Quote Originally Posted by Tamarsamar View Post
Pardon me if I'm being naive here, but unless I'm mistaken, the update to RMEs still doesn't come even close to resolving the enormous effort/reward schism between the RMEs themselves and the Delve weapons. True, it makes them as powerful as the Delve weapons, more or less. Sidegrades, if you will.

Quite frankly, this is the exact same trap SE fell in to when they first released the Empyrean weapons: they release a new batch of overpowered weapons that's both more powerful and easier to acquire than the Relic/Mythic weapons. They gave Relic/Mythics Magian Trials to play catch-up, and eventually Heavy Metal Plates (and so on) were introduced as a bottleneck so that everybody and their mother wouldn't have what were (in general) the best weapons in the game. Eventually, Empyrean weapons settled to be more-or-less on-par (but still coming out a bit ahead on average) with Relic and Mythic weapons in terms of effort put in compared to reward received, and the playerbase was more-or-less satisfied . . .

. . . and then Delve happened. Rinse and repeat.

(Quite funny, thinking back on it. Back then I had advocated weakening the Empyrean weapons themselves, but SE then and now seems way too trigger-shy to nerf much of anything--especially anything that deserves it! So now we even have a whole new system where "Item levels" go up so far as 119 with content being designed to match . . . it's an arms race that's spiraling out of control! As excited as I was for SoA, I am now actually happy that I did not have the opportunity to pre-order it, as I am now withholding my purchase in protest of all this nonsense. Accordingly, I've also been playing more sparingly, but that's been more due to shifting my priorities around . . . okay, aside over.)

Let's just face the facts here: to have a weapon on par with a Delve weapon, you could . . .

* Go through the already notorious processes of acquiring a RME weapon.
* Do every Magian Trial required to level them up to 99.
* Then do Delve anyway (or some kind of ridiculous alternative).
* Then Delve (or ridiculous alternative) some more for the final quest.
* Get your 119 weapon.

Or, you could . . .

* Do Delve.
* Delve some more.
* Get your 119 weapon.

Something's gotta give. Or so the legend says.

And other mmos have long grinds for just for just cosmetic. The relics are back where they should be a huge grind you can hold over someone else but not automatically be better then them when it came to doing your role. At 75 and old dyna many were not worth playing FFXI human resources to get a shell to farm up the currency or convincing people to keep grinding cities when all they needed was northlands gear. Even the more dreaded self funded bought all and merc the fights. So get used to it this has been the way it has always been. Franky if dyna hadn't been changed none of this REM crap would be happening now. What changed was even with no gil you could still solo the currency and sell what you didn't need to either cover cost or speed it up with buying currency. If that had never happen most of the Relics holders would be saying let them die since they wouldn't have one.