Quote Originally Posted by Alhanelem View Post
It's a weapon. It's meant ot be used as a weapon. And, as a weapon, it's good.
So how do you explain elemental staves? Or pretty much any other staff in the game? Are they bad weapons? Then why use them? Because what makes mage weapons useful is not what makes melee weapons useful. As a melee weapon it's useful, as a mage weapon it's not. And since that's what mages are, while it has some niche uses, it doesn't play to the strengths of the job, and in fact using it prevents you from using elemental staves and other weapons, making you actually worse at what you're supposed to do, hence you can't really call it useful.

I see many people saying things like "gear gets obsolete", "the game moves on, move on with it" and stuff like that. However that's not all there is to it, and SE knows that. It's about years of effort, years of some people's lives invested in something, that's made obsolete. It's a matter of drawing the line, some items are meant to be forgotten, even good items. Kirin's Osode, Hagun, Blau Dolch, etc. a ton of items considered good, even great, are now useless, and that already pissed off tons of people. But there had to be losses somewhere, for the game to not get stagnant. But should that apply to absolutely everything? Remember people were still using elemental staves, certain AF pieces and even miscellaneous items like Swift Belt or Soboro at 75. Old doesn't always mean they shouldn't be used anymore. As I said, it's a matter of drawing the line, what should be obsolete and what shouldn't. And wasting years of hard work is not what a dev team should do, and they know that very well, otherwise they wouldn't have made relics upgradeable and now even talk about making AF2, which is incredibly easy to come by these days, augmentable too.

However, just upgrading relics a little is still wasting all the effort. Why? Because people who are after relics want them, because they want the best. That's the entire motivation behind spending a lot of time and money into it, to ultimately gain (sometimes even only a small) edge over all other available weapons. If they aren't the best anymore, all that time and money is still wasted, because it disregards the motivation behind obtaining those weapons. And personally I believe they know that too, it seems like they're trying to restore relics to their former glory, just being a bit awkward about it.

My opinion isn't that they should make relics much stronger, but rather nerf some empyreans, or at least their WS. Some of them are insanely overpowered imo, as I said before, some relics only had a small advantage over other weapons in the same category, mythics are often even worse. Empyrean weapons on the other hand all (or all I know of at least) seem to have a huge advantage over other weapons, something that's impossible to keep up with. Relics still required skill to be good, you had to know how to play and what to gear for which situations. In contrast, every empyrean has a native power to that weapon alone, that compensates for lack of everything else. Sure, having skill and gear will improve the damage output even more, but it's not required to beat a decent player otherwise.

In my opinion things that are hard to obtain should be good, or at least decent, but more importantly, it should also apply vice versa: things that are good, especially things that are exceptional, should not be easy to obtain. And that is currently my main problem with empyrean weapons, they are way too good for the effort it takes to obtain them. Some things should just be balanced out.