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

[Arkdra]

I love Occult Crescent. I maxed all the jobs and cleared out the shops and have a full suit of +1 gear. I still go back in and piddle around a little bit because I just find it fun. Love to zeninage a rude lion for more damage than a limit break. I loathed Eureka and tolerated Bozja so liking this as much as I did is a pleasant surprise.

That said, Forked Tower is big miss for me. But so was BA so I am not surprised. I will probably never bother with a ft run given the logistical hurdles and that makes me a little sad because I want that +2 gear set for bigger zeninage's. I'm not going to pan the isle as a whole for it though. It was a big step up for me over the previous iterations. Hoping in the 3rd update we get something more like Dalriada or maybe DRS.

[PyurBlue]

I was hoping that OC would provide interesting midcore content instead of the slightly changed mishmash of existing systems, with all their flaws attached. Constant teleporting makes it feel like multi world hunts, all load screens. FATEs should be much longer lasting which would make the removal of teleports feasible without forcing players to run around the map on foot all the time. I have no interest in phantom jobs since they're just more buttons to press. There are enough job skills already and I'd rather improve what we have now instead of adding on random extra layers.

[Sourcy]

There is absolutely zero reason to play any job that isn't a Tank outside of forked tower.

Multiple attacks will kill you instantly as DPS/Healer, where Tanks can stack up to 20+ vulns in some fights. There never is a DPS race save for on Company of Stone, and even then cannoneers, Geos and Zerkers handle the lack of Blue DPS.

A lot of these mechanics need to be tuned from raw damage to dealing % HP.

[Krojack]

It's ok...

The gear is glam unless you want to join a Discord server and do the failure of a Tower dungeon.

In the end, it got boring within the first week but that's expected seeing as most people won't do the Tower.

[Alahard]

After 2 weeks inside -> its kinda meh. When compared to Bodja

The good ->
Phantom jobs are better than refarming the same lost actions. Kinda wish freelancer let you pick 5 skills from your maxed jobs for full customizability

CE -> good engaging encounters that are difficult yet approachable. Overall better than bodja, but red chotober still the superior CE that the black chocobo doesn't nearly live up to.

The meh ->
Item chest. The amount and how you find them i think is fine. The problem is 1) pots should be given out on all fates ( granted at a smaller volume) people, not just 2 so you can look foward to one more often. You can keep pot super fates every hour for a guaranteed one. Also generic materia just sucks as a reward when we are already stockpiled. The basic award should be gold coins ( because gold farming sucks as it is)

The bad ->
Carrot drop rate -> I know I haven't been actively going crazy farming chest, but you think I would be able to get the carrot once by now?

Gold Farming -> Why is it just wacking normal mobs all the time? It's worst than bodjza. At least there you get rewarded with lost actions and a CE spawn. Here im just wacking basic mobs that are generally non threatening and require me to turn my brain off for hours at a time for a few gold per kill. And it's required to play more jobs. Here's what I would do next time -> create active hunt style areas that point to a specific region, where mobs are supercharged. Mobs supercharged gain access to some basic telegraphed attacks, depending on the mob. As a reward for farming there, a hunt style s rank can spawn, that when killed gives like 300 gold coins, and a guarenteed pot. And then make chest drop gold. Aka -> standing at one corner, in an exploration zone, for hours on end shouldnt be happening as the best grind method.

Fate Scaling -> Why is the normal fate scaling absolute garbage? The fates DO have great mechanics for normal fates, but whats the point if they die in 2 hits????? Also makes the riding map necessary, as the first hour means your probally not reaching fates in time to get credit, which can be frustrating. Fates should last at least 1:30, or 2 min for the pot ones

The WTF where you guys thinking ->

Forked tower entrance requirements. So bad that at least 4 different threads have spawned just on it. So bad, it's baffling to figure out why it was even designed this way? Is the system designer in charge of this a sadist?

[Gurgeh]

I just want to say one last time that I thought the CE designs were fantastic.
(It's just such a shame that the role/job design has backed XIV into a corner where tank is so OP self sufficient that any challenging content is going to make it the clear choice. If people could queue all tanks into roulettes they would for most when not levelling.)

Please, you could fix so many of the problems by just tweaking some constants.
Increase FATEs' scaling or HP bars.
Maybe increase FATE respawn.
I wanted lots of EX difficulty and I got that in the CEs, but reduce their respawn rate, I didn't just get lots, I got lots and often. That doesn't work for other people.
I dint know what to say about Forked but just turn off ciphers.
You need to be dropping these 'fixes" this Tuesday. If key devs are on holiday, just tell us. Otherwise these fixes are needed now.

Just tweak some constants/variables. It would go so far.

[CCheshire]

After spending 8 days inside and a few days later to reflect on my exp: I liked it more than old zones, but not sure if I want to bother getting the last 2 missing job shards or even farm gold coins since it looked p boring. I'll be back once they release the 2nd part of North Horn but so far I'm not doing FT since that requires more energy, I don't really care much, and grinding for its own sake is already boring after I got all my atmas done.

I feel like Pot and Bunny chests are more useless than I expected, since the few I found gave me a lot of ribbons, not including the loss of gil to buy the fate carrot or missing out on silver coins from CE since I have to go to the other side of the map to get nothing each time.

FWIW: I liked all the random bronze and silver chests in the map, which were personal chests and made wandering the map a good value vs just sitting at camp 9/10 times.

[ForsakenRoe]

There's some real headscratcher design decisions IMO. The biggest one that comes to mind is the Atmas. I have 6 of one colour left over, due to RNG being a bastard to me. They're useless, now that I've done the first step of the Relic grind. Now, I have to hand in a new item which, surprise, costs 500 tomes (welcome back, EW).

Instead of the current '3 of each Atma, then 1500 tomes of Arcanite', why couldn't it have been '2 of each Atma to empower Gerolt's hammer, then 1 of each Atma per Relic you want to make'? By making the price of each Atma from the vendor 250 tomes, you'd still retain the 1500 tome price per Relic, but you'd be able to use duplicates you got while farming for the first step for something (that being, more relics). Additionally, you'd be able to use your tomes to purchase Atmas you have less of, making a 'bad luck protection' of sorts against the RNG trying to screw with your Atma drop ratios.

But wait! What if these Atmas were also purchaseable via Bicolor Gemstones, so that even farming outside of OC, you'd have a 'bad luck protection' system of sorts? This would allow for players to have the option to work on getting multiple relics completed, AND levelling alternate jobs to 100 (potentially being able to kit them out with a brand new relic the moment they hit level cap)

But wait! There's 6 Atma types, which correlate to the 6 zones of Dawntrail, right? But hear me out, there's something else in the game that there's 6 of: Expansions! ARR, HW, SB, SHB, EW, DT. So instead of doing 'everyone farms in these latest 6 zones (or OC)', we could have instead had each type of Atma be linked to each of the Expansions (ie: the light blue one comes from HW, the red one comes from SB, the purple one from SHB, etc). This would drive activity in FATEs across the entire game, from level 1 to 100. This would also be a boon to some players, who would be working on secondary objectives, such as working on an ARR/HW relic (which have some FATE related steps each), levelling a new Job from even lower levels, or even helping players finish working on the 'Shared FATE' systems of SHB/EW (if they didn't already do them while they were current, maybe they're a newer player IDK).


As for the OC itself, I am genuinely impressed, that SE has now had ~10 years since the planning phase of HW to work out a way to implement a Chemist into this game. As far as I've heard it told, AST was originally meant to be Chemist, and SGE was another crack at it, with both the healers we now have being the results of 'well we tried and couldn't work it out in time'. And now that we finally have a Chemist, in a side content where balance need not be respected (so the ideas can be as zany as we like), we got... 'Benediction, but it costs a 10k item per use', 'Manafont, but it costs a 10k item per use', and 'Benediction AND Manafont at the same time, but the item costs 300k now'. Oh and an instantcast Res on a 5s CD. What? Is this the best that they could come up with, after all this time? Even the FFTA/TA2 rendition of the Job has more actions it can use. Where's the 'mix an effect that causes all of your hits to deal 99999 exactly, for 15s' raidbuff? Where's the 'instantly generates a bar of LB' Mix?

In fact, given that we have 'a Job that thrives in the open world, and progresses by fighting different monsters and learning their abilities', and OC is 'a zone full of different monsters, and abilities that a Job could hypothetically learn from them', and it's a side content where we have Phantom Jobs that can literally oneshot monsters with their abilities (or reduce damage taken by 90%), and Dawntrail takes place on the continent that the Job in question originates from... Why on earth is BLU not available as a Phantom Job? The absolute 'most obvious contender to be on the Phantom Job roster' and it just... isn't? But somehow, Berserker made the cut? Berserker, the Job known for 'you autoattack, but harder' and nothing else?

I have to wonder, if the purpose of the side content is to be able to make fun crazy effects with no regards for inter-Job balance, why did they play it so safe with some of these Phantom Jobs? Chemist feels like it was designed, first and foremost, to be the solution to the 'Resurrection Restriction' in Forked Tower (with little regard given to the rest of the kit), Ranger feels like it's there as the solution to 'how to disarm traps in the Forked Tower safely' (with Thief being there only as the 'trap detector'), etc.

The tinfoil hat theory would be 'SE purposely made these job designs bland/sterile so that people would stop asking for them to be real jobs', because after seeing what 10 years of trying to make a functional Chemist has wrought... Yeh, if that's what SE's offering, they can keep it thanks. I'd argue that I made a better Chemist, accidentally, while trying to make a fan-made rework to the SGE kit.

Please be more Creative, Business Unit III, for the next installment

[fulminating]

In fact, given that we have 'a Job that thrives in the open world, and progresses by fighting different monsters and learning their abilities', and OC is 'a zone full of different monsters, and abilities that a Job could hypothetically learn from them', and it's a side content where we have Phantom Jobs that can literally oneshot monsters with their abilities (or reduce damage taken by 90%), and Dawntrail takes place on the continent that the Job in question originates from... Why on earth is BLU not available as a Phantom Job? The absolute 'most obvious contender to be on the Phantom Job roster' and it just... isn't? But somehow, Berserker made the cut? Berserker, the Job known for 'you autoattack, but harder' and nothing else?

I think this specific criticism might not stand the test of time; there are two more sets of phantom jobs we’re expecting in 7.4 and 7.5. I don’t know if they’re planning on adding every ff5 job, but if it were up to me I’d slate blu as a method to breathe life back into south horn once north horn is active. Then again I’m not a game designer.

I think they may have painted themselves into a corner somewhat with the FT specialist actions of limited field use. Short of having unrelated effects tied to damaging/buffing actions, or 8 choose 5 actions, I don’t really know how they could have addressed this. Surprisingly no one, I think ffxi integrated subjobs better, but there’s also a more unified gauge in TP there and less in the way of 3 fell cleaves under inner release for big upheaval etc allowing for easier integration - mnk/war benefits from berserk in ffxi but mnk/war here wouldn’t benefit as much from inner release given the direct crits don’t apply to every weaponskill etc.

[Carin-Eri]

Finally obtained the last piece of Atma I needed a few days ago and have a couple of Relic weapons. However, I still maintain that the drop-rate for the Atma is insulting. And farming Gold pieces is tedious and tiresome.

However, regardless of that, I will say I think the map itself is gorgeous - I love the 'abandoned city' feel of some of the areas and it's a pleasant map in general. And I love the Glams on offer.

Regardless of having gotten my first-stage Relic weapons, I'm still feeling somewhat compelled to visit OC; still collecting Silver pieces as there are some Glams I don't have yet, and still working on Phantom jobs - although have to say that the Phantom Jobs element of it doesn't interest me all that much.