Abyssea - Casual Or Hardcore ?

After reading a lot of posts on different websites like ffxiah, alla, BG on abyssea, a lot of people consider abyssea the event "that everyone was waiting", especially "casual" players, whatever that means.

* I have seen reports of 5 hours exp parties in abyssea being awesome - how is that casual ?

* I checked the requirement for Verethragna, the empyrean H2H :

It requires 50 "Two-leaf Chloris Bud" ; this drops from "Chloris", an abyssea NM with unknown drop rate, not 100%. Requirements for popping Chloris are 4 key items :

*Veinous Hecteyes Eyelid => requires killing "Olphanim" not 100%
*Torn Bat Wing => requires killing "Treble Noctules" not 100%
*Gory Scorpion Claw => requires killing "Hedeteted" not 100%
*Mossy Adamantoise Shell => requires killing "Chukwa" not 100%

olphanim requires 3 "rare" items : "Bloodshot Hecteye" "Shriveled Wing" and a "Shriveled Pincer" - which themselves drop from either normal mobs or NMs that requires another item to pop. Hedetet and treble noctules work the same. Chukwa doesn't require pop (key) items.


Poping just *one* Chloris seems like more of a headache than poping a tier4 ZNM or the tier4 VNM, and you need 50 of its drop (hopefully 100% drop rate), making the difficulty to get the item much longer than getting a pandemonium warden drop.


How is this casual ? Did SE really manage to make us pay 10$ for a retardly time consuming event. It's not like Chloris is the only NM looked after, as there is one equivalent for each weapon it seems, and there a lot of other NMs dropping gear.

Did we really get an event 10x more cock blocking than Salvage ? Doing NMs in abyssea is not exactly the same as normal exp, you will quickly consume your time and be only able to enter once every few days alla dynamis/limbus.