[Feedback] Occult Crescent

[Bubline]

Just posting my feedback here in case developers read the forums (do they?). This is mostly so the devs can see the perspective of a casual player who would like to play more FFXIV but has trouble actually finding the content worth my time. I think a lot of players who post online are very defensive of the game and so the real feedback is often burried behind that, so I hope people won't immediately jump at my throat for explaining all the things that bother me about this content.

I like Bozja a decent amount, but Occult Crescent seems to be a step in the wrong direction in many ways:

• The randomness of the grind is unacceptable. There is no reasonable way to predict how long the grind is. You could spend an entire evening grinding in occult crescent and get no demiatma. This has happened to me a few times already.
• The fact that occult crescent doesn't give me xp for my side jobs, or any tangible permanent progress for my character makes it feel like a hollow time waster. I get nothing out of my time spent in this zone really. If a grind expects me to put dozens of hours in, I'd like it to give something more.
• Bozja at least had the dual benefit of leveling side jobs making it feel less like it had no use for my character. As an aside I have also been playing RuneScape and love the amount of horizontal progression this game has, where you can do long grinds that will keep mattering. In contrast, occult crescent might as well be a separate game as it generally doesn't impact my character outside of it. It just feels like a bad deal if you ask me to do such long grinds for things that won't matter in a few months. Just because the 1% of most engaged players do it doesn't mean that the rest of players aren't sitting there wondering what content is actually worth their time.
• Having to spam return and run to the next fate as far as possible is unpleasant, tiring and stressful. Fates should scale in HP as more people approach, or have some kind of timer before being attackable to at least give a chance for people to join. When I didn't have the riding map, I was missing half the fates because even if I teleported out and back in instantly, people with the map often arrived and killed the fate boss before I could. It makes what should be a chill grind into a frenetic race to the bottom. Wow solved this problem with rare mobs many years ago.
• Generally field operations only being fate spam with no downtime is kind of weird. I understand that you're trying to minimize how much time people spend waiting, but it's so constantly active that it's hard to even find time to chat with people in the zone, so no one even talks. Given that this is an incredibly long grind, I would expect it to be less intense and more social. An MMO can't have people socialising if it doesn't give room to breathe
• Please invent more interesting world content than just fates and CEs. Look at what Guild Wars 2 does with their equivalent of fates.

Part 1: character limit

[Bubline]

• Mobs in the zone are useless, the meta is to teleport from fate to fate and join CEs. Half of the gameplay of occult crescent is staring at the map in front of the aetheryte to teleport somewhere as soon as the fate spawns.
• The coupon collector problem of demiatmas is really bad. I got 4 of 3 types of demiatma before I had a single orange one. I still don't have an orange one. I have no control over the right fates/CEs spawning. I am now at a point where most of the fates or CEs that spawn are effectively a waste of time because I only need specific ones.
• The ilvl 745 gear reward for grey pieces could be nice catch up gear for gearing up jobs newly level 100... except I only have 7,000 silver coins after hours and hours in occult crescent (having bought only riding map + the 3 advanced jobs), which is enough for 1 piece, almost 2. If I was trying to use this to gear up the Sage I just got to level 100, it would take incredibly long and would be an absurd waste of time compared to any other way of gearing up.
• Because the zone progresses nothing tangible for my character, I will have wasted my time if I don't get the demiatma. I have spent a lot of hours in the zone and have absolutely nothing to show for it on my character because I still haven't been lucky to get the right types of demiatma. Again to bring up Runescape, every action you do in that game progresses your account in some way. What you do is meaningful. If you do a long grind, you might not get the item you want but you will gain other useful items, and xp. My time in occult crescent feels like a waste of time, and the main motivation to keep grinding in it is the feeling that if I don't get my relic weapon out of it, I will have wasted hours of my life.
• I still don't have a single orange demiatma so I can't speak for how long the next steps are, but given that this is only the first step and after days of spending a few hours in there every now and then I still don't have step 1... This is absurd. Sure, put some long grinds in the game for people who want them, but maybe there should be some kind of in-between where it's not 0 or 1. Even playing a lot it seems like it would be hard to finish those relic steps in time for a next patch.
• I wish it wasn't technically a duty, and this applies to a lot of content in the game. If this was just a zone I could hang out in, I could do some while queuing for duties, or do a few minutes here and there. But almost every piece of content in this game is implemented as a duty. As a result, when I have downtime queuing I have nothing to do on my character, and I wish I could progress my relic weapon while queuing.

[Bubline]

• The storyline was very vague and didn't seem to get very far. I feel like I did a few quests at first and then 100 hours of grind with no quests progressively unlocking. Bozja had a clear sense of progression through subzones and quests at regular levels.
• The game also hasn't really told me about forked tower and I'm not sure how to unlock it or go there. I think I've finished every normal quest but the way it ended felt like something was missing.
• The phantom classes don't feel interesting. They don't have that much effect, and they're incredibly slow to level. The knowledge level also felt meaningless other than to avoid getting one short by higher level mobs. I have no sense of getting more powerful in this zone. And my character sure isn't getting more powerful since nothing I do here matters as soon as I leave the zone.
• I have absolutely 0 interest in grinding for the zone gear which seems to give nebulous stat boosts in the crescent only. Again, I don't care about power upgrades that won't matter anywhere else. From reading the item, it also seems like the power up will be negligible? The only point of this gear to me would be as catch up gear like mentioned before, but it requires way too much grind.
• I'm not dealing with the horrible inventory/armory chest dance UX that would be required to equip occult crescent gear specifically in that zone and nowhere else
• Also having this gear means you can only play occult crescent on one job, because you'd have to regrind the gear on another if you want to try coming as a healer or dps or whatever.

Overall, this is way less engaging than bozja. The only reason I spent so much time here is that when I tried it out, I got a few demiatma and thought it would be a reasonably short grind. My luck then ended and I am about to give up despite having 4 of each demiatma because I got no orange one. I don't know, I feel like I got tricked into a massive waste of time.

This isn't respectful of the players' time.

[Shistar]

I resonate with many points here.


Replying to some of your confusion:

• You technically unlock the ability to buy Ciphers after you finish all your sidequests. If you haven't seen a huge text flash your screen about Forked being unlocked, you might have forgotten to turn in the last one or something? But other than that, most of the information is, funny enough, found in LLs of all places? Long story short, get a Cipher, wait until the middle platform is glowing, put your Cipher in and get hated on because you accidentally took someone's spot in a static. If you want to do Tower, you'd be wise to search up a Discord that does them (usually grouped with the same people that do DRS, BA, etc) because accidentally showing up to one of these groups can mess the whole thing up. There's lots of coordination for jobs/P. jobs needed and some mechs are pretty nasty. But there's newbie runs so as long as you can find a group whose schedule isn't completely bonkers you should be ok.
• The color of demiatma you get is decided by where you completed the FATE. So check out a map online and you basically do nothing except FATEs and CEs that spawn there. I had to do do this for my last demiatma, during FATE downtime I was killing mobs to trigger a CE in the area. Which is another problem in of itself, that the game literally wants you to ignore part of it if you want to be somewhat efficient in your farming... I have a feeling you already knew this, but since it was brought up a couple of times I'm dropping it here just in case.
• Mobs are used to gold farm, and that's pretty much it.

As an extra tip, you can post a message, then go to edit and keep adding more text to avoid posting back to back.

[Bubline]

Do you mean that editing bypasses the character limit? That's strange.

Otherwise yeah, I have the map, I simply haven't seen enough fates spawn north and middle. I did all the fates and CE that did spawn but never saw an orange demiatma in all my time there. I've also heard that CEs are on a 2 hour timer and manual spawning is on a 1 hour timing, so really depending on when you join the zone, and how long your session is, you can eaasily be essentially locked out of a type of demiatma during your run without even knowing it.

[Shistar]

Do you mean that editing bypasses the character limit? That's strange.

It does indeed!

I've also heard that CEs are on a 2 hour timer and manual spawning is on a 1 hour timing, so really depending on when you join the zone, and how long your session is, you can eaasily be essentially locked out of a type of demiatma during your run without even knowing it.

Hmm, I don't think that lines up with my experience... I believe there's a 30min cooldown to spawning CEs, at least that's what worked for me when I was spawning Calamity Bound back to back for my last demiatma. If your area has a spawnable CE, it's the best thing you can do while waiting. When I was farming there for a long while, I'd see the same CEs spawn in less than 2hrs, but keeping in mind they don't repeat, some people interject the order with their spawned CEs and they have a bit of a cooldown to prevent you from chaining CE after CE.... yeah, it takes a while if your zone has literally only one. That's why I was farming Inkstains to spawn Calamity Bound, otherwise I would have been stuck with only 2 FATEs (South pots are also there, but I don't think they can drop demiatma)