Cosmic Exploration is CASUAL content with a pinch of midcore

[Valkyrie-Veil]

You heard it here folks, melding materia is now considered by at least one person to be hardcore gaming
Thank you FFXIV community

You forgot the word “penta,” which is the actual try-hard part of it.

[Kaurhz]

Furthermore, even if people can't figure out what they're supposed to do, there are literally dozen other doing the same thing in the instance. Like, ask around? The instances I've been in are generally friendly enough people regularly answer questions.

All these 'macros not working!!!' honestly brings up the question: do you (general you) even know why XYZ macro works or are you just copying homeworks?

The worst part is if people asked questions, like "How are you progressing your relic? What missions are you doing", and literally many people would jump in and help, many may even be inclined to give macros to help with it, or a resource that they are using. I would literally do the same on this forum in this thread, but some people are more concerned with thinking the content is wrong, too hardcore, too try hard, or whatever.. Than what they are with actually asking questions

To be honest, a lot of this issue is just compounded by guides more often taking the path of least resistance rather than trying to convey how the actions interact with each other, which in many respects I understand, but it is a major contributor to these all these issues happening with Cosmic... People for the past several years have googled "Levelling guide", and in most instances all you get is macros. I get that the onus is on the player to ask why or figure out the actions, but guides compound this issue massively.

[s32ialx]

You heard it here folks, melding materia is now considered by at least one person to be hardcore gaming
Thank you FFXIV community

when it costs you millions of gil to penta meld yes it's tryharding.

[Minali]

when it costs you millions of gil to penta meld yes it's tryharding.

There is still the point that you don't need to pentameld for any of this though, it just makes things more convenient and allows for some optimizing for this specific kind of content, to my knowledge. (It's much more important for regular endgame gathering and crafting.)

You might not be aware if you're not gathering or crafting much, but gear you buy for scrips from Rowena's vendors cannot be overmelded. It's impossible to put more materia into these than the guaranteed slots they give you and depending on the piece of gear that's either one or two pieces of materia. So when people say they did this with scrip gear, it automatically means they did this without pentamelding said scrip gear.

[Astronis]

You forgot the word “penta,” which is the actual try-hard part of it.

Ye I'm ever so slightly less casual on gatherer, and I won't pentameld new gear until I absolutely have to. I spent some gil pentamelding my Indagator's gear at the end of Endwalker and I'm still using some of it fine for all kinds of gathering in Dawntrail so like hell am I spending anything to do it again. It's good to hear scrip gear works fine for crafting in CE though, I got a bunch of that via custom deliveries.

[hydralus]

Admittedly, telling someone that the thing they struggled with is actually super easy probably only ticks them off more. That said, it is very easy. Like even if you can't clear the A-ranks for some reason, red alert missions will give you rank IV and B-ranks will give you rank III which will eventually get you the tool.

However my favorite comments have been from people complaining that it's too much of a grind. I want them to run into the people who say there's nothing to do.

[Aidorouge]

I don't disagree with your sightseeing log, although the platformer part of it was there in ARR with a couple of them already, and they were tied to annoying weather/time windows. They got rid of most of it in HW only to reintroduce and try out the kugane inn and tower in SB because they had that new idea of doing jump puzzles, so sightseeing seemed like the right place for it. Counterpoint though, it was merely 3-4 logs in SB, so is that a problem that some people could get a little challenge as well or should the entirety of the content have been dedicated exclusively to you there? Genuine question: do you need them ALL done for something? Is there a specific reward attached to this?

Anyway, that's beyond the point, where is the difficulty spike here exactly? It's baseline crafting recipes, and A-Ranks are either hard or expert recipes, which has been a requirement for every DoH relic since their introduction in ShB. Where is that wrench that came out of nowhere supposedly there? Or are you just unhappy that the relics require expert recipes? Because that argument, I can hear. It's valid. Doesn't mean that I agree or disagree with it, but it's valid (and has some have said above, you can bypass A ranks for your relics anyway apparently). But let's not pretend a second that it's something that came out of the blue?

The fundamental issue I take is that you try to conflate the whole game as "midcore" or "hardcore" as soon as a small part of it is above the baseline (yes big fishing is a small part of fishing, like A-ranks are a small part of cosmic). This sounds genuinely disingenuous to me. Aren't people allowed to have more challenging things to do as well? 90% of this new content is literally casual, yet you're trying to shoehorn it under a hardcore umbrella? All your examples, I feel like that you're taking offense that a part of the content is targeted at a higher difficulty than the majority of the baseline. Should we also delete extreme trials and whatnot because they suddenly render ALL pve "hardcore"?

You're trying to shift the subject on what the OP wasn't about. You're perfectly within your right to find the current content hard for you. You're perfectly within your right to find baseline crafting hard for you (because again, 90% of cosmic is baseline crafting).
But saying this is hardcore? Just no.

I was doing Sightseeing Logs because I was running out of other things I could feasibly do at this point, so yeah, not being able to do all of them means there was no point in doing any of them. Had I known I was going to get skilled checked in Kugane, I would not have stood around waiting for time/weather pattern ones in ARR, I would have simply accepted Sightseeing Logs were another thing like Deep Dungeons/Field Operations/Extreme/Savage/etc: Content I can't do so don't touch it, leave for the people capable and move on.

If these A-ranks are "just like how its always been" then it seems I can probably stop worrying about crafters too because I'm once again going to run into something I suddenly can't do. All you've done is warn me about the wrench in advance instead of it indeed coming out of the blue for me once I reached a point where hard and expert recipes are a thing I have to deal with.

I never suggested hard content can't exist or that it should be "deleted" I've only said that when that hard content suddenly happens as a requirement for progress within a certain piece of content touted as "casual" it ceases to be exactly that because without clearing that difficulty spike, you are literally stuck and you can't just fall back on Duty Support or unsync for that content... assuming the fights even allow you to solo due to mechanics, as the case often was with Stormblood trials I found, especially Extreme when I went trying to farm cards by my lonesome (because lord knows there's nobody on my home data center I can ask for help, and people on Aether/Primal/Crystal already seem to think people on Dynamis are "bads" without me coming over there and proving it).

I don't engage with large parts of this game already because I was trying to stay in my lane, and yet cars in that other lane just can't resist merging into mine and spinning me off the road. I don't even do roulettes anymore because I have to worry about Stormblood content "polluting" my options, as if Mhach and the Aetherochemical Research Facility weren't already bad enough (to the point I auto-left ARF every time, no exceptions). Or how I've been playing PVP less because Role Actions have been a wrench I keep taking to the face with no solution (unless its Comet) and I don't want to be accused of just being some leecher because my performance tanked ever since 7.1.

And the MSQ? Oh... I know all about "In from the Cold", or how the one thing people praise Dawntrail for is how it's "so much harder" than previous expansions when it comes to even the normal content.

You and other players as good as you are will never lack for content it seems because nothing ever slows you down for more than a day (if that), while mine is drying up fast and a whole expansion became this grueling wall to climb over, and even after reaching the top there was no sense of satisfaction or accomplishment out of it, just exhaustion and frustration from struggling through content that people constantly insist is "brain dead" and a general unwillingness to hop down the other side where Shadowbringers and the rest awaits because if I'm getting skill checked at THIS halfway point, the other half is going to be a nightmare.

And that's a me thing, obviously, I'm not expecting the game to suddenly curb its difficulty on my account, because contrary to what some people believe around here, it's not casual players demanding things like job homogenization and every other piece of "dumbing down" that occurs because I imagine most casual players either don't touch a lot of stuff at all due to the hurdles, go AFK at a major city or venue somewhere, or quit outright. As for me I don't even know what to do with this game anymore, for being an MMO it's become one of the smallest online spaces I've been in between community and content I can engage with and I DON'T want to be an obstruction to the experience of others whether that's not making requests for making things easier or just avoiding group content because I clearly suck at it. Cosmic Exploration just sounds like more of the same, content I have no business touching even if I had access to it because I won't be good at it for one reason or another, and if its well and truly considered casual? Well, that just makes my personal inability that much worse.

[Nero-Voidstails]

my biggest problem is not Penta meld but GP Regen and cordial. like let us have overworld nodes for almost any currency but mostly just let us get the GP faster so not waiting 2/3 minute per mission(don't know how long it take)

[Kuroka]

Again, it would be so so much easier if people here would just admit they're actually just super good at the game instead of saying everything is easy because the false hope of what casuals can actually accomplish in this game gets tiresome after awhile because this game keeps getting harder but I'm not getting any better.

Im not super good no... but yes, sometimes its a matter of skill. Today i did raid roulette and got Arcadium 6... 18 minutes in progress. Eighteen minutes lol

I was healer and replaced the other one that gave up. my co was new and so was one dps, but that doesnt really matter. After two more wipes he gave up and DC'd... I solo healed and ressed the part as we had neither smn nor rdm and we cleared just fine...


Same for crafting, some see the 25-12000-700 and take 5 seconds to know what skills to use, while i mostly either fu## around and find out or use an crafting solver if i totally cant manage lol

yet it never feels this bad, like yes some crafts just suck, but at least some you can just clear with base level.



While in most areas the game got too easy, the balance and difficulty curve is just trash...

[Astronis]

Cosmic Exploration just sounds like more of the same, content I have no business touching even if I had access to it because I won't be good at it for one reason or another, and if its well and truly considered casual? Well, that just makes my personal inability that much worse.

It's up to you if you want to give it a try, but there's some of it that can be engaged with that has no curve at all--the mech ops and the Red Alerts can be done by anyone and you can get currency to play the roulette game to get orchestrions or mounts that way as well as buy glams and portrait frames and such. The crafting and gathering tools want a little more effort, but if you don't want to do any expert crafts you don't have to, it will just be slower relying solely on the Red Alerts for the tool XP that otherwise you'd only get from the harder quests.