Ok...let me level with you here SE...

[Alerith]

Let me put this way: anyone who completes the stage 2 trial is an absolute moron. You're losing 2.5m potential gil every dynamis run you fight ADL instead of farming currency. Multiply that by the number of times you'll need to kill him for every person in the alliance, and you could have completed every relic weapon up to level 99... instead glowing blue.

The auras are nothing more than a /point and laugh at how stupid someone is for actually having completed the trial.

I don't completely agree with this. You could argue that anything you do is a waste when you could spend that time doing something else.

Not everyone plays in the same way, and while one player may prefer to specialize in a broad range of jobs and collect relics for each of them, others prefer a far fewer number, even one job, that they choose to specialize in and complete as much as they can.

While I understand where you're coming from and I agree the time could be better spent, it's not the motives of the players that I'm concerned about when it comes to this situation. It's the trial and SE's line of thinking that concern me.

[Strife]

If the +2 is a trail you don't want to do for a reward you dont want.. where's the problem?

I don't understand QQ'n because someone else may be getting what they want while by your own admission it's no lose to you.

Don't forget, that that Afterglow effect is overwritten if they have a relic/emp/mythic and activate their aftermath. Priority order is Aftermath Lv3>Lv2>Lv1>Afterglow. So if you think that getting that afterglow so others with emps/relic/mythic can reap the reward, think again. As soon as they gain their specific aftermath that afterglow is gone meaning it only benefits those without relic/emp/mythic or don't use the WS to activate aftermath. In otherwords, about the only ones who reap any reward out of this are WOE users or someone using their Merit WS. ~golf claps for SE development~ Thank you for giving us something that hardly benefits anyone at all unless they don't have one of these weapons already.

I'm all for helping my fellow player...but not by making them slave away to give me a spiffy glow and afterglow they may not even benefit from anyway.

Kind of sad when you think the people most likely to do the stage 2s will be in linkshells with other relic/ emps and will therefore have thier hard won buff wasted.

They should really at least make Afterglow a separate buff from Aftermath so that it can stack with other player's Aftermath, considering how marginal Afterglow is... :/

I agree after all as far as i know sphere effects from gear and atmacite aren't over written by aftermath but I guess it depends on the strength of the effect as to wether this will be to over powered or not.

[Insaniac]

I agree after all as far as i know sphere effects from gear and atmacite aren't over written by aftermath but I guess it depends on the strength of the effect as to wether this will be to over powered or not.

They are separate buffs. After glow is like an instant cast AoE buff that lasts 30 seconds. Kinda like warcry but activated by a WS. Once you get it you don't need to stay in range or anything so it shouldn't effect true sphere effects in any way.

For people talking about the precedent these trials set you are looking at them in the wrong way. They set the precedent for extremely long soul crushing grinds to be truly optional. For instance the upgrade to nyzul gear could be reasonable all the way up to the last stage which could require something crazy like 200k tokens or defeating some random pop NM 300 times but the effect would be a blinking light in the middle of your askar helm and a 1% boost to the set bonus over the previous stages effects which are +15% crit damage and 10 str.

SE is clearly intent on making these unholy grinds (/point VW) so wouldn't you rather them be optional like stage 2 trials instead of being something you feel obligated to pursue?