So how is everyone feeling about Occult Crescent now that it’s been a few days?

[itachi-otsutsuki]

It's ass. Aside from just a mind numbing,endless grind with no end goal. The Forked Tower is the only thing that needs any of the grind, and it is gatekept by the most idiotic and evil entry methods I've ever seen. (Literally WORSE than BA). On top of that it is also a higher difficulty, it's practically a savage raid. So how they can stack the entry prog on top of a savage raid is baffling and insane. Do one or the other, not both.

Positives are you get some glamor. The CE and Raid mechanics are actually good. The phantom job system is..okay. But all that is undone by the rigged incentive structure and asinine grinds in OC.

To further explain that, there is 'no point' in grinding silver,gold,jobs,gear unless you either 1. can make gil 2. can level jobs 3. can optimize the raid 4. are just a masochist who likes pointless grinding.

You can't do 1-3 basically so all that's left after that is you being a masochist. The motivation to continue doing any of it is just gone before you even get a single relic.

It is really a waste of potentially good content with some insanely stupid dev decisions ruining it.

[mallleable]

I'm really enjoying it, but they desperately need to fix FATE scaling being too low, treasure chest loot crashing markets, and making Forked Tower runs easier to coordinate groups for.

Some measured nitpicks that could be better is making Critical Engagement, and FATE spawn rate just a little bit slower. The pace is a bit too fast, and it doesn't feel like there is time to catch your breath, and constantly watching the map for spawns is not fun. Return needs a cooldown as well to slow things down a bit. And it feels like a liability if you play anything but a tank, but I don't know what could be done to fix this. Also Arcanaut gear, and upgrade mats could be a little cheaper.

[itachi-otsutsuki]

Honestly when I grind I don't even do the fates, they aren't worth the stress on top of having to RUN to CE's which is also a downgrade from Bozja.

[mallleable]

Also gotta say that regular FATEs should be as complex as FATEs in Occult Crescent.

[Kozh]

Or just do weekly M4 Cruiserweight normal for the x7 blade thing+500 green tome . weapon is 750 while phantom relic is 745 lol.

Relic is always mostly about glam as they're only BiS at the final stage/end of patch. And there's the worry that if you end up liking the later stage's look, you will have to do massive grind as you need to start from the very beginning.

[Harlequinsy]

Regarding new jobs and battles with them, they've maybe felt more fun than the basic game classes or dungeon running.

In normal dungeons, I might not notice what class others players have, as every class simply does damage, with different moves / animations, and the runs are generally easy.

On the new crescent isle, it might've been a bit refreshing and fun, when classes are more different or have more noticeable impact in fights. Perhaps more so, if fights are challenging (7-8 levels higher) and not too easy. For example, when Cannoneer can blind enemies, it's a noticeable and even tide changing effect. Same could be with TM using slow on enemies, and maybe in fewer cases, if Geomancer uses floating ability. I definitely had a thought, that would like to bring cannoneer to some other instances.

[XtremePrime]

I like it! I have lv.20 knowledge and 2 jobs mastered right now, doing mostly CEs and some FATEs! Chests add a lovely reason to explore around, the patterns for the boss get easier the more you do it and with so much revive accessibility in CEs, dying is not as punishing!

I have yet to try Forked Tower, but the limited revives and the "required jobs" and massive coordination required is giving me a little anxiety to go for it.

[itachi-otsutsuki]

I am a savage raider and ultimate raider and even I get anxiety for it. When even an ultimate raider feels anxious to join schedueled runs in discord servers cause you didn't get to prog earlier phases, even when they are relatively easy.

You only have 1 pull lol and you don't want to punish the entire group having to be timed out for atleast 1 hour (Most likely way more cause you need to re-scheduele the 48 premade) and having to pay another 3 ciphers.
It's all crazy. None of this would've been as much of a problem if they just let an alliance queue in normally.

[hunter2]

It's not perfect but it's really fun; I resubbed for it and I don't regret doing so.

My biggest gripe is there's no way to get any Haste. Even on Phantom Time Mage you only get a 10s buff every 120s. I want to play dumb crap like 1.0s GCD Monk or 1.5s GCD Summoner, this is the kind of content where I should be able to do so.

[Ryaze]

It was ok at first. Anything new has some level of excitement, but it quickly spoiled when CEs started popping off seemingly on their own. There was no downtime or pacing to the zone. CEs don't feel as special when there's no group effort or collaboration to get them going. It's not like Eureka where people were communicating with other light and full parties of people to spawn several NMs. I ignored most of the CEs so I could work on the quests and explore, taking my time with the variety of content offered. There's no agency in the zone. Nothing feels impactful.

Exploring the zone was ok, nothing new, but fairly fun nonetheless. A pretty zone, but still lacking substance. Mobs everywhere, but not to fight or interact with meaningfully, just to sneak around and ignore. So many odd decisions. You can't effectively farm gold solo, unless you're WAR + Cannoneer. You can't farm gold in a group unless the mobs are several levels higher than your group. Why? One of the better things about Bozja was being able to group up with people, and have them reap the benefits of you tackling a side objective while they worked on their own thing. Farming mechs to spawn CEs would give Clusters to the whole group whether they were helping or not, same for Fragments and Memories.

The jobs are a huge disappointment. I never even played FFV, but after hearing that OC would be FFV inspired I read a blogpost and was completely floored at how amazing and freeform the job system was. FFXIV's reinterpretation is of course nowhere close to my dream of FFV inspired content (which I kept it as, a dream and nothing more). Ever since I heard it would be FFV based I tried to keep my expectations rock bottom. "We'll get Bozja actions but in sets of actions tied to jobs", I told myself. And I still feel disappointed. So many of the phantom jobs feel so odd. Several jobs' kits are half useless because the actions literally do nothing outside of Fork Tower. Other jobs, like Oracle, have some interesting synergy with Starfall and Rejuvenation. But the problem is Starfall is available from lvl 1 and Rejuv is lvl 4. By the time you're able to use an actual interesting interaction with the kit, you're almost done leveling the job. Nearly every job is exactly like this, by the time a job feels fun you're done leveling the job and you're incentivized to move on to the next. Why couldn't they do something like FFV and let us carry a trait over from a maxed job to the next so we could have some semblance of our favorite job? Mix and match, make interesting combinations, weak but novel combinations, or broken as shit stuff. Which, already exists with 6/7 WAR + SGE gold farming btw. If SE refused to let us experiment for fear that we would break content, well, they failed. They kept the paint of FFV but left out everything that made it interesting (from what I've read). There was just so much potential to do nearly anything and instead they made a bunch of bland generic jobs that have very little interaction with either themselves, each other, the overworld, fates or the CEs. Sure, there's a few small things here and there. You can levitate over some ground AoEs and raidwides, but so what? They were either super easy mechanics or non-threatening infrequent raidwides anyway.

If SE isn't going to do something interesting, why do it at all?

To speak nothing of the continued horrible fate scaling, the entry barrier into Fork Tower and the lack of a more casual friendly end of zone content. CCL, DRN, and Dal was the best Bozja had to offer and everyone that I know that did the content loved it. Most of my online buddies that did the content eventually did DRS as well. It was a ton of fun. Why eschew the natural progression of the content? Why do we need that much high end content in this game? I'm a Savage raider myself with a couple of ults under my belt and more on the way (slowly). This game is hurting more for a lack of approachable casual/midcore battle content than it is high-end content.

The lack of duels or something as a replacement was also a huge disappointment. Sure there were complaints and some initial flaws but it was a ton of fun both for those who wanted to attempt and those who watched. I only ever killed Gabriel myself but I worked on Lyon quite a bit. Having a difficult goal to work on, whether you reach it or not is a ton of fun. I can understand not wanting to do the same thing twice, but then were is the "something else" instead?

I wanted OC to be an interesting and novel experience and it's anything but. Hopefully Fork Tower is interesting (when the discord groups are no longer 100% full up constantly). It's another 2 steps back (and so far no steps forward) for CBU3. Why do they keep doing this? Why can't they improve on past designs or god-forbid actually innovate?

To those saying "wait for 7.4X/7.5x" or "they'll add something good later down the line". I'm done with that. I wasn't around for the mess that was the original Diadem, but I was around for Eureka not having Logos actions until the expansion was half over. I was around for Bozja not having interesting actions and interactions until DRN (and for some jobs/roles Zadnor). This content is already ridiculously back-ended and when it doesn't even feel complete until the very end of the expansion, that's just unacceptable.

I'm not at all hopeful for whatever they do for the rest of the expansion, side content wise. And to that end I also have no hope for whatever they do in 8.0 either. I unintentionally banked on OC being the saving grace of the expansion for me, and now I'm let down and glancing towards the door. The Arcadian Raids are the most fun I've had since I started raiding in Omega back in SB, but everything else feels extremely lackluster and uninspired.

I'm just plain disappointed. I've been tired and burnt out before. But I don't think I've felt this disappointed with a game in a very long time.