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

[Valence]

Way too fast paced and hectic to take a breath, it's fates into fates into CEs then fates on a loop. Everything spawns back to back but only one thing at once so the area turns into a gigantic zerg train running from one side of the map to another. And you better be fast because those fates are dying in 10s. It's bland and tasteless. CEs and even fates are just DDR and gotcha mechanics, feels extra bad. Literally learn the dance or else.

Phantom jobs have interesting job identities but they're all over the place, and mostly designed for Forked Tower so 80% of them are terrible outside. I dearly miss the experimental and customization side of lost actions and logograms and how they interacted with older systems (reflect, dodge, etc).

Pot fates and carrots just feel like an extra bad gamba. No thanks.

The Atma relic step was terrible. I'm finally free of that nightmare.

Gold farming is very potent to level up phantom jobs and make gold coins. Too bad gold farming meta now makes it so that parties are asking everybody to use cannoneer for those except perhaps one thief. It's really frustrating. But it's definitely more chill than the regular rush train hopping from fate to CEs even though there isn't much gameplay behind. It's a basic grind gameplay, like in eureka.

Forked Tower suffers from 72 people instances. I haven't been inside, so I can't judge if it's fun or not. Judging by how they design their pve nowadays though and seeing how CEs and fates are, it's probably just terrible DDR again with bosses in the middle of a circle arena. How original... but I hope someone proves me wrong there.

Phantom jobs and perhaps the gear upgrades are the only sense of progression in the area. Bozja already lost a lot of it as a step down from Eureka since it was just artificially cut into 3 areas per zone. This one didn't feel like my level mattered for anything anyway because you level by spamming CEs and fates, which are level agnostic. Since you spend your time running everywhere on the map and mobs are mostly designed not to get too much in the way, you essentially discover the whole map at once, and immediately get access to everything at once. No progression at all.

[Daralii]

Forked Tower suffers from 72 people instances. I haven't been inside, so I can't judge if it's fun or not. Judging by how they design their pve nowadays though and seeing how CEs and fates are, it's probably just terrible DDR again with bosses in the middle of a circle arena. How original... but I hope someone proves me wrong there.

Most of what I've read is that it's considered harder than BA and DRS and has plenty of body checks and hard enrages. This is ignoring the nonsensical nightmare that getting in with a premade is.

[Kisshu]

Phantom jobs have interesting job identities but they're all over the place, and mostly designed for Forked Tower so 80% of them are terrible outside. I dearly miss the experimental and customization side of lost actions and logograms and how they interacted with older systems (reflect, dodge, etc).

All they had to do with Freelancer was let you take abilities from mastered jobs. Something like 4 ability slots and 1 trait slot and people could use that to build their own job. Instead we get a weird heal and treasure number detector.

Not tried it yet, not sure when I will,

But it's actually serious that only 1 given FATE or CE spawns at a given time, and if it relatively faster paced than Eureka?

At most I've seen 1 fate, 1 CE and 1 pot(bunny) fate up at the same time.

[Kaurhz]

Not tried it yet, not sure when I will,

But it's actually serious that only 1 given FATE or CE spawns at a given time, and if it relatively faster paced than Eureka?

[Valence]

Not tried it yet, not sure when I will,

But it's actually serious that only 1 given FATE or CE spawns at a given time, and if it relatively faster paced than Eureka?

Yes. A fate approximately spawns 1 minute after the last one was cleared, but they queue up one after another so you will never have more than one at a time on the map. If people are busy clearing the CE that's up, then the fate will wait and no other will spawn until said fate gets cleared.
CEs also only spawn one at a time.
Since there is no progression inside whatsoever (the knowledge level is only a gatekeep for forked tower or endgame mob farming for gold coins), as soon as you step in OC you have access to everything and just have to follow the rush train of 60-70 players, that jump between fates until a CE spawns, then resumes.
Oh and of course as people have complained about everywhere already, the fate scaling is borked so they die under 10s so you better be fast.

[ovIm]

the entire content reeks of mediocrity, there is nothing to be found in OC that is not already in the game in a way, and it failed to iterate on the things that made previous Field Operations so interesting.

Phantom Jobs only upside is that there is no limit to using them, compared to Logograms or Lost Actions, which required some modium of farming to keep available. However, very few of those skills actually interact with your kit, meaningfully change what you do or offer any kind of customization. Its a second set of cross class skills you equip.
Giving people that mastered a job a permanent damage and healing buff is a cool idea though, I have to admit. Some phantom skills have interesting effects, but not enough to distract from the simplicity of the combat system. Which is a missed opportunity, considering that this could have elevated the gold farming in this area.

The CE's are just your typical "boss in square or round arena making you dodge AoE" kinda fights that we have aplenty in this game. There are a couple where there are groups of enemies that need to be nuked down instead of a singular boss, but they still follow the same kinda design. The only somewhat interesting CE I played was the turtle one, and I really wish there were more fights like that. CS3 have shown us that they can do more and design something interesting, but chose to instead give us more of the very same stuff we get from anywhere else in the game.

FATE HP scaling is busted, that so far is known. Some of those fights could be interesting if they weren't to quick to explode. Which they need to though it seems, to funnel you quickly into the next CE, and to warrant what little reward they give. Unless you are goldfarming with mobs, you rush over the map constantly chasing the next FATE or CE circle. You could of course completely forego CE farming to instead focus on FATE's, but with how unrewarding some FATE's are, I don't see many people doing that.

I have no opinion about atma droprates to be honest. The PVE side of this game becomes more stale and boring by the patch, thus I have no reason to desire a PVE weapon, so I shrug whenever an atma gets dropped into my inventory. My own RNG was round about 8% droprate, based on the amount of CE's I did. I have not done a single DT FATE.

The social aspect is diminished. Its still cool to see people traversing the map to help lone stragglers that were defeated with a res, but 90% of the things I see in shout chat are, and I quote, "lfg ce". with how fast paced FATE and CE spawns are, there is very little time to talk to your fellow adventurers, unless of course you chose to forego a FATE or a CE.

The fact that we have no CLL/Dalriada instance is baffling to me. I have no opinion on Forked Tower as I have not yet entered it, not sure if I ever will.

Overall, to me, the content is a "it exists" / 10.

[ZephyrMenodora]

Really enjoying it, as someone who also really loved Eureka.

Love the lore and having rewards to grind for outside mindlessly doing dailies and then logging off. Getting a lot of gameplay out of this. I am enjoying levelling Phantom jobs and am getting a enjoyment out of some of them like Oracle.

I like the aesthetics and lore as well which is nice after not liking Bozja's environment very much.

I have my relic already but still a lot of other things to grind out, so I'm happy for sure.

I haven't gotten involved in the raid zone, but from what I read they should make some changes there for sure.

[KarstenS]

My issues compared to Bozja:

- Combat classes cannot be levelled.
- The 48 player content at the end looks very savage.
-> Would have been better to at least do it like Delubrum. One version for normals and one for those who want to know.
- Apart from seeing the Fates and CEs and doing the story, I can't think of any real reason to enter the zone.
- Even the Atmas are better farmed in the normal Dawntrail areas, because the types are firmly assigned to the areas (and you can level up along the way).

[Rayne6665]

I like it so far so ill probably go back and have fun in there leveling up phantom jobs and knowledge after I finish with the relic. I'm almost there getting the demiatmas from dt fates to finish my first main ninja relic and ill be freeeee lol its been day 6 and I still haven't finish it yet xD (been off and on taking breaks in between lol)

[Hallarem]

Got the airship with the grind system. Dropped it