FFXIV: Occult Crescent, FATE Grind, and Relics
Posted on June 13, 2025 by Aywren
I wanted to talk a little about the newest content that’s been released in FFXIV as of last week – the Occult Crescent. Along with this content comes the beginning of the new Relic questline. But despite this being the kind of content people have been clamoring for since last expansion, more and more, I’m hearing folks express their frustrations and disappointments with it all.
Before I talk about other folk’s impressions, let me talk my own.
Thoughts On “Open World” Content
I really love open world content – it’s my favorite thing in MMOs to do. I tend to have good fun in cooperative zones like Bozja and Occult Crescent. I’m all for doing some FATE running, even in the actual open world. However, FFXIV has never been known for sparking imagination in the kind of content they put in their open worlds, much to my great sadness. It could really take a page out of games that do this well, such as Guild Wars 2.
I forwent several days of Occult Crescent to start chipping away at the FATEs in the actual overworld because I haven’t finished them in this expansion (or the last). While scoring demiatma for the Relic is a nice bonus, honestly, I just want to clear out all the shared FATEs in Dawntrail while there are still people out there doing them to make the grind go faster.
I’ve finished up three zones in a few days, but still have the other half to complete.
My initial thoughts about the story upon starting Occult Crescent was – finally, here’s the vibes I had originally expected and hoped for from Dawntrail! The Warrior of Light setting sail to a mysterious location, a place which identifies them as someone “worthy” of earning information and discovery.
Exploring a new land and a lovely zone with nicely varied structures and lore? Yes, please!
Sadly, the questline took a dip once we actually got on the island. There’s a bit of fussing about to figure out the mysteries, but the quests themselves are underwhelming. Go find stones. Go find lore spots (that aren’t marked on your map). Go do a critical engagement. That sort of very basic stuff. I’ve not quite finished all the quests, but leveling in the zone and the quests themselves aren’t particularly hard or engaging. It’s a shame because it started out as something I was interested in.
The concept behind the Phantom Jobs is interesting. However, none of them have really made me go: “WOW, this is incredibly fun!” I can’t see myself spending a bunch of time leveling them all at this point. Mostly because I really prefer to play the content solo unless I’m with my friends, but doing that is very difficult if you’re a DPS – at least in the beginning (I don’t know if this changes if you buy some of the gear there).
Instead, I’ve had to go in as my White Mage because chaining Critical Events (CE) is the pastime in this zone, and even if you know the fight well, and are very good at avoiding damage, the raid-wide damage done by most CE bosses will take you down as a DPS without some kind of healing input.
I’d do FATEs instead, but the rewards are dismal and the fights are usually dead by the time I reach them – they are so very poorly scaled they’re fairly much worthless to me. Especially since I haven’t sprung for a speed map in this zone as I’m trying to save up for the airship mount instead.
I was skeptical about Occult Crescent when it was announced, especially since, unlike Bozja, you can’t level your actual alt jobs within the instance. Having put hours into this content, I feel like this was a missed opportunity and I can’t imagine why they went with this design choice.
This essentially means that all progress you make in Occult Crescent stays in Occult Crescent, aside from earning demiatma for your Relic weapon (more on that later). This makes engagement and replay-ability of Occult Crescent far lower for most folks once they snag the Relic and decide the content is one and done.
I also continue to wonder why we have to have a zone specifically set aside for this kind of interactive content. Why don’t they spend the time sprucing up the actual overworld zones instead of filtering everyone into one smaller landmass and continuing to leave the overworld zones fairly vacant, aside from demiatma hunters? Once the Relic hunt is over, overworld maps will go back to being sadly under-used content once more.
Other’s Thoughts and Feedback
There are several folks I’ve seen do just that, mostly because they’re sick of Occult Crescent once they manage to finish that initial demiatma grind to unlock the first Relic. I admit, I’ve done my share of farming both in the zone and through FATES outside the zone, and the drop rate is about what you’d expect from the ARR original Relic grinds.
It’s interesting, however, that folks are so over this now, despite how many voiced frustration at the previous Relics being “nothing but Tomestones.” So, which is it? Do you want something that takes time, or do you want something that’s a Tome exchange?
Yeah, I know there can be something in the middle, and something more engaging/imaginative to do, but essentially, the devs have just handed folks that which they complained they wanted last time. Only to the tune of more complaining.
There was also a big outcry in Endwalker due to the lack of a field operations zone like this. So, what do the devs do? They give us both Cosmic Exploration (for crafters/gatherers) and they give us Occult Crescent (for battle content).
It seems like neither of these pieces of content have earned a lot of praise, however, despite how much people begged for more “casual” content. Most of this sounds like it’s because S/E has missed the mark in what players hoped for in terms of engagement. They also missed the mark on the definition of “casual,” if you ask me.
I didn’t blog about Cosmic Exploration because after seeing what I had to do to work up a Relic there, I mostly turned it into a daily chore to earn tokens to buy the things I didn’t just outright buy off the market board. I liked the idea of it, but I’ve never been one to fully understand how to do Expert Crafting, so the grind it would take to level up that Relic is stupidly long, and I will not be doing it.
In the meanwhile, Occult Crescent is being knocked a bit because of its “sameness.” People wanted a field operations zone, so now they gave us a blend of Eureka and Bozja with a full-on focus on chaining CEs. The CE fights are tough, but learnable, though I’m not sure they will appeal all that much to actual casual folks. This isn’t quite like Bozja where you mostly ran FATEs, which usually wouldn’t slaughter you, with the occasional CE boss fight popping to spice things up.
From my experience, most CEs still leave a chunk of players dead on the ground over and over again. Sometimes, myself included. Last night, I was playing out there a bit, and decided I just didn’t have the energy for this “casual” content, so I think today I will return to working on FATEs instead. If there are people still out there doing the zones I need.
It doesn’t help that most the folks in my FC are either not super interested or absent at the moment. I’m not much of a pick-up group person when I know that I’ll be going into content where I will be dying over and over again due to not having memorized whatever it is I’m supposed to know to survive. Some of these CEs are extremely unforgiving, and it’s not much fun to eat dirt for the 5th time because you didn’t have a healing spell up to protect against a raid-wide.
Some Final Thoughts
Anyhow, my time in Occult Crescent isn’t done, despite what I feel and have had to say in this post. I don’t think it’s the most imaginative content I’ve seen from the team. I really wish it were more solo-friendly to non-healer jobs. I really wish it had allowed us to bring in other jobs to level. But all that being said, I do want to earn the Relic on Tad (my main) because I’ve foregone the raids on him thus far, and have a crappy ilvl weapon holding down his ilvl in general.
So even if that means FATE farming until I’m sick of it (or more sick than I already am), I guess that’s where I stand right now. Hopefully others are having a better time!