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

[Fawkes]

It sounds like Forked Tower is difficult content. I'm casual as heck so I would've strongly preferred a Castrum or Dalriada to a DRS/BA. Maybe I'll try it once I max all my jobs and gear, but I don't know. I don't want to join a discord.

I kinda miss the progression of earlier zones, but I assume the point is so new players coming to the content late aren't immediately left behind not being able to use their mount and missing every FATE/CE.

The treasure chests are much better than lockboxes IMO. Even if the stuff inside is still the same garbage, it's nice to have a reason to sneak past some high level mobs and it feels good to find one. And I love that you can open them up while mounted.

I'm enjoying the phantom jobs and some of the abilities are neat. I hope the North Horn adds more, but also gives more opportunity to use the max level ones we have.

Gold farming seems dumb. I wish SE would stop trying to make exp chains a thing. It's nothing like FFXI, this game isn't capable of recapturing that, FFXI is a million times slower so you had the opportunity to chat and have fun, chains in FFXIV are a perpetual grindfest that will give you hand cramps from spamming your three cannon buttons for hours with no breaks. I can't believe this is the intended way to get three of the jobs and upgrade the gear. There should have been a Castrum that gives a bunch of gold for clearing it.

[Infindox]

So I stand corrected on gold farming. There's a solo strat you can do that's pretty good if you don't want to deal with the PFs. I kinda like they have that as an option.

[kyyninen_kirahvi]

I think the content is good and enjoyable, but... I have problems with lag as PS4 player when there are many players around. The critical engagements are fun but I'd prefer to see the attacs to go off before I take leathal damage. At least I get the rewards after the fight and now I can (with low success) evade some of the attacs. These same problems have been for the whole expansion but now it's more of a problem. Haven't tried the tower yet but I can't see myself clearing it if the game is still like this... I think there should be more action interaction with the stones.

There should be more than just South and North imo. Bit weirded out there are no suggestions to heal/change Archive back.

And before someone comes yelling "Just buy a PS5 or new PC", not possible at the moment.

[Cilia]

Obnoxiously low Demiatma drop rates, difficult to see what I'm doing in CEs, FATE bosses tend to die before I can even get a hit in for credit...

It's about as good as I expected it to be, which is to say not at all. A 3 hour session today yielded 4 Demiatmas... one of which I don't need. RNG is atrocious, unenjoyable content and no guarantee of progress for time spent is not a good way to keep people invested. As a very objective oriented person running around killing things and praying for RNG to bless me is not my idea of fun. Feelies are cool and all but when I'm looking for diamonds finding cubic zirconia along the way does not make me happy.

[Evermomo]

I'm having a lot of fun so far, though I can see the fate/CE core loop getting tedious down the road, and the grind might be a little much for me. I've been doing 2-3 hours with friends on a couple of weeknights, and we've really loved the zone itself. Sneaking around, finding survey points, experimenting with new phantom jobs, it's all been nice. I wish there were more story content, and I'm concerned about how forked tower is going to go once we get there, but all in all there's pros and cons. I will say I greatly appreciate the QoL designed into the phantom jobs vs other battle content systems, which felt cumbersome to deal with without offering a lot of meaningful impact on gameplay.

Oh, but the snapshotting on that one boss with the rotating AOEs.... I'll admit that has my fc flustered.

[Jeeqbit]

I've found it decent. Fun fights that take time to learn and improve at, doing the content with lots of other players, things to grind out and work towards over time. Pretty much what people had been asking for, for ages. Things to work towards: notes, gear, Phantom Job levels, mounts, the raid, atma, relics, etc.

Yes, most of it doesn't continue out of it but rewards such as mounts and gear do. If you get nothing for 12 hours, there's lots of other things you're getting anyway.

[Misutoraru]

So far, I am on the okay side

The good:
CE/FATE Spawn rate is quick, so little idling. Leveling feel much more comfortable than old Field Exploration.

Mount available at the beginning, enough teleportation point and mob density is spread out enough. So going to CE/FATE at lower level is not a death wish, and it also less frustrating travelling between CE/FATE.

The map, it is not like DT where there are lots of hill/peak/cliff, it doesn't feel so tedious netvigating the map. The scenery also much prettier than Anemos and Bozja.

CE, most fight are fun, so are little frustrating due to very tight timing.

The Bad:
The currency grind is not the most fun experience, especially gold. However, I believe their might be some buff at end of expansion/life cycle.

CE mechanics, some very quite tight time and I am feeling FFXIV seem to struggle with high players count and the connection become a bit of issue. See a few times players/my character got hit even way outside the AOE marker.

Forked Tower, don't even need to say much.

The Meh:
Phantom Job, it lack flexibility like lost action. DPS need healing job or the team need a healer, needing to buy potion for Chemist is not fun.

The Relic grind, grind isn't bad but RNG really could leave bad taste. This go for the soul stone drop in CE as well.

[CCheshire]

I've been grinding here since the launch, and I just got the Light Blue atma from only doing CE in OC after 4 hours. So far, still missing the Yellow ones, and I need 2 more of everything except Dark Blue.

Also, I'm at KL 18, so I'll need to work on getting canoneer up to gold farming, which sounds p boring, but I want to get the gold PJ done. Also, I haven't gotten the other PJ soul shards from drops despite running them 3-5x now, so yeah. Then I have to deal with farming 20k silver coins for alt jobs, and life is hard.

The one positive part is that leveling KL is fast, and when I play tank, I can solo join CE or Fates, since you're able to sustain yourself along with any PJ healing skill, it's fun. I do admit to doing it every day, and getting nothing from each session is depressing. The few chests I found gave me demimateria for 1k or a useless item, along with ribbons ofc.

I'm not into FT now or later since I find the reward mount to be deeply creepy, and I'd just not spend more time farming silver coins. So far, I've bought the new OC items from MP and am still waiting for some items to drop in value.

[Little_Giant]

I find it fun, the only complaints I've are that fate scaling can be really bad at times and make gold farming more viable for all classes and not just warrior. That's it, but that is also a big part of the Occult content.

Also the amount of stuff that drops from silver/bronze is crashing the markets, so that wasn't very smart.

[Ajisaii]

It's not too great, it gets old pretty fast actually.

The entire gameplay loop is do 2 fates then a CE, there's no downtime between them because mobs don't drop anything apart from gold pieces and aren't required to spawn the regular CEs so everyone sits at the base camp aetherite and waits for stuff to spawn, which is pretty much required if you want to get to a fate in time because the scaling of those fates seem to be based off how many people were there when it died the last time. I've had an instance with 4 people in it try to take out a fate that was clearly scaled for 20+ people.

Phantom jobs were a huge missed opportunity, why can't I take actions from my max level monk and put them on my freelancer? the variety feels limiting I just realised I don't really care and no one will read this so im going to stop here lmfao bozja was better why is there no cll/dal?