Crystal Tower - Development: 5+ months, shelf life: 3 months.
I think SE needs to rethink Crystal Tower's placement in progression.
The difficulty and loot were great for Labyrinth of the Ancients. It fulfilled a role in helping newcomers
catch up at a time when FFXIV was gaining a chunk of it's community.
but if they're going to continue unlocking restrictions on coil and tomestones with the following patch, it will continue
to prematurely cut the lifespan of the content.
Then there's the Echo buff, which fulfills the role of CT 10x times over and completely eliminates the gear checks.
Now you'd be hard pressed to find a CT group in party finder these days. However, there's copius amounts of groups
forming for first Coil, 8 months after it's release. And people are going to continue farming 2nd coil months after patch 2.4
Crystal Tower needs that same level of replayability.
Practical solution:
- Drop weathered i100 Armor upgradeable to i110
- Also Drop Oil/sands of time and unidentified Allagan pieces
- share same Weekly loot lock for both
That way even after the patch 2.4 people will still want to run the instance. but what CT2 really needs is a promotion in relevance: Make it the same level as coil.
Unlock soldiery in 2.4 and with echo buff, people will catch up. There's no need to have a less relevent raid under coil months after it's release. I fully support
making older content easier (e.g. Echo buff) to bridge the gap of new players and old, but I think it's a waste of resources to retroactively add weaker raids like CT.