For grumpy old Final Fantasy 14 enjoyers like myself who won't stop banging on about how the game doesn't have midcore content—good news! The game has midcore content now, and we can finally shut up until patch 8.0. Released in Patch 7.25 today, the Occult Crescent, a new Bozja-style exploration zone, is now open to the public.
In case you're unfamiliar with what these are, an exploration zone (officially dubbed a "field operation") is a piece of large-scale world content, typically accompanied with its own levelling system. You enter them solo, but will be passively thrown into large boss fights and FATEs with other players. In terms of difficulty, they're often in a sweet spot: You'll absolutely die if you aren't paying attention, but you won't wipe the entire group if you do.
Because of their relative lack of required organisation, but emphasis on personal responsibility, exploration zones are the most midcore of midcore content that FF14 gets, taking the world quest model of a game like WoW and fleshing it out into its own proper progression system—with a few zone-specific grinds to keep you invested.
The Occult Crescent is no different. As the patch notes explain, you'll be able to grind EXP for both your "knowledge level" and your "phantom jobs" while inside the zone. Knowledge level is your overall power—letting you deal more damage to enemies of higher levels—whereas phantom jobs are their own separate system, giving you access to new abilities and passive effects.
These phantom jobs seem to be the core crux of the zone—we already know we're getting chemist, ranger, berserker, geomancer, samurai, bard, freelancer, cannoneer, monk, oracle, thief, time mage, and knight. But the patch notes state that there'll be more available either through purchasing them, or via critical engagements (boss FATEs you can get pulled into on occasion).
One neat element is that, apparently, maxing out a phantom job will give you "the Phantom Mastery status, which grants increased damage dealt and other helpful effects, and remains active even should you change to another phantom job." In other words, if you want to reach bonkers levels of power while in The Occult Crescent, you're incentivised to max out every job you can.
Once your knowledge level is 20, you'll also be able to tackle The Forked Tower—an up-to 48 person raid that's accessed via offering something called a sanguine cipher at a special reliquary. Given how busy the zone is bound to be at launch, you'll probably be vying for a spot—you can offer more ciphers for a better chance at entry, and fortunately, if you aren't picked to go dungeon delving, your ciphers will be returned to you.
There are other side-activities, as well, including treasure hunts at the behest of little goblin pots—but this all sounds like a jolly good time. My only gripe is that it's taken this long for us to get something like this from ol' Square Enix. Four years, in fact—nearly five.
Bozja, the last field operation, came out during Shadowbringers in October 2020. Square Enix skipped over the content type for Endwalker, electing to add variant dungeons instead which, while fun, were also one-and-done gauntlets you could knock out in about eight hours. I had a great time with them, sure, but if you're playing an MMO? You gotta grease the wheels with a little grind.
Due to a combination of Dawntrail's sluggish release schedule and weird prioritisation of raid tiers and extreme fights, The Occult Crescent—the most accessible and longest-lasting type of content the expansion will have to offer, bar none—has taken nearly a full year to arrive after the expansion's release. Why? I couldn't tell you.
On the plus side, this is a great expansion for something like this to arrive in. Square Enix has been popping off with its fight design recently, and despite my complaints about how long it's taken, I can't wait to get stuck in.
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