Zodiac Weapon Questline vs Anima Weapon Questline - Your preference?

I liked ZW through Zenith step. That's it. Everything else was boring/miserable.

Your point about the books step: Essentially we are doing that now with the 210/230/240 step. You can get esoterics and unidentifieds through so many different methods it's like all the crud you could do for books but you're free to do it anyway you want instead of having to stick the constraints of the book.

I do like that each of the beginning steps of ZW had a unique story, but I feel closer to my AW since it is actually alive.

Overall I prefer AW to ZW gameplay wise. I appreciated the lore of the ZW more though.

Zodiac had more work involved, and was more difficult to obtain than anima. I do like the anima only because I got to skip the fate grind, but as far as story goes, Zodiac is better

The Anima questline is much better designed from a mechanical perspective overall. I do wish the Anima questlines had begun with a unique story for each job, as the Relic Reborn questline did, but beyond that I've liked the Anima much more.

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Originally Posted by Daemius

I do like that each of the beginning steps of ZW had a unique story, but I feel closer to my AW since it is actually alive.

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See, I'm not particularly attached to my Anima at all... I like that SE tried, and the characterization it gets is nice, but... They're not unique... It doesn't feel alive to me because I've done multiple weapons... Perhaps it changes with later quests, but right now the Anima just feels like Siri or something... It talking to me is a novelty, devoid of any real personality and it comes as standard on every Anima weapon... Perhaps A Dream Fulfilled changes that, I really need to get that finished...

Really wish they didn't mess up the Zodiac Zeta weapons honestly... The quests made it sound like we were finishing our Zodiac weapon by giving it sentience, and we get absolutely nothing out of that except a glow... For the best, since the role of the Zeta weapons was to be desynthesized to let us skip a FATE grind, but damn... I was really hoping for a little bit of personality from the weapons, sort of what like XIs original Relic weapons displayed... It was a fairly brief cutscene, but those weapons felt much more alive than the Anima weapons IMO... I think in Wings of the Goddess, when we could see their original owners wielding them, we could even see them talk on the battlefield... Those weapons were alive... These weapons... Meh... Doesn't help that they gave the Anima its own model... Would have felt much more like my weapon was alive if the weapon itself floated about and spoke to me, though then we couldn't have had the meaningless "The NPCs can't see it yet!" plot point...

Both were pretty equally horrible, though anima didn't have an interesting first step like Zodiac did-and nothing has ever been worse than the unidentified items, so I guess I'll go with Zodiac.

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Originally Posted by FinaSel

....So which did you prefer? Do you have a different perspective on these quest lines?
What type of relic quest line do you want in the future?

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Below is what I experienced for my Zodiac weapons.


ATMA
a lot of ppl did 1000FATE for 12 ATMA, heard that less than 5% drop rate.
farming 13 yoikai weapons is definitly a lot easier than this step.

Animus
each book 1500 tomes of Myth, so speedrun brayfoxHM 100+ times,
some book FATEs just didn't pop for 4-6hours, and end within 2mins.

Novus
75 Alex. mainly came from daily Expert roulette(get a map for 1 Alex), so it took around 60days.
Infuse materials, Critical4 was 400-600K each and you needed 11 pcs for max state, the last infusion was at 60% success rate.
Good news was when fail you would not lost the Alex but ONLY lost the 600K material.

Nexus
kill GarudaHM in bonus window for double lights = 4lights and you just needed 2000 lights.
each kill around 4min at that iLV.

Zodiac
ATMA2.0, grinding dungeons instead of FATEs, heard that 10-15% drop rate.
10 runs for no drop was not a big surprise.

Zeta
More lights!

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3.x Anima:

Beastman fantasy.
Beastman fantasy.
more beastman fantasy.
Crystal tower 123 every week, ESO ESO and ESO.

This week my best friend just quit, I am sad.

Anima is far better. It is true that the third and fifth steps are long (well ,the third are no longer anymore), but with the exception of 2nd step, you can do the weapon without any class limitation, most steps of ARR relic lock in your class to progress. Also, you can take quest from other Anima relic while you doing one. Only the first step have RNG (last Step RNG only affects how many points you get per Umbrite), the last step is like the Alexandrite, but without the nightmare of the RNG making fail you like shit and losing lots of materia. And no gil expend on materia IV to have the perfect stats. Now you can have the stats you want with the same efford.