Originally Posted by
Roris
The truth is Daily Hunts, the real meat of the Novus quest, aren't here yet for another month or so, another truth is the very first relic quest got a lot of steps right, and the 1.0 relic quest got a couple more steps even more right. These elements are group participation and a clear set of steps in a clear path of progression, with a clear reward including bits of lore for each time you complete a step, and progression depending only on how much time you were willing to spend on each step helped by your skill as a player.
Sure you can group up for FATEs for either Atma and Alexandrites and some book objectives which is great, but it's not on the same level of what the first relic quests presented. In the case of the 1.0 quest, sure it had its own share of grinds like Hamlet if you didn't supply, the melds and materia RNG in itself, farming beastmen currency and SBing your weapon, but other steps were a bit more balanced and even Hamlet required a good party and some sort of skill to get the required points, which also involved DoL and DoH, and beastmen strongholds themselves were more dangerous for both SB and currency farming, not to mention each step was unique. If you were good, you didn't have to repeat them over and over, you knew exactly when it would end and what it would take, with almost no luck element involved aside from the first three I mentioned.
In 2.0's case the steps are even more clear, the only feedback about it being too "easy" is because there aren't really that many steps compared to the 1.0 which is both good and bad, it took out some of the grind from 1.0, the only real grind being 900 philosophy tomes or I guess less than 300 myth nowadays, but it also took out more unique steps like beastmen NMs, levequests and a couple more dungeons, still the rest of the steps are clear and you also don't have to repeat them over and over if you're good. It also was only "hard" for some because there wasn't a proper Party Finder and both Chimera and Hydra weren't in the Duty Finder, and of course server latency because some regions still don't have proper servers.
Now of course the Novus quest has some sort of semblance of this, you know it takes exactly 75 Alexandrites to complete whether the meld fails or not because you don't lose them, and you get a free one a day from expert roulettes so that's 75 days to complete the quest if you choose to opt out of both FATEs and myth farming, if you opt in however that's potentially less time if you're really lucky or want to grind the same dungeon over and over which that's the main issue here. Once again, the first relic quests didn't have this level of repetition for a single step aside from the mentioned grinds, it had more unique steps that revolved around parties, and everyone involved in them helped progress go much faster, and in some steps it helped progress at all.
Sure feel free to throw in a "well if you want proper party content why not do Coil or Extremes?" that's not the point, people are already doing that for their alt classes or even their mains because it's just faster, also feel free to throw in a "well casuals don't do Coil or Extremes so the relic quest shifted to a casual focus for them, how is that bad?" at this point it'd be faster for so called casuals to look up videos, form learning parties and skip the grind. Even then, ignoring the grind still won't change its flawed design, it could be more balanced but the easy and lazy solution is to over inflate the requirements needed for a single step instead of designing more unique steps, I think they could look back on their previous quests and see what worked and just avoid this repetition and focus more on party content, especially because the game is lacking on real open world group content, FATEs and treasure hunts not needing much group coordination, and especially more because group synergy is a big element of Second Coil that's also a current issue. I think more party content for the relic quests would help people learn to work as a party, it's an MMO after all, just don't make the party coordination as unfun and super synced as in Second Coil because that'd be bad too.