Yet Another Occult Crescent Opinion That Nobody Asked For

[escapeRealm]

Decided to share my thoughts on the new Field Operation since I’ve pretty much completed it (relic obtained, Level 20, two Phantom Jobs mastered, only the dungeon remains).

Gameplay loop - gets old real quick.
"Please, Square Enix, please make this field operation gameplay interesting!... But they only answered - fate, fate, critical engagement. I didn't understand."
The "Fate > Fate > CE" loop might have been fun first couple hours, but quickly becomes a mindless slog after that. CEs themselves are not bad, bosses are mostly fine but are not really anything special (the only exception being the turtle). Fates, on the other hand, not only are they your typical absolute nothingburger, but their syncing might be broken - I can't give any other explanation as to why all fates being cleared in 30 seconds.

Knowledge Level - pointless numbers.
Only exist to make mobs above your level do more damage and lock the Forked Tower entry. Considering how they were presented at the start, I thought it would be something similar to turn-based FFs level, where they determine your stats and how effective you'll be against low leveled mobs. Instead, lvl 20 players does the same damage to lvl 1 mob when they themselves were lvl 1, while also still receiving the same damage. Heard people say that it's quick to get, but it took me over 15 hours of endless looping to get there.

Currency - unbalanced.
OC have 2 types of currency - silver and gold. Silver can be received for doing fates and CEs in a pretty sizable amount. Gold, on the other hand, can only be received from killing/chaining regular mobs, and you get so little of it even when chaining lvl 28 mobs. But what's weird is that, for some reason, all items that you can buy with gold are much more expensive than their silver counterparts despite silver being much easily farmable currency (examples: cyphers cost 600 silver against 960 gold; occult potion cost 40 silver against 50 gold; any XII materia cost 200 silver against 320 gold; and so on). Did they mix up the currencies during development? Why would gold be less expensive currency than a silver???
And then there's gear. Each piece cost 4000 silver (20000 in total), which is fine. But +1 augmentation, which costs 3600 silver and 4800(!) gold PER PIECE, or 18000 silver and 24000(!!!) gold IN TOTAL. How is anyone expected to get that much gold if you get literally nothing for chaining mobs, and it's literally the only way to obtain it? Has anyone on the balancing team actually done any math for this?

Phantom Jobs - overhyped additional skills.
Kinda disappointed in how PH Jobs are made. Just like Knowledge levels, they don't interact with your stats in any way (which I guess somewhat make sense), instead just give you a set amount of additional skills. It's nice to have more tools to deal with enemies, but I feel like more could have been done with them (for example - allow mixing skills from different mastered jobs). What i also don't like is just how slow they level up - amount of Phantom Exp that game gives is not a lot. I probably won't grind any more masteries since i see no point in doing so (not counting freelancer skill requirements - 5 masteries for 30% heal and 10 for chests search is ridicilous and worthless)

[escapeRealm]

Exploration/Quests - it's neat, actually, but with a caveat.
I liked the zone, how it looks and how you can find and look for chests. What I don't like is the requirement for quests to have a specific set of survey points unlocked in order to progress, with my infuriation picking while trying to find them for "A Common Thread". The only clue given was to survey "architecturally distinct ruins", which I interpreted as that I need to go to different ruins and find points there. Except that it isn't the case - I visited and got all points from Shadowed City, Abandoned Ascent and The Wanderer's Haven, and those turned out to be not the points that I needed. I then proceeded to scout the entire map for 2 hours trying to find points that I do actually need, and finally give up and just googled the map for them. Turned out 2 out of 3 points were nowhere near "architecturally distinct ruins" - one of them was in the middle of the Vanishing Slope, the other was in Crystallized Cavers, and the only one that can be considered to be near ruins was just near Shadowed City near the other ruins. There needs to be a more clear clue on where these points could be, because it was not fun wasting that much time on searching for them and just giving up. The same goes for carrot chest - they are not easy to find, and it's really easy to miss them and waste a huge amount circling between every possible point where it can spawn.

Relic Grind - best of both world.
I have already seen people saying that It's either "the worst grind that ever exist", or the opposite, "it's nothing but an easy tomes grind". I personally think it's a pretty balanced system - you still have to grind demiatma to get access to the relics, but after that you can just chill and get the weapons for tomes and not waste your time on, frankly, bad RNG for each new weapon. I got more than half of the required demiatma while leveling Knowledge to 20, and the rest farmed in the DT zones, so the grind was still there, but not to an infuriating degree.

Dungeon - ???
Have yet to do it since It's pretty hard to find 16 lvl 20 people right now (or at least that how it is on Alpha). I'll update this or reply here when I actually complete it.

Overall, I think this field is kinda mediocre - there are some things it does right, but others are just so bad that it's hard to ignore them.

[ServerCollaps]

i think they also messed up the bunnys.. the carrots are supposed to drop from chests around the world, but I havent seen a single one in 100+ chests >.>

and then theres a title for getting 1.000 carrots..