New Relic step is great

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Originally Posted by Jason_Ashford

Setting aside the rest of your post for for a moment i want to address why grinding tomes when you come back for more relic weapons is completely fine.

it's not boring, that's the best QoL change they ever made to relic farming. We get the sort of challenge for the relic grind that people crave, but repeats are streamlined through the use of tomestones, so people don't have to invest serious time into grinding for a second, third, forth, etc. relic weapon. I know of several people who consistently grind for EVERY relic in each expansion and i can only imagine that not needing to spend 3 million gil and weeks upon weeks of light farming on 20+ jobs is a godsend.

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It's not, there should be a way to either to not do boring tome grind or buy with tomes. Calling this a qol is just trying to appease lazy as hell devs. Step 1 is same thing, can't farm anything in OC.

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Originally Posted by Stasya

It's not, there should be a way to either do not do boring tome grind or buy with tomes. Calling this a qol is just trying to appease lazy as hell devs. Step 1 is same thing, can't farm anything in OC.

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if we didn't have the tomestone grind, you would be complaining that it's not fair to force people to grind for weeks on end for light, or spend 300k+ gil on materials every time they reach this step.

WHAT exactly are you looking for in terms of relic content? because all i'm hearing is complaints and no realistic ideas.

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Originally Posted by Jason_Ashford

if we didn't have the tomestone grind, you would be complaining that it's not fair to force people to grind for weeks on end for light, or spend 300k+ gil on materials every time they reach this step.

WHAT exactly are you looking for in terms of relic content? because all i'm hearing is complaints and no realistic ideas.

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Having the relics be a Gil sink would ironically be fantastic

This game has too much Gil and not enough uses for it

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Originally Posted by Stasya

It's not, there should be a way to either to not do boring tome grind or buy with tomes. Calling this a qol is just trying to appease lazy as hell devs. Step 1 is same thing, can't farm anything in OC.

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Okay, so let's take a look at the ARR relics. Guess what? There's an RNG FATE grind, and oh....looks like you need tomestones to buy the mist and enchanted ink? And then after that? A dungeon farm for light. You then got the books, then have to either craft or buy the mats from the MB.

If we take away the tomestone thing on the new relic for a moment and just put the mat as an RNG drop in dungeons or FATEs, would that make a difference or is it the exact same thing? Oh yeah, there's also a step where you have to shove a bunch of materia in your weapon.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Having the relics be a Gil sink would ironically be fantastic

This game has too much Gil and not enough uses for it

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yes, but gil sinks should be along the lines of the golden mounts, or housing. extravagant things that cater to the super wealthy players. we shouldn't penalize the players on the other side side of the spectrum who have very little gil.

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Originally Posted by Dastan

Okay, so let's take a look at the ARR relics. Guess what? There's an RNG FATE grind, and oh....looks like you need tomestones to buy the mist and enchanted ink? And then after that? A dungeon farm for light. You then got the books, then have to either craft or buy the mats from the MB.

If we take away the tomestone thing on the new relic for a moment and just put the mat as an RNG drop in dungeons or FATEs, would that make a difference or is it the exact same thing? Oh yeah, there's also a step where you have to shove a bunch of materia in your weapon.

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So i say "lets have a choice to buy relic with 1500 of tomes or have a way to grind it elsewhere like OC". Your chat4pt response is basically "nooooo don't take away tomestone step".

Are we at the point where forking out 300k gil counts as 'rich person thing'-thing only? Or what am I missing here? That's literally about 3-4 days of doing full suite of roulettes, assuming you don't spend unwisely + it's just one-time.

The crafting is also barely any harder than your standard 7.2 MRs. At this point of the patch you could probably shout in main cities "I got the mats, can somebody craft these for me?" if you're hell bent on not willing to raise DoH/L.

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On the topic of step enjoyment... now that I've let the steps sink in for a bit, I can safely say that I'm mostly ambivalent with 2nd step. It's a bit better than the 2.0 tome weapon route they took for Manderville - stress on 'a bit'. Because at the end of the day, I think my personal issues are mostly compounded by the fact that none of my jobs that I play are particularly fun in any contents that's not styled like Eureka/BSF.

If jobs are more fun, I think I could even stomach garbage RNG bs that has no bad luck proof.

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Originally Posted by Jason_Ashford

yes, but gil sinks should be along the lines of the golden mounts, or housing. extravagant things that cater to the super wealthy players. we shouldn't penalize the players on the other side side of the spectrum who have very little gil.

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There should be gil sinks for everyone. But yeah maybe what they should have done was make regular people pay 300k for the step, and let the rich people pay 100 mil to skip the light farm. Now that would be an amazing gil sink.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

The crafting is also barely any harder than your standard 7.2 MRs. At this point of the patch you could probably shout in main cities "I got the mats, can somebody craft these for me?" if you're hell bent on not willing to raise DoH/L.

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This! :D

People extremely often forget that this is still a multiplayer game. They saw a craftable item and they scoff and groan "now I gotta craft this". No you don't, you can gather the materials if you hate crafting, and if you hate gathering too you can buy the materials with the gil you get from roulettes and then get someone at the end to craft it for you, or just straight up purchase it from the MB.

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Originally Posted by Jason_Ashford

Because they simultaneously want something challenging, but only in the things they want. They asked for something harder and the devs delivered, so now they are complaining that it's not fair and it is too hard because they neglect crafting/gathering and how dare Squeenix try and make them do content. (that last bit was sarcastic).

The devs are damned if they do, damned if they don't. Nothing they do or add is ever good enough for some of these people and the ones who act the part of contrarians are often the loudest minority on the forum and on social media.

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Please stop adding to the disillusionment that this relic step is hard or challenging in any way and that's why people are frustrated. People are mostly frustrated because it's just roulettes and or they have to spend gil.

Genuinely what are people actually willing to spend Gil on?

Like if you are whining about wanting to spend Gil on a relic what are you willing to spend Gil on

Tomestones for weapons after the "hard" step is fine by me. Not that there is much use for them, unless you count the Mason's Abrasives for 7.3 crafter gear.

Making subsequent weapons simple to get is healthy overall because we're talking about 21 weapons and, in the future, there will be more jobs and, thus, more relic weapons per expansion and more time sink.

What I do wish is that we could get an improved armoire where we can dump all the completed relic weapons because it's either deleting them or them taking unnecessary space. And I'm not keen for either. But, alas, the item systems is still as flawed as ever.

The combat relic requiring max level crafters is such a weird and silly requirement to have. I don't know what was going through their heads when they set this up. Are they going to put an item for the crafter relics behind savage next?

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Originally Posted by VerdeLuck

The combat relic requiring max level crafters is such a weird and silly requirement to have. I don't know what was going through their heads when they set this up. Are they going to put an item for the crafter relics behind savage next?

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Their line of reasoning was probably, "Oh, this lv 100 relic should involve lv 100 crafting. If they don't have a lv 100 crafter they can always talk to other players for this step. It's an MMO after all!", lol.

Didn't ARR and HW have cap level crafter tidbits, too? DoH/L back then were also way more evil & less accessible, lol.

During post EW patches, I recall some players calling for ARR/HW-styled relic grind, so Ig that's why?

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

Didn't ARR and HW have cap level crafter tidbits, too? DoH/L back then were also way more evil & less accessible, lol.

During post EW patches, I recall some players calling for ARR/HW-styled relic grind, so Ig that's why?

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ARR had things I had to buy on the marketplace as I hadn't done any crafting. A green weapon with a materia on it or something. HW had some pieces you could buy with crafter scripts; not sure if you can get them another way since I always just used scripts.

I guess even though I have level 100 crafters now, when I saw it needed 12.5K quality and durability of 35 to work with after I gathered everything, I decided to just buy the pieces for this relic. I think I spent about 3 million to get the array. If I waited it already would have been a lot less with how prices are going. (Most of that cost was the 600 bicolor gemstone item as I really don't feel like grinding fates).

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Originally Posted by VerdeLuck

The combat relic requiring max level crafters is such a weird and silly requirement to have. I don't know what was going through their heads when they set this up. Are they going to put an item for the crafter relics behind savage next?

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This is like saying needing potions and food are silly requirements for raiding because you need to craft them. Crafters aren't supposed to be an isolated bubble apart from combat content. Completely the opposite, as matter of fact, as a very sizeable portion of the crafting log is combat gear.

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Originally Posted by ZephyrMenodora

ARR had things I had to buy on the marketplace as I hadn't done any crafting. A green weapon with a materia on it or something. HW had some pieces you could buy with crafter scripts; not sure if you can get them another way since I always just used scripts.

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There was also one of the early stages of the Anima weapons where you had to get a number of components, some of them could be either crafted (and, at the very beginning, it needed a craffer with soul crystal and to be HQ) or bought with a sizeable amount of GC Seals

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Originally Posted by XtremePrime

This! :D

People extremely often forget that this is still a multiplayer game. They saw a craftable item and they scoff and groan "now I gotta craft this". No you don't, you can gather the materials if you hate crafting, and if you hate gathering too you can buy the materials with the gil you get from roulettes and then get someone at the end to craft it for you, or just straight up purchase it from the MB.

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After looking into the relic steps myself (have not done them because unsubbed) in greater detail, I think the complaints are overblown. For the most part, these steps are exactly what a relic grind should be. The only things I dislike about it are the over reliance on RNG (where applicable) or grinds lacking options (aetherway).

I feel like for example, you could give people some alternative ways to complete the aetherway, such as completing a specific set of hunting logs daily the open world, or a set of gathering requests. I think having a few options available that give small rewards toward progress might help break up the grind a bit.

I do understand their goal here is getting the roulette more active, which is why if they do offer more activities that give progress, they may need to slightly heighten the point requirement.

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Originally Posted by Raoabolic

Their line of reasoning was probably, "Oh, this lv 100 relic should involve lv 100 crafting. If they don't have a lv 100 crafter they can always talk to other players for this step. It's an MMO after all!", lol.

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My FC has a few dedicated crafters and gatherers, so they made all the crafting stuff for free for the members.
We also do a Fate Saturday so we can tour a bit and get the bicolor gems for those who don't have enough right now.

It's good to be connected, eh?

I am assuming that if a second weapon is to be progressed, do we have to repeat all the steps in this patch again? E.g. components and farming light.

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Originally Posted by PaulH

I am assuming that if a second weapon is to be progressed, do we have to repeat all the steps in this patch again? E.g. components and farming light.

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None. The orbs are specifically made for the forge to work the relics. So it will then go back like before - Get 3x Waxing Arcanite per weapon you already posses which you want to upgrade, 500 tomes each. From the same NPC you got the ones from the previous step.

Nah back to tomestones weapons once you finish the light farm.

amazing thank you

While I would have preferred it being tied to OC, I do really like that this step rewards you for having unlocked a lot of optional content. I appreciate Ivalice+Nier giving the most for alliance raids. This is a glorious situation where for once you're rewarded for doing some of the longer raids instead of just spamming CT. Loved seeing 999 aether from Paradigm's Breach without a daily bonus.

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Originally Posted by angienessyo

I do really like that this step rewards you for having unlocked a lot of optional content.

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Unless you're working on Alliance raids :)

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Originally Posted by Stasya

So i say "lets have a choice to buy relic with 1500 of tomes or have a way to grind it elsewhere like OC". Your chat4pt response is basically "nooooo don't take away tomestone step".

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There will be complaints no matter what. It seems like they really looked at ARR relics because "That's what people wanted" and put that into Dawntrail. Yet, the complaints are still there. This is why I say they can't win. People forgot what grinding in ARR was like.

Also lol thinking I'm using chatgpt because you can't fathom anyone genuinely enjoying the game at this point. Very dismissive and not constructive.

The reason they can’t win is because the seismic shift in the entire games design principles in ShB has fundamentally created two distinct player bases who want to play two different games

For people who’s relic experience is EW the new (and old) relics feel like they are being asked to do something unreasonable. Meanwhile for people who actually did the original atma pre nerf the whole tomestone cop out seems insulting for a relic

It’s going to very hard to marry those players. Square seems to at least partially understand because their shift to quantum design of “everyone should have something to do in every piece of content” but it remains to be seen how they implement that into content that was built with the foundation of a grind in mind. Like how do you make an inclusive but still grind friendly equations of arcanauts/augmented laws order/elemental gear?

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Originally Posted by MarniDawg

I have some feedback for this. I very much like the grindy step with the roulettes except because it's weighted I've seen people leave lower level stuff. In the future if the goal is to fill up roulettes then consider making it a flat number and then balance based on that. A shame that you didn't have something to do in occult crescent to keep that going and populating it a bit for new people. I liked having two options in the past with field content.

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This is my only real complaint in this step, personally. I am fully on board with the how of this: none of the roulettes were particularly popular, so this is an effective way of incentivizing people into them. But given we have no real sway on what we get, getting ARR content...the most common content purely by virtue of everyone having it unlocked as a matter of course...and being rewarded next to nothing feels particularly punishing. By all means I am fine with variance in the gains, especially since a lot of the ARR content can be knocked out relatively quickly, but I hope the formula used is recalibrated a bit to narrow the field a hair or two.

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Originally Posted by ZephyrMenodora

Roulette raids are easy and most of what you get is so old you can be carried easily as a worst case scenerio.

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Yea, I tried an Alliance raid. It's like having Unrestricted Party turned on in a level 60 dungeon. So, I'm resuming the grind.

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Originally Posted by yesnt

I mean, yeah, but what's the point of the quest if it's just a quick venture to the Marketboard? I don't have my crafters equipped for this and it's not even worth it gearing up now since the matters are getting affordable by the minute. This doesn't scream "content".

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I was lucky enough my FC leader had the materials on hand and crafted all 3 of them for free an gave them to me. My highest crafter is BSM at 100 and that was after i forced myself to spend 2 days grinding it to 100 from 20

Honestly, given how relic steps have been in the past, I don't think it's unreasonable to farm 4 aetherwells per weapon.

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Originally Posted by SamSmoot

Yea, I tried an Alliance raid. It's like having Unrestricted Party turned on in a level 60 dungeon. So, I'm resuming the grind.

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Good to hear, as it'd be a shame to let those raids stand in your way. Even if it's been a very long time, you'll slowly pick up on the mechanics again too until your relic is done and you can go back to ignoring them lol.