Sincere Question...No Troll...Has SE Gone Full Regress?!?!

[TheRealMadruck]

I know I’m a few months late to the party. I just returned in November from a two-year hiatus, and after a random conversation with someone while FATE farming, I discovered something truly baffling: The geniuses at Square Enix actually brought back the Atma grind.

If this is the direction they are taking, then by every metric, I firmly believe Square Enix wants their game to fail. I cannot wrap my head around this design philosophy. Why would you take an incredibly unpopular system—one that is hated to this day—and reintroduce it as the core of a new expansion's content?

The "Z" Title is Rare for a Reason
There’s a reason you don’t see everyone rocking the "Z" title or carrying Zodiac Brave weapons. They are some of the rarest glams in the game because nobody wants to do the work. Outside of an exceptionally rare few who enjoy slamming their heads against a wall for the most monotonous, poorly designed grind in Final Fantasy XIV history, the community has always loathed Atma.

I have respect for the "mad lads" who do it, but I’m in complete awe that Yoshi-P and the devs thought this was the "right mind" for the game in 2026.

The Regression: From Bozja to This?
How do we go from Shadowbringers, which gave us amazing content like Bozja and Zadnor, back to 2.0-era mechanics? Bozja has a purpose even today. You can gain experience, level alternate jobs, and engage in a unique ecosystem.
Occult Crescent has zero purpose once you finish your glam weapon. After 7.5 and the launch of 8.0, it will be a almost a ghost town because the leveling system is restricted only to that zone. Why create content that has no viability outside of the current expansion? It’s a massive, uninspired waste of resources.

The "Shadowlands" of FFXIV
There is plenty of criticism regarding the story and voice acting this expansion, but from a purely design perspective, this is the FFXIV equivalent of WoW’s Shadowlands. If you’re in denial, go play Shadowlands for a week. You’ll see exactly why that expansion failed Blizzard, and how Dawntrail is following that same path of bad design. Square Enix needs to wake up and remember what made them popular. They had the largest player count in history by giving us content that worked during Shadowbringers for a reason!

So SE, stop wasting our time with archaic systems and dead-on-arrival zones. I welcome anyone to compare the player counts who still do Bozja/Zadnor versus this new content in when 8.0 drops. The results won't be pretty.

[Ankhira]

I'll agree Occult Crescent is a major step backwards after Bozja, I spent days in Bozja just doing fates, farming Dalriada and such, it was genuinely fun, but regarding the atma grind, people were so up in arms about Endwalker relics being just "Get tomes" they were very vocal that relics SHOULD be a grind, and SE now made the first step a grind and subsequent relics after the first one just tomes.

Is it the right path for relics? Not my place to say, there will always be those who are unhappy with any path, I just hope if we get a new field exploration in 8.0 it'll be better than Occult Crescent. But, I do not think they want their game to fail. I think as always with an MMO, it's just really hard to please everyone.

[TheRealMadruck]

I'll agree Occult Crescent is a major step backwards after Bozja, I spent days in Bozja just doing fates, farming Dalriada and such, it was genuinely fun, but regarding the atma grind, people were so up in arms about Endwalker relics being just "Get tomes" they were very vocal that relics SHOULD be a grind, and SE now made the first step a grind and subsequent relics after the first one just tomes.

Is it the right path for relics? Not my place to say, there will always be those who are unhappy with any path, I just hope if we get a new field exploration in 8.0 it'll be better than Occult Crescent. But, I do not think they want their game to fail. I think as always with an MMO, it's just really hard to please everyone.

I can appreciate your perspective...buts lets take a step back and look at this from a logic of game design...they know when they had the biggest numbers...they know what kept people playing. I agree that EDW relic was to much of a cake walk...yet seeing this going from a cake walk to a brick wall based on pure RNG is pure poison. I remember playing this game for over 13 years now, and the Heavensward and Shadowbringers were both not a cakewalk nor pure gambling. Even if you didn't get the items from Bojza as a example, at least you earned XP, boxes, mounts and things that had utility even to this day. Occult Crescent is the polar opposite of all that. But thank you for the reply and be well!

[VeyaAkemi]

The only flaw of the Demi-Atma step is that it devolves into tome grind after the initial quest.

[Ankhira]

I can appreciate your perspective...buts lets take a step back and look at this from a logic of game design...they know when they had the biggest numbers...they know what kept people playing. I agree that EDW relic was to much of a cake walk...yet seeing this going from a cake walk to a brick wall based on pure RNG is pure poison. I remember playing this game for over 13 years now, and the Heavensward and Shadowbringers were both not a cakewalk nor pure gambling. Even if you didn't get the items from Bojza as a example, at least you earned XP, boxes, mounts and things that had utility even to this day. Occult Crescent is the polar opposite of all that. But thank you for the reply and be well!

I think (purely speculation, though) that the graphical overhaul ended up taking far more resources than the team expected. That’s probably why so much of Dawntrail’s content leans toward battle content like raids and such. And while the battle content has actually been really good even if visually a bit too overwhelming at times, it is the easiest type of content for them to produce. Everything else feels a bit more barebones.

When you look at Occult Crescent, it’s missing all the special systems that Eureka or Bozja have. All it really has is Phantom Jobs which don't really do much. My guess is that the team simply didn’t have the time to build something on the scale of Bozja while also juggling everything else. Like, the engine updates, the new dye system, hat compatibility for two races, fixing the issues introduced by the character overhaul, redoing the entire coding for housing, plus a deep dungeon with new systems on top of it all. Bozja didn’t have to compete with any of that. I think it probably had a less busy team that could focus PURELY on Bozja which is probably why it turned out as well as it did.

As for the RNG in the Atma step, I didn't like it either. RNG never feels good personally. But I can kind of see why they did it. Maybe to stretch out the novelty of the new exploratory zone and make the content feel fuller than it actually is. That’s just speculation on my part though. I will say that Square Enix has a habit of taking feedback and swinging too far in one direction or the other. So I'm not sure what to say about that without knowing where they gather their feedback.

But yeah, that's just how I see it. I hope you stay well too!

[Underscore]

Nah, relic weapons are supposed to be grindy and hard to get. Zodiac Weapons, at least in the current nerfed state of the grind, are the best relic weapons in the game. Maybe it was bad on release, but now? It's a model that should be emulated.

I was disappointed with Occult Crescent and think the acquisition of demi-Atma there could've been handled better, but there's nothing inherently wrong with Atma itself.

[TheRealMadruck]

Nah, relic weapons are supposed to be grindy and hard to get. Zodiac Weapons, at least in the current nerfed state of the grind, are the best relic weapons in the game. Maybe it was bad on release, but now? It's a model that should be emulated.

I was disappointed with Occult Crescent and think the acquisition of demi-Atma there could've been handled better, but there's nothing inherently wrong with Atma itself.

Then we will have to respectfully disagree. I own every Shadowbringers weapon as I know fully the grind to get these weapons. If I had to chose doing Shadowbringers Relic grind again or the Zodiac Brave, I will chose SHB any day of the week. Both required a grind and commitment, yet I am sorry, the Zodiac Brave weapons should never be emulated again...your opinion I promise is a extreme exception to the general rule! Thank you for the reply.

[Ankhira]

Nah, relic weapons are supposed to be grindy and hard to get. Zodiac Weapons, at least in the current nerfed state of the grind, are the best relic weapons in the game. Maybe it was bad on release, but now? It's a model that should be emulated.

I was disappointed with Occult Crescent and think the acquisition of demi-Atma there could've been handled better, but there's nothing inherently wrong with Atma itself.

I disagree tbh. Relics have never been prestige or mechanically difficult to get. They’ve always been something anyone can finish with enough patience. Shadowbringers wasn’t hard just time‑consuming. Same for Stormblood and Heavensward. I recently finished my first ARR relic and yeah, it’s a massive grind, but it was just long.

I don’t think going back to something like the old Atma grind works in today’s gaming. Personally, I think Shadowbringers struck the best balance. You could grind it out in Bozja or do it through other content, so people could choose the path they liked. It took time, had a bit of RNG, but it was fun and flexible. The problem with Atma in DT is that seeing someone finish their relic while you’re still stuck needing ten more doesn’t feel like "wow, they earned that." It just feels like "wow, they got lucky." RNG doesn’t create prestige, it creates frustration. When your progress is gated by luck instead of effort, it stops being satisfying.

[PercibelTheren]

Nah, relic weapons are supposed to be grindy and hard to get. Zodiac Weapons, at least in the current nerfed state of the grind, are the best relic weapons in the game. Maybe it was bad on release, but now? It's a model that should be emulated.

I was disappointed with Occult Crescent and think the acquisition of demi-Atma there could've been handled better, but there's nothing inherently wrong with Atma itself.

Relics aren't hard to get. It's just a massive grind and I seriously wonder where this "it's supposed to be that way" attitude comes from.

MMOs are a dying genre and they need to learn that most of their players are in their late twenties and older, with jobs and/or families. Most of us can't grind the game 6 hours a day like we used to when we were teenagers with nothing but time.

The way Endwalker did it was dumb but the massive grind isn't great, either. Surely, some kind of happy medium is possible without them wildly swinging between "no effort" and "incredibly time consuming and RNG dependent".

That being said, my biggest problem with OC is that it feels pointless. Phantom jobs don't add anything fun. Mindlessly grinding basic mobs is soulcrushing. The FATEs are...alright, I guess? But the insane rush from one to the other before it dies almost instantly is also not amazing. Forked Tower being Savage difficulty and needing to be organized through Discord means it's dead content. And, worst of all, you can't even level in there.

The thing I liked the most about Bozja was that I always felt like I was progressing towards something. I was leveling up my rank, gaining memories, leveling my alt jobs. OC took the worst aspects of Eureka and Bozja and combined them.

[VeyaAkemi]

Relics aren't hard to get. It's just a massive grind

I seen this point be brought up a lot, and "hard" is perhaps the wrong word, but "intensive", it is a lengthy grind, and one that requires some commitment to complete, something that may not be for everyone, and every relic barring the EW ones require a lenghty grind to get, it has always been that way, and that's why people say it is "supposed" to be that way, and that grind also becomes an experience, a journey, something you don't necessarily need to do at once, but you can slowly chip away at over the course of months, I can even agree that the RNG behind the Demi Atmas is a mistake, it's hard to "chip away" at something that comes in 5.5% progress chunks that are extremely erratic in their nature, but not the intensity associated with it.