Cosmic Exploration is CASUAL content with a pinch of midcore

[Valence]

After reading a lot of feedback from people I really do think this community needs a reality check for a moment.

• The community based group fates (MechOps and Phase Progression) are the most "casual"content there is in the game: it's all about clicking on quest items mindlessly, going back and forth between them. There is literally no skill involved in those and they're designed for everybody to get by.
• Every mission from D to B ranks are literally standard content found in any piece of DoH/DoL stuff that has been everywhere in the game, between leves, collectables, and normal crafting. There is literally nothing newfangled, different nor hard about them. This is literally casual content.
• A-ranks are spread between 1) expert recipes and/or weird dura/progress/quality recipe stats, and 2) normal high end recipes. In the case of 2), it's not much different from endgame gear crafting but with an added timer with a lot of margin especially once you macro things out. In the case of 1), then yes, we're entering relic expert recipe territory and other newfangled challenges like on DoL missions: this is what I'd qualify as midcore content here. I have yet to see anything truly hardcore like resplendent recipes back in their prime, or the ARR masterbooks I and II.

It needs to be reiterated that if you do not want to engage with a bit more involved content, you can stick to D to B-ranks in order to level up, and B-ranks for the last stages of your relics. B-ranks are like standard endgame lvl99-100 recipes. If you cannot do them, then perhaps you leveled your jobs to 100 and never actually got to play them beyond copy pasting macros because that's literally the recipes you've been getting at every expansion so far. A-ranks swing between harder endgame normal recipes and actually difficult expert recipes with steep requirements, and they're just here for people that want to engage further with it, and I'm glad they're here. Nobody is forced to go through them at all.

But perhaps some expectations relied on getting content on the level of community fates literally everywhere, and if that was your expectations, then I can understand how engaging even with baseline DoH/DoL leves/recipes suddenly looks like a steep endeavor.

[Jeeqbit]

Yup, I know nothing about crafting and gathering hardly and I am getting by. How? By doing Red Alerts, Mech Ops and FATEs. These work for players that aren't really into crafting and gathering much.

[Kaurhz]

Thank you...

and it is worth saying that you can reroll your A-Ranks and B-Ranks to start being selective about them if some of the weird Prog/Qual/Durab recipes are too intimidating or hands on.. A lot of the recipes in A-Rank are really approachable with macros, and even on affordable stats, it just happens those macros aren't public knowledge yet, unlike what we have with traditional high end recipes where they are available within 1-2 hours of the patch going live.

People just need to be patient they are newer recipes and newer content, and some of them are non-traditional like the 20 durability recipes, which initially may seem hard if you zerg out on Groundwork and Preparatory Touch, but when you start using durability efficient actions, e.g., Prudent Touch and Delicate Synthesis then those become fairly easy.

For the most part, aside from the unique handling of certain recipes, e.g., High prog, low qual, vice versa, and low durab... None of the recipes are really much different from what people do with the standard master recipes or old relic experts, like the A-1 Test Processing recipes are actually easier than Ceremonial, and closer akin to the Archeo gear.

Edit: I just wish people would ask "What am I doing wrong here", or "What can I do differently", and be receptive to that rather than thinking the content is exclusively the problem.

[hydralus]

We may also have a skewed perception since most people don't go to the official forums unless they have a complaint, or are downright trolling. Needless to say the thousands of people who are giving the content a go are able to make it work somehow.

[Kohashi]

That's why you never listen to people that spend every waking moment in the forums venting and crying about stuff. One minute they cry they don't have enough stuff to do, the next they cry it's too grindy and takes to much time.

I personally didn't even touch CE but I am glad my crafting/gathering enjoyer friends are making the Moon great again.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

We may also have a skewed perception since most people don't go to the official forums unless they have a complaint, or are downright trolling. Needless to say the thousands of people who are giving the content a go are able to make it work somehow.

NGL I had a friend who told me how OF is 'burning with CE complaints' and I couldn't care less in the first 2-3 days because I was having a good time there. It's only now I need to take a break from all those poking, dinking, thwacking, & running to revisit...................

.... yeah roflmao. Even if I saw some of these 'complaints' in-game, good amount of them were alleviated quickly enough because from what I could tell, people share their 'do(s) and don't(s)' freely in shout chat while correcting where there are misinformation given, then everybody happily profits from the correct methods onward.

[Minali]

Thank you very much for this thread!

I have the feeling there is also this lack of the sentiment of saying "this content is not for me". Now, does it suck when there is not a lot long term content for your taste? Of course! We had a full year since release where hardcore raiders dined well while the rest didn't really have anything with long time engagement. (I very much enjoy the normal raids and the alliance raid, but I wouldn't consider weekly farming for an hour max "long time engagement", nor doing ten minutes society quests for a few weeks. And I dislike progging hardcore stuff as a concept, it's just not fun for me.)
However, does this mean the content itself is bad? No. That's like saying milkshakes are a horrible invention and have many core design flaws because you're lactoseintolerant and cannot digest them. The solution for this isn't changing milkshakes but offering some without animal milk. And that's the same with this game's content, ask for content that suits your taste, not say the once we got is bad just because it's not your thing. Many people clearly enjoy it or enough parts of it, otherwise all worlds would still be stuck at phase 1 or 2 because not enough people are there for the upgrade missions. (Even the ones on less populated worlds who are playing a much harder version right now while the others breeze through it.)

Having said that, I am a person who is never getting tired of pointing out how "easy" and "hard" in itself are very subjective and just because one thing is easy for one, it doesn't mean it's hard for others. But we're talking about going into content with FATEs where you just stand in front of a crystal or a squishy pink bubble and aim a drill or flamethrower in its general direction. You don't even have to target anything, you don't have to be an omnicrafter with pentamelded lvl 100 gear for more currency. You just have to be in this instance during a mech op and point your character in the general direction and press one button. And at some point you have to walk three steps to the containers where you hand them in, which works by just standing in the circle centered on these tanks.
You even get a currency reward boost for the following missions by being part of the ground support team. It is not getting any easier than that.

(One could argue you still have to be level 10 at a DoH/DoL, but you can just unlock fisher, do the first quest by buying the required fish at the fishmonger in Limsa, then unlock Ocean Fishing by targeting a guy and do one or two ocean fishing trips while having a food buff, for reaching level 10. Where you again just point your character in the general direction of the water with a versatile lure and press "1" and "2" frequently. If you want to play half decent, you can get the three ocean fishing baits and ask in chat if anyone could pls mention them, if nobody is doing it already, but Ocean Fishing is so damn broken, it is really low effort.)

Now, are there missions who require you to put in more work, knowing what the buttons on your hotbar actually do instead of pressing a macro? Yeah sure, but that's on the highest tier of missions and if you compare rewards, it's not like they are massively better than Class B missions. I often mix them up because I want points for my DoH/DoL relics and sometimes the B ones I can see offer more of these than the A ones. And the C and B ones are not really any different than crafting on the higher regular game recipe levels, which you have to be on anyway to do Class B+ missions, and I'm sure there are macros for this out there, for the people who really don't care for crafting and gathering above the level of "having anything to do while watching Netflix" or "printing gil with stuff I sell on the marketboard".

Yes, some missions are going to be hard, but that's a good thing, considering what a faceroll average crafting usually is. Even the regular expert recipes for resplendent tools or dragonsong/splendorous tools if you wait long enough you can just outgear any difficulty (which I may have done in the past... ) I am crafting and gathering because I enjoy it most of the time. I don't even really care for the lottery, Kupo o' Fortune in Ishgard taught me well to expect nothing and rather be happy when you actually get something nice. I started skipping mech ops when I'm on the other side of the map for stellar gathering missions because I find them more enjoyable. If this all sounds wild and absurd to you.. that's perfectly fine. It's not your cup of tea. Same as raiding is not my cup of tea. Not everybody needs to like everything. But please just accept it's not a cup of tea instead of asking devs to dumb this down to the faceroll level it usually is. Just do Class B missions who tend to give similar rewards, and Mech Ops with or without mech, and enjoy your loot from the vendor and the lottery. Let us crafters and gatherers who are in there for the fun "gather" some sense of pride and accomplishment for tackeling an expert craft or gathering just fast enough for reach gold tier in a Class A mission, please.

[Aco505]

My main issue is that the relic progression is a bit weird. You cannot obtain rank III points until level 90, meaning that if you're leveling a crafter you will quickly cap ranks I and II, and then get stuck. Your relic will also out level you fast so you can't really use it that much, not even at level 100, until it's fully upgraded to ilvl 720.

A new type of mission unlocked at level 70 would've evened things out a bit more, imho, with the top A-level missions staying as the overall best for the different types of points or progression.

I don't like DoH/DoL content much (except fishing!) but I'm still engaging with it because I find it alright and I'm learning about crafting, which I've avoided before. It's cool that the more enthusiastic people are getting stuff out of it and it's definitely content that can appeal to the more casual audience, which the expansion has lacked for a whole year.

[Supersnow845]

My main issue is that the relic progression is a bit weird. You cannot obtain rank III points until level 90, meaning that if you're leveling a crafter you will quickly cap ranks I and II, and then get stuck. Your relic will also out level you fast so you can't really use it that much, not even at level 100, until it's fully upgraded to ilvl 720.

A new type of mission unlocked at level 70 would've evened things out a bit more, imho, with the top A-level missions staying as the overall best for the different types of points or progression.

I don't like DoH/DoL content much (except fishing!) but I'm still engaging with it because I find it alright and I'm learning about crafting, which I've avoided before. It's cool that the more enthusiastic people are getting stuff out of it and it's definitely content that can appeal to the more casual audience, which the expansion has lacked for a whole year.

Yeah the relic starting at 10 and levelling all the way to 720 is near pointless when a person levelling the crafters can barely use the relic as they level because of the A/B/C/D rank scaling. The relic could have just be substituted for like a relic you get at ilvl 675 and each research rank gives you 5 ilvl’s and increases the cosmic credit bonus with rank 9 also conferring the splenderous effect because right now the relic levelling from level 10 is useless to someone actually levelling the crafters

[Fawkes]

Every mission from D to B ranks are literally standard content found in any piece of DoH/DoL stuff that has been everywhere in the game, between leves, collectables, and normal crafting. There is literally nothing newfangled, different nor hard about them.

They are absolutely not standard, a lot of them seem built around using one or two specific skills. Maybe rank D is mostly normal but they start getting weird pretty much immediately.

I'm not saying they're hard, but if you're used to the regular content in the game you might just approach this like anything else and find yourself unable to complete some of the tasks.