Eureka feedback.

[PangTong]

I'm sure everything I could say has already been said, but I just feel I have to add my voice to the chorus. Eureka is awful.

I can get behind the idea of a nice big zone filled with dangerous enemies, where the idea is to form impromptu groups and go on adventures in killing mobs and getting loot. This kind of seems like what Eureka is intended to be, but in practice it is just miserable.

Firstly, the worst thing for me is that there is absolutely no variety at all. It is JUST trash mob grinding. There are no quests, no fates, no leves, no dailies, no hidden spawns or loot, no overarching or randomized objectives of any kind. You go in with your party, pick a group of mobs, and kill them over and over and over, for hours. Occasionally a NM pops and you all run over there and kill it because they're the only things that give decent XP, and then it's back to mob grinding. The mobs aren't challenging, or special in any way, they're genuinely just like dungeon trash. There's no special abilities or mechanics to be aware of, just the same AoE-dodging and tankbuster-defending we've all done thousands of times by now. There is a questline, but you need to level up to progress it, and the only way to level up is, you guessed it, mob grinding.

The elemental system doesn't improve the situation at all and the magia board on the whole seems half-baked. The strategy of it is obvious. You stack all your magicite in one element, and spin the board to match the weakness of whatever you're fighting, or the defense element if you are the tank. That's it, that's the entire system. There are no mobs which force you to consider an unusual magicite loadout, or mobs which force you to spin your board on the fly as you fight them. Maybe undiscovered ones at a higher level, but certainly nothing immediately available. As is, the entire thing just seems pointless, I don't even understand why this system exists, or what it adds. You could do away with it completely, and the gameplay of Eureka would not visibly change at all.

And thirdly is of course, the utterly, utterly absurd grind. Grinding is something that isn't uncommon in XIV, but I don't know if it's ever been done on this scale before. I'm not sure if this was done to intentionally resemble the grindy MMOs of the past, or if they genuinely think this is a fun and balanced approach to content reward schemes, but it is absolutely miserable.

Grinding mobs aggressively, you can expect to get maybe 20-50 protean crystals per hour, depending on your luck. However, you need THOUSANDS of crystals to get a fully upgraded set of gear, translating into literally HUNDREDS of HOURS of mob grinding. Just mob grinding, of course. And then this gear is not even as strong as the gear that can be acquired with tomestones! So not only is tomestone gear easier to get, it's also more fun to get, since there are actually many various ways to get tomestones that aren't just killing trash. What's more, because Eureka is synced to ilvl 300, this gear that you spend so many hours grinding out will not even help you INSIDE EUREKA! Even the tome-grinding of the Heavensward relics was preferable to this, because at least there are many ways to get tomestones, and besides that the grind wasn't nearly half as long.

You could potentially argue that this gear will be upgraded to be more competitive in 4.3, but that too will require even more grinding, so what is the purpose of having us suffer all this now just for mediocre gear? Even the cosmetic rewards from lockboxes are disappointing. Mostly you just get materia or worthless sparklers and prisms. The only glamours I've seen so far, are just crafter/gatherer leveling gear with the required jobs switched so battle classes can glamour it. That's pretty poor.

It is possible that the crystal drop rates increase dramatically at higher elemental levels. But that is just as big of a grind! After you've gotten past the first few levels, you're still looking at dozens of hours of mob grinding to even get as high as level 9 or 10, let alone 20. You're probably better off not grinding mobs at all and just waiting for NMs to pop, because for some reason NMs give literally 100x more experience than mobs. It would take maybe 1-2 hours of grinding to equal the experience of a single NM that can be downed in 5-10 minutes.

Lastly, a comment on the general state of content in the game. For some reason, the developers seem very obsessed with grinding trash mobs. Every time they "take a risk" by implementing a new form of content outside the normal dungeon/raid schema, that content ends up boiling down to mowing down easy monsters for hours. Diadem, PotD, Aquapolis/Canals. The context varies slightly, but ultimately all you are doing is grinding trash mobs over and over. It gets old FAST. I don't understand why this is. It's like the designers are afraid that anything more challenging than killing trash mobs is too hard for the players.

Is it any wonder that so many people consider the raid and trial bosses the only "real content" in the game? Besides providing a much nicer visual spectacle, they are also actually -engaging-. You're not just standing still and banging out your rotation on easy monsters over and over. There's mechanics and special effects you have to react to and work around. The game rewards you for playing well, and punishes you for failure. It's multiple times more interesting than just killing normal mobs.

When the event instances for Halloween and Valentine's day were released, they were very well received. People asked to see more of that kind of thing in the game. Why do you think that is? It's because these things are something actually DIFFERENT. It's not just grinding trash mobs! They're not hard at all, but the sheer novelty of the content made them unbelievably refreshing. Why can't we see this kind of thing in normal content as well? Why is it always just killing trash mobs?

At this point I don't expect to see significant revisions to Eureka's design, but I'm hoping at the very least that the grind will be toned down, because I definitely don't see this lasting long in it's current state.

[DarthRok]

I was very, very disappointed today. I am not inspired to do this content in any way. I have several relics completed from ARR and HW, and today my first impresssion is this is just plain awful.

Oh the segregation! How is this in any way good? If you don’t do this right now, I don’t see how anyone could come in later and finish this. I got to level 3 my first trip. Came back with my wife, formed a party, and got her to lvl 2 and I didn’t even get halfway to 4 after an hour of grinding that got so boring so fast. Most people are not going to do this content because it’s worse than the Diadem. This zone is so unfriendly, it feels like it will be empty in no time.

My friends in my FC are too far ahead of me and my wife is going to be behind me, and we’re going to be stuck apart from each other. I will have to quit doing everything else in the game to get ahead in Eureka. So the idea is all the lvl 70 players are going to be separated from the rest of the players in the game and stuck in this new area? And then the lvl 70 players will be divided up again in this area? And if you’re behind, it looks pretty difficult to catch up. And it’s only going to get worse as people quit doing this content and disparity in lvls increases in those that continue and the zone becomes empty with no duty finder or party finder?

So will the dev team please explain how this is a good idea? Am I missing something? How is this content supposed to last? I tried on the upgraded gear with Gerolt and it looks exactly the same! Again, am I missing something? I’m supposed to be motivated to grind my ass off for the characters +2 ? I don’t get it. The zone looks amazing and I want to see it all, but that’s about it right now. I hope I’m wrong.

[FlanKitty]

Also tried it and got to lv4 on opening night. Came in the next night only to find I'm out-leveled by groups looking for 6+ people. Now I don't want to touch it ever again. If i had to describe it to someone who didn't grind diadem in HW days it would be like an area with a nice shiny weapon hanging from the ceiling but there's nothing to do except spending countless hours killing mobs and using the bodies to make a tower way up to the shiny weapon. It wouldn't be too bad fates never spawn unless are grinding select mobs, and the difficulty is fake to discourage equipping multiple jobs. The elemental revolver is cute but its also broken (can't control rotation direction with ps4 pad on pc).

If i were to suggest improving, I would flat out increase xp and crystal drop rate by 50%, make the fates forced spawn if the conditionals aren't met by say 4 or 5 hours real time, and add exploration activity to reduce the reliance on mindless combat activity to progress.

[nekohime1138]

The elemental revolver is cute but its also broken (can't control rotation direction with ps4 pad on pc).

On PC with a PS4 controller X rotates in one direction, Square rotates it the other. The UI tells you this when you select it.

[Squintina]

On PC with a PS4 controller X rotates in one direction, Square rotates it the other. The UI tells you this when you select it.

Probably couldn't tell because a PC player using a controller might still have the mouse-layout (which shows left/right click, not buttons).

I had to tell it to switch to console layout to figure it out (and then I switched back because I don't want them gigantic menus when I click for my menu, and using Mouse layout allows us to have both cross hotbars and hotbars displayed together)

[nekohime1138]

Probably couldn't tell because a PC player using a controller might still have the mouse-layout (which shows left/right click, not buttons).

I had to tell it to switch to console layout to figure it out (and then I switched back because I don't want them gigantic menus when I click for my menu, and using Mouse layout allows us to have both cross hotbars and hotbars displayed together)

I can understand not wanting the large menu from controller, but you can still display both cross hotbars and regular hotbars with controller layout. Granted you can't use abilities from the hotbars on controller but you can display them to track CD timers for things that aren't on your main cross hotbar.

[Squintina]

I can understand not wanting the large menu from controller, but you can still display both cross hotbars and regular hotbars with controller layout. Granted you can't use abilities from the hotbars on controller but you can display them to track CD timers for things that aren't on your main cross hotbar.

How?

I'm legitimately asking. Every time I switch to "controller" mode, all my non-cross hotbars disappear and won't ever come back up. Not via hud, not via macros, nothing. Only time they both show up for me is when I'm in mouse mode, so I play controller in mouse mode (though the menu thing is also a big reason.).

[CyrilLucifer]

My Eureka feedback, level 17 at the moment:

I love it. I love the genuine sense of danger the instance possesses, I love the sense of progression - of how mobs that were previously terrifying become survivable 5 levels later. You can feel yourself get stronger in a way that a few iLevels of gear doesn't allow; for example, I can do my daily hunts, 60-70, on a 60 class. There's no danger there.

It also has restored some of my hope in the community, with everyone going out of their way to raise others, even off the train.

Edit: I also love the style of quest progression and relic progression. Rather than having the relic tied to some extraneous quest, we're getting actual lore and a story tied into the MSQ. Absolutely an improvement in every way over the previous two relic stories.

[Plinio]

The prevalent strategy of just making a train endlessly killing the mobs that spawn the NMs is kind of an awful EXP black hole, as it's usually the high level players who spend all day in Eureka who get the tags, and thus no one gets the exp for 100s of kills.

But the proverbial straw that broke my back was that a 7-level difference in party member levels nullifies all exp gain. What the hell. I just want to party up with my FC friends, who happen to have more time to devote than me. Why should I get punished for their powerleveling? Why is there no omnipresent level sync? I mean, this would be easily fixed by just letting high level players sync down to the lowest level party member's level.

[Crostar]

I'm just gonna type word-for-word what I said someone else's video

I really wish they emphasized exploration more than chain grinding in this content. In my opinion the map looks cool as hell and it's pretty different from other lands we've seen in the game so far, it'd be a waste if it was just all watered down to "Kill a bunch of things". Also there's too many cases in the game right now where much of the map is unused or unexplored because the content doesn't really require you do anything with it. For Eureka, it would've been perfect for the game to have us traverse through the land and discover things since it is (sort of) an area nobody has mapped out yet. I don't know if anybody else feels this way though.

That being said, I really wanted to like Eureka. But now it's just so hard to do that when it's just a game of "beat things up and maybe get a crystal from it."