So how is everyone feeling about Occult Crescent now that it’s been a few days?

[yesnt]

Tanks just end up as kings

Wouldn't call someone who can not do mechanics a king, rather playing the game on "very easy mode". This is the job you pick when you don't actually want to play the game. The real magick happens when tanks manage to die regardless, that's pretty funny.

[skooma_dealer]

It gets very old very fast. Eureka was already kinda a braindead content, but nevertheless it was ok somethimes. OC... I feel like there is nothing to do here. This is just a glorified hunt train. There is no danger, the map is small and has the simpliest leveldesign you can imagine. You can experience literally everything in this zone in a few hours (except the raid), maybe even less. The story is criminally boring. Another "hey let's check some mysterious place" thing. You sail there and nothing happens.
I don't know, it's just not fun.

[Gurgeh]

CB3.
I think you really tried to listen with OC, but the devil is in the numbers.
For once, please just make some proper changes and fast.
Increase the Fate scaling. (Don't worry if the odd fate gets wiped)
Reduce the CE frequency. You got the difficulty perfect, more of less. They are being cleared. They are challenging.
Reduce the gear grind to give more casuals the confidence to try forked.
But dont bother if you are not going to change the body checks I keep hearing about.
If savage sweats want to optimise their way to a clear in two pulls, let them. They have more than their fair share, and you know it. They'll be eating rich again when the static requiring deep dungeon comes out, by which time the likes of me will be unsubbing again.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

All the following will be my personal opinions.

Phantom Jobs: 6/10

When I think of something that's created in the place of old Logos/Lost Actions, I normally thought one of - or combination of:

• The likes of setups that allows something absurd in a broken ways, like Lost Flare Star 'cheese', chaining Double Edge, 7m damage afflatus misery, DRK on Blood Rage.
• Let one role covers another role's responsibility... well sort of. and;
• Changes the way you approach xyz jobs i.e, Healers with Chainspell/FoM and LSS needs to be mindful of their MP consumptions and buff alignments, double edge users needing to ensure their most damaging attacks falls at the last 14th-16th stacks of the DE duration unless they're chaining them rather than following the strict balance created standard rotation, BLM needing to time their Magic Burst well to ensure two Foul casts will fall under its window, how Blood Rage slightly changes tanks uses their gapclosers... ah, the list can go on...

Phantom Jobs does not remotely come close to any of those examples outside probably Berserker. And maybe Oracle, which I think of it Oracle is a plus - an 'improved' Dynamis Dice although they're not quite the same. And I guess BLM's Enochian enhancing anything that's magic based by 27% so they will have an edge on that front... but does that even change how they approach their rotation in major ways?

I gave the system a 6/10 by the virtue of simply existing on top of today's already bland jobs (anybody recall PLD Requiescat augmenting any spells by 50% rather than specifically for their Holy magicks? Can you imagine the absurdity of Starfall augmented by old Requiescat? Lmao) and the fact they're one-time acquisition. But even the latter only opens up another issue that I will touch on in other point. I know that we're also getting additional phantom jobs later on, but I'd very much prefer to have the option to mix and match these phantom jobs together, at the cost of some drawbacks if you may.

FATEs & CE: 6/10

For the most part, they're inoffensive at worst. Overall still enjoyable. The only - and arguably a major complaint for this point, is how terribly off the FATEs scaling is. I can get to these FATEs just fine rather consistently. Additionally I find it a shame that some of these FATEs has some genuinely fun mechanics that we'd never get to see because with how everything are ran like a hunt train, they almost always die before they start becoming a threat.

CEs are mostly 'mini alliance raid bosses' which I think tend to be my 'sweet spot' in term of engagement & difficulty that I'd enjoy the most, so no complaints on that at all. Save from the fact that these bosses may also die too fast in near future because more and more people are going to attain bigger phantom job mastery bonuses.

The Zone: 7/10

Aesthetically pleasing! My complaints on this point is how devoid of danger it feels even at lower level. LoS detection felt very narrow. Mount speed is already fast enough even without riding map. Hell, even some of the supposed 'ranged mobs' like the sprites... for some reason needs to be at melee range to attack you with their Banish..? You can reduce the amount of AA they do by 'soft kiting' the same way you do with any other melee mobs. This may sound nitpicky, but it still make me raise the question: why do this at all? Occult Return having no cooldown probably also contributed to that but I digress, for now.

The Rewards (Preliminary): 0.1/10

"Preliminary" because I haven't touched ToB just yet so I can't form any opinion on that part specifically. Maybe that one will change my mind but for now, without further ado...

...Cannibalizing its predecessor's incentives to the degree we're seeing from whatever those bronze/silver chests spat out ain't it, SE. Not cool. Not cool at all. The only logical conclusion that I could think of why they did this is either (1)They're not confident this new content will garner enough attention, so they seek out to push people out of older content to force them all over here. After all, we know they love their engagement metric without parsing why they turn up its numbers. Or (2)They're cutting corners from making more new rewards.

Not being a zone to level your lv91-99 jobs is also kind of a mistake in my opinion. Giving more reasons for people to enter the content helps it longevity, whatever that is. But I suspect they're not doing this because they don't want the 7.3 DD arrives deader than the undead.

Also what does OC even have that's remotely sustainable to be farmed and sold for profit at this point, anyway? Not even its own unique new reward - the blue shark - survives past 2nd day before they too crash. This is the point that I briefly mentioned in the phantom job section. Eureka may still have the logograms. BSF used to have frags, although right now I imagine they're so much more de-incentivized it's no longer worthy of the effort. OC has... umbrellas? Lol...

Relic Grind: 5/10

Unsure at best. I understand people's frustration over anything that involves a grind against the Lady Luck. As people says, RNG giveth, and RNG taketh. My main approach to this is to assess whether or not I will enjoy the process itself. In my case? I already do - the barebone phantom jobs are enough to spice up the almost mindnumbingly boring 'hunt train'-styled FATEs and the well designed CEs. Does this makes the relic grind itself good? I don't think so. But I still enjoyed the process so they weren't much of an issue to me.

A bad luck proof solution to this such as adding an NPC to convert... say, 5 of the same Demiatmas into 1 of your needed Demiatmas would be miles better.

Tower of Blood (Preliminary): 2/10

How did they manage to release BA and CLL/Dal only to regress into something that's somehow the worst of the 3 in term of the hoops you need to jump to even participate is beyond me. But since I've never actually step into the raid, I won't say more than that. Suffice to say, it doesn't instill desire in me to even try the raid from such hearsays, so... meh.

Sure, I may enjoy the OC for the moment and having a blast in general. I will definitely procure at least +1 gearsets for all roles eventually. But judging from my past experiences with Bozja and Eurekan, I can foresee a future where the lack of incentive would lessen my own hype in a steeper fashion, and much quicker.

[Tsukino]

Mostly agree with what's been said in general. There are things I like, but every one of those has a downside to it, and it additionally feels like a big step back from "Save the Queen" areas in a number of ways.

The phantom jobs are fun, and FFV is my favorite in the series so I like this form of service. I also like the basic idea of having some more traditional FF abilities that don't fit into the normal game (like levitate and steal), which is one of the biggest things I liked about the ones in previous field ops. I also think the mechanisms in use for FATEs and CEs are pretty good overall. I really like the idea of having chests you can find that belong to you, even if they may not have done the loot tables for them well.

As much as I like the phantom jobs, they're not as good or interesting as the previous actions were. Like everyone said, you're stuck on one at a time, so even though they may have five abilities instead of two, they're fixed instead of letting you choose interesting combinations. The actions themselves are also generally not as impactful as the previous ones. They're also very uneven and mostly geared toward doing Forked Tower - a bunch of abilities only really do something at all in there, and then you're basically discouraged from using anything that's already mastered until they're all mastered, otherwise you're wasting the EXP. Also seems to be a massive missed opportunity in not having Freelancer be able to use abilities from the other jobs.

Even though the FATEs and CEs have good mechanisms, actually doing them feels pretty bad in general. FATEs are either done in 10 seconds because everyone warped in at once, or they take 10 minutes because only two people showed up and the scaling is garbage. And because everything is done so quickly and you have to be at a CE before it starts, that's all anyone does - try to make it to two FATEs and get a hit in to get any rewards at all, then go to the next CE. It seems like they wanted to avoid the way people sat around the camp and then went directly to CEs or FATEs, but ended up with something so much worse in practice. My small group would farm items or EXP while waiting for FATEs, and then do those as well while entering the queue to get into a CE, but now there is nothing to do in between - you either Return immediately and go to the next FATE/CE, or you stop doing those entirely to focus on something else, which brings me to...

Possibly the most confusingly designed part of the whole thing is how it's divided into two completely separate parts that have no interaction with each other. You can either grind silver or you can grind gold, with no way to earn both at the same time or gracefully shift between the two. EXP is technically available for both, but since most of the efficient ways of earning gold require a specific phantom job, mastering them also falls mostly on the silver farming side. All the ways people have found to get gold are also mind-numbingly boring and require specific jobs not everyone has or wants, which also sucks.

And I only say "possibly" for the split because everything about Forked Tower is just idiotic. They had basically as good a system as we ever get with Castrum Lacus Litore, Delubrum Reginae, and The Dalriada, and for some reason they decided to go back to Baldesion Arsenal, except somehow even worse than that too. Those scaled great for any amount of people that wanted to do them, and the various actions made it possible to have a damage dealer become a tank if needed. Now it's back to being only for the serious raiders, except they can't get into it because of the asinine system they concocted to even get the thing started. The only neat thing about this was how they brought back some of the old-school dungeon stuff like needing different abilities from different specific jobs, but they could have easily put those mechanisms into something like in the StQ areas people would actually be able to do. The fact that the timer to try entering is shorter than the length of the average CE is just the icing on the stupid cake here.

Finally, I think the overall grind for silver and gold is pretty much insane. I assume I don't see many people talking about this because most MMO players are masochists who think it's good to have to play the same game for hundreds of hours to get some gear that will be outdated right after, but needing 38,000 silver and 24,000 gold to get a full set of +1 gear for one role is ridiculous. And of course you can't even get +2 without doing Forked Tower and lucking your way into a bunch of chest drops.

[KageTokage]

The zone really did need some equivalent of the Eureka/Bozja potions so you're not forced to play tank/heals and/or have a specific phantom job equipped just survive the unavoidable damage in most of the CEs.

Though it's made me raise the more fundamental question of why the heck AoE healing is limited to only party members when that is largely not the case in other MMOs.

Despite my misgivings about the appalling Atma drop-rate, I returned to OC with the mindset of "forget Atma, just grind Silver pieces".

And I'm STILL disappointed; because I favor playing healer, particularly Sage. To quote something I read in the comments on Reddit:
Moreso than any exploration content beforehand, Tanks just end up as kings. Phantom actions devalue dps by giving huge damage buttons to everyone; healers are devalued by chemists spamming out infinite raises. Survivability is the thing most limited both by the mastery buff and by phantom actions, so tanks end up being kings of the zone. Phantom jobs have shrunk the player space, not expanded it.

And this is evidenced - from my experience at least - by the sheer number of Tanks in every CE or OC-FATE I enter.

The thing is, I never really finished fully levelling any tank job as I just don't enjoy tank gameplay. Which means I generally play OC as Sage, and it feels really unrewarding and redundant.

If there is one thing phantom jobs don't really provide it's consistent AoE mitigation so SGE and SCH still have their niche to fill when it comes to keeping DPS with tons of vuln stacks alive.

Also, the lazy people playing tanks so they don't die are ultimately making the CEs drag on longer then they need to. DPS-heavy instances can down the bosses before they even finish cycling through their mechanics provided most of them stay alive.

That's another thing I simultaneously like/hate about the content is that unlike Bozja, you are still largely locked into being whatever role you are natively because there's a lack of the stuff like the aetherweaver/martialist soul buffs that make you much more of a DPS/healer/tank.

[Rayne6665]

Or just do weekly M4 Cruiserweight normal for the x7 blade thing+500 green tome . weapon is 750 while phantom relic is 745 lol.

[itachi-otsutsuki]

It's ass. Aside from just a mind numbing,endless grind with no end goal. The Forked Tower is the only thing that needs any of the grind, and it is gatekept by the most idiotic and evil entry methods I've ever seen. (Literally WORSE than BA). On top of that it is also a higher difficulty, it's practically a savage raid. So how they can stack the entry prog on top of a savage raid is baffling and insane. Do one or the other, not both.

Positives are you get some glamor. The CE and Raid mechanics are actually good. The phantom job system is..okay. But all that is undone by the rigged incentive structure and asinine grinds in OC.

To further explain that, there is 'no point' in grinding silver,gold,jobs,gear unless you either 1. can make gil 2. can level jobs 3. can optimize the raid 4. are just a masochist who likes pointless grinding.

You can't do 1-3 basically so all that's left after that is you being a masochist. The motivation to continue doing any of it is just gone before you even get a single relic.

It is really a waste of potentially good content with some insanely stupid dev decisions ruining it.

[mallleable]

I'm really enjoying it, but they desperately need to fix FATE scaling being too low, treasure chest loot crashing markets, and making Forked Tower runs easier to coordinate groups for.

Some measured nitpicks that could be better is making Critical Engagement, and FATE spawn rate just a little bit slower. The pace is a bit too fast, and it doesn't feel like there is time to catch your breath, and constantly watching the map for spawns is not fun. Return needs a cooldown as well to slow things down a bit. And it feels like a liability if you play anything but a tank, but I don't know what could be done to fix this. Also Arcanaut gear, and upgrade mats could be a little cheaper.

[itachi-otsutsuki]

Honestly when I grind I don't even do the fates, they aren't worth the stress on top of having to RUN to CE's which is also a downgrade from Bozja.