Occult is awful, and I enjoyed both Eureka and Bozja greatly

[occultsux]

1. Go-go-go Gameplay taken to the max. The optimal gameplay that everyone has devolved into is sprinting to a FATE, killing it in 5 seconds, returning, immediately sprinting to the next FATE, killing it 5 seconds, returning, sprinting to another FATE, returning and then sprinting to the CE.
There is no chill downtime with the gameplay loop, and the unlimited return function seems to only encourage this. The gameplay map seems incredibly small, as you're only ever sprinting to the same couple of FATEs, instantly returning, and teleporting to the next FATE.


2. Critical Engagements are poorly designed and courage Tank turtling. Get hit more than once on a DPS job and you're eating the floor, having no fun, and placing a burden on your teammates. Sure, it's a get good angle, but the actual reaction of the playerbase is for everyone to turtle on Tank jobs. You can get hit a couple of times on a Tank and shrug it off. Every CE is the majority of the players turtling on Tank jobs, or on a rez job.
The real problem here is the lack of defensive options for DPS jobs (aswell as my upcoming 3rd point). There is no Beast essence or something that will allow people to have fun on a DPS job, but stay alive. Even in a group with a shield healer if you aren't completely confident in the CE you're just going to die, and be a burden to the group. A Tank on their own is so much more safe than a DPS player inside a group with shield healers.
There are surprisingly few defensive utility with the support jobs too, most DPS will not be able to heal or protect themselves when they get hit.

3. Not being able to play with the support job/actions that you want because the gameplay loop requires you to swap support jobs to a new one to continue building EXP. Let's say I really like playing with Oracle. Too bad, I can't ever play with it because I need to level all of my other support jobs. You spend the entire gameplay experience leveling support jobs that you don't care about, instead of playing the ones that you actually want to play. There's also the hilarious thing of when you max out a support job, and get its final skill, you never actually get to use it because you need to be swapping to a new support job to level.

4. The complete destruction of the Eureka and Bozja gil economy. Why are all of the rare drops from Eureka/Bozja flowing out of random chests in Occult? It has completely destroyed the economy of both of them. It's like saying "We don't want you to make gil in Eureka and Bozja, only do Occult where you make no gil". Many of the rare drops and glamours from Eureka/Bozja tanked to nothing in value.

[occultsux]

5. Fork Tower

Fork Tower might be fun if you could get in with 48 people reliably, but it's entrance method is the most pathetic trash I've ever seen.
This is not a Eureka Hydatos situation. Hydatos was 144 players. These instances only hold 72 players. How are you supposed to get 48 players into an instance to do the content, and what is the merit of staying in Forked Tower instance when 2/3rds of the max players are inside it?
If Fork Tower was Baldesion Arsenal level difficult it might be not so bad, but by all accounts its more difficult than Delubrum Savage. DRS let you queue in.
Is this really supposed to be puggable content? What are you smoking?
There are constant body checks everywhere. The very first enemy has tons of coordination checks. A single random player can also completely destroy your group, even on the very first enemy, with a misplaced meteor or knock-up stack.
There is also only a 5 minute timer on the Fork Tower entrance weather. Zero time to in-instance organize an attempt. Again, how is this supposed to be pugged when the weather blinks out of existence instantly if you're not already a premade of 48 people waiting to go in.

It's such a blatant waste of player time. There is zero reason that this isn't queueable, or at least allowing an alliance to queue into the zone.

[CNitsah]

I strongly agree on 2 and 5.

2 : if you don't have a heal in your team, or if he not used to the fight yet, you get rekt by raid wide, even if you avoid all the mechanics. a simple recup potion like eureka had would fix so many things on this side.

5 is particulary wild to me. The main farming experience occult crescent has right now is not the relics, it's the zone gear, only useful if you aim to do the forked tower. But by doing only one version of the forked tower that is high end, they kinda wrote with fiery letters in the sky : this is only for a little part of the playerbase, when the said playerbase main complain over the past 3 years has been the lack of content with aimed for a larger audience. It feels kinda tone deaf. If you're not into high difficulty raid, there is no reason to farm occult crescent once you get your atmas. I don't get why they didn't went the Delubrum Reginae way. To me they fail to capture what makes eureka and bozja popular and still relevant to this day.

And man, you have to be pissed off to create an account on the forum just to complain. That's the second person I see doing that today.

[Arohk]

they kinda wrote with fiery letters in the sky : this is only for a little part of the playerbase, when the said playerbase main complain over the past 3 years has been the lack of content with aimed for a larger audience. It feels kinda tone deaf..

Feels like streamer content, like Xenoxys who can actually get a large enough group together, how is anyone that playes the game not as a job with enough reach ever going tog et into this.


About the fates and CE, i like this pacing a lot more than this god awful slog which is Eureka, where you crawl around on snails pace and have to wait 5-10 minutes on every fate for people to arrive, and then having to check a website that tracks spawn times and then you must kill dozens of monsters just to spawn the damn thing.
Eureka was just god awful in every way.

If it wasn't for the total garbage with Forked tower this could have been better than Bozja, i have run Castrum , Dalriada and Delubrum over 50 tiems each, but i don't see myself ever getting into that damn raid once right now.

[Rizlee]

I strongly agree on 2 and 5.

2 : if you don't have a heal in your team, or if he not used to the fight yet, you get rekt by raid wide, even if you avoid all the mechanics. a simple recup potion like eureka had would fix so many things on this side.

5 is particulary wild to me. The main farming experience occult crescent has right now is not the relics, it's the zone gear, only useful if you aim to do the forked tower. But by doing only one version of the forked tower that is high end, they kinda wrote with fiery letters in the sky : this is only for a little part of the playerbase, when the said playerbase main complain over the past 3 years has been the lack of content with aimed for a larger audience. It feels kinda tone deaf. If you're not into high difficulty raid, there is no reason to farm occult crescent once you get your atmas. I don't get why they didn't went the Delubrum Reginae way. To me they fail to capture what makes eureka and bozja popular and still relevant to this day.

And man, you have to be pissed off to create an account on the forum just to complain. That's the second person I see doing that today.

- this, I highly agree with what u said, yoshi p and the devs really lost touch with what the community wants, dead content on arrival, and nobody gets to have fun other than the first 2 days when its fresh fates and critical engagement, and then it gets repetitive and not even worth grinding since you cant even use the gear since u cant do forked tower, relic atmas have higher drop rate in fates in tural zones not in occult crescent which is also baffling as it encourages u to not engage with the exploration zone, then what u do is grab 8 players and spam cannon strat gold farm till u buy all the glam and forget the thing exist... another piece of content which the casual playerbase wanted to play with friends for fun but cant even play it due to how they designed the system and difficulty, really disappointed how they marketed the game as massive multiplayer experience in dawntrail fanfest but none of the promises were kept, at this rate they are speedrunning their own death

[itachi-otsutsuki]

Exactly, the content is fine but for the love of God. Atleast make it queuable like DR. What the ???? are they doing? Just wasting our time for nothing? You can't even get in to prog lol.

[RyomaUchi]

Well said. Just very well said.

[mallleable]

Yeah, and no on 2. I think the fights themselves are great, but yeah red DPS jobs need some help in Occult Crescent.

[caffe_macchiato]

Square Enix Co., Ltd. is still neglecting its online infrastructure. Your #2 issue (floor tanking) is likely due to "snapshotting", which is very prevalent in Critical Engagements. While a TON of people LOVE snapshotting, the delay has gotten substantially worse, likely due to the larger player count. The game cannot handle 72 people in a CE, yet it still insists on split-second snapshots that are nearly impossible to move out of. The player count is making the snapshotting worse. No other MMO has this problem. This is unique to Square Enix Co., Ltd.

#1 is because there is no variety of gameplay. It is FATE then instance. There is nothing to break it up, because Square Enix Co., Ltd. has not invested in proper gameplay mechanics besides what they originally invented 11 years ago. Square Enix Co., Ltd. has somehow lost the ability to design new games. Obviously, the company badly needs a buy-out. Hopefully it can happen soon. Even if monetization would get worse, at least FFXIV will finally have decent content like WoW has now.

[Fawkes]

While a TON of people LOVE snapshotting, the delay has gotten substantially worse, likely due to the larger player count.

Hold the phone, I thought snapshotting was just terrible janky garbage caused by the internet part of the game being made poorly or something. You're telling me people LIKE it? As in they prefer it to having the things you see on screen actually matching up with what happens?