Cosmic Exploration is CASUAL content with a pinch of midcore

[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.

[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.

[s32ialx]

My problem is this was touted as 'casual' content so adding try hard content in it just makes it no longer casual content at all.

For it to be casual content all of it has to be casual, I don't care if it takes twice or 3 times as long to accomplish things if it was fully casual, but gate keeping casual players into lower tier and rare spawn red alerts making it even harder and even more painful to them them to be fucked by the gacha rewards for participation and put in days no a week of work to not even get 1 relic max because doing even 5 red alerts a day (which no one could possibly even do since they are about 5 hours apart on busy servers) would not even give you enough points of IV to level from .7 to .8 once.

So you're asking people to spend weeks on weeks doing red alerts for a single relic, not even multiple, if they are even lucky enough to be able to play during a red alert and all their time and work they spend doing that to also then be told by the gacha system haha here have 10,000 Lunar Credits worth of Prisms.


P.S. lets not forget that all A-Class mission are time sensitive so a casual player would have to fail the mission multiple times just trying to learn if they could possibly even do it causing them to take even that much longer to obtain even just their first relic.


P.S.S. I'm not complaining on behalf of me, I have already 4 relics I try-harded bad, but I was expecting a nice relaxing easy going cosmic exploration not this BS.

[hydralus]

We're never going to agree what counts as casual or midcore or hardcore content since they're community-coined terms. Personally I think just because something takes a while doesn't mean it's hardcore/tryhard. However grinding out 4 tools in a week is pretty tryhard so no wonder you feel it's a grind.

[Catwho]

Casual content does not mean "you can easily grind out all achievements." The people who already have the black mount are NOT CASUAL PLAYERS and they should absolutely not be the standard against which you are judging yourself.

It's casual content in that you can drop in and drop out freely, with no set time commitments, and participate in the events though you're not already max level.

[Minali]

(snip bc. post length)

I hope it doesn't come off as rude, I am not you of course and you have to know what is or isn't fun for you, obviously. However, going by the examples you mention, like the sightseeing log, triple triad or crafting and gathering in this case, this feels like "perfect" is standing in the way of "good" a lot. It sounds like very binary decisions are being made here, leaving you with nothing to do due to not being able to do them 110%. There are hundreds of Sightseeing Log entries, and maybe a hand full after ARR involve jumping puzzles like the ones on the Kugane Tower or Bokairo Inn. And some of the ARR ones used to have jumping puzzles but are now nothingburgers due to the addition of flying in ARR regions. Considering the point of the Sightseeing Log is exploring maps and getting some nice extra lore about this world of FFXIV, and maybe unlocking paintings for housing or getting a minion or two, I can't help but wonder how not being able to do a hand full of them suddenly makes the experience of dozens of others really bad. It's not like you have to do them in order or have to have finished all HW entries to unlock the SB ones or so. (A part of the ARR logs seems to be hidden behind other ARR logs but as others already pointed out, the ARR ones are weird as hell and not representative for this whole feature anyway.)
And it's the same here: Plenty of people described in detail how there are many parts of Cosmic Exploration you can do with zero knowledge about gathering and crafting whatsoever, maybe 10-20% of knowledge for Stellar missions, should you decide to do some, it just takes more time. And yet just knowing there is an optional part somewhere in there that might not be your thing spoils the whole experience for you.

I am a person who has some completionist tendencies, and issues with being too perfectionist in some regards, so I fully understand of not wanting to do something maybe 70% instead of 100%. However, perfection is an illusion, not just in FFXIV but just in life in general. And I learned sometimes these 70% can also be a lot of fun one would otherwise miss out on entirely, limiting my life experience drastically.

Of course, as said, I am not you, but I know this kind of striving for experience that fulfill you 100% leads to a very lonely path with not a lot of options for enjoyment. If this is still enough and satisfying for you, sure, go for it, but maybe consider once in a while to look for fun in imperfect things as well...?