Cosmic Exploration is Bad

[Ekymus]

I don't know what happened, but it's taken me 2 days of playing to get one level on my fisher.

I thought this was supposed to be some kind of activity for crafters and gatherers to level up, but apparently, its only reason for being is for people to waste their time, get zero XP, and make zero progress towards anything.

It doesn't help that the missions are so badly worded that I can't figure out what I'm supposed to do most of the time.

I came into this really wanting to like this and really wanting to have fun leveling up my gatherers (I don't play crafters, I don't like the crafting system), but I haven't ever been this frustrated or disappointed in this game as I am with this game mode.

I really hope they fix this soon. It's like they made this for the super hardcore players only and left the rest of the player base out to hang.

[Supersnow845]

What exactly are you struggling with?

Are you performing the rank D stellar missions. They your first port of call, rank D missions should be relatively easy for someone of any level

[Ekymus]

I had to spend almost 400K on gear to just get to the minimum iLvl to even have a chance at success on those and I'm still failing. It doesn't help that min iLvl is 626 or some b*llsh*t like that. And I know that to some people 400K might not sound like a lot, but I only have 300K left to my name at this point.

This content SUCKS. I think the best I've gotten on any of the missions was bronze... I get more XP from Ocean Fishing, but I haven't been able to get into an Ocean Fishing group in 6 months.

I hope they fix this at some point, because as it is, this is the worst content in the game and the worst content I've ever played in FFXIV.

[Supersnow845]

What gear did you buy? What level are you at based on your gear?

If you are synced then your gear may be playing a larger part than you expect but (in the nicest way possible) you may have bought the wrong gear

I can offer some advice but i need a bit more info

[Ekymus]

I'm level 97. to get to the min iLvl gear level I had to buy the sh*t you can get inside Cosmic Exploration. If you don't hit that min iLvl then you have zero chance of success. Once I spent the gil, I was sometimes able to hit bronze level.

If you like this sh*tty content, then by all means, please... continue to play it. But this is awful and it's clearly only meant to be played by the most hardcore crafters in the game. If you play gatherers, the devs have gone out of their way to make your time playing a living H*ll and clearly want you to quite playing gatherers.

It doesn't help that they let the entire "story" of the base getting setup be finished within the first few hours of release so anyone with a job wasn't able to participate.

But I'm done with this content until I hear that they fixed it and corrected the problems. It's NOT fun and it's NOT enjoyable, and it's NOT a way to level gatherers.

[Supersnow845]

The problem you are running into is caused by the fact you have severely weak gear for what you are trying to attempt. Crafting and gathering is designed so that gear jumps up in bundles of 10 levels, it doesn’t function like combat gear that moves almost every level

If you are level 9x then the game is expecting you to use the purple scrip gear you can buy in raz-at-Han to use all the way to level 100 where you would progr as to current gear. Using purple scrip gear at level 90 will make D and C ranks a breeze and B ranks possible

The game could arguably do a better job of explaining how the crafting/gathering gear progression is rather unique but this is also how the crafters/gatherers have always works

[Alyx-Greywind]

The problem you are running into is caused by the fact you have severely weak gear for what you are trying to attempt. Crafting and gathering is designed so that gear jumps up in bundles of 10 levels, it doesn’t function like combat gear that moves almost every level

If you are level 9x then the game is expecting you to use the purple scrip gear you can buy in raz-at-Han to use all the way to level 100 where you would progr as to current gear. Using purple scrip gear at level 90 will make D and C ranks a breeze and B ranks possible

The game could arguably do a better job of explaining how the crafting/gathering gear progression is rather unique but this is also how the crafters/gatherers have always works

The game actually tells you to use White Gear from the Vendors for your iLevel warning, the missions at first are meant to be designed around that ease of access which I think it's failing at.

[Valence]

I honestly don't think their stat/recipe synch system was a good idea. It brings too many problems and it's not like spamming D-ranks would be possible anyway since relics also require datasets that only the higher tiers reward anyway.

[Volgia]

I just ignore the ilvl synch, I suspect it might become an issue max level, but I've managed to fish on script gear in 70 and 80 so far even if it warns me that my ilvl is too low.

[Catwho]

I don't know what happened, but it's taken me 2 days of playing to get one level on my fisher.

I thought this was supposed to be some kind of activity for crafters and gatherers to level up, but apparently, its only reason for being is for people to waste their time, get zero XP, and make zero progress towards anything.

It doesn't help that the missions are so badly worded that I can't figure out what I'm supposed to do most of the time.

I came into this really wanting to like this and really wanting to have fun leveling up my gatherers (I don't play crafters, I don't like the crafting system), but I haven't ever been this frustrated or disappointed in this game as I am with this game mode.

I really hope they fix this soon. It's like they made this for the super hardcore players only and left the rest of the player base out to hang.

Mr. Happy said he made the mistake of starting with fisher too - it's arguably the hardest of them, since the RNG procs are every 15-30 seconds instead of every 2 seconds like in crafting or gathering.

That said, this is casual content. That's not the same as "free" content or even "easy" content. The crafting and gathering relic grinds in other expansions have also had similar levels of difficulty. Hell, just the normal fishing quests are ridiculously grindy - Feasts of Famine takes people months!