People who like Bozja/Eureka, I would like your input

[Jade3173]

As the title says, I’d like the help of people who enjoy Bozja or even Eureka in helping me understand what exactly it is they like. Cause from what I’ve heard it’s mostly Logorams/Lost Actions and the Critical Engagements that people enjoy and was wondering if Square could manage to put that into the overworld, the normal zones we progress through during MSQ, if you guys would still enjoy it?

A simple mockup of an idea I had, and I’ll use 5.0 zones for reference, would be that each one has about 3 Critical Engagements in them. The Tempest, being the last zone, would have something BIG in it like the Castrum CE that you need to progress the Bozja story. Now in order to join these Overworld Critical Engagements, you’d need to farm bicolor gems. Using those gems you purchase an item, maybe each zone (Lakeland/The Tempest/Il Mheg/etc) each has its own item, and when you use that item you are granted a Buff. That Buff would work one of two ways, you either need it to damage the monsters in the CE, while not used in FATEs, is something Square has coded before. The other way it could work is that you need the Buff active by the end of the CE in order to gain any rewards, much like how Twist of Fate grants you bonus EXP if you complete a FATE with it.

What you do in the Critical Engagements I’d imagine would be much like what is already in Bozja, just fitted for the area it is in. I’d go with them all being made for Lv80 though so it’s something you see at the start of the expansion and go “wow, that looks cool” and work towards it. To keep you from just steaming through it by X.2 patch though, it has an item level sync to it, maybe not as tight as Unreal, but something that keeps them biting throughout the expansion.

Now, rewards, obviously since they’re max level content, they need to reward tomestones. I would add 2 more rewards though, a simple “tricolor gem” for a guaranteed reward that can be used just like bicolor gems to buy certain things, each zone having its own set of rewards. For the other, please don’t shoot me, the Bozja/Eureka style lockboxes. In order to keep people doing these and not having them die after everyone gets their tricolor gem rewards, there needs to be some RNG loot. Could also make it that each zone drops its own lockbox so have lots of them to farm but that might be a bit much.

Spawning these CEs though, other than doing FATEs and killing overworld mobs to get them to spawn, maybe take a page out of the book on how S Rank hunts are done? Each CE has a set timer, say 5 hours or so, but if people are trying to actively spawn them, that time can get cut down to 2.5 hours or so. This way they aren’t reliant on people to spawn them, but you can help make them appear faster.

Lost Actions are a bit harder, I can think of two ways to do it at the moment. One, they are just the expansion feature and you can use them in the overworld always. I actually wouldn’t mind this, the idea of them is a fun one and overworld content can use some fun stuff in it, but not sure how badly this would influence Hunts. The other way would be that once you’ve entered the CE and clicked the Sync button, you get the Duty Action button and can use that for Lost Actions. Farming them would be via mob and FATE farming, maybe toss some in for Gatherers to get and sell on the Market Board. Could also buy them with bi/tricolor gems so you have something to buy repeatedly with the currency.

I write all of this as someone that does NOT enjoy Bozja/Eureka. I don’t want the people who enjoy it to lose the content, I just don’t want the dev team to keep sticking the relic behind it and that seems to be how they justify making a whole zone for it. This is me trying to meet in the middle, trying to keep the spirit of the instances alive, without requiring the long dev time to make a whole zone just for it.

So please, tell me what you enjoy about Bozja, do you think this system would scratch the same itch for you guys? Of what I’ve typed out here, what do you like, what have I gotten horribly wrong, what would you add/change?

TL;DR put as much of Bozja/Eureka into the overworld as possible so the relic isn’t tied to it.

[MPK]

Just delete bozja all together. They took everything bad about eureka and put it all into one place.

[E4EO]

I like both first and foremost for the grind, in Eureka with every NM killed it felt as if you were getting closer and closer to your goal of a new weapon and potentially Armour, this is how you design a good grind, make it so the players efforts are rewarded gradually, and don't make it feel like they're working towards nothing with bad RNG. The social aspect is another thing I enjoy, I detest miserable people who can't be fcked to say Hello or GG at the beginning or end of a dungeons, in Bozja and especially Eureka people are always talking about something.

Now all that applies to both, but honestly it applies more to 5.X Eureka as holy hell Sqeenix has made some bloody stupid decisions with Bozja.

First off, why does it feel like I'm working towards nothing when trying to get my artifact weapon? I did over 2 dozen CE's yesterday and got 1 loathsome memory, and I didn't even think I got a single red memory. And why is it faster to run years old, synced 50 content that everyone is sick of? Its boring, you feel like your playtime in Bozja is worthless because of the terrible RNG, its not like old school JRPG's and Eureka where you constantly feel like you're working toward a goal, instead it feels as if you're throwing sh t at the wall and hoping it sticks for hours on end.

And that's just the weapons, of you wanna get dyeable Judge Magister Armour added in the patch, you have to augment the base Bozja gear, so that's potentially hundreds if not thousands of coins for a set or two, and even with earning coins from FATEs it is still slow as all hell as your earn a whopping 1 coin from skirmishes and I think 3 from CE's, oh and Castrum for coins? Yeah, good bloody luck more then likely you'll wipe because noobs didn't watch a guide for months old content and fail at a boss. But that's not all, you also need to do the new 48 man savage likey multiple times for one piece, so you could be stuck running one of what seems to be the hardest piece of content to pog because of the sheer amount of people required! And you'll likey need to do it dozens of times over the course of days, if not weeks.

Oh, and then there's the whole losing XP that turns people off, I'm more on the fence about this as you earn little for dying and can't level down, can't level down at max either, but I can definitely see how this would turn people off.

So it all comes down to Bozjas grind being worthless compared years old content, I've given up on the relic weapons, I don't play CT raids, and I'm sure as he'll not getting the materials from Bozja. Will try to get some armour though, at bare minimum the caster chest, but the only reason why is just because I adore the Judge Magister Armour, and if this were literally any other piece of armour I'd just skip it, savage and EX can be a bloody nightmare thanks to some of the people you get, not to mention the ridiculous coin grind, so who the heck even knows if ill end up getting it after all.

[SturmChurro]

..

Yeah, it seems to me they designed this new relic+armor to be long term filler grind content. Probably some content drought coming up. The weapon grind is one thing, but the armor grind is another level. I'm almost glad most of the outfits look terrible on my au ra, my tail clips through the ones with capes , and the hair I always use (pretty much only use) clips badly. I'll probably go for at minimum the healer set. I might go for the caster set too, but probably not the dyable variant. Honestly though, I doubt I'd even get the full dyable version for healer, at least not anytime soon. That grind is definitely.. pretty bad.

[Packetdancer]

Yeah, it seems to me they designed this new relic+armor to be long term filler grind content

I don't disagree, but I feel like this statement is true of all relic weapons anyway. It's not like Zodiac weapons or Anima weapons were designed to be completed in an evening, and Eureka weapons are one heck of a grind. Eureka even threw in a bonus armor grind as well!

Like it or hate it, I don't feel like the long-term grind for this should be a surprise.

I'd actually argue the new Law's Order stuff is a great deal more generous than Eureka; the pieces cost 2 or 3 of the Gold Bozjan Coins, and you can get 3 per week for just running Delubrum Reginae once.

[SturmChurro]

I don't disagree, but I feel like this statement is true of all relic weapons anyway. It's not like Zodiac weapons or Anima weapons were designed to be completed in an evening, and Eureka weapons are one heck of a grind. Eureka even threw in a bonus armor grind as well!

Like it or hate it, I don't feel like the long-term grind for this should be a surprise.

I'd actually argue the new Law's Order stuff is a great deal more generous than Eureka; the pieces cost 2 or 3 of the Gold Bozjan Coins, and you can get 3 per week for just running Delubrum Reginae once.

I mean, I know relic grind is supposed to be filler, but I feel like all this is kind of excessive. For the regular armor yeah, the dyable armor variant is another story - which is what I was talking about. For regular armor, I'll probably grab healer and caster, but the others, I may just casually pick up. Like I said most look pretty bad on my au ra. The aiming (iirc) top looks really bad in general. Has a dump truck butt.

[Packetdancer]

I mean, I know relic grind is supposed to be filler, but I feel like all this is kind of excessive. For the regular armor yeah, the dyable armor variant is another story - which is what I was talking about. For regular armor, I'll probably grab healer and caster, but the others, I may just casually pick up. Like I said most look pretty bad on my au ra. The aiming (iirc) top looks really bad in general. Has a dump truck butt.

Fair.

To elaborate, I was thinking that the Elemental Armor was a pretty chonky grind, since you had to pick up the base Elemental Armor in Pyros with a honkload of Pyros crystals (which you therefore could not use on your relic weapon), then augment said armor in Hydatos with Hydatos crystals (which, again, means you couldn't use them for your Hydatos weapon), and then gather materials in the Baldesion Arsenal to finish the upgrades.

In contrast, the costs of the base armor here aren't bad, and the currency you use is not what's shared with the weapon augmentation; the grind to augment is pretty brutal, considering you need to augment the base Bozjan resistance gear, and get the base Law's Order gear, and get the Secrets used to augment it as well. So you'll be at it for A While, but at least you aren't stealing from your weapon's progression to aid armor progression.

But the base Bozjan stuff can't be dyed, where the base Elemental stuff can. So... yeah, if you just want a plain-but-dyeable set for glam (or use in general gameplay, where the Elemental or Bozjan effects gained with augmentation have no meaning), Eureka's definitely less of a grindfest since you can just get the stuff in Pyros and call it a day.

And it sounds like that was what you were aiming for, so from that perspective, I concede the point.

[Seraphor]

I don't disagree, but I feel like this statement is true of all relic weapons anyway. It's not like Zodiac weapons or Anima weapons were designed to be completed in an evening, and Eureka weapons are one heck of a grind. Eureka even threw in a bonus armor grind as well!

Like it or hate it, I don't feel like the long-term grind for this should be a surprise.

I'd actually argue the new Law's Order stuff is a great deal more generous than Eureka; the pieces cost 2 or 3 of the Gold Bozjan Coins, and you can get 3 per week for just running Delubrum Reginae once.

The surprise is that it's infinitely more viable to do the relic grind outside of the content that was designed for it.
Memory drops in Bozja should be comparable to memory drops outside, so that people actually play Bozja and it's not a dead instance in a weeks time.

[Packetdancer]

The surprise is that it's infinitely more viable to do the relic grind outside of the content that was designed for it.
Memory drops in Bozja should be comparable to memory drops outside, so that people actually play Bozja and it's not a dead instance in a weeks time.

Yeah, I have no idea what happened there, but I'm in agreement with you.

I can understand making the drop rate for Memories in Bozja lower than outside; the balance is that I can run Crystal Tower raids and get one guaranteed drop of one type of Memory, whereas in Bozja I can be doing skirmishes and critical engagements and such and potentially get some combination of many different memories (Harrowing, Sorrowful, Tortured, Bitter, Loathsome, etc.) -- as well as stuff like Lockboxes and Bozjan Clusters and Forgotten Fragments. Bozja gives you the convenience of grinding multiple stages at once, so you can have several relic weapons in flight, at the cost of uncertainty since you never know which ones will drop; doing stuff outside Bozja gives you the surety of guaranteed drops, but at the cost of only advancing one relic step in a given duty.

But right now, the drop rate for, say, Loathsome memories in Bozja is so bad that I could literally farm all 15 that I'd need through Crystal Tower before I even saw one drop while running Bozja content for that same amount of time. And that seems like a balance issue.

[RokkuEkkusu]

I like using the Lost Actions/Essences here. If you played Pyros/Hydatos like I did, making use of them felt special and rewarding. [Not that I am going to convince you anyway.] If it was put in the open world, might as well discard the MMO role Trinity altogether for this game.

The mounts, minions, emotes, and various rewards are icing on the cake.

Skirmishes are just fates, but Critical Engagements are similar in difficulty to the likes of Hashmal, Construct 7, and all bosses in Orbonne Monstary (not counting pre-nerf Thunder God of course).

At the end of the day, I enjoyed the Bozja more than I enjoyed Eureka (including Pyros/Hydatos), and I made use of the rewards I earned from that place without taking them for granted.

They could improve the rewards for Castrum though by adding mettle and EXP.