Cosmic exploration and Occult crescent

[CNitsah]

Lately, I've been doing some Cosmic Exploration. I'm not a craft oriented player, but I like gathering enough so I choose to concentratre on those 3 relics. And I must say... I'm surprised, because everything I complain about fighters relics has been done mostly right with crafting relics. For more context, I'm part of the people that think the DT relics are a failure, and still failed to capture what older relics meant and why it was pleasant to farm them... And surprisingly, the tools relics did procure that feeling.

I can't help to wonder why the fighters relics, which are relics for the core gameplay of the game, got done so dirty compared to the crafters and gatherers ones.

First of all, there is the fact that tools relics are still prestige weapons : getting one is still an accomplishment that means something, and that ask you to work for it (I'll never shut up about the importance of long term objectives in MMO, even in XIV that doesn't want to be too time consumming : it's important to give players that want to spend more time in the game to have things to do, even if that means most players won't do that). Relics are 100% linked to the relic zone, while still giving you a long term objective. We don't have the full cosmic exploration yet, but from where we are, we can guess that we'll need 15 to 20 hours to get a full relic, which is fine, especially with the bonus making the subsequent one faster.

Then there is the kind of grind it propose : Every activity you do makes you progress toward your objective. If you achieve the activity, you get points. RNG is still there, but the whole progression is not based on it. Most of the time, the rng will determine if you'll get silver or gold. Sure it will sometimes make you fail your activity (especially with fishing), but you'll have a constant feeling of progress. RNG has it's place in a mmo, for rare mount drops or thing like that, but farm based on RNG (the atma one) are awful. If you have a bad RNG, you'll just get frustrated and it's not gonna be fun.

The whole thing about rng is to know when to use it. Use it to determine the bonus of completion, or for a one time drop, and it's fine. Use it for a repetitive activity, and it gets frustrating. The worst use of RNG is still the timeworn artifacts in PotD : not only did we have an awful rng farm, but that farm was in a content that was mostly dead : that brought the worst of both word : not only it took forever to enter, but after that, you weren't even garanteed one item, which made whole thing look like a huge waste of time.

But cosmic exploration, I feel like RNG has been done right. You'll sometimes have fail an activity because of it, but most of the time, you'll still get some progression despite it.

Now the second place where things have been done right is the pacing. Granted, the nature of craft and gathering helped a lot. But overall, we are not in this constant rush, which is nice. You can take your time, have some off time where you can discuss with other. I always felt that the charm of exploration zones came from the other people you met and spend a little bit of time to work together for a similar objective. Peers that like you engaged in this time consumming activity, and more than the gameplay itself, it was those people that brought variety to those activities. This might be where Cosmic exploration has some room to grow, because doing thing alongside each other is different from doing things together. Overall, I feel SE limited communication to a minimum, and to me, they should stop that. The infernal rhythm of OC is part of that. Eureka and Bozja both had their down time, which made the whole thing breathe. That's what cosmic exploration has, and OC doesn't, even if it's mostly due to the kind of content it is.

So I wish they will take inspiration from the Cosmic exploration for the next relics. I don't know why they don't feel everyone has to have the relics with tools, but they clearly don't bother with that, while it seem to be important with fighter relics. Maybe it's because the fighting is the core gameplay of the game, but this lead to this weird situation where it feels like the side content get more care than the core content. Cosmic exploration relics feels far more satisfying than normal relics.

Even worse, exploration zone are bad for farming relics, and this was already the case during ShB. Bozja/Zadnor options was systematically the worst choice. The content linked to the relic feels like the secondary option to get thing done. 7.4 one time step still suffer from that. I mean you need to do 240 CE to get all the items needed. That's 115k of OC xp, while the total needed to get the current 15 phantom jobs to max lvl is 237k. And that's considering you don't do ANY fate between the CE. Completing a CE takes between 5 and 7 min in average, and it takes nearly as much time for another to spawn. The time needed to complete that objective just has been designed to ignore completely the content it linked to.

In the meantime, Cosmic exploration do the things exactly how a lot of us have been asking the relics to be. So please, take inspiration from that for the future, it can be tweaked, it can be upgraded, but please take the general design of progression of tools relics for weapons relics.

[Supersnow845]

The combat relics should adopt the cosmic relic system of “the more you do the easier each subsequent relic becomes” rather than every one after the first being a glorified tomestone weapon

IDK maybe it’s just me but when I see a zeta relic or even a physeos relic I go “wow that person did some grinding” even if they massively nerfed the actual grind. When I see a current DT relic I just assume “oh that’s probably your 9th relic you bought with tomestones after doing the (not long) grind once

[Reginald_Cain]

The tomestone grind wouldn't be so annoying if i wasn't forced to run the same two expert dungeons to farm them efficiently. The alliance raid tome rewards are a complete joke and need a massive increase. Same with normal mode trials and extreme trials. Give us some diversity in how we can tome farm square!

[CCheshire]

I like having all the options for the DT relic tho and I don't think I've ever thought I'm impressed with X relic even on current patch because they've always been the casual path to gear everyone up who don't do high-end content. It's not really challenging content overall, and it's just very repetitive and time-consuming task, and no one I've ever met has actually wanted to farm 10k paste for each weapon instead of tomes.

Also, I'm tired of EXDR since I'd been doing Mistwake for 80+ for the glam pieces that I gave up on them so now I only do Capped and Leveling once a day too. Then I like that we can even do DT fates since I'm still working on my Shared Fates progress and even PT got a bit more active since we can get paste from them too. The OC is what it is as forever since people still join to get demitatmas and the few others are still there to farm for gil or to do FT1.

[Aidorouge]

There should be alternate paths for relics, yes, but I'm not going to act like one grind is more "impressive" than another because its still all grinding in the end. It still takes tons of poetics to make even ARR and HW relics, and light-farming still sends one into the same places we'd be getting in roulettes anyway. Farming junk in Eureka and Bozja isn't much different than farming for tomestones, one is just "outdoorsy" instead of being endless hallways, and the currency you need thousands of goes into your inventory instead of its own tab.

People really do over-inflate the "effort" of earning these things, when most of them are "do something else in another monitor" content depending on which step you're on with only a few steps requiring you to wake up and pay attention.

[Pricia]

I'm REALLY not sure what people want from relics. The steps are not so different from HW or SHB relics, it's just grinding. When there was a tomestone grind, which, by the way, by default lets you pick the activities you want to grind them, people complained too.

I guess people will always complain no matter how.

Grinding Cosmic tool is mindless and boring, woohoo if we get the choice of 12 different missions to do them, when roulettes are more varied than that (well, except expert).

[Valence]

The combat relics should adopt the cosmic relic system of “the more you do the easier each subsequent relic becomes” rather than every one after the first being a glorified tomestone weapon

Only if the content required is actually fun because if it's just to emulate CE that literally becomes stale after the first area, idk about that.

[Daralii]

I'm REALLY not sure what people want from relics. The steps are not so different from HW or SHB relics, it's just grinding. When there was a tomestone grind, which, by the way, by default lets you pick the activities you want to grind them, people complained too.

I guess people will always complain no matter how.

Grinding Cosmic tool is mindless and boring, woohoo if we get the choice of 12 different missions to do them, when roulettes are more varied than that (well, except expert).

Some people want something on par with pre-nerf Zetas, some people want something on par with Mandervillous or even easier, and some people want any number of points in between. It's not rocket surgery, and someone always complaining because everyone wants different things isn't a groundbreaking conclusion.

[ServerCollaps]

The tomestone grind wouldn't be so annoying if i wasn't forced to run the same two expert dungeons to farm them efficiently. The alliance raid tome rewards are a complete joke and need a massive increase. Same with normal mode trials and extreme trials. Give us some diversity in how we can tome farm square!

you can get tomes by playing pvp, doing treasure maps, do hunts, roulettes, ex trial farm, farm OC...almost everything gives tomes with an okay-ish rate

[Kaurhz]

The combat relics should adopt the cosmic relic system of “the more you do the easier each subsequent relic becomes” rather than every one after the first being a glorified tomestone weapon

IDK maybe it’s just me but when I see a zeta relic or even a physeos relic I go “wow that person did some grinding” even if they massively nerfed the actual grind. When I see a current DT relic I just assume “oh that’s probably your 9th relic you bought with tomestones after doing the (not long) grind once

This would have been the best choice IMO... You retain the value, and you don't devalue subsequent relics too much as you would actually have to go out of your way to collect them.

I do agree on the second point... They aren't notorious grinds in the modern days... But if someone comes around with multiple or all Zeta, Physeos or Resistance relics, you know they worked for them.. That they did a solid amount of grinding... I view the Phantom weapons as only being marginally better than Manderville.. But after you've done that initial step they are just... Glorified tomestone weapons...

I can't actually motivate myself to collect them all this expansion, for the simple fact that in the next expansion they will be Poetic weapons. . . Which is kind of ironic because I would in theory be the target audience (being a collector myself), yet it's only pushing me away because there's no justifiable reason to bother going out of my way to do hunts.