What Diadem should have been.

[Tracewood]

Diadem should be a tier of content that's optional aside from savage raid. Right now if you want to get the max gear you have to grind tomes and 24 man raids AND/OR alex savage.

EDIT: Completely retracted.

UPDATE: So... tried showing my idea on reddit, shot down with each post. People really don't like the idea of random stats over materia even though the gear would be predetermined before adding the randomize bonuses so I need to take that into consideration. Though you can't have gear be instant gratification in an MMO or minimal work done otherwise content will be mowed over in a few days (hours even) and players will complain content was too easy and move away from it leaving other players in the dust.

At the risk of using unpopular opinion, I want to simply suggest the dev team borrow some ideas from XI's Abyssea. (Yes, I can already hear the booing, hahaha!)

Abyssea more or less was an open world instance, meaning you could enter solo or go as a pre-made so you can share time in there. Only there won't be a way to extend your time, once you exit you have to wait until a couple RL hours to pass to re-enter. Perfect for casuals and reasonable for even the hardcore players. You can still keep the whole FC workshop mechanic if you will, though from my experience I apparently know more FCs that have a house but don't have an airship at least give the airship users a free pass while those without will have to purchase a key item to enter. Max time for Diadem should be 180 minutes, if you want you could name one of the quests to reunlock this "A Three Hour Tour" as a reference to an old show named "Gilligan's Island".

Guess I can talk about loot:
Now for the gear, they can use a similar loot system to that of alexander where you trade in items for a piece of gear. Abyssea used seals that correspond to a certain gear piece, if I recall it's 8-10. Since there is a shorter lockout compared to savage raids and 24 man raids, it would be feasible to have more items to turn in for a piece of gear. Players will be competing with each other and not sure how the droprate would work.

The lore could have something like the adventurers could aid the people in Diadem in some sort of excavation expedition, where you return ancient bones and rare jewelstones from fallen creatures to NPC and trade them in for the gear of your choice. Lets also abolish NORMAL and HARD modes and combine elements in the same instance. Otherwise what might happen is people will prefer to do only HARD mode for the better gear as opposed to NORMAL, which was another reason people lost interest since people were far too reluctant to do normal unless it was for gathering. Bones would be for armor pieces and jewelstones for accessories and waist.

Normal trash mobs will be plentiful, while harder trash mobs and bosses will require some work and farming of items to pop at specific destinations. There would also be fates that randomly spawn, sometimes normal bosses, sometimes a hard one that reward the appropriate fossils. There could be sections of the Diadem for normal and hard monsters too so inexperienced parties don't get overwhelmed.

Now for the gear:
Lets say if you gathered eight diademic skulls, you trade that in for an i250 head piece. However, you can upgrade that to a i260 if you get a required number of fossilized diademic skulls from the harder content and trade for an upgrade token similar to how you upgrade tome.

Also, let Diadem specific treasure maps drop. Either it be by a trash mob, boss, or a gatherer. Nothing wrong with bonus loot, could be additional fossils/jewelstones , crafting mats, minions, Tier IV, V materia, and some gil. Also put in some hunt type monsters there to add to the suspense, you could give them specific pop conditions like weather, gathering a certain item or defeating a number of trash. Defeating it will reward tomestones and a random chance for a diademic item (A rank = diademic bone/stone, S rank = fossilized diademic bone/stone)

I think Diadem has potential, but it just needed to change it's execution. These are merely suggestions and I'm very thankful if the dev team went over these in consideration. However, I anxiously await what the revamp has in store.

[Mraj]

Diadem: An area with powerful monsters, exploration, and loot. A place for players to flex ( or improve ) their gear and simply enjoy non-scripted party-content. While the basic framework is there, the execution of some of the features were mishandled. I won't touch on everything wrong with Diadem, but there are a few basics that I feel should have been in there from the start.

* Monsters should not be respawning.

Sense of progression / exploration and optional clearing of area was missing. This was something YoshiP supposedly promised early on -"you may enter and find that other parties have already killed most of the monsters / looted chests etc" - and backpedaled on it seems. While this may have seemed alarming to some players (and clearly, the devs? ) it would have given parties a goal other than "kill things, wait for respawn, kill the same mobs some more". I believe the main fear was that people would queue into cleared / half cleared instances. One way to alleviate this would have been to guarantee "fresh" instances for most parties - or for players to simply accept whatever they queued into ( lockout / reentry times might be adjusted for parties ). Although for some classes, such as gatherers, cleared islands might not have even been a bad thing!

* White crystals / Black crystals:

Totally obsolete as of now. You can avoid the black crystals easily, and the white crystals are almost never in a location that would provide an incentive to use the buff. Here's how you fix that: Make black crystals on islands inflict vuln up / weakness / whatever over much larger portions of the island ( or the whole island ). Make the team ( or member of teams ) find them to disable those debuffs. At the same time, make the white crystal buffs island wide and provide beneficial buffs like haste or dmg up. And have them good for 5-10 min ( or longer ) while players are clearing the island. If the devs were really feeling inclusive, they could even have certain DoL classes be able to interact / augment / gather crystal components.

* Airships:

I'm not sure about other players, but for a personal airship, our airships are pretty impersonal. Beyond outfitting and now dying them, we still only see them in cutscenes - just like the airships we once used to travel between the major cities. This was just another added disappointment, unfortunately. After learning that our airships were just another set of retainers, I waited patiently to fly my airship to the Diadem. However, after the initial cutscene, our airship is nowhere to be found. It's not even situated on our landing island or ( and this would be neat ) seen circling the area overhead. Keeping in mind limitations, I would be even more interested in being able to board it while mid-air and have access to a central cabin within the airship for the FC members / crew.