Cosmic Exploration Opinions

[Supersnow845]

It's not about liking. Like everything else it always comes down to how you play. Are you casual about it or are you hardcore.

Me, I'm a casual crafter and gatherer. I enjoy leveling them. I enjoy using my crafter to make money. I enjoy using my gatherers to get mats for my crafter. I've never in my life done an expert craft. But I have the newest crafting and gathering gear. That's how I enjoy crafting and gathering.

Apparently, Cosmic Exploration is not designed for people like me. So far, I've only been working on my Botanist. I don't have a ton of time to devote to this. At first I was like "wow this is fun!" Then I got to the A rank missions. Not ALL of them are terrible. There are some I can get gold on. But there are a lot more I can't even get silver on or can't even complete at all. Right now if I get bronze I earn around 5 or 6 points toward Cosmic Research. I'm progressing at a snail's pace. No, I'm not pentamelded. I'm not at max efficiency. I have trouble remembering how collectibles work when I haven't done one for a while. I'm just a casual crafter/gatherer. I just wanted to participate and have fun and not be frustrated all the time or have to spend 5 years to get a relic.

As a casual player of FFXIV, I'm beyond disappointed.

That’s literally part of what you quoted on my post. The A ranks have hard walls on competency and breakpoints. I’m not necessarily saying that’s a good thing. Just that it exists and it’s causing frustration for people. If you want to consistently do A ranks you NEED pentamelded gear and likely food. And you need to know what you are doing with the job, that’s just how A ranks work specifically, but A ranks aren’t the be all and end all of cosmic

One thing to note is that starting with a gatherer relic is a really bad idea, they naturally level slower than the crafters and completing relics increases the experience you gain from other relics, if you made 5 crafter relics as an example (I know it’s a lot I’m just using it as an example) then all your gatherers would get 4 times the experience they currently get. So B ranks give totally viable amounts of experience. The only time you HAVE to do A ranks is for rank 4 experience which only comes from A ranks but gatherers have special cross fates with crafters that have low requirements in both and give lots of XP

your method of enjoying crafters and gatherers is totally valid, it just doesn’t jive with A ranks specifically, but cosmic is designed so you don’t need to do A ranks if you don’t want

[Khryseis_Astra]

That’s literally part of what you quoted on my post. The A ranks have hard walls on competency and breakpoints. I’m not necessarily saying that’s a good thing. Just that it exists and it’s causing frustration for people. If you want to consistently do A ranks you NEED pentamelded gear and likely food. And you need to know what you are doing with the job, that’s just how A ranks work specifically, but A ranks aren’t the be all and end all of cosmic

The multi-part ones seem next to impossible… how are you supposed to gather 25 collectibles in 3 minutes, and then aetherially reduce them all in time? How are you supposed to gather 180 mats AND craft 20 crafts in 3 minutes? Like are the people that ARE super pentamelded able to do this? I can barely even get the gathering half of these ones done in time! Cordials are a 2-minute cooldown even if you have the good ones! And then you have to switch to crafter, waste the rest of your gathering food to eat crafter food…

[hydralus]

The multi-part ones seem next to impossible… how are you supposed to gather 25 collectibles in 3 minutes, and then aetherially reduce them all in time? How are you supposed to gather 180 mats AND craft 20 crafts in 3 minutes? Like are the people that ARE super pentamelded able to do this? I can barely even get the gathering half of these ones done in time! Cordials are a 2-minute cooldown even if you have the good ones! And then you have to switch to crafter, waste the rest of your gathering food to eat crafter food…

You get multiple items per reduction. Up to 8 from 1000 collectability, but usually 2-4. You also don't need to do 20 crafts. Get HQ and you only need to craft 3, which is 27 gathered mats. Very doable.

[MoofiaBossVal]

The new zone has a neat theme and presentation, but I still do not fundamentally like the crafting gameplay of navigating menus and you hit your macro and let it do its thing. Expert crafts requires you to pay more attention but you are still looking at menus. Not visually engaging. It is also strange that there doesn't seem to be any actual multiplayer component to this. You don't need other people to get your points. It is everyone playing a solo game in the same space, but I suppose this applies to most of FF14. It's not like FF11 where you are really playing a Final Fantasy game as a team with other people.

[IndraSyngiwyb]

Should have been the Garlean Restoration. Not "build stuff for the rabbits that literally already have everything they need." Especially since the rabbits already got beast tribe quests. Did we really need them to be the "Ishgardian Restoration" of this expansion, too?

[DivineP]

The new zone has a neat theme and presentation, but I still do not fundamentally like the crafting gameplay of navigating menus and you hit your macro and let it do its thing. Expert crafts requires you to pay more attention but you are still looking at menus. Not visually engaging. It is also strange that there doesn't seem to be any actual multiplayer component to this. You don't need other people to get your points. It is everyone playing a solo game in the same space, but I suppose this applies to most of FF14. It's not like FF11 where you are really playing a Final Fantasy game as a team with other people.

This.

I don't have pentameter, nor do I want it - not my thing. That said I do have over 600 hi-cordials and I do 740 food buffs.

I was expecting that gathered gather and crafters gain those materials? Not sure if ot works like that as I've only done mining.

There's alot of flaws in the content - hence the lodestone post (that doesn't even touch upon Drivingways location to get back to the map in bestaway burrow)

I was expecting something abit more engaging than 2 different fates (that get over powered with the mechanism that get selected) and missions that don't really have any other impact outside of picking the ones you need to progress your tool.

Speaking of tools - why are they not bade 690 from the first step if they give lunar token buffs?

I'll most likely finish miner and move on.

I'm happy for all the gather and crafters that are enjoying it, don't get me wrong. This kind of content just isn't for me I suppose.

[SkankyRoe]

You get multiple items per reduction. Up to 8 from 1000 collectability, but usually 2-4. You also don't need to do 20 crafts. Get HQ and you only need to craft 3, which is 27 gathered mats. Very doable.

That's still a lot of rng between the collectible skill procs and the reduction amounts, plus the wasted time running between nodes and dealing with menus, and you're on a timer. It's the worst for the ones requiring fishing, because it's entirely rng whether or not you get the fish you need, let alone three of them and with enough time leftover to actually complete three crafts.

[hydralus]

That's still a lot of rng between the collectible skill procs and the reduction amounts, plus the wasted time running between nodes and dealing with menus, and you're on a timer. It's the worst for the ones requiring fishing, because it's entirely rng whether or not you get the fish you need, let alone three of them and with enough time leftover to actually complete three crafts.

It's not going to work 100% of the time, but you should be able to do it like ~75% of the time if you're properly geared and know what you're doing/how to use your skills to stack the odds in your favor. If that's too RNG for you or the timers are too clutch, do the ones that are easier. They tend to be better time/reward investment anyway.

[Supersnow845]

Sequential missions are rank A3. They are the hardest missions you can do in any content at the moment. I don’t think making them so hard that you can’t gold them 100% of the time in current gear is necessarily a bad thing

[Asari5]

for content as big as this. announced and talked about so often... in a MMO... i would have expected more than just crafting and gathering reduced to its very core.

'you can do it in a group' simply means we are able to do it while we're in a group..... amazing MMO content
'working together'... what a tease.