Reflecting on Occult Crescent

[Celliera]

Hello, this is sorta a thread I'm putting out there to cover my personal opinions in regards to Occult Crescent. I am someone who absolutely loves Save the Queen and thinks Eureka is excellent content as well. Occult Crescent however took all the pieces I disliked of both those forays then somehow added even more garbage on top.

There are a few positives to start out with before I dig into the negative however. First off has to be the most obvious one. It's nice seeing a foray where people engage with the action systems. Occult Crescent is the only foray where actions are almost entirely free to use so unlike Bozja where most people just run Protect and Shell without an essence you do actually see people using Phantom Actions that have real impact on the content. The second positive is that I do like both the zones. Both are nice visually which can certainly not be said about Bozja and some parts of Eureka. Finally I do think Forked Tower Magic Normal and Extreme are good and enjoyable foray raids though I've already written plenty about Extreme in another thread on here so I won't dig into it further here.

Now onto the negatives of which there are far too many so I'm just going to list them off:
- Only having 1 FATE up at a time makes the zones incredibly dull and results in so much time being spent staring at an aetheryte menu.
- CEs are fun but are largely pointless to grind since they are slower than FATEs and don't reward well
- Having to run to every CE sucks after Bozja just let us teleport to them.
- Auto-spawned CEs and CEs based on mob kills do not go well with eachother, choose one or the other
- Pots are downright miserable, the 20 pot limit existing even in North Horn even after all the previous complaints is downright shameful.
- Mobs below your level still doing the same damage to you as mobs at your level completely removes the feeling of power you get from leveling in content in Eureka
- Gearing never actually makes you feel that much more powerful on non-tanks as the mobs do far too much damage to you as non-tank jobs
- Unlike previous forays you are locked into your job's normal role. There isn't anything like essences or actions to allow you to meaningfully do things like Tank as a DPS or become a DPS on a Healer.
- The Phantom Job leveling grind saves the most interesting action/trait for last usually but since you need to level every job to raise your mastery you never get to use it until you are done leveling everything
- Phantom Samurai was a massive mistake. Making one job that overpowers every other job with no actual skill expression besides hitting 2 extra GCDs every now and then is incredibly boring.
- The Elemental Weakness system was completely pointless because none of the jobs that utilize it are actually better than Phantom Samurai

Continued in the next post

[Celliera]

- Every Phantom Job feels like it was balanced around Phantom Samurai. Forays benefit from not feeling balanced so this is a massive negative.
- A vast majority of North Horn Phantom Jobs are just copied and pasted with cooldowns being the only difference.
- The lack of mixing and matching actions across jobs makes every experience feel the same over time.
- Adaptation on Freelancer feels like it could have fixed a lot of this but was just a disappointing capstone with no interesting use.
- Forked Tower Blood's 100 clear achievement leads to people being exceptionally toxic about getting clears.
- The Dead Stars encounter in FTB having a hard HP lock we can never beat is extremely boring.
- The Dead Stars encounter in FTB having multiple raid wipe mechanics that can be caused by 1 person that never got changed is absurd.
- The support enemy spawned by clearing the lockwards check in FTB didn't drop enough to be worthwhile for those outside in South Horn
- The bugs with OC happening almost every patch with one being so bad the instance got locked for nearly a whole day.
- The level system feeling largely pointless once you reach max level as deleveling only takes 1 CE to get back to max for. What was even the point of having this other then to slow people down?

I've said this in other threads but I'll say it one more time here. Occult Crescent feels like a foray that the devs tried to balance while forays are traditionally content that get their fun from their lack of balance.

Additionally, I understand this part will certainly be unpopular so I saved it for the end, but I think the removal of fragments/logograms was a horrible mistake. Part of the decisions you make in Bozja and Eureka come down to the resources you want to put into something. For instance I can farm clusters fast for a high action/essence cost on healer or I can run extremely cheap actions and go a bit slower on Black Mage. I can prep NMs with Double Edge in Eureka or I can just run Bloodbath for much cheaper. Having that decision removed made the content so much more boring for me, you just always do the most optimal strategy and nothing else. There is no reason to even consider anything else because there is no downside. Phantom Samurai is the only phantom job with any cost and the cost is far too small for this to ever matter.

So finally, I just want to say I do want a foray in Evercold. I'd love to see the return to the more active and engaging instances of Bozja. I want the return of fragments/logograms to let me make decisions. However I want to see more vibrant zones similar to that of Occult Crescent. Regardless, at least Save the Queen and Eureka still exist to enjoy as they are.

[Caesitas]

It was really bold of them to look at the hunt train loop where you spend more time in load screens and auto running then fighting and finding a way to add a second load screen to that, truly enlightened.

Less jokingly I do agree that P.SAM is an issue but I come from Materia, its possible for everyone in instance to get a pot because there is often under 20 people... except that the fate dies instantly to P.SAM bots/achievement hunters and then you get nothing and it never outscales that happening. You just can't compete and I also shouldn't be using the word COMPETE to talk about large scale content that in almost every other instance has been purely co-operative.

In retrospect its very obvious that the forked tower dialogue dominated the feedback because nothing else really changed between zones. I guess they doubled the achievements because the only people playing the content were slaving away to farm pots all day every day.

My suspicion is the take away from this is going to be something like: "we were right to not do one of these in Endwalker, just look how well the next one did" and that's it, it gets shelved and we have to hope that the overworld rework comes close to striking the mark. This is my most pessimistic take towards the expansion in general but my distaste for North Horn having the same issues as South basically made me walk away from the game until Beastmaster came out.

[SkankyRoe]

we have to hope that the overworld rework comes close to striking the mark.

I wouldn't get your hopes up on that since Mr. Ozma is in charge of it.

[TheGrimace]

Limiting Pots to 20 players is one of the most clueless decisions they have made. Doubling down and keeping the mechanic this way in North Horn was incredibly tone deaf.

Good list, OP. Very good arguments abound.

[Carighan]

Limiting Pots to 20 players is one of the most clueless decisions they have made. Doubling down and keeping the mechanic this way in North Horn was incredibly tone deaf.

Good list, OP. Very good arguments abound.

I'd even go a step further: Pot fates existing as they do is just showing that they do not know how players actually run the content. Like, they never looked. They could have long known of this problem, and found one of a myriad solutions to it even if they had not wanted to just uncap and ideally randomize it (make it a CE with a proper pre-warning but no fixed timer).

[Valence]

Limiting Pots to 20 players is one of the most clueless decisions they have made. Doubling down and keeping the mechanic this way in North Horn was incredibly tone deaf.

The irony is that it was an even more dire problem back in Eureka with bunny fates because the instance size was double (144 players), and the amount of bunnies you'd get wasn't higher. 16 players maybe (correct me if wrong)?

And they still giving you the middle finger with this 8 years after. Design hasn't changed one bit.