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

[ForsakenRoe]

There's some real headscratcher design decisions IMO. The biggest one that comes to mind is the Atmas. I have 6 of one colour left over, due to RNG being a bastard to me. They're useless, now that I've done the first step of the Relic grind. Now, I have to hand in a new item which, surprise, costs 500 tomes (welcome back, EW).

Instead of the current '3 of each Atma, then 1500 tomes of Arcanite', why couldn't it have been '2 of each Atma to empower Gerolt's hammer, then 1 of each Atma per Relic you want to make'? By making the price of each Atma from the vendor 250 tomes, you'd still retain the 1500 tome price per Relic, but you'd be able to use duplicates you got while farming for the first step for something (that being, more relics). Additionally, you'd be able to use your tomes to purchase Atmas you have less of, making a 'bad luck protection' of sorts against the RNG trying to screw with your Atma drop ratios.

But wait! What if these Atmas were also purchaseable via Bicolor Gemstones, so that even farming outside of OC, you'd have a 'bad luck protection' system of sorts? This would allow for players to have the option to work on getting multiple relics completed, AND levelling alternate jobs to 100 (potentially being able to kit them out with a brand new relic the moment they hit level cap)

But wait! There's 6 Atma types, which correlate to the 6 zones of Dawntrail, right? But hear me out, there's something else in the game that there's 6 of: Expansions! ARR, HW, SB, SHB, EW, DT. So instead of doing 'everyone farms in these latest 6 zones (or OC)', we could have instead had each type of Atma be linked to each of the Expansions (ie: the light blue one comes from HW, the red one comes from SB, the purple one from SHB, etc). This would drive activity in FATEs across the entire game, from level 1 to 100. This would also be a boon to some players, who would be working on secondary objectives, such as working on an ARR/HW relic (which have some FATE related steps each), levelling a new Job from even lower levels, or even helping players finish working on the 'Shared FATE' systems of SHB/EW (if they didn't already do them while they were current, maybe they're a newer player IDK).


As for the OC itself, I am genuinely impressed, that SE has now had ~10 years since the planning phase of HW to work out a way to implement a Chemist into this game. As far as I've heard it told, AST was originally meant to be Chemist, and SGE was another crack at it, with both the healers we now have being the results of 'well we tried and couldn't work it out in time'. And now that we finally have a Chemist, in a side content where balance need not be respected (so the ideas can be as zany as we like), we got... 'Benediction, but it costs a 10k item per use', 'Manafont, but it costs a 10k item per use', and 'Benediction AND Manafont at the same time, but the item costs 300k now'. Oh and an instantcast Res on a 5s CD. What? Is this the best that they could come up with, after all this time? Even the FFTA/TA2 rendition of the Job has more actions it can use. Where's the 'mix an effect that causes all of your hits to deal 99999 exactly, for 15s' raidbuff? Where's the 'instantly generates a bar of LB' Mix?

In fact, given that we have 'a Job that thrives in the open world, and progresses by fighting different monsters and learning their abilities', and OC is 'a zone full of different monsters, and abilities that a Job could hypothetically learn from them', and it's a side content where we have Phantom Jobs that can literally oneshot monsters with their abilities (or reduce damage taken by 90%), and Dawntrail takes place on the continent that the Job in question originates from... Why on earth is BLU not available as a Phantom Job? The absolute 'most obvious contender to be on the Phantom Job roster' and it just... isn't? But somehow, Berserker made the cut? Berserker, the Job known for 'you autoattack, but harder' and nothing else?

I have to wonder, if the purpose of the side content is to be able to make fun crazy effects with no regards for inter-Job balance, why did they play it so safe with some of these Phantom Jobs? Chemist feels like it was designed, first and foremost, to be the solution to the 'Resurrection Restriction' in Forked Tower (with little regard given to the rest of the kit), Ranger feels like it's there as the solution to 'how to disarm traps in the Forked Tower safely' (with Thief being there only as the 'trap detector'), etc.

The tinfoil hat theory would be 'SE purposely made these job designs bland/sterile so that people would stop asking for them to be real jobs', because after seeing what 10 years of trying to make a functional Chemist has wrought... Yeh, if that's what SE's offering, they can keep it thanks. I'd argue that I made a better Chemist, accidentally, while trying to make a fan-made rework to the SGE kit.

Please be more Creative, Business Unit III, for the next installment