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.