Idea for a future relic quest

Hey! Long time player, (kind of) first time poster. Hopefully you’ll hear me out because there’s a wall of text coming. Sorry if this is in the wrong subforum by the way, I’ve searched through them and think this is here we post this kind of nonsense.

So I had an idea on what I’d love to see from a future Relic quest. I’ve always loved the idea of the Relics and think they’re a very important part of the game, but I haven’t…immensely enjoyed actually grinding them out? I finished a couple Animas well after they were nerfed and am currently about to finish my first resistance weapon. I think they were on the right track with Eureka and Bozja, but think they could have gone a lot farther with making the relics themselves feel more tied into the content itself rather than a promised reward at the end of a tunnel.

So my idea is this: combine the Lost Action and zone ranks into the relic itself. You’d receive your relic at the start of the new relic zone, and it would have a large skill tree that you could spend EXP on to unlock big stat boosts, Lost Action type abilities, and other powerful passives (lifesteal, chance of auto-phoenix, double auto attacks, etc), kind of like the Crystarium in FFXIII or the ascension grid in XV I guess.

You’d unlock these skill trees by doing the usual material gathering inside or outside the new content, but the relic EXP would only be accured inside the new content, hopefully keeping it alive for years to come. This doesn’t have to be the case, it’s just one idea. Once you finish a current patch’s skill tree, you’d be able to take your relic outside, but it would of course be downgraded into the usual stat-stick format.

I think this kind of addresses two issues. One, it gives the people who maybe want more “interesting” gear in FFXIV something similar to that while keeping the main game balanced. Two, it makes the relic grind feel more constantly rewarding, rather than only getting something after the entire grind, leading to possibly higher completion rates.

Obviously, this is missing a lot of the finer details, like what the actual content inside the new zone would be, etc, but I’m sure they’d come up with something. This is just trading one grind for another I realise, but I put a lot of thought into this and think it would at least possibly be a more engaging grind than before.

If you read all of this, thanks a lot. Let me know your thoughts!