Please bring back Exploratory Zones in Dawntrail

[OzumaKuma]

adding my wish for exploratory content to come back as. It was fun and engaging and added a lot of weight to the relic quests.

[Jojoya]

"there are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard Square Enix business performance."

Reminder that SE has sold 439,736 Lunar Whales which equates to $18,468,912

Considering the whale is account wide and the statistics sites can't sort out what characters are alts, they've probably sold far less.

[Aco505]

According to Reddit (see here), Exploratory Zones could still be on the table for Dawntrail.

That gives me some hope but we should not stop having our voices heard so that the devs understand loud and clear that this content is good for the game and that there's plenty of players that want it.

[Hallideus]

The game is crying out for this sort of content to come back, it was a huge mistake not putting it in Endwalker! It would certainly have made these content droughts easier to withstand between the increasingly long patch cycles.
Plenty of folks are still doing all of the Eureka content very frequently, as is the case with Bozja. Whether its for the Relic grinds or achievement hunting just to create an incentive to do SOMETHING. Its active, its alive.

[LilimoLimomo]

Still, impressive of you, I think. Goes to show "preferring slow pace" and "unable to do complex things" aren't synonymous.

Indeed! That's one of the things I like about BLM, is that the difficulty isn't necessarily in the dexterity of your fingers, but rather the dexterity of your mind! I often need to be thinking 3 steps ahead and also formulating back-up plans for certain contingencies, despite the fact that the result of those calculations is generally a single periodic button press!

Maybe I just need some good macros, otherwise I find SMN to be more accessible.

Oh 100% SMN is waaaaay more accessible (generally speaking). It's a beautiful, straightforward class with an amazingly elegant and intuitive design. It makes great use of buttons that contextually change their function to massively reduce button bloat, and the 3 elemental summons provide strategic flexibility that is simple yet satisfying. Honestly one of the best designed classes in my opinion!

Meanwhile, BLM as a class is full of fail states where if you make a mistake you get meaningfully set back and have to build yourself back up. Where SMN is forgiving (your highest damage spells will always become available based on time, not performance), BLM is punishing. It's so easy to do terrible damage as a BLM, and much more difficult to do high-end damage. But I also think that can be a part of what makes it so fun to some people. For me, there's nothing I can do to meaningfully improve my performance as a SMN; but for BLM, it feels like there's always a new height for me to achieve!

Well, if you play like I do (PC but with a gamepad), you can always click them with your mouse if that helps.

I'm on PS5 and using a mouse is actually uncomfortable to me, which is part of why I prefer to game on consoles.

[LilimoLimomo]

You know, I hadn't thought about the lower APM. Fair point, it's one reason I like WHM and WAR (and now PLD). I still think SMN would be lower, but maybe not (Garuda/Titan do have a bit of weaving going on). BLM seems to have a lot of oGCDs, but I suppose if you macro them well, you can get around that. And I guess there are some buttons you can kinda drop from your bars somewhat (Scathe for example, Blizzard 1 if you aren't doing low level content - get into a Leveling Dungeon, though, and...) Maybe I just need some good macros

Thankfully, BLM is generally pretty great to macro for. In my experience, there are two places where macros shine if you're looking to reduce button bloat:

1. Jobs that have different "modes"
2. Jobs with buttons that are impossible to activate unless certain requirements are met.

For BLM, there are 2 obvious modes: Fire mode and Ice mode. But I actually double those modes by making AoE and Single-target their own distinct modes for each element. So, for example, I can make a macro so that when I press my Fire 3 button, it changes my crosshotbars to give me my single-target Fire spells, since I'm not going to need any of my Ice spells in Fire mode — except for Blizzard 3, which will switch me into Ice mode and give me my Ice spells!

As for activation, BLM has several spells that can only activate in certain modes; Despair and Fire IV require Fire mode, while Blizzard IV requires Ice mode. Spells also can't be cast without mana, making this a kind of mode that we can exploit. In addition, GCD's require GCD to not be on cooldown to cast them; this means that macroing a GCD and oGCD onto a single button will cast the oGCD if the button is pressed while GCD isn't ready!

So just to show an example, with all of that, we can do a very basic version of BLM's basic rotation with just 4 Playstation buttons:

Circle (Fire 3) -> X (Fire IV) -> Triangle (Fire/Paradox) -> X (Fire IV) -> Square (Despair) -> X (Manafont) -> X (Fire IV) -> Square (Despair) -> Square (Blizzard 3) -> Triangle (Blizzard/Paradox) -> X (Blizzard IV) -> Circle (Fire 3) -> Repeat

We use those same 4 buttons to do the AoE version of all that as well...we just press a macro that switches us to our AoE hotbars first. As you can see, each single button has a lot of functionality; mostly it's just about stacking moves on the buttons where they feel right to press. This works for me because I think of Ice being on the left, and Fire being on the right, and I'm ping-ponging back and forth between them. So I mapped my buttons to sort of follow that vibe.

Hopefully that provides a taste of how powerful macros can be for reducing button bloat on BLM! If that sounds like something you'd like to investigate, let me know and sometime I'll see if I can do a more thorough write-up on my setup!

[AmpelioB]

Have you not explored Island Sanctuary?

[franklinwi]

You could pull out the relic weapons entirely and I'd still pinpoint Eureka and Bozja as the most rewarding gameplay experiences XIV has ever given me. I was not an old school MMO head -- XIV is my first and only -- but Eureka (at least in its somewhat nerfed state, TBF) made me see the light.

I didn't touch Eureka until 5.2 or 5.3 and it ended up being my absolute favorite content in the game, working though it, leveling up, earning that Baldesion Arsenal clear. Stuff like the sleeping dragons, the near-fatal drops, begging for resurrections -- it's not just different from other content in the game, but different in an actually interesting way. Bojza is similar, not as good to explore (though it does have neat stuff like some areas getting really deadly at night) but the Critical Engagements and having three giant chaotic raids make up for it. I really, really like the chaos, progression, community-led organization, and level of difficulty that Eureka and Bozja provided.

Harder alliance raids like Orbonne have some of the sense of chaos, and world bosses like Chi or Archaeotania offer some of that serendipitous community organization, but just a taste. BLU offers some of the build variety, sure. But this stuff only really all comes together in Eureka and Bozja, and nothing else in XIV scratches that itch. I love that feeling of a huge group of mixed competency players, all of whom only just met 30 minutes ago and will never see each other again, barely dragging each other over the finish line.

In retrospect, Shadowbringers' game design was IMO a step down from what came before but I didn't really notice until Endwalker because Eureka and Bozja were so entertaining. Well, in Endwalker, I feel it acutely, and am losing faith that Dawntrail will be different. The climax of the game's 10 year story carried me joyfully through 6.0 but since then I've just felt over and over like I'm waiting to be won back over. For now I'm logging in because I have a house, but that's only going to motivate me for so long.

There's certainly any number of other things SE could do to make XIV more interesting to players like me (BLU does help, and I'm happy to see the alliance raid roulette problems finally on SE's radar), but AFAICT there's only one guaranteed cheat code to make me fully love the game again: new exploratory zone.

[Fortecael]

You could pull out the relic weapons entirely and I'd still pinpoint Eureka and Bozja as the most rewarding gameplay experiences XIV has ever given me. I was not an old school MMO head -- XIV is my first and only -- but Eureka (at least in its somewhat nerfed state, TBF) made me see the light.

I didn't touch Eureka until 5.2 or 5.3 and it ended up being my absolute favorite content in the game, working though it, leveling up, earning that Baldesion Arsenal clear. Stuff like the sleeping dragons, the near-fatal drops, begging for resurrections -- it's not just different from other content in the game, but different in an actually interesting way. Bojza is similar, not as good to explore (though it does have neat stuff like some areas getting really deadly at night) but the Critical Engagements and having three giant chaotic raids make up for it. I really, really like the chaos, progression, community-led organization, and level of difficulty that Eureka and Bozja provided.

Harder alliance raids like Orbonne have some of the sense of chaos, and world bosses like Chi or Archaeotania offer some of that serendipitous community organization, but just a taste. BLU offers some of the build variety, sure. But this stuff only really all comes together in Eureka and Bozja, and nothing else in XIV scratches that itch. I love that feeling of a huge group of mixed competency players, all of whom only just met 30 minutes ago and will never see each other again, barely dragging each other over the finish line.

In retrospect, Shadowbringers' game design was IMO a step down from what came before but I didn't really notice until Endwalker because Eureka and Bozja were so entertaining. Well, in Endwalker, I feel it acutely, and am losing faith that Dawntrail will be different. The climax of the game's 10 year story carried me joyfully through 6.0 but since then I've just felt over and over like I'm waiting to be won back over. For now I'm logging in because I have a house, but that's only going to motivate me for so long.

There's certainly any number of other things SE could do to make XIV more interesting to players like me (BLU does help, and I'm happy to see the alliance raid roulette problems finally on SE's radar), but AFAICT there's only one guaranteed cheat code to make me fully love the game again: new exploratory zone.

Bless you brother. SE better read this.

[Renathras]

...

Honestly, that's really cool. Yeah, I figured it had something to do with exploiting the fact that a "GCD then oGCD" macro would execute the oGCD if the GCD was on CD.

Personally, I just don't tend to like DPSing in general. My mind is more for healing or tanking. Contingencies and reactive gameplay and such. I make a poor metronome. I don't know for sure, but I think it's the same thing in my brain where I can't play drums (consistent repetition of a given pattern for long periods of time). This leads to the situation where I can perform a DPS rotation OR gameplay mechanics. On the other hand, choosing heals or tanking CDs on the fly I can do super easy while jumping through mechanic hoops. No idea how or why that works, but the short version is that I don't like involved rotations I need to maintain as an undercurrent while doing more important things.

So I happen to like SMN since its rotation feels similar to Tank ones, and those I generally don't mind much. It slots into the overall 2 min cadence just fine, and it's intuitive to play, and flows smooth as silk. It seems to just be a really well put together Job that just works as it should while allowing some variation to the situation in terms of Primal order and such. I agree with you that it's just a really well made and designed Job. I think BLM is, too, just for a different approach/type of player. And I think it's nice the game has Jobs that work for different people, that way everyone can find something they like.

Have you not explored Island Sanctuary?

1) IS isn't a combat zone, some people care about that.

2) Yes, yes I have. It just doesn't have the replay value to me since so much of it is gated with the Workshop, so I can neither go faster nor slower than that allows in terms of progress.

EDIT:

3) It also doesn't have the community/grouping for collective progress/etc aspects.

Combined, those things make it completely a non-starter as a Eureka/Bozja replacement.