Hey everyone, Frosty here! On Saturday, May 31st we brought on the first players to clear the new content inside of Occult Crescent, the Forked Tower: Blood. On this MogTalk episode we discussed how they accomplished the feat as well as their opinions on the content overall. I know not everyone has time to listen to the shows, so I wanted to try my hand at creating digests. So what better show than this, where we had over 25 guests!
A couple of notes: If any members feel the quotes need corrections, please let me know. Some time has also passed since the interview, so some opinions may have changed. And lastly, the questions are not organized by the time they were asked, but more categorically where they would fit in the digest.
There are many guests, but here are the ones represented in the interview questions and answers below:
- Kana – Aether Group 2 Raid Leader
- Suki – Aether Group 2 Raid Leader/Shotcaller
- Youko – Healer Shotcaller
- Zeppe – Strategist
- Narrlocke – Tank Shotcaller
- Perezident – Tank Berserker
- Sausage – Streamer, Samurai
- Sindalf – Party Leader Tank
- Regar – Tank/Knight
- Kio – Healer/Bard
- Libby – Healer/Chemist
- Ren – Healer
- prettymf – Thief (right side)
- Kev – Party Leader
- Chayo – DPS
- Robin – Thief (left side)
- beraru – DRK
- Flaire – Melee DPS
- Lleu – Tank/Knight
- Brian – Tank/Geomancer
- Snow – Tank/Knight
How was the group organized?
Kana: I basically divided it into 6 groups, full statics communicating with each other with dedicated party leaders.
Frosty: What was the responsibilities of the Party Leads?
Sindalf: Just do what I’m told, like everybody else. But you got to make sure everybody else is doing what they are told too.
Frosty: So middle management?Sindalf: Yeah the thing with 48 people is that they like to talk, hang out, and want to have fun – but have you ever been in a room with 48 people trying to talk all at once and wanting to get a word in or do their own thing? It doesn’t work. Once the vibe gets figured out, you just
need to fill in where you are at the moment. I made sure I got my 8 people in there, leveled, and ready to go. When we got a ping that says everybody does this, I make sure everyone else in my group does it.
Sausage: I think the biggest responsibilities of the 6 party leaders were, one – making sure the party’s phantom job composition would work and people were picking the correct things to level. Two – getting us into the instances. The party leaders put in a lot of work getting us into instances and were crazy efficient about it.
How did you build the team?
Frosty: Who does the raid group compose of? People you trialed or people from past raids?
Kana: Mostly just friends honestly that I thought were pretty good.
Narrlocke: Guys did you hear that? He thinks we’re friends.
Kana: Most people here are from the world race scene, we just all know each other.
Frosty: So this is basically just the NA World Race scene?
Kana: Yeah, this is basically just NA – or at least most of it (some EU).
Frosty: A lot of the names I recognize, as they have been on the show before.
How long did everyone think it would take?
Frosty: Did you guys think it would take as long as it did to clear it?
Kana: I did, no one believed me though!
Regar: I did not.
Kana: I had to convince these guys it would take 3-4 days.
Libby: For the record I believed you.
Lleu: I thought we’d take 3 days, but not 4.
Kana: When we woke up in the morning, at least half this group that looked at the achievement and it said 100 clears and they thought “oh no, this is going to die in one pull”
Youko: To be fair, it would have died a lot faster had instance prog not been a thing.
Regar: Absolutely
What was the team’s schedule?
Frosty: Did you have a strict schedule for everyone? Did everyone take off work for 3-4 days?
Regar: Most people took 3 days off, and on day 4 we just started a bit later.
Kana: 3 days was the requirement.
Frosty: What was your daily schedule?
Suki: 16 hours raiding, 8 hours sleep was the requirement… but we all did play more than that.
Frosty: How far did you get day 1?
Youko: Second boss.
Suki: 12 hours of leveling, then 6-7 hours of progging.
Youko: Really like 3 hours of progging and 2 hours of trying to get in…
Was this meant to be cleared by a pre-made?
Frosty: Did you think SquareEnix was hoping 48 people would come together in an organized manner or were they hoping random people who didn’t know each other would clear it? It being so difficult to go in as a pre-made group seems like they were trying to prevent it?
Suki: They definitely expected it would happen.
Youko: That’s the thing, it was going to be difficult for pre-mades because it was a lottery system. It’s like half and half, because the mechanics of the raid allude to a premade because they involve working together and one person could wipe the entire raid. But getting together was just so inaccessible compared to DRS or Bozja.
Kio: Like pugs might exist now that largely a lot of the mechanics are solved, but for NA it will still be in the domain of pre-mades and discords specifically set for it. I don’t think non-premades will do as well.
Frosty: Even with the mechanics mostly solved, you don’t think random people would just join in and clear it?
Narrlocke: I don’t agree with that. Because anyone who knows the mechanics in the raid will notice that the entire raid is designed for exactly 24 players in the instance. And there are very few assignments other than if you are in party 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6, and that you have every phantom job.
Frosty: Did you guys have all the gear maxed out? On the clear?
[Collectively]: No.
Kana: That’s why the dps check was super hard.
Regar: We had to spend most of the silver on the ciphers to get in.
Kana: We had about 1-2 pieces and master levels about 5, not that high.
Ren: I think SquareEnix didn’t do a good job explaining what this content was. In BA, there was a dialog box you had to press like 3 times, that specifically said “hey, this is extremely challenging content and is going to require a lot of coordination”. Forked Tower doesn’t really do that, you can just go in the middle and say “what’s this?”, click it and just go in even without a cipher. They didn’t do a good job explaining it and giving warnings.
Frosty: Do you think if everyone had full gear sets it’d be very easy in comparison to how you guys experienced it?
Kana: Oh for sure, this is going to be very easy for pugs to do later. DPS check wise.
How did you play together?
Frosty: I was surprised you were able to get everyone you need into the instance too. How did you work with the community in a way that you can get everyone at the same time? Was it difficult or were people like “hey cool, we will back out and let you go in?”
Perezident: Honestly, one of the best strategies that we found to work consistently was going to a low population datacenter like Dynamis, where there is typically only 1 or 2 instances. You would get players to fill up the instance so a new one would spawn, then we would all queue up into that instance.
Kio: It’s worth mentioning we called it “Instance Prog” and this was the major struggle with other datacenters too. You could only queue 8 people at once and there was a priority system about who gets in. Some groups couldn’t get in for 30-45 minutes, and you were just stuck. We would scout instances to figure out when they are about to fill up, then we’d know we could start a new one.
Frosty: That seems overly complicated.
Kio: It was rough, we went a couple of stretches where it was over a hour waiting to get in.
What kind of interactions did you have with the community?
Frosty: Again, the community doesn’t have any obligation to help you or be a part of this at all. Did you have any experiences with the community while trying to organize your groups in the same instance?
Narrlocke: Towards the end when we were trying to get our instances, we ended up colliding perfectly with another group that was also trying to get in a new instance.
Suki: They weren’t racing or anything, I think they just started that day.
Kev: We were super appreciative because they gave us that instance so we could continue prog.
Kana: Yeah they were nice enough to leave for us.
Narrlocke: Basically the team that had the smaller amount of their own members would leave.
Ren: There was one particular individual was part of the team of the second kill.
Youko: They were sniping us for 12 hours straight. Them and their friends would kick some of our group out to snipe it.
Frosty: Maliciously aiming for your group? They didn’t just happen to be in there too?
Youko: At least 2 times.
Regar: The main thing that would happen is people would submit ciphers and kick some of our group out of the raid, which was a little annoying, but we were able to adjust our comp around that.
Narrlocke: To clarify, most of the time that would happen, it was just someone who had no idea what was going on.
Regar: Yeah nothing malicious, just the information wasn’t very clear – people were just curious and wanted to try to see what was happening.
Kev: That’s SquareEnix with their design because, if you are a new player, you hit max, and you see it light up and you are like “What’s this?”. It’s unfortunate they designed it in such a way.
Suki: There should be a warning saying “This is difficult content, are you sure you want to sign up for this?”
Suki: We did receive help from people too, from Xeno’s, Arthar’s, and Deathsnail’s chat to help fill up instances so we could create a new one.
Frosty: Having Xeno and Arthars in as well, which brings a lot of streamer attention – did that bring some snipers as well? Or was it more beneficial than harmful?
[Many members]: More benefit definitely.
Libby: I don’t think anyone from Twitch chat sniped, besides the one guy.
Frosty: And Xeno and Arthars performed well too?
Narrlocke: Yeah.
Any problems between players with such a big group?
Frosty: Did you have any “screw this guy, never want to raid with him again” moments [with your team]?
[Collectively from the group]: Ohhhhh yeah.
Youko: Unfortunately we did.
Frosty: You don’t have to call anyone out! I just want to know if it happened.
Narrlocke: Yeah, let’s not [call them out].Frosty: After that happens, how do you keep morale up?
Kana: I mean morale was never bad, we were always vibing. Arthars and Xeno helped a lot with that too.
Narrlocke: It was only the one instance. So a lot less than you’d think. I was surprised with how little problems there were.
Regar: Pretty much everyone was on time too, which is impressive with 48 people.
Perezident: I don’t think there were even really arguments, it was more like just someone did something that someone else didn’t agree with and we just moved on.
Kana: I learned from the last 48man, this one was way more organized.
Frosty: Were there any moments where people didn’t agree with the proposed strategy?
Youko: Everyone was good foot soliders.
Kana: Yeah, I would say the only issue potentially is people would say we should just pull and not talk too much.
Frosty: That’s typical raid stuff though right?
Kana: Yeah, just typical raid stuff.
Kio: I appreciate that we had a lot of people cooking in voice chat, and a lot of people cooking in text chats. So we could multiple conversations going at once about mechanics and solve it.
Frosty: As long as you all end up on the strategy in the end right?
Youko: Yeah, we made diagrams for that so everyone was crystal clear on what to do.
Kio: Our shot-callers did a really good job of saying “Okay we are going to do this now” and getting people together and in line.
How many people were there and were there any “9th mans”?
Frosty: How many people did you actually have? Was it exactly 48?
Kana: Yeah.
Frosty: No extras for fillers or anything?
Kio: We had a couple of people that could jump in. We had 2 people that did fill in a couple of times.
Narrlocke: Those were just friends that were around and were able to help at the time, but not dedicated backups.
Frosty: Any external members like “9th mans” outside of the raid group?
Narrlocke: Rumi helped a bit, but no one dedicated outside the group.
Frosty: I heard Zeppe was one of your main strategist.
Suki: Yeah he was helping a lot.
Frosty: Zeppe, figuring out a lot of this stuff, was it pretty straight forward to you?
Zeppe: I think most stuff was rather straight forward except for the tail end of the prog. A lot of tinfoil hat strategies and one mechanic we were stuck on. Everything else was mostly straight forward, was mostly assigning people to specific positions.
Frosty: Okay so you were telling people where to go, did you do any of the map drawing?
Zeppe: That was someone else.
Suki: Youko did a lot of diagrams.
Narrlocke: I did 5 second MS Paint drawings and Youko did more complex diagrams.
Frosty: You’d just do a quick sketch and Youko would bring it to life?
Narrlocke: Yeah I would just slap stuff in MS Paint as they were talking and post it, and when a mechanic actually required a diagram that had to be good, Youko made it.
Ren: And there were very, very rough drawings…. the first drawing posted by Narrlocke just had an angry face
Youko: I couldn’t even decipher some things…
Narrlocke: My bosses just tend to have little angry faces on them, you know?
Was it enjoyable from a race perspective?
Frosty: Are you guys satisfied with the experience as world racers?
Ren: I love this content, I’m a huge fan of the Criterions and puzzle solving was the greatest part of it. All the crackpot theories we had to come up with were so much fun. Maybe it’s not as fun for the people who don’t get to solve it.
Kana: The best part of this content is playing with people you don’t normally play with. It’s like a summer camp.
Frosty: These are the people you normally compete against.
Kana: Yeah that too.
How did you organize phantom jobs and what were the opinions of the system?
Frosty: Did you have your phantom jobs all planned out? Like who was doing what?
Suki: I did a rough party comp that every party should have. Every party leader kept track of who was leveling what and had everything covered.
Narrlocke: It was actually so crazy, we didn’t miss a single gap in our comp. It was actually perfect the whole time.
Kio: Everybody had a nice spread of jobs they could switch to.
Ren: Nobody had freelancer obviously, but we were get a little nervous it might be needed for the puzzle.
Narrlocke: We did bring a level 5 freelancer once, but his heal did not activate the secret – in case you were curious.
Frosty: What was the comp you used?
Narrlocke: I have a list of the required jobs, if that’s what you want, but there’s only 18 on that list and the rest are all filling up each party with good party buff jobs and stuff like that.
Suki: Basically you want a minimum of one knight in every party, one bard in every party for the buffs and the mitigations, and 1 chemist for the rez’s. Rest are support jobs like Time Mages, Rangers, and Thieves.
prettymf: Yeah we ran 4 thieves, but you only need 2.
Suki: Originally we had back ups for jobs in case they died, but as we got better at it we removed the backup supports and added dps jobs.
Frosty: Did you guys like the Phantom Job system?
Kio: Yes!
Kana: Yeah I like it, it’s more organized than Bozja I think.
Suki: I like how they are used in the fight, but I think it’s just more buttons to press. Doesn’t really cool stuff, except I think Oracle. But most of them are hit a button every 30 seconds, 1 minute, or 2 minutes.
Perezident: Yeah, but there is also some interesting jankiness – where you have to think out of the box a little bit to maximize it’s usefulness. Berserker for example, you need to take as much damage as possible within 10 seconds, and you holmgang a tankbuster and pop it, you can
reflect that damage back. The highest hit I have gotten was 2,100,000 – and that’s very significant and feels really good to pull it off.
Suki: It is kind of annoying that SquareEnix doesn’t tell you that.
Kio: But I like that!
Regar: Yeah the tooltips are kind of bad for Phantom Jobs.
Kio: To be fair, a lot of the field operations content is modeled around the FFXI system and it had a lot of similar vague descriptions, level down mechanics, and things like that. It was more about the community solving what these things do. So it’s a nod to that game I think.
What were the thoughts on the mechanics?
Frosty: Was there any mechanic in particular that was extremely interesting to figure out?
Suki: Most of the mechanics were very straight forward. You can put a marker on someone, everyone follow them, and you’d survive on all boss fights besides the last one.
Perezident: The secret room was interesting spawning the boss outside. Other than that, pretty straight forward.
Kana: The mechanics were simple, but you had to die to figure out what they do.
Narrlocke: For example there is no way you’d like know the ice puddle with the circle does, and the ice puddle with the spike in it is a giant cross. You can’t know that until you see it blow up.Suki: Yeah, but once you see it once no discussion needed.
Frosty: Did you find that annoying combined with the rez mechanics?
prettymf: It’s very sad because the optimal way to prog is for one guy to stay on the floor the whole time and raise after.
Suki: Ideally they way they should do it is not let you sack a healer.
Kio: Our very first time going into the tower, you spend all that time getting in, the boss does their mechanic and we just die. Then back out, go hunt again for half a hour. It’s rough, you look for solutions to not sit around for a hour in between runs.
Chayo: One good solution for that is if you wipe, as long as you have 1 life left – you just get teleported to the start of the tower.
Suki: Yeah I like that too. As long as you have a life you go to the start, if you don’t you get kicked out.
Narrlocke: Yeah it sucks for the one guy out of the 48 out that doesn’t get to play the game because their job is to stay dead on the floor in case the party wipes.
Suki: Shoutout to Miyuki!
Frosty: Was that his main role?
Suki: Yep he was dead for most of these prog pulls, kind of sad.
Robin: He took off 3 days of work just to do nothing
Youko: Unlucky.
Kio: He had like 7 mastery points.
Frosty: Why was Miyuki picked for it?
Suki: He volunteered originally and we just stuck with him. Going forward in the next prog, we will have someone set as that’s their job.
Frosty: That sounds real easy, if you guys need me to do that let me know! I’d like to get a world first under my belt.
Narrlocke: You still have to play some of the bosses, like the bridge encounter. You can’t reset it.
Suki: The person would still have to play some.
Frosty: Well shit… I guess that puts me out…
What was it like from different role perspectives?
Frosty: How did tanking feel in this content?
Narrlocke: As one of the tanks, I don’t know if we all feel this way, but some definitely do – we brought in 12 tanks, 2 per party, but the raid is very clearly intended for 6 tanks. And the problem is we had 12 tanks all fighting for aggro. So what would happen is you would be one of the twelve tanks all attacking a trash pack never taking damage for 95% of the raid, then randomly get aggroed by every add at one time and almost get one shot without a cooldown.
Frosty: So the aggro was just whoever got crits?
Narrlocke: Yeah too much ping pong, too many tanks.
Snow: The worst was the locksmith adds where you could just explode from grabbing two or three of them.
Regar: Yeah especially when the two minutes were going up.Frosty: I mean that could be a good thing, making people pay attention to tanking and maybe manage their aggro?
Narrlocke: I actually think the Locksmith would have been easier with less tanks, since it would be more predictable when you are getting aggro on what. But it was impossible to predict anything with so many tanks. 3 adds would spawn and 5 tanks provoke them and no one would provoke the other one and no idea who has what until they start punching you.
Frosty: That sounds like a leadership problem.
Kio: To be fair the times when the tanks would die is when they would get aggro on everything present. If we would have just assigned tanks to specific mobs it wouldn’t have happened.
Libby: The answer is to not do so much damaged and just focus one.
Kio: Yeah single target.
Narrlocke: After I had an unfortunate death in the lock room, we did end up saying every tank
just provoke every add you silence and it was better.
Frosty: It’s funny it sounds old schoolish having to prioritize your tank activities instead of just doing straight damage.
Narrlocke: For most of the instance you have 3 parties on each boss. And every party just had a main tank and an offtank for the most part. But for the trash it’s really fun though.
Frosty: What about healing?
Libby: From my perspective it feels like it was designed for 1 healer, even zero in some cases. One of the issues is the raidwides do so much damage it’s hard to justify dropping the shield healer. But you probably can very easily run like 1 healer. The other half of this is some of the
support jobs you really want them on your non-dps like the chemist and the bard, and that just naturally lend itself to having 2 healers in each group.
Youko: Yeah I agree.
Frosty: So you think this content is going to be done with zero healers very soon?
Youko: Yes, very quickly. Because chemist can just full heal everyone and as long as you have correct party mitigation there are support jobs and phantom actions that give 40k shields, so if you have multiple of those you can completely forgo certain classes and roles.
Regar: The one thing about that is there is a single mechanic in the entire raid that does actually do role assignments, which may be a little hard on the second boss, there’s these giant cones on the fire phase which one is baited on a random dps and the other baited on a random healer,
or closet to the fireball. So I don’t know how that would work if you are missing the role.
Narrlocke: And because you have so many people, there is no way you could spread out enough without having a slaughter house with it.
Frosty: Nothing too special in this raid for dps right?Kev: Unless you go in with Monk, then it’s a mini game in itself. The phantom job itself, because trying to time that 10 yalm dash every 30 seconds becomes kind of fun to dance with the mechanics.
Beraru: It’s so scary during it when it lines up with some mechanics and just I’m praying I don’t die.
Kev: Many times when Suki says “Stack at C” and I have to refresh my stack so I dash from the side through the boss and it looks so suspect.
Narrlocke: Just to clarify it’s a 10 second buff window with phantom monk that throws you 10 yalms when you use it, and it can be highly dangerous. Definitely had some deaths to it.prettymf: I threw myself into the wall in the very first CE we did.
Was there any neat interactions with phantom jobs?
Frosty: I was told Beraru did some sort of silly trick with the Dark Knight?
Beraru: Yeah, the chemist job one of the things that it does besides raising people is that it has some potion that you buy with gil that could either fully restore your hp or mana. So I had to do a lot of complaining to my two healings to give me MP pot on dark knight so I would just spam edge, like every GCD I would just hit three edges between them. It was insanely good, you lose a little healer dps, and I took monk so I had a 40% buff on top of all that. My healers are very stubborn until I got one of them to cave. I think they spent 3 million gil on me with just mana pots. I didn’t tell the my healers they were both giving me mana pots, so they’d just keep spamming it on me. It was important they didn’t know each other was doing it.
Regar: We actually had a leaderboard on who spent the most gil because of Samurai’s ability too.
Frosty: It’s actually a lot of money. It feels like they wanted it to hurt financially.
Youko: I spent 10 mil on elixirs.
Perezident: To be honest, the is like the best gil sink for the game if that was the goal.
Narrlocke: There’s nothing like farming gil for two weeks to blow it all in a hour.
Beraru: I’m just glad my ether healers were gil capped, so I didn’t feel too bad.
Which side was better?
Frosty: Was right side or left side better?
(entire call shouting and arguing on which is better)
Frosty: Is there really a correct side?
(more shouting and arguing and undecipherable)
Kana: By the way that’s how some of the conversations went.
Frosty: Really?
Kana: yeah, we had to tell some people to shutup (joking)
Narrlocke: You have to have some “shut ups” with 48 people.
Suki: To be fair, moments like that when everyone is excited and talking all at once is very fun in this type of content. It’s hype.
Kana: yeah, it definitely part of the experience.
Suki: When you see something new and everyone is excited, 48 people, it’s great.
Narrlocke: For the most part that would mostly happen when someone visibly starts messing up a mechanic and everyone gets scared and starts doing call outs at the same time. Then someone yells and tells everyone to shutup and calm down, and it just stops.
Frosty: And no one gets offended right?
Narrlocke: Not at all.
Ren: It never gets old either, when you are about to get a kill and everyone starts getting hyped and voices raise, that shit just never gets old. A lot of fun.
Were traps a good addition to the raid?
Frosty: Did you guys like traps being in the raid?
Narrlocke: The traps are based.
Flaire: I think the traps were fine.
Suki: I wish they were more random.
Regar: Yeah, there’s like two patterns.
Suki: If they were more random, it would be more exciting every pull. Once you do it 5 or 6 times, you know where they are going to likely be.
Narrlocke: I think traps should spawn anywhere, including in boss rooms and not only in the red parts.
Suki: I agree, one of my favorite parts was the bridge.
Robin: This is the first time they indicated where mines were going to spawn with red lines. I don’t how I feel about that, it kind of takes away the fun.
Suki: Red lines with random traps is good, but with static traps it’s bad.
Youko: I like the threat of imminent death.
Suki: Speaking of the red line, it was funny the first time we saw it, people were so scared to cross it.
Narrlocke: We were approaching it like we were the bomb squad
Were there any fun secrets to figure out?
Frosty: Was there anything else in there like that? Any other tricks?
Suki: Well stealing the weapon off mobs to make them weaker and killable. It’s pretty unique and makes it fun.
Frosty: How did you figure that out?
Suki: First group went in and died immediately.
Narrlocke: He has a buff that says he has a highest dangerous weapon, then stands there for three seconds after pulling and gigaslashes the entire room.
Frosty: So it’s pretty straight forward?
Kio: Straight forward if you know a thief can still a weapon, but when we first got there a lot of people didn’t know what all the phantom jobs did.
Robin: They are usually pretty good about saying there is a secondary effect, but for the thief skill it just says “pilfer weapons”, so you have to kind of put two and two together. First time I recommended it, I was like “maybe”, like a tinfoil theory.
Libby: The effect of that ability is a damage down, it doesn’t exactly say steal their weapons.
Kio: You usually just use it for the damage down and don’t think about it otherwise.
Ren: There was also a unique reaction with the final boss with needing the berserker, there is a purple cannister that gives hysteria. Berzerker is vague enough that it says you are “immune to most status effects”, but if you are a lore person you know it would be immune to confuse – which ended up working.
Suki: That’s what’s exciting about the new jobs coming out and how they will interact with the new raid.
Regar: Something I wanted to mention that was disappointing was the big floating green orb in some rooms. Because it didn’t really do anything if you tripped into it, some people thought it would alert enemies, but all it did was silence you. Which doesn’t do anything to you if you are a
melee.
Narrlocke: Yeah the green orb just needs to be avoided by healers and casters, rest of the party can just walk through it. It should kill you instantly or something.
Suki: Or spawn more mobs once you step in it.
Frosty: Yeah make things scary. The open world felt scary somewhat, did you guys have any issues with it?
Ren: I think the worst zone was the cave section, because it’s really tight in the hallways out west.
Narrlocke: Yeah the cave on the west is the worst part for sure, not even because of the mobs, but just how obnoxious it is to figure out how to get in there, and by the time you figure it out another CE has popped.
Zeppe: Shoutout to the bridge mechanic, easily one of my favorite things I’ve seen in the game. Conceptually I love it.
Narrlocke: The bridge encounter is the best fight and it’s not even a boss.
Youko: I agree it’s very interactive.
Suki: Make the chasing fire do more damage and be more scary.
Regar: It’s scary mentally, orange is bad.
Going to go back in?
Frosty: Are you guys going to go back into the content and do it over and over again?
Narrlocke: To prepare for the next raid, of course.
Suki: We told everyone they should max out every job for next year… everyone has a year…
Thoughts on the mount?
Frosty: What do you guys think about the mount?
Ren: It’s grotesque, but I love it. And I hate it.
Regar: Yeah your legs are sticking out at the bottom. And when you are flying your hands stick out and are flapping,
Narrlocke: And it’s based off your character too, so it just looks funny.
Will more people race in the future?
Frosty: Do you think the next raid we will see a lot of groups racing?
Ren: Depends on what they do with the instances.
Frosty: It’s tough, because you have to game the system to get in, and maybe SquareEnix doesn’t want this content to be built for racing. I’d be interested to hear what SquareEnix has to say about it.
Perezident: Just to note, doing this content if people are interested in actually competing, I think a better way to see it is to compete to be the first people able to create theories, crackpot theories on how we can possibly get this rune to start glowing, like that is the most enjoyable
thing you can get out of your subscription to FFXIV. Obviously people enjoy content differently, but in my opinion this is it. It’s not competing to beat groups, but compete to be the first to enjoy it. The mount is great, don’t get me wrong, but the experience is the most valuable to me.
Frosty: I mean that’s the world race mentality, most people are wanting to just figure out the content themselves. Winning is great, but seeing the mechs first is the core benefit.
Did this content get released at the right time?
Frosty: Do you think this content should have been released in an earlier patch?
Perezident: I don’t know why they stopped releasing the relic step with the expansion. You should get your base relic at [launch] and level it progressively as the expansion goes out. The actual exploration [part] put it wherever (besides with savage or ultimates), but the relic should be earlier.
Zeppe: You are trying to say ARR did it best.
Perezident: Yes. And it’s not even close.
Narrlocke: Yeah the relic coming out almost literally halfway throughout the expansion is pretty egregious yeah.
Perezident: The exploration content is pretty perfect timing, because people are now familiar with their jobs and they are throwing in extra phantom jobs now. Maybe people have different perspectives, but in the middle is fine.
Narrlocke: If we are just talking about content release schedule, but one big criticism is there is always one big gap at the start of an expansion, 7.0/7.1, because all the side content ends up getting released after the second or third tier.
Frosty: So relic early near expansion release, then integrate it into exploration later?
Narrlocke: Yeah. Something around 7.1 area would be nice.
Perezident: When I was doing the ARR relic and I had that special purple weapon that felt like it was “my weapon”, has a special name, special effects, special stats. Why not have your special weapon per expansion that goes with you the whole way? And honestly, that is my one thing would actually solve a lot of problems with content early on.
Snow: I think this content, relic aside, introduced at a pretty good time. One of my biggest griefs with chaotic was it release around Christmas. A lot of people couldn’t make it because of family obligations.
Brian: Yeah it was like back to back, Ultimate during Thanksgiving, Chaotic during Christmas.
Ren: Please SquareEnix consider western holidays.
How does this content compare to other difficult content, like Savage and Ultimate?
Frosty: Listening to you guys talk about it, it sounds way more fun than Savage and Ultimate. Exploring an area and a dungeon, figuring it out over multiple days. Do you enjoy this content more? Or is it incomparable?
Youko: I can’t compare it, completely different feeling.
prettymf: It’s just a different experience.
Suki: I think Ultimate is absolute peak, but this is far better than Savage.
Narrlocke: I agree, I think this is better than Savage – I like this a lot.
Ren: I would say FFXIV is an eight player game, having 48 people is kind of the WoW experience, I’ve never played it, but what I would imagine.
Perezident: I think if you are just going to look at the word “raid”, like what is a raid to a person that’s never played 14? Like these 48 mans are, in my opinion what a raid should be. To be honest the savage and ultimate content shouldn’t be called raids. They are just a boss. So you can’t really compare. But if you were going to ask just strictly from an enjoyment stand points, then this is peak FFXIV. It doesn’t get much better than blind progging with 48 people in an environment you go in and conquer. The crackpot theories we were coming up with were some
of the highlights.
Anything you want to say to SquareEnix?
Frosty: What would you want to say to SquareEnix about this content? From both perspectives of racing and not racing?
Kev: Let us queue into the raid.
prettymf: Let us choose our instance please.
Narrlocke: Or queue in as a 48 player party.
Kio: that was definitely the worst part of prog.
Youko: They should not be so hostile to pre-mades.
Suki: We could do it in DRS, so why not here?
Narrlocke: Not only to benefit the pre-mades, but also other players said their experience was being harmed because pre-mades were trying to get into instances. And no body wants that. It’s bad for us and everyone else.
Frosty: You don’t want to cause problems with other people, but it’s the only way you can play together, right?
Narrlocke: And even then, not to mention the experience of the people who walk up and see the big glowy thing, they queue in, die to the first raid-wide and had to sit there waiting to be rezzed and lose their exp [later]. No body wants that.
Frosty: Did you guys put a ton of ciphers in each time?
Narrlocke: Couldn’t afford to, couldn’t make enough between attempts.
Kio: Compared to people who have been just farming outside the group probably can put in a lot, so we were at the mercy of people who could submit like 10 ciphers.
Frosty: Is there anything else to say to SE?
Ren: Please keep making content like this
Perezident: Honestly, I a lot of things we want are things they already have done in the past. So it’s not like it’s impossible to do it.
Frosty: So it was more likely a decision to do it and not a programming issue?
Perezident: Like DRS having a good functional queuing system, then going to this. And it was complained about in BA.
Frosty: So the entry system sucks, but the content is great in an organized manner? It would suck as a non-premade for the first time?
Lleu: Yeah you just die if no one was organized with it.
Conclusion
With that I conclude the digest of this interview. There were more questions asked, but I tried to include the majority of them. If you would like to see the interview in full, please check out the video on YouTube!
Remember to be good, keep cool, and stay frosty!
-Frosty