Quote Originally Posted by CNitsah View Post
BA was the final optional step. The enterety of Eureka was still relevant without BA. Relic quest are considered finish without the BA step. Even the story is considered finished with BA being an epilogue.

With FT, the story leads directly to FT. OC is irrelevant if you don't plan to do FT. I hope they won't be stupid enough to gate the rest of OC behind FT...

People give a pass on BA because the context is different. Plus BA didn't come after the better option DRS was.
This. We went from Eureka zones where the story and relic felt pretty much complete armor/relic-wise, with the big NMs feeling like zone bosses, and BA came at the end. Still want to do it eventually to see if there are any extra cutscenes and/or story dialogue after, but I don’t feel my time in Eureka was wasted, and I still go back there every few months or so.

Then we got Bozja, with CLL, Dalriada and the DRN/DRS split… so many felt like it was backwards to go back to a BA-style raid when - love Bozja or hate it - the dungeons were fun and accessible to all skill levels. They weren’t really easy at first, but they became easier as you leveled in the zones and built up your mettle and stash of actions, as well as learned the mechs.

And now we have the next incarnation of BA… right in the middle of the content, with no other dungeons in the instance, making the lack of a Normal mode very noticeable and disappointing. Everything leads to the Tower, and it’s likely going to be the same for the next zone. Not only that, but the last 5 field notes are locked inside it, something Bozja did not do with its harder duty DRS. As well as another Triad card, which is probably random drop, whereas Bozja had theirs in the currency shop.

I would’ve much preferred something equivalent to CLL/Dalriada/DRN, especially when they’re locking basic rewards behind a duty with rez restrictions and multiple wipe mechs. The harder version having the mount and maybe some extra currency rewards is fine, but there’s nothing Normal level to get everything else and feel like you participated in the story until it gets to the point where discords are offering carry runs, and by then we may already be well into the next zone before many players can even get that scheduled. I’m going to try to get it done before the next zone if I can, but this isn’t the experience I wanted to have. I don’t want to have to prog a whole damn dungeon. I wanted something I could just pop into the zone and do, which was a realistic expectation post-Bozja.