Chocobo companion timer.

[Theodric]

As an aside, it's always fascinating to me that despite the development team's own habit of adding quality of life changes with each new content patch there's always a handful of posters quick to shoot down suggestions based around quality of life features.

I generally like to have my chocobo companion out when I'm doing a new batch of MSQ's, doing FATE's, participating in hunts and when tackling treasure maps.

It's not a huge pain to grab some gysahl greens from a vendor, or to use them to summon our chocobo companion. With that said, it isn't particularly thrilling and could easily be streamlined to free up an inventory slot by reducing the mechanic to a simple summon and withdraw feature that is tied solely to action commands rather than an item.

If more people get into the habit of using their chocobo companions maybe it could even lead to the open world experience being a little bolder.

[Raikai]

It's not a huge pain to grab some gysahl greens from a vendor, or to use them to summon our chocobo companion. With that said, it isn't particularly thrilling and could easily be streamlined to free up an inventory slot by reducing the mechanic to a simple summon and withdraw feature that is tied solely to action commands rather than an item.

That's the thing... when a certain design ends up being thoughtless, or unthrilling as you put, then it's stale, at least is how I perceive.

There's a similar example to that: Back a while ago, a lot of healers got mad with the removal of Protect... But the spell itself (the latest iteration, at least) bore little to no thought or player agency. It was a long duration buff, zero cost to maintain, brought by every healer... When a maintenance buff brings zero layers of complexity to it (much like Ghysal Greens are as a summoning device), that is a strong candidate to be streamlined.

In Protect's case it meant 1 free slot in the action bar... In the Green's case, yeah, it is 1 free slot in your inventory, which can go a long way, depending on the player.

[GrumbleBeard]

Pretty sure with chocobo's making things more difficult when it comes to things like hunts or congested areas in general, the last thing they want is to have everyone have theirs out indefinitely. It's such a none issue to get the item for them for when you want to use them, not everything needs to be streamlined to death in some cases.

[Artemiz]

I can see the OP's point, greens do seem a bit pointless at this point and pretty much just act as inventory -1. I have my chocobo out 24/7 when I'm in the open world and as greens stack to 999 and cost pennies it just seems like a waste of an inventory slot. I certainly wouldn't miss them if it just became an action instead of an item.

[Nabril]

Well you don't expect your chocobo to fight with you without getting anything to eat do you?

I think that since my character never ever eats and is able to fight, my chocobo should be able to do the same.

After all, do you feed all of your mounts that fly you around? Obviously there's a line somewhere.
Now that I think about it, I never feed my 5 retainers either... or my housing merchants... or my fish.

Should feeding be added for everything? Maybe...

Though we should probably just call it what it is- a tax on the chocobo just like crystals are a tax on crafting.

[Nabril]

If I had to hazard a guess, I would say it's deliberate to actually disuade you from having your chocobo out at all times - they don't want you just spamming open-world content over and over again for hours on end with your chocobo, but actually varying what you do (e.g do a few FATEs, then move onto a dungeon or two, then maybe work on some sidequests or something similar) - which is why you cannot take your chocobo into instanced content. Your chocobo companion is simply meant to be a help in certain open-world situations (such as open-world solo fights or FATEs), but not as a crutch to over-rely on.

Really, it's not that hard to simply buy a stack of gysahl greens from the many vendors, then map it to your pet hotbar and simply hit the icon when the chocobo's timer gets low, which again is probably what SE were thinking when they designed the system. It doesn't need to be even more simplified than it already is.

How does it dissuade anyone? The greens are almost free. I could buy over 145,000 hours of chocobo time with my current gil stash. Making money is so easy now that they may as well be free.

My chocobo is level 20 so he has max skills in everything. This makes him a very valuable companion that I can always have at my side.
It doesn't matter what my needs are. Glen can Tank, Heal, or DPS really well which makes him indispensable.

[ItMe]

Though we should probably just call it what it is- a tax on the chocobo just like crystals are a tax on crafting.

Yeah, that's a good summation of it.
Though the tax def made more sense back when the game was experimenting more with open world content.

[Denzyl]

Is there a point to this being a thing anymore? I question to reasoning of a companion still being locked to being a 30 minute summon. I mean you can make the argument of greens being some kind of gil sync.....but they cost next to nothing so outside of that and maybe being a coding issue I can't understand why its still a thing.

Apart from I like the idea of feeding my Chocobo, I feel you can think of it as an expense, i.e. the same as the cost of repairing your Armour and Weapons.

So if you still want an alternative idea then you could combining the ideas above and instead of a timer, your Chocobo needs to eat more food after a long battle

Personally I'd prefer a more WoW hunter concept, can keep your pet out indefinitely but feeding them improves their mood and therefore their stats. Add some food to each zone that the birb can eat, some generic some potent. I have some fond memories taking care of my pet like that. Although if I recall correctly WoW killed pet food stuff, which imo is kind of sad.

If you do the Vath Beastmen Quests. You can buy Food that helps to improve your Chocobo

• Mimett Gourd - Enhances Healing
• Pahsana Fruit - Enhances Emnity
• Sylkis Bud - Attack Power Boost
• Tantalplant - Increase Chocobo HP

[SilverObi]

This suggestion/complaint sorta reminds me of the problem some folks had with Epona having a "carrot meter" in the older LoZ games. Yes there's no REAL reason to restrict the speed boost just as there's no REAL reason to limit how long we can keep our birds out, but it's a mechanic that can help some other people get a slight sense of immersion (yes the horse/chocobo isn't real and doesn't NEED rest/food but having that limitation mimics a real world thing) basically along with whatever potential backend stuff or gilsink justification. At least that's how I see it.

[Shougun]

Apart from I like the idea of feeding my Chocobo, I feel you can think of it as an expense, i.e. the same as the cost of repairing your Armour and Weapons.

So if you still want an alternative idea then you could combining the ideas above and instead of a timer, your Chocobo needs to eat more food after a long battle


If you do the Vath Beastmen Quests. You can buy Food that helps to improve your Chocobo

• Mimett Gourd - Enhances Healing
• Pahsana Fruit - Enhances Emnity
• Sylkis Bud - Attack Power Boost
• Tantalplant - Increase Chocobo HP

You can grow em too . When I said that I was thinking on the WoW hunter side of things, where you might go get some stuff in said zone - adding a living on the land sort of vibe. Certainly if the system went to indefinite like WoW, then these other foods would translate into that position of neat food to feed them - but wasn't quite what I meant in the 'of the land's vibe. My boco favors the sylkis

With an extra note being that WoW removed a lot of the depth from their food system, so speaking from memory / history at some level lol.

This suggestion/complaint sorta reminds me of the problem some folks had with Epona having a "carrot meter" in the older LoZ games. Yes there's no REAL reason to restrict the speed boost just as there's no REAL reason to limit how long we can keep our birds out, but it's a mechanic that can help some other people get a slight sense of immersion (yes the horse/chocobo isn't real and doesn't NEED rest/food but having that limitation mimics a real world thing) basically along with whatever potential backend stuff or gilsink justification. At least that's how I see it.

The response then would be couldn't there be a more immersive system if that was it's purpose? The carrots personally I never found annoying and do fine immersive- the timer on my bird is annoying and doesn't feel immersive either (imo). Why wouldn't I summon my bird with a whistle lol? I shake the greens like cows or pigs being called in.

Although I would agree that sometimes immersion just happens to have some annoyances (like epona can't infinite sprint, but that adds some gameplay mechanics and immersion), I guess we might just differ on that I don't think the chocobo system is a good example of immersion.