Eureka type content improvements

[Kalise]

I kind of want to just put together a thread where people can talk about things to improve future Exploratory Missions such as Eureka and the equivalent that will be appearing in Shadowbringers.

More so than "Just delete it" or "Don't do it" that much of the feedback has been about it.

To me, the most significant improvements would be:

* Remove FATEs being tied to enemy kills.

Since this promotes people being AFK waiting for the spawn while people who are participating get the very boring activity of just farming trash mobs (The majority of which are less than max level and thus even more trivial than usual) for obnoxious amounts of time.

* Add in a consistent way to make progress.

So for example, don't make Crystals/Logo's only reliably attained through FATEs (Or ONLY attained through FATEs in the case of Anemos Crystals which are required for the final upgrade of Anemos armour)

Allow for other activities to be done. Be it "Hunts", repeatable quests, Leves... Whatever. Just something that isn't condensed into "Lul just FATE Train" as the primary way to progress (Outside of leveling, which is best done via Chaining kills)

Heck, you could even put randomly spawning Treasure Chests around the place that promotes people actually exploring the content.

* Don't make enemies so darn annoying to beat solo.

What with their current inflated health pools and punishing scaling beyond your level (Which makes fighting +1 enemies a slog, despite being required to complete logs at certain level ranges)

Yes, you want to promote people working together... But that's inherently done via the fact that 8 people kill things faster than 1 person (As well as FATEs existing) rather than being pushed by the fact that killing stuff as 1 person is just annoying/time consuming.

* Don't make the Magia Board again.

It didn't provide anything to the content. It merely made things more annoying, especially when adds were pulled, or when certain Notorious Monsters created adds with different elements. Mostly because of the limiting restriction on how often you could swap elements, where if you were actually doing things like target switching, you'd run out of swaps really fast (So it promoted just focusing the one target. If there's an add wailing on a party member? Screw it, let them deal with it...)

* Allow item levels to actually progress in the content.

This is mostly because of how sync'd gear ignores Materia. Which ends up tossing a ton of your stats out of the window when you basically lose all your Materia (Ironically, when you get literally thousands of Grade VI Materia thrown at you via the boxes from FATEs...)

It also has the secondary effect of making your work actually pay off in the content. As opposed to the only thing mattering being your level and being item level 300 and item level 405 has no difference in any area of the current Eureka. Which does not feel rewarding at all (Especially when one of the primary reasons to be in the content, is to farm out the gear upgrades...)

At the moment, gear is only relevant when you hit Hydatos and thus start getting the Elemental Bonuses, which makes it completely pointless in the beginning 3/4 of the entire content...

[MorbolvampireQueen6]

i agree with most of this however i disagree with the magiboard thats my favorite thing making elements matter is how ff is suppose 2 be

the only change 2 board is it shouldn't tell you what element is strong or defensive.
you should have 2 learn that the hard way.

also if ur on water fighting a water ur attacks should heal the creatures not do just low dmg not enough punishing for using same ele as nm or creature

[Halivel]

For me it would be perfect if they will make it solo-able (except Baldesion Arsenal, since it's an actual dungeon, kind of) or, at least, 8-person party-doable. Finding 8 friends for old content is much easier than finding bunch of pugs, really.

[Milea]

Rather than fates, make them S rank hunts that roam the map.

Also have smaller bosses, might consider them like A or B rank hunts.

Allow same level enemies you can solo and even farm stuff off of.

Have ele like gear from the start that upgrades kind like in potd.
You use it in this instance and become stronger in this instance.
Since they experiment with unique effects tied to logos and special gear, implement that fully.
Allow use to add stuff to our special instance only gear like increased sprint, chance to proc revive, chance to summon some uncontrollable pet that helps us fight, etc.

[Physic]

the idea is that its open world group content, so, whatever means of doing things needs to encourage groups. By its nature, this means killing alone will be fairly slow, especially for tanks/healers. Having the elevel, and experience scaling actually helps this a lot already. Groups should be targeting higher level monsters, which give them better defense/offense. I think fighting things your level gets a lot better by pyros, with better elevel, and logos. the very beginning is the worst part imo.

the elemental leveling system is to create a self contained leveling system, which acts as an incentive and reason to kill monsters. As well as create goals, and danger in the map.



The problem with making gear matter more instead of elevel, is gear uses up space, and is a bit harder to give incrementally. It could be done, but is it worth it? Well, they could try out a more gear based incentive system, with monster crafting drops, and gear upgrades, or some currency.

Note, there are actually already a number of items which do have eureka effects, like cassie earring, optical hat, speed belt etc. Also note you can get ilevel 300 gear and use materia on it, (some of these special gears are ilevel 300 for that reason)

As far as new mechanics, Hunts work.... but arent hunts basically fates? They could have some fates triggered by other conditions, but no matter what, the people who dont spawn events will afk and wait for events.

They kind of already have treasure hunts with the bunny fates, but they could reskin it, and make the treasure hunt spawning part be more varied and interesting.

They could design more goals for smaller groups of players inbetween fates, and make some of the spawning conditions less hidden.

[Vahlnir]

At the very least I think that they should change the markers for NMs and not keep the fate boss symbol. It would at least give people the illusion that it isn't a fate. Maybe have special map markers designed for Eureka (or whatever the next iteration is) or something.

[CaptainLagbeard]

I only recently made it into Pyros, so I can only really comment on Anemos and Pagos, but...

1) Quest locations, they're all in locations with enemies higher level than the quest needs. Make the quests more reasonable by placing them in areas where you can fight the enemies solo, using Pagos for example the level 23 quest makes you walk past level 27 enemies which will murder you horribly if they see you.

2) Mounts, just allow people to mount from the very beginning, locking mounts until you reach max level and finish the quests in the area just makes getting around more annoying.

3) No RNG grind, specially with something like light... Grinding for light to upgrade your weapon by itself isn't all that bad, but when you add a drop chance to it, it quickly becomes very annoying. FATEs and Dragons were the only way to realistically get any light in Pagos, and the dragons didn't always give it. Overall, if you want to do a light grind in something like Eureka, just make all enemies drop light so it's just a set amount of kills needed.

[Physic]

At the very least I think that they should change the markers for NMs and not keep the fate boss symbol. It would at least give people the illusion that it isn't a fate. Maybe have special map markers designed for Eureka or something.

why do you think its bad that people think of it as a fate? Does fate have a negative connotation or something? I think of fates as group content that scales with players (to an extent) and provides markers on the map. In eureka they are almost all boss fights of some sort.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

why do you think its bad that people think of it as a fate? Does fate have a negative connotation or something? I think of fates as group content that scales with players (to an extent) and provides markers on the map. In eureka they are almost all boss fights of some sort.

The community hivemind has decided fates are bad, simply because they have an icon on the map and music announcing them, and a level sync feature. Remove those things and no one would complain somehow.


People are silly.

[Physic]

I only recently made it into Pyros, so I can only really comment on Anemos and Pagos, but...

1) Quest locations, they're all in locations with enemies higher level than the quest needs. Make the quests more reasonable by placing them in areas where you can fight the enemies solo, using Pagos for example the level 23 quest makes you walk past level 27 enemies which will murder you horribly if they see you.

2) Mounts, just allow people to mount from the very beginning, locking mounts until you reach max level and finish the quests in the area just makes getting around more annoying.

3) No RNG grind, specially with something like light... Grinding for light to upgrade your weapon by itself isn't all that bad, but when you add a drop chance to it, it quickly becomes very annoying. FATEs and Dragons were the only way to realistically get any light in Pagos, and the dragons didn't always give it. Overall, if you want to do a light grind in something like Eureka, just make all enemies drop light so it's just a set amount of kills needed.

the quest levels was odd to me at first, but thats mostly because the quests are mostly about navigating to deadly areas. The mount thing is also about that. In a different area, i suppose they could have a different design, where its designed expecting you to have a mount, but then theyd just design it to be just as dangerous while mounted as not.