Cosmic Exploration - Great for DoH, Stressful and Unpleasant for DoL

[Supersnow845]

I was having a very hard time progressing through tool upgrades as a DoL until I radically changed my approach. On my experience, Stellar Missions with high RNG (such as hitting Gatherer's Boon, which wasn't working very well for me even with 70% chance) to get you to higher ratings are a waste of time and GP. Instead, it is the mission I initially despised that has been the most reliable and helpful at the end of the day: the Aetherial Reduction/Aethersand one. There's a collectability bonus for having enough Gathering and you can easily hit Gold with just a couple of nodes using the role action and ~700 GP alone (or less if you're lucky).

Of course, you'll still have to complete other Stellar Missions in between until it becomes available again. But you consistently get a lot more Analysis Exp this way than focusing on missions that spend all your GP and can barely get you to Silver unless you're extremely lucky. In general, my impression is that the missions are lacking balance and haven't been thoroughly tested (as many have already mentioned). It's by far the most buggy state a new FFXIV content has launched with — being reward wrong grades during missions, Spongoi not disappearing after being broken during Mech Ops and other stuff. It's not all bad, but I do think there's a lot of room for improvement and I hope the next planets are more interesting.

There might be a breakpoint you are just missing on the gatherers boon one. I am mid tier pentamelded (mostly using materia from island sanctuary so no 11’s or 12’s) and for me all gatherer boon missions when they spawn 6 nodes 2 will be 100% if I use pioneers gift 1+2 and the other 4 will be 90% if I use pioneers gift 1+2. If you use nophica’s/nald’thal’s tidings on the 2 that are 100% chances then you basically gold that mission 100% of the time even with bad luck on the 90%

If you are only getting 70% you may just be missing a breakpoint you may be able to hit easily with really cheap food and those missions don’t need a lot of GP so if you use food to fall over the breakpoint line with low GP it shouldn’t negatively affect you