What MMO Grind is WORSE than relic/zodiac weapon grind?

I hope SE bring back that old school Xp grind for 50-60 in the expansion, really miss feeling. Probably not going to happen tho... You know that feeling of meeting up with a group at a Xp camp and killing shit all day for that one lvl? Or that fuckedup feeling you get to the group and the healer or tank DC and party disband or that one person that try to save the party by looking for a new tank/healer. You would be upset then but looking back at those memories are some of the best one's. Meeting friends that eventually turn into IRL friends. The good old grind!! Holy shit I miss it.

Yes as stated in first post it took years for anyone to get an original FFXI relic, it requires an insane amount of currency from Dynamis world where back then was not an easy task to farm, I was witness to 3 relics being completed in my time in FFXI (Excalibur, Amanomurakumo, Gjallarhorn)

Which involved first getting the rusty weapon drop (easy) then upgrading it through stages of increasing currency.

For perspective currency randomly drops off enemies in dynamis and on a general run of the cities you could expect around 200ish on a good run which is completely dependant on the higher denomination bills dropping. This would then be divided by the amount of players in the run (30-50) so you could expect around 5-10 bills a run if your lucky. In our linkshell we pooled them and certain people paid for entry into the dynamis run (1 million gil) to take them all which was the most efficient way of collecting bills, you could also buy them but its not cheap.

So at 400 for the first stage 1500 for 2nd stage 6000 for third stage and 10000 for the final stage you can easily expect 90 runs of dynamis and remember you can only run twice a week at most so that's over a year of dynamis alone without buying currency and you have to somehow accumulate over 2 million gil a week to fund entry not to mention have 30+ other people willing to give all of that to you. Furthermore you then need to get some items and crafted materials from the dynamis stages and some REALLY hard pulls and bosses to get them from Dynamis Beaucadine and Xarcabard, killing the Animated weapons in Xarcabard generally required a large sacrificial pull and a zerg rush to kill it before it despawns.

So 2 years is an easily accountable timeline that's WITH many people helping you along the way.

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Originally Posted by Nekodar

I believe EverQuest epic weapons were more of a grind than FFXI... I didn't play it myself, but it's what I've heard at least. Or if it was just harder to obtain due to rare drops from NM's being required.

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My cousin did the monk Epic quest on EQ1. Spent close to 6 months (about 6 hours a day) camping one mob to spawn the one he needed (Raster). That was one mob out of the entire quest, in total took him near a year to complete everything. Granted it was bad luck as Raster can spawn quickly and that is the most time consuming portion of that quest (or rather it was, not sure anymore since I quit playing years ago.) Then again, "hell" levels on EQ1 original was pretty grindy. It could take 6+ months to get max level (50 at the time). Now, like most other games, you can max level in under a week or less.

Ragnarok Online. Card farming at .01% was more than just a little tedious. especially for MVP(boss) cards. They're on a 2-14 hour respawn, and competed for by everyone, and also have a .01% drop chance. Merely leveling your character to rebirth-99 was a trial in itself, as there were next to no quests to do, no repeatables, no turn ins(until much much later at least) It was just you and oceans of mobs.

FFXIV - 1 million MGP grind.

Literally every free MMO in existence. This game might as well not even use the term "grind". If you grew up on Korean MMOs like me, with 0.001% EXP per mob at not even half the max level, and failure rates below 1% that break your weapon without cash shop, then you could use the word grind.

To be fair though, KMMOs are notorious for terrible design like that, and ARR is tame by practical standards, not KMMO standards. To put in perspective, Destiny has a dumber grind than ARR does.

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Originally Posted by ClaireAbigail

Ragnarok online, snip...

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Aaaaah, good old memories come back, the gind there was insane, but the thing that they got right, was that it was actually fun to grind killing monsters with your characters always hoping for that card to drop, or forming parties to try to take on MVPs that could kill you in seconds, WoE was fun too and the community, at least for me, was awesome. Those things made the grind more bearable.

I can back up those that mentioned the original EQ epics. Example: The Ranger epic bow was a nightmare that on top of the massive time sink camping mobs and running raids required levelling two trade skills and mastering one of them - a process that could take months.

Thank all that is good in gaming that that kind of ridiculous game design has died.

Honestly the relic grind here is in my opinion more of a moderate grind in comparison to other MMOs. If you look at some of the origins of the genre you can see some truly epic "grinds". This relic seems more in line with some of the things in vanilla WoW (pvp grinds, etc). You can do it solo and if you focus on it and spend a few hours a day each step can go pretty fast.

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Originally Posted by Bluejay

Thank all that is good in gaming that that kind of ridiculous game design has died.

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Amen. It's still pretty bad in eastern MMOs, but thankfully for the bigger developers that try to bring games west, they've realized that western players aren't much to suffer it.

These days, it's all about vanity, fanservice and cashshop exploitation. But luckly these days, you can usually just look at a game and tell how bad thats going to be.

Not the worst, but the grind to Jedi (pre-NGE), in SWG took months, and then they just gave everyone access to the class upon implementation of the NGE. :/

FFXI Mythics. Quite literally had to do every single thing in the expansion, TWICE (or more) and collect almost double the currency you needed from the god awful relics.

Edit: Forgot you did need 30+ people for Odin and the HNM beastmen leaders.

The RNG grind to obtain 1 piece of Flemron 108 in White Knight Chronicles 2. The drop rate was well below 1%, and until a quest called Enemy Mine was added, it was extremely rare and difficult to obtain Flemron 108. Players put weeks and months of play time into trying to farm the material without success. I know, because I was one of them. the thing was, it was an item that you had to have if you played the sword/shield weapon class in that game, because without it you could not unlock your complete skill tree, and specifically a dual wield capability that greatly increased the class' utility.

There was no staged progression like obtaining 12 Atma, so you could at least see some progress, it was an all or nothing grind against the RNG. What made it worse was the simple fact of the RNG because for every player who spent weeks or months farming for the Flemron 108, there was a player who got it first time, or within an hour of trying. Which just served to make the less fortunate player even more demoralized by the grind.

Oh, and some people will say White Knight Chronicles was not an MMORPG because there was no persistent open world. However, it was an RPG, there were 10's of thousands of players and 90% of the game happened online with teams of other players, plus you could interact with any of those players at any time, or visit them directly in their own town or guild room. So, yeah, massively multi-player, online and an RPG.

Another grind in that game was rebirthing. You had to rebirth several times to receive the maximum number of skill points and therefore gain maximum access to the skill trees. Each rebirth dropped you by 20 levels which you had to regain before you could rebirth once more. you had to rebirth 4 times to gain maximum skill points, so there was a hell of a lot of level grinding involved in the rebirthing of a character.

The other big grind was for Guild Rank (GR) points to get to GR30 (needed to use the top line gear of course...As you might expect, that involved many hundreds of runs on a specific quest that was the most efficient reward for time used in the game.

Oh, I forgot the True King weapons. To get those you had to be GR30, and you had to collect tokens (which had a drop rate below 5%) that could be traded through an RNG based interface called the Geo-forge for specific items called Vessels of Truth (can't remember the ratio, but you needed a specific number of each token to make the trade). To make the true King weapons you had to have Vessels of Truth which were only there 1 day out of perhaps 30 (RNG of course), plus you already had to have a well enhanced pre-cursor weapon which itself involved a long grind. Even after getting the True King, you had to grind out more vessels of truth to upgrade your weapon all the way to +20.

I played Sword/Shield in that game, when the game was eventually taken offline, I had +15 True King Shield and Sword (and a +15 TK Bow...), and the dual wield skills, and was filly rebirthed. Then again I also had very literally 1000s of hours sunk into the game as well.

Well, having written all of that I find myself wallowing in nostalgia for WKC/WKC2. I really wish that either SE had taken a lot of notes from Level 5 and their game WKC2, or that WKC2 had not been taken offline. Dammit....oh well, Eorzea is not so bad, and FFXIV does many things right, although there are a few glaring issues such as personal housing...

I used to play Isles of Myth a MUD. The experience from one level to the next level doubled every time you leveled. So 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64....etc. That's not including your class level, which also took from the same pool. So If you were a level 10 warrior, you had to level to 10, and then gain class levels to 10 as well. There was no cap on levels as far as I know. I think the highest level at that the time I quit was level 80. I remember the top guy was grinding on mobs daily for months just for a level. I myself stopped after level 32 as a martial artist.

For what purpose...I dunno.

With that I leave you with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD69PAIqiYo

I can't believe nobody mentioned Dark Age of Camelot (one of Yoshi-P's MMO of choice iirc). While the 1-50 grind was nowhere as bad as his asian counterparts at the time, the game fell into a gigantic grindy pit with the release of Trials of Atlantis and the artifacts.

So, you want this cool weapon/armor? Yeah, sure, here's how it's gonna be:

- You must collect specific scrolls, which are basically parts of the weapon. How would you like to get a boss to spawn specifically between 5 and 7am, that respawns once every 15 hours, for a 10% chance to drop the scroll?
- Repeat above process 3 to 5 times, while fighting with the rest of the server.
- Once you get the scrolls, you must level each of them from level 1 to level 10. Righty-o, in order to get any point of xp you can't just farm any mob, nope nope nope. You need to farm FEMALE leprauchauns with a horrible respawn rate in this one zone underwater, again while fighting with the rest of the server. For hours. And hours. And hours.

Well, at the end you do get an item with a description that comes with its own glossary...

http://i.imgur.com/v453JOV.png

You want the "BiS" build for your class? Repeat all the steps above several times until your lifeless body falls on the floor.

THAT, my friends, was grinding.

Guild Wars 2, both legendaries together took 1 year. About 7 months for my main-hand and 5 months for my off-hand.

Ragnarok Online, when become Acolyte. Seriously its really ridiculous to grind yourself. Easily run out of MP when killing undead, suck on defense, and wasting item for ressurection lol.

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Originally Posted by MeeDeggiThePunisher

Sorry white knights, but I've never experienced something as mind-numbing as spamming FATEs in any game ever. Also length =/= boredom.

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Simply put, you haven't played many MMO's then. Relics are quite a grind, but it's only one facet of the game. One you can choose to ignore, since they have two gearing paths (3 if you consider primal weapons).

In other MMO's, there's grinds you can't avoid, as it's crucial to even playing the game at some points. Nobody's forcing you to farm FATE to be involved in the end-game here. However, play a Korean MMO, and you'll see just how much IS required of you to be involved in end-game. (Also, enjoy blowing up your weapons/gear. It seems to be the number one balance philosophy of any Korean MMO).

ahh the wonderful days of Ragnorok. Get your base jobs to max level, then when you're done.. transcend and do it again! This time use MORE experience. ah fun fun. and them card drop rates. You need them to survive too. I remember the days when the stars aligned and I found two pupa cards for my super novice job. XD Someone I knew played on the 1/1/1 servers. took him forever just to reach the first class.

Cool that other folks played it too. xD This is a cool thread. I love the grinding stories.

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Originally Posted by Nep_Nep

ahh the wonderful days of Ragnorok. Get your base jobs to max level, then when you're done.. transcend and do it again! This time use MORE experience. ah fun fun. and them card drop rates. You need them to survive too. I remember the days when the stars aligned and I found two pupa cards for my super novice job. XD Someone I knew played on the 1/1/1 servers. took him forever just to reach the first class.

Cool that other folks played it too. xD This is a cool thread. I love the grinding stories.

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You aren't the Nep Nep from Cactuar. WHO ARE YOU

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Originally Posted by Izsha

Original mythics. Ffxi. Counted in years
Original relics. Ffxi. Counted in years.
Original empyreams. Ffxi. Around 1 year.

most endgame items in xi you chased for months or years. Not just these legendary level weapons, but powerful armor too. They rarity level of items in ffxi combined with the larger raid/endgame group size (competition for items) would put most of the 14 official forums into a mental institution. You worked to get many, many items for months and years, and that was just normal.

It took me longer to get an assault jerkin than get a nexus.

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I agree with everyone who equates FFXI to a kick in the crotch, for an in game weapon grind. Emp was not quite as bad (until you tried to go past lv 85) as Relic or Mythic. However did they ever figure out in year (s) the time it takes to get those last two relic-ish weapons for Rune and Geo? (the red/orrange-ish ones with aftermath)

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Originally Posted by Nep_Nep

ahh the wonderful days of Ragnorok. Get your base jobs to max level, then when you're done.. transcend and do it again! This time use MORE experience. ah fun fun. and them card drop rates. You need them to survive too. I remember the days when the stars aligned and I found two pupa cards for my super novice job. XD Someone I knew played on the 1/1/1 servers. took him forever just to reach the first class.

Cool that other folks played it too. xD This is a cool thread. I love the grinding stories.

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Yes! So much nostalgia ; ;
I always loved getting a card and checking out the awesome art. It sucked when a cool monster had a totally poo illustration :(

Definitely not WoW.

All those legendaries were cake to get compared to this.

FFXI was different back then a really good community ingame wise, even thought they never reached the numbers wow had but it was crowd time to time.
Now ofcourse you can get it really easy.
But if we talking about when the max level was 75 Zilart, CoP, ToAU and WoGT expansions.
It did took me to get 1 relic about 1 years and spent alot of money on those glass you needed to enter dynamis + i even bought from people who sold the currency.
But don't complain when you end up haveing ingame best weapon.
Price ithink was around 100+ mil if you actually bought everything.
Then we talking about 2006 or 07 Good old times.
So we all was very patience when we played XI i mean you had to be or game was not for you at all. Todays mmo people expect get everything by a silver plate!

So enjoy the easy grind! :)

probably something from runescape