I want to start this by saying that I was incredibly disappointed by the archaic way Forked Tower Blood was handled back in 7.2, with queueing requirements that were needlessly complex and a difficulty far above anything a casual player could actually experience outside of organised play, that the new Forked Tower and its difficulty/design has exceeded my expectations for a second go at this content.

Firstly, making the content part of the core quest progression path just makes sense, it very much encourages players to engage with a system when its a persistent tick mark to be filled. As well, queueing into the content (whilst I\\'d still prefer it to be like Bozja with a button press) does have the advantage of allowing people to communicate in a singular area which has made speed kills and specific types of runs more feasible than spamming shout chat.

The actually difficulty of the Normal mode is actually pitch perfect to what I expected, as someone who did engage with FT Blood before, this is a lot more approachable but also not *too* easy to where I cant pay attention. I also appreciate that certain phantom jobs also still engage with the environment which was a particular highlight of Forked Tower Blood progression and gave those raids a uniqueness not seen in other similar types of content.

Whilst I am still progging boss 2 on the extreme version, I will also say that the difficulty there is much less overturned than Blood, with several mechanics such as the Twin Head Aevis limit cut and their coloured portal in/out attacks to be much more parsable in a clustered environment compared to some of the mechanics displayed in Blood. My only true disappointment with the content so far is the lack of new arrangement for the final boss, however the choice of track provided is at least fitting.

I very much hope this level of difficulty and choice and *accessability* is present in field content going forward, similar to what we\\'ve seen in Deep Dungeons and Variant Dungeons in Endwalker, as this has been far more enjoyable for someone who dips their toes into both casual, and hardcore. Please give my thanks to the battle content designers as well for the boss design so far in Magic!