Occult crescent feels safe and mid

[Tahmamo]

Agreed, SE needs to add a BLP (Bad Luck Protection) bar like that to this step and the Atma and Luminous Crystal phases just to make sure progression is eventually guaranteed. When I bring this up with my static my MT says, "No, guaranteed drops leads to optimizations, and that leads to the content dieing in a month!" as if people won't be optimizing this already.

[Rithy255]

So far phantom jobs are underwhelming, it's nice to have more then just two added actions though.

I wish freelancer was able to take abilities/passives from your fully levelled phantom jobs so you could creatively mix your own build

Though im going off the wiki and what ive played so far so maybe it gets better.

[Misutoraru]

I did a few CEs and racked up 9 vuln stacks on a PLD+Knight and I took such little damage (unmitigated) that I could virtually handle another 10 or 20 stacks most likely. Even for a tank, 9 vulns is usually the breaking point but it's not in Occult.

That strange, I was tanking a CE with WAR (using dps phantom job), the tank buster hit so hard popping only 1 def skill still take half my HP bar without any vulnerability. Popping 2 def CD to only reduce it to 1/3 of my HP taken away.
On a side noteatt one point rack up 4 stacks vulns and the mechanic took half my full HP bar

[MoofiaBossVal]

Repackaging/presenting the logograms/lost actions as "subjobs" makes them a little more exciting. It is neat that you can be a regular Samurai job main and whip out a flute and use regular Bard ability VFX. The flashiness of the abilities seems to vary. The level 1 Monk gap closer is kind of eh.

I am happy that you now have to physically run to the Critical Engagement location and be inside when the arena walls go up. I was asking for this after Bozja, and it makes the experience more coherent.

FATEs are also sparse and uncommon, so instead of just zerging FATEs to level up like in Bozja, it seems like the intended core gameplay loop is farming regular mobs to level up your knowledge level and Phantom Jobs. A FF11-esque party level sync system has been added, and EXPing by yourself seems to be very slow. It also appears that the current Knowledge level cap is 20, but mob levels go up to level 28, so it seems like you are intended to level up in a party fighting the highest level monsters you can. I find this preferable to solo FATE zergs. However, the moment-to-moment combat gameplay of FF14 is that you need to pressing an ability every second, so you do not have time to shoot the breeze in chat like you can while exp farming in FF11.

The perpetual war theming of the field operation is gone. We are once again back to being random adventures running around an overgrown island fighting random monsters, which fits better for content that you are supposed to be spending hundreds of hours in for years after it has released. It felt odd to return to Bozja last year to work on some more relics and spending dozens of hours fighting a war that canonically ended 5 years ago, and also to be doing all of these military operations that never actually cause the war on the map to end like in a GW2 meta event where you finally push all of the way to the evil dragon's citadel and have fully conquered the map and then the instances and closes and resets in 20 minutes.

I am disappointed that currently the first map looks to be another generic overgrown green island, which we have had before with the La Noscea maps in the base game of FF14 and the first map of Eureka, Anemos. I wish that the map was visually more novel. Most new zones that gets added in WoW or GW2 usually looks pretty novel and unlike what had come before, whereas FF14's new zones tend to feel more mundane and often like rehashes. It also does not help that Nym, Mhach, and Amdapor assets are copypasted here.

The magic pots that lead you to the treasure chests (like the bunnies in Eureka) only give you some materia and prisms. Not worth the time and effort.

The story so far has been so-so. The premise is a little interesting in that you are trying to chart a shorter straight line path from Limsa to Tuliyolal, which historical has been so treacherous that every ship that tried never returned, so currently all mercantile traffic has to go through a detour to the South. The ship finds an island and then gets magically sucked in and trapped there, and you find a couple shipwrecks of people who tried to leave. However, once you are actually on the island, the story becomes a little boring - mainly because you are spending hours running around doing field ops stuff, with very little tension in the few cutscenes that happen.

[MitsukiKimura]

From my experience playing roughly 9-10 hours today on patch release the drop rate for the atma stones is really low it feels intentional but I assume this is just to keep people grinding when playing a MMO. I think I did around 20 fates on one map for a blue atma stone and not even 1 drop so I think it's around 5% chance if I had to guess. I kind of wished you could mix different phantom jobs skills as you leveled different ones but you can only use one phantom job skills which is a bummer. I missed experimenting back in Eureka the logograms felt better in my experience.

[Arkhyna]

>lower the difficulty : complains
>revert back to the gud ol' grind : complains

the duality of the gcbtw

[Misutoraru]

>lower the difficulty : complains
>revert back to the gud ol' grind : complains

the duality of the gcbtw

I think we have two major groups of players
One with many free time could grind from morning to late night in weekdays

The other barely hour/s to play weekday and some hours to grind in weekends

This time SE please the former, may be next expansion SE will try to please the latter

[Kaurhz]

>lower the difficulty : complains
>revert back to the gud ol' grind : complains

the duality of the gcbtw

This is because not all grinds are equal.

Some grinds are grinds just purely by being an RNG-fest, e.g., you can spend an entire evening on something, following the exact method needed, to have made zero progress whatsoever. Conversely you could also spend an entire evening and make amazing progress. It's purely random.

Some grinds are grinds by virtue of items required, number of steps to complete with guaranteed item or reward at the end, or just by pure slow and steady progress. Regardless of it though you're always going to be at a progress gain at the end of that session.

Whilst both types of grinds may consume the same amount of time, e.g., average time taken to get reward. How you got there, and how satisfying it was, is going to differ massively. This is why you're having the 'duality'. Personally for me I would find a grind far more enjoyable when it is slow and steady progress-based, versus an equal or less grind that is just RNG-based.

[BokoToloko]

I think we have two major groups of players
One with many free time could grind from morning to late night in weekdays

The other barely hour/s to play weekday and some hours to grind in weekends

This time SE please the former, may be next expansion SE will try to please the latter

Society Quests, Mandervillous relics, DoH/DoL stuff, Island Sanctuary, V&C Dungeons. Even Raid and Trials farm could easily fall in that category. Even Shared Fates don't take really that long.

There has always been plenty of casual grinds. If anything, casual grinds do seem to tend to get the bigger appeal when about the short life expentancy of the game's contents (which sounds exactly the opposite of what people who like long grinds want). Let those who like running the treadmill have their (optional btw) piece of the cake instead of pushing away other people's niche until they're back to only getting obscure achievements that come from even more repetitive tasks than Occult Crescent is.


And regarding Phantom Job's deal... Yeah, that's about as I expected. Some phantom actions seem interesting to use but, without the chance to customize the job actions, it's bound to get stale. But there is always the possibility that they bring that possibility with Phantom Mimic, though it would've been better by now, as it would further incentivize leveling up as many PJ's as possible.

[DynnDiablos]

I expect this content to die off quickly. The gear/rewards aren't all that great. The relic grind is absolutely abysmal due to the low low drop rate of atmas. Most casual players (like me) may dip in and out from to time to time, but this really seems like content designed for the weekday no-life players who are gonna lose themselves in it 7-10 hours per day.

I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes Discord-only content within a month or two. Good luck with getting full raids.