Cosmic Exploration is CASUAL content with a pinch of midcore

[s32ialx]

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.

LOL calls it casual content with a pinch of mid core but then admits that the a-class missions require try hard levels of penta melding to even do. and telling people to do b-class mission to level is i'm sorry buddy but unacceptable the time different especially on your first relic for 6 points (B-Class) vs 19+ points (A-Class) it takes to level is too much it's not 'casual' in the slightest. how hard it is to make lunar credits at b-class even with a maxed weapon and a-class is still forever only to be slapped in the face with prisms 50 times in a row is NOT 'casual' friendly.

Esp considering on small or medium servers it's not like a Red Alert happens every hour or two or three you'll be lucky to get 2 red alerts in a day amazing if you see 3.

[Yoshihara]

try hard levels of penta melding

melding

try hard

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

[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.

[Valence]

LOL calls it casual content with a pinch of mid core but then admits that the a-class missions require try hard levels of penta melding to even do. and telling people to do b-class mission to level is i'm sorry buddy but unacceptable the time different especially on your first relic for 6 points (B-Class) vs 19+ points (A-Class) it takes to level is too much it's not 'casual' in the slightest. how hard it is to make lunar credits at b-class even with a maxed weapon and a-class is still forever only to be slapped in the face with prisms 50 times in a row is NOT 'casual' friendly.

Esp considering on small or medium servers it's not like a Red Alert happens every hour or two or three you'll be lucky to get 2 red alerts in a day amazing if you see 3.

You don't need to do A-rank missions. That little 10% of midcore is not even mandatory.
You're also purposely quoting the lowest rewarding B-ranks to the highest reward A-ranks (A-2s and A-3s). I can do the same the other way around and say that they're all similar for 9 points (B-rank) vs 10 points (A-rank) because that's also true.
I am also not pentamelded by far, I run mid tier builds from teamcraft which I do believe is pretty standard for most crafters, and it's way enough for the non expert A-1s.

I swear do you people even craft casually out of cosmic? Beyond society quests and customs?

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.

It's literally the raidplan disease that has spread all over pve since at least the same amount of time (it was macros before raidplans). People have stopped actually engaging with the content mechanics and gameplay, they just log in to get it solved for them so they just have to execute.

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).

It is not a requirement, unless you do consider normal crafting recipes hard, then yes, normal crafting is a requirement to progress content about crafting.
A-ranks are not mandatory. And some of them are nothing more than endgame master recipes if you really have to.

What is how it's always been, is that doh relics have been gated behind expert recipes since their inception. It's actually the first time you can do them WITHOUT doing expert recipes if you dodge the expert A-1s (and all of the A-2s and A-3s), or do red alerts.

I do not understand why you keep insisting this is hardcore content. As I already explained above, this is normal, baseline crafting. All you have to do is decide if baseline crafting is hard or insurmountable for you, which can be a valid take. Or, if you don't consider the content worth to you because you cannot 100% it.

Admittedly I don't know how much slower it is if you avoid A ranks altogether.

Not much in reality, because even the players attempting the A-ranks, especially the 2s and 3s, will meet consistent failures, and for example when you're getting an average of 50-80% on A-3s like me then obviously not getting gold on everything is a given for those. I'd probably not go any slower if I did only A-1s, nor much slower with Bs, that can be 100% gold without any rng or uncertainties thrown into the mix.

[s32ialx]

You don't need to do A-rank missions. That little 10% of midcore is not even mandatory.
You're also purposely quoting the lowest rewarding B-ranks to the highest reward A-ranks (A-2s and A-3s). I can do the same the other way around and say that they're all similar for 9 points (B-rank) vs 10 points (A-rank) because that's also true.

Actually I was referring to the highest rewarding ones, there is not a single B rank that I have seen that is higher than 11 the MAJORITY of them are 6-7 NOT TO MENTION you are suggesting that you get to PICK which ones are available for you, which you know is flat out not true.

It's literally the raidplan disease that has spread all over pve since at least the same amount of time (it was macros before raidplans). People have stopped actually engaging with the content mechanics and gameplay, they just log in to get it solved for them so they just have to execute.

OH NO people are playing this game just like other MMO's and looking up how to do things instead of wanting to spend hours learning something when they have a life and job that they also need to take care of, insane.

[Supersnow845]

Actually I was referring to the highest rewarding ones, there is not a single B rank that I have seen that is higher than 11 the MAJORITY of them are 6-7 NOT TO MENTION you are suggesting that you get to PICK which ones are available for you, which you know is flat out not true.

B ranks are twice as fast to complete because they need fewer crafts and shorter macros. If you want cosmocredits spamming B ranks is objectively faster than A ranks and for research it’s only a tiny bit slower for half the investment and no food needed

And you can spam which mission you want because there is no downside to accepting and immediately abandoning a mission. It’s really easy to have 4-5 out of the 12 you do regularly and if none of those 5 are available accept a random mission then immediately abandon it