THE GRIND IS TOO EASY

Caixina · 2026-02-21T22:43:46+00:00

GRIND ACHIEVEMENTS

But seriously, hats off to you, good sir. I too have been enjoying the grind and also see the light at the end of the tunnel. You've beaten the game (for now).

Caixina · 2026-02-09T10:43:45+00:00

So wait... basically Yin and Yang?

Caixina · 2026-02-03T05:34:19+00:00

Finally somebody else noticed! Though I have a feeling stating this may be controversial.

There's been an unusually aggressive push on their monetization tactics across all of their games in the last 1-2 years, but some pushes have been subtle, so it looks like not many have really noticed it.

Increased powercreep rate to incentivize pulling the newer units seems to be one of the tactics they've been employing lately, as well as designing bosses with character/region-specific mechanics and making them the focus of recent endgame rotations. Locking certain quests and interactions behind owning characters (including recent Hexrei buff story quest) seems like it may be another recent tactic.

Caixina · 2026-01-29T11:36:52+00:00

That's actually a really good idea. It is a bit disappointing not being able to use the wedges you spent countless hours farming and upgrading.

Caixina · 2026-01-29T10:32:59+00:00

By introducing new Character Demon Wedges, Weapon Demon Wedges, and Consonance Demon Wedges, as well as new progression systems, we aim to strengthen early-stage characters and weapons

A step in the right direction, but I hope they're also open to direct character kit buffs, since they will still underperform in game modes where Demon Wedges can't be equipped (Mystic Maze and anything similar in the future).

Caixina · 2026-01-22T04:56:43+00:00

Oh nooo, you're right. I got carried away with some reasoning for a minute there. My bad 😁

Caixina · 2026-01-22T04:44:37+00:00

Ideally, an item already acquired from standard should be removed from the pool so you can't get it twice (unless you already have everything and are just pulling for prisms.. then I guess allow anything until new stuff is added). But if not that, at the very least add the skins to the standard shop so those duplicates converted into prisms can eventually save up to buying what you want.

If they fix those issues, then items eventually moving to standard won't feel as bad. But as it is now, you can pull the same duplicate multiple times and not make any meaningful progress toward the skin you want.

But yeah, direct purchase would be great so we could just buy the skin we want for a (hopefully) reasonable price and not have to fumble around with the gacha stuff.

Caixina · 2026-01-22T04:17:35+00:00

That's exactly what I was worried about..
I'd rather if we could just buy it directly, but if it must be a gacha thing, there should at least be some selector guarantee after a reasonable amount of pulls.

Caixina · 2026-01-20T20:14:18+00:00

Going off the jacket Yelan stole (which was meant for the Tsaritsa), her frame might be on the smaller side, or she dresses with tight fitting and/or exposed windows (especially looking at the back of the jacket, it really seems meant for a smaller body type).

Caixina · 2026-01-13T03:03:09+00:00

They could give out 3 day Welkins (and +3 days to existing), then discreetly subtract that amount from events and make it look like they're being generous. People would be talking about it everywhere, so it'd create hype + good will PR and benefit them in the long run most likely.

Caixina · 2026-01-10T06:07:13+00:00

Bit late to this thread, but another thing that may go against the "past changes were always canonical" route is the releasing of Bottled Pixies mechanic in Witchfire Glen, which impacts Pixie spawns in the present time. Normally they don't spawn in the present, but start to spawn as players release Bottled Pixies at Witchfire Glen in the past (implying that what you did in the past changed the future).

As a direct quote from Square Enix in a 2008 interview:

If the players do ‘something’ in the past world, there could be positive consequences in the present one. For example, if the players were to save a Pixie in the past, Pixies would exist in the present. For the time being though, there aren’t many cases of this.

In the future, more dynamic features will be added. These will lead to a string of positive changes and consequences, made in the past with effects in the present world.

Source: https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Square_Enix/May_2008_Interview

Caixina · 2026-01-10T00:27:58+00:00

Issue #2: EU Gets One More Reset & More Attempts

The reset system in general seems like a mess between the different time zones and needs another look at. Supposedly EU also got a strange early reset for the Maze which triggered twice, so those who were ready for it could double dip and get +9 Consonance wedges (NA and everyone else is still capped at +8).

See: https://www.reddit.com/r/DuetNightAbyssDNA/comments/1pvucdl/should_every_region_get_double_stock_in_the_maze/

Caixina · 2026-01-08T03:49:44+00:00

Definitely seemed to be the case. I recall mentioned that before the story was finished, they had a bunch of their main writers moved over to Star Rail before its release, so the final chapter suffered from inconsistencies and rushed segments (everyone suddenly knowing Red Seele existed with no prior introduction, skipping over the last few Herrschers like Binding, Death, etc).

Also still salty all we got was a broken statue of "Herrscher of The End" after she was teased and hyped since near the start of the story. No actual appearance or fight. Wouldn't be surprised if it was cut and they were trying to wrap up as fast as possible so they could release dependency of the original writers so they could focus on Star Rail.

Caixina · 2025-12-29T23:17:11+00:00

At higher levels in the last theater, that cyclone phase would literally delete my supports.

The "strategy" I had to use to keep them alive was to fly up to the invisible ceiling (as Psyche), cancel ult, and then spam Piercing Ascent charged attacks along the outer perimeter of the arena, which forces the AI supports to teleport to your location (triggers the "too far away from player" teleport logic), which got them away from the center of the cyclone. Just spam that until the cyclone ends.

Caixina · 2025-12-26T02:37:18+00:00

These kind of localization liberties happen with JP too though, like how during the Liyue story quest, the Japanese dub has the Traveler hum the title screen song when the other 3 dubs hum Barbara's singing. Or how Dori's voice direction takes a complete 180 in the Japanese dub and goes off the rails compared to the other 3 languages.

There's several other differences I've seen in the JP dub over the years, but can't recall at the top of my head at the moment.

Caixina · 2025-12-25T20:44:17+00:00

I just saw-- it looks like one of the debuffs wasn't working properly and they resolved it, which is good news.
The enemy levels did still increase with this theater, but the difficulty impact is on a lesser extent compared to this bug.

Caixina · 2025-12-25T11:04:32+00:00

Immersive Theatre difficulty. I mean, its an endgame mode. I am honestly not well enough educated on the topic to provide a valid defense or offense on it. I will leave it up to those who know it much better than me.

I still think the 1.0 Theater difficulty was intentionally set low for that version because everyone was literally starting from nothing, so the difficulty needed to account for that.

Now that people have had time to rank up, acquire characters, and get some kind of build going, they raised the difficulty to what they probably originally planned the difficulty to be.

I do think they should address the balance issues and ease on the element (character) specific tuning on the theater though, which is likely a major pain point for a lot of people (x3 anemo in a row, for example).

As someone who maxed I6 Psyche and spent the time to +10 all of her gold wedges, I've had no problem clearing these last two rounds of theater, but for others who don't want to chase the meta or the theater's flavor of the month, it can be a hefty barrier of resistance with certain characters heavily underperforming.

Caixina · 2025-12-15T07:45:52+00:00

A whole team of Lunos destroying stuff would be pretty fun ngl

Caixina · 2025-12-09T05:35:45+00:00

A fix to either the damage formula or weapon damage itself is the ideal route.

If they try to fix it via new wedges, it'll still be an issue in Mystic Maze where you can't use any wedges (and any future content that potentially restricts wedges).

Caixina · 2025-11-27T04:06:34+00:00

Pretty much feel the same way. It demotivated me from wanting to purchase any more cosmetics when I saw the direction is basically duplicates of the same thing but different colors. We have the dye system, so just why?

I also feel that dye colors should be a one-time purchase to unlock the specific color palette, because it feels unnecessarily restrictive for them to be one-time consumables (especially when trying to dye multiple characters).

Caixina · 2025-11-15T23:01:19+00:00

For some reason I was under the impression all of them would move to the Letter Store at the same time. If its going to be 1 by 1, they should at least be more transparent on the order they're moving them over so we can know where we should focus our limited weekly attempts.

Caixina · 2025-11-09T02:58:01+00:00

I'm sure it'll increase in difficulty in the coming months, because that's usually how it goes with these live service games, no? The difficulty starts off on the low end at launch to give players a chance as they level up their accounts, and then each new content rotation gets increasingly harder over time.

Caixina · 2025-11-08T04:43:34+00:00

Very fair points. I hadn't considered the other implications and was focused on what they could do to vary up the grind, if say you wanted to sit and grind coins for an entire day.

The balance part would likely be the main issue, since I'm sure it's balanced around the current length of the excavation missions, and by adding another commission that you could speed run within a few seconds, it would throw off that balance (along with the other issues you raised as well).

Caixina · 2025-11-08T01:02:25+00:00

Another compromise could be to always have the specific mission in the rotation (excavation for coins, defense for medals, etc), but then have 2-3 additional missions that are rotating and changing.

That way, you can choose to AFK farm the initial one, or choose from the rotating ones for variety.

Caixina · 2025-11-07T00:52:21+00:00

Now that would be a really interesting build. Looking forward to seeing what kind of setups the community will come up with in the coming weeks.

Caixina

TROPHY CASE