not going to be role balanced.

Still, adding XP and mettle will help right now.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

I'd wager that a good portion of players inside Bozja are not aware of even half of what you wrote here. Especially those who need a Castrum clear. The coordinated effort required for clearing with fewer players is a tall order, and cannot be expected from those who need Castrum for the clear. If players who have cleared it are running it, why would they be willing to forego even one prisoner? It is also risky as the loss to mettle should the instance fail is massive. Anyone less than rank 15 will feel this hit hard.

Just because it can be completed doesn't mean there are not fundamental problems with Castrum. I agree that I don't believe Bozja will die out. Bozja has incentive such as leveling and cluster farming. Castrum has little to none.

Of course. I wouldn't expect 16 random pugs to be able to do castrum that easily. I was just pointing out that 24 players minimum is factually incorrect, and that it can be done with less if you get the right players. Just as you can get a group of 48 and still wipe & fail in castrum until it times out, players numbers are irrelevant to a point compared to player awareness & skill; the higher player numbers is really only giving more rez power for people dying to every aoe, in the grand scheme of things. But like I said in my post, Square has all the metrics of castrum they could need and a track history of future proofing older content in Eureka; I'm not worried. I can pretty much guarantee CLL will get some modification in either 5.4 or 5.45 to help aid it, not to mention CLL will likely become very important for anyone at R15 that wants to do the savage version of the next instance due to exclusive powerful fragments in CLL.

[Deceptus]

Of course. I wouldn't expect 16 random pugs to be able to do castrum that easily. I was just pointing out that 24 players minimum is factually incorrect, and that it can be done with less if you get the right players. Just as you can get a group of 48 and still wipe & fail in castrum until it times out, players numbers are irrelevant to a point compared to player awareness & skill; the higher player numbers is really only giving more rez power for people dying to every aoe, in the grand scheme of things. But like I said in my post, Square has all the metrics of castrum they could need and a track history of future proofing older content in Eureka; I'm not worried. I can pretty much guarantee CLL will get some modification in either 5.4 or 5.45 to help aid it, not to mention CLL will likely become very important for anyone at R15 that wants to do the savage version of the next instance due to exclusive powerful fragments in CLL.

Technically correct and functionally correct are two completely different things. This is the FFXIV playerbase we're talking about here, lets be honest. The "good" players aren't running Castrum anymore because they sped to Rank 10/15 when Bozja first came out, and got their rank really early, and ran Castrum then. Now they're in Cluster Groups / CE groups for coins.

Regarding buffing / nerfing the content: Look how long it took them to fix the FusterCluck that was Pagos. Lets just say my confidence in their abilities to fix it in a timely manner isn't very high.

Especially when they made the situation WORSE by putting coins in CEs which disincentivized people from running Castrum. There were much better, easier, more elegant solutions (that have been repeatedly pointed out) and they didn't do them.

[ADVSS]

Technically correct and functionally correct are two completely different things. This is the FFXIV playerbase we're talking about here, lets be honest. The "good" players aren't running Castrum anymore because they sped to Rank 10/15 when Bozja first came out, and got their rank really early, and ran Castrum then. Now they're in Cluster Groups / CE groups for coins.

Regarding buffing / nerfing the content: Look how long it took them to fix the FusterCluck that was Pagos. Lets just say my confidence in their abilities to fix it in a timely manner isn't very high.

Especially when they made the situation WORSE by putting coins in CEs which disincentivized people from running Castrum. There were much better, easier, more elegant solutions (that have been repeatedly pointed out) and they didn't do them.

Yeah I have to agree. I think at the least they should allow any rank 10 and above to start collecting coins, honestly so theyd at least have a couple pieces for castrum, but the end result, as you said totally took the incentive out of doing castrum for those that cleared it already, which was kind of not a cool gesture, that could have been fixed with replenishable mettle gains in Castrum itself. Sort of like the whole level 50 dungeon mobs dropping 1 gil each at launch, and people stopped doing dungeons cause gear repairs were higher than the gil theyd make doing the dungeons

[Seraphor]

I'd wager that a good portion of players inside Bozja are not aware of even half of what you wrote here. Especially those who need a Castrum clear. The coordinated effort required for clearing with fewer players is a tall order, and cannot be expected from those who need Castrum for the clear. If players who have cleared it are running it, why would they be willing to forego even one prisoner? It is also risky as the loss to mettle should the instance fail is massive. Anyone less than rank 15 will feel this hit hard.

Just because it can be completed doesn't mean there are not fundamental problems with Castrum. I agree that I don't believe Bozja will die out. Bozja has incentive such as leveling and cluster farming. Castrum has little to none.

I ran CLL on day... 2 or 3, when barely anyone knew what was going on.
We had about 17/18 people. (I'm sure about this because we only had one party of 8 up the top in the first boss, and we still killed it before the bottom group and had to fight off waves of magitek because of it)
Only a few people had done it before.
We still cleared and saved five prisoners.

Of my 5 or so subsequent runs, all of which were clears, though only one six-save, I don't think I ever had more than about 22 players.

I can only assume the issues that have arised are due to people being defeatist and giving up before even starting, and some really bad players that just keep dying to AoEs.

[Vahlnir]

I ran CLL on day... 2 or 3, when barely anyone knew what was going on.
We had about 17/18 people. (I'm sure about this because we only had one party of 8 up the top in the first boss, and we still killed it before the bottom group and had to fight off waves of magitek because of it)
Only a few people had done it before.
We still cleared and saved five prisoners.

Of my 5 or so subsequent runs, all of which were clears, though only one six-save, I don't think I ever had more than about 22 players.

I can only assume the issues that have arised are due to people being defeatist and giving up before even starting, and some really bad players that just keep dying to AoEs.

Everyone's experience is different. For me, out of every 5 or so runs...only 1 raid seems capable of making it past the first boss, and even then they probably won't clear. I got real lucky last night and managed to get mine, but I haven't been able to repeat that success prior to that run or since.