How to Restore Confidence in FFXIV

[Deo14]

Island Sanctuary is one map, but as of 6.4 will have had 2-3 increases to the ranks (like Eureka had increases to the level). Additional progression systems involve the quests, the workshop system, gathering enough materials and buying all the rewards. There are rare animals to obtain for your farm (although not FF11 rare).

Last increase to rank (10-12) was more of the same, just another glam set and other one time rewards. Nice of you to mention quests, since Eureka had them and they even had real story, unlike IS. Island upgrades are nice, I wouldn't mind comparing it to elemental level progression.

V&C have rare minion drops and a mount.

Most of the regular content has rare minion drop and some mount as a reward, this isn't meaningful progression.

Both Island Sanctuary and V&C have special actions similar to logograms.

I have no clue what special actions of IS you mean, maybe that weird sprint which is bound as duty action, instead of putting it in place of an actual sprint? And V&C has five (5!) special actions which are bland and void of any creativity. Eureka has 50+ logos, many of which have very creative effects, like reflects and similar.

Obviously we get that with Hildibrand now and it's much quicker. Special effects on armor seem to have happened for the raid armor instead.

You could replace Hildibrand with just a Gerolt and much wouldn't change. It shouldn't be quicker, point of relic is (was) that there is some prestige in getting them. Now they're just alternate tome weapons. Those special effects are only on abyssos right now, I don't think there is some correlation.

You can sell V&C minions or crafter and gatherer materia from Island Sanctuary for a good profit too.

Rare drops are unreliable source of income. Materia from IS is timegated, so it's just a passive income. Unless you want to click on nodes 24/7, in which case, regular DoH/DoL activities are much more effective.

Technically you could probably do that with Eureka as well. When it was current, I did each area in just a few 3-hour sessions. If we split 9 hours up into 30 minutes a day, it would take 18 days, which is close enough. Let's include Variant dungeons, which have multiple routes and we will have 3 of, in place of the other 3 areas. There just isn't the social interaction involved.

You do IS once and you're done, same with V&C. You do Eureka relic from start to finish and you have 14 other relics to get. And after that, you can still make profit from just logos.

Also you did not account that Eureka takes much longer first time you do it because of leveling.