What Diadem should have been.

[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.