This is what is wrong with the Atma quest

The Atma quest has no uniquely new content. It's all rehashed content with an easy but extremely long grind.

Compare this to 1.0 relic or even 2.0 Relic. Relic requires Chimera, Hydra, beating all 3 HM primals, double melding a weapon and then a few dungeons and killing mobs.

Relic by comparison is a much more unique, challenging, less grindy quest which is why it was probably a lot more interesting and you don't hear as many complaints about it as you do now about the Atma.

I hope SE really rethinks the next steps of Animus and ACTUALLY make new content for this continuation of the relic.

actually, you go it all wrong. you relic requires you to go retrieve an item, make or buy a particular weapon that has two of a particular materia melded to it, then you go kill chimera, then you do AK, then you kill mobs with the unfinished relic, then you kill hydra with the unfinished relic, then do HM ifrit, garuda and titan(there are more then then three HM primals), then buy Radz at han quenching oil.

doing things in order matters, cause if you do it out of order, it wont count :D

I'm tired of the rehashed content too (especially the low level dungeons forced on us by the books...), but Zodiac weapons were intended to be grindy for the people who were upset about everything being spoonfed and taking no effort at all.

I hope later steps have some new content attached, but I don't feel like they should nerf the grind. I'm sure as new phases are added, the old ones will become easier, but the grind is what a lot of people were demanding for months. There are other options for people who don't want/have the time it takes to obtain animus weapons.

What I like about 1.0 (Besides Hamlet) was that it involved mastering old content. The double meld was 'mastering' materia (I'm not saying I liked this part, I think it was a huge mistake because it led to a huge backlash against the 1.0 materia system and why we have the system we do now), the 17m runs were mastering the only 2 real dungeons in the game, the levequests were actually difficult (I'm looking at you, Warrior), and you had to beat Garuda with no deaths and in a certain amount of time. Only then did you get to Ifrit Extreme.

There is no mastery on content here, just simple grinding your face into it until you never want to do any of it again. People already strongly disliked FATEs before this patch, and now we have reason to hate them even more. Heck, even you get your anima you are stuck waiting 4 hours (Heroes of the 2nd) for FATEs to pop. And there is no way you could argue that Brayflox speed runs are mastering that content; it's just another grind.

I'm glad to see something that isn't just handed to you like 2.0 relic was, but if they are going to reuse old content I'd rather try and master it than grind it to death. Of course, they'd need to create content worth mastering because as it stands nothing in this game even comes close to 17m AV/CC runs.