Zodiac Weapon Questline vs Anima Weapon Questline - Your preference?

I'm currently working on another Zodiac weapon and Anima weapon and I can't help but see such a big difference between these two quest lines.

There is no doubt we will see another quest line similar to these in the future.

I am wondering what your preference is. What type of weapon quest line would you like to see in the future?

Although I have only experienced the Zodiac quest line post-nerf, I personally prefer the Zodiac Quest line.

To start, the first step in obtaining the relic weapon has a unique story for each class in the Zodiac quest line "A relic reborn."
The AW quest line does not.

In the ZW questline, you follow in the footsteps of former heroes, to strengthen the weapon. (Zodiac Books)
In the AW questline, you just go to a few dungeons to strengthen the weapon's spirit.
To me, the ZW seems a lot more interesting.
However, doing the books is more tedious, BUT the variety of things "killing mobs, doing FATEs, Leves, Dungeons" gives us different things to do.

Alexandrite and Materia vs Crystal Sand and Umbrite
Although they come at different points in the quest lines, they are comparable.
The Alexandrite and Materia one stands out better than Sands and Umbrite to me.
First, there are many ways to acquire both Crystal Sand and Alexandrite. Neither is really preferable.
However, materia is better than Umbrite.
Materia can be gathered by yourself relatively quickly. It can also be purchased. Many different activities can spirit bond gear.
However, Umbrite is acquired though one method: Tomestones. And the only reasonable method of getting them is running the same dungeon(s) repeatedly or doing roulettes every day. Nothing else even comes close.
Materia wins hands down because there is less monotony required to get it. Plus, if you have money earned through crafting or just saved a lot, you can simply buy materia. Can't do this with Umbrite.

Gather light vs Gather a whole bunch of seemingly meaningless items
Gathering light is preferable. First, it takes zero inventory space. Second, it can be done through a various activities that actually require(d) fighting.
Gathering light means / meant going into dungeons / PvP and fighting. A key point is that it can be acquired through a variety of dungeons.
On the other hand, AW weapon items (unidentifiable items and those crafting items) can be gathered through activities which require little / no skill. Therefore, making them boring and grindy.
Beast tribe quests are repetitive, boring, and honestly, way too easy. Even Heavensward ones. They can be bought with Allied seals / Grand Company seals. Or easily made through crafting. Or just purchased with, yes, tomestones.
Gathering light happened naturally as you FOUGHT. It is simpler, takes no space, and it's faster. No exchanging items every day.
Furthermore, you got a lot more light from difficult Instances than from easy ones. Going to a raid is far more efficient. Again, this gives players a reason to challenge difficult content.
AW has really no incentive for this.

ZW questline - Gather meaningful items (Ponze of Flesh etc)
In the ZW questline, you are tasked by 4 people to gather a variety of items. Most from top tier dungeons (at the time). A couple items from vendors, and Grand Company Seals.
But the key point is you are sent to tough dungeons. Again, to fight. Plus, each person explains the reasons for needing each item. Unlike those cursed unidentifiable items.

In the AW questline, you are never really tasked with fighting anything tough. You can just gather ESOs running Aetherochemical Research Facility all day and get almost everything you need. Umbrite, Unidentifiables, Aether Oil. It's basically all about ESOs

In summary
AW questline:
More monotonous
More grindy (gathering tomestones for almost everything)
Less fighting / Easy fights
Less meaning associated with items tasked to gather
No unique story to your weapon
Requires a lot of inventory space
No title awarded (I think they said the AW questline was finished?)
Little / no incentive to challenge difficult content

ZW questline
Less monotonous, but has some monotonous parts. Need less monotonous quests in the future.
Required to partake in more difficult fights / dungeons.
Meaning is assigned to the items you need to gather.
Each weapon has a story.
More variety
Title awarded
High incentive to challenge difficult content. Often required.

So which did you prefer? Do you have a different perspective on these quest lines?
What type of relic quest line do you want in the future?

I much preferred the Zodiac quest line myself - it at least originally felt more like restoring an old weapon. The Anima just feels like I'm making the new tome weapon for people (which kina is what it is about I know, but still).

the 1 step of the relics were good , after primals.... all went downhill....to grind hell of not fun allowed

I'm not sure you can really compare the now super nerfed zodiac relic to the only just nerfed Anima relic...

It's like with the original zodiac, without the light nerf, light farming was way more tedious than you've made it sound...

And the dungeon drops were originally random drops (10%?), not guaranteed. Some dungeons you had to run 30+ times to get your drop (Dzemal Darkhold was one I remember well as it took over 50 runs...) and it was incredibly disheartening to not get your drop and have to repeat a horrible dungeon (like Aurum Vale) again for another 30+ minutes in the hope you might get a drop. At least the Umbrite is guaranteed and you will definitely get there within a preset amount.

And the book stage where you had to kill 10 of each monster (now only 3) and run the 3 dungeons and 3 fates and 9 different books... Sorry just combined with the original light farming and original dungeon drop rate, I just don't agree at all with your saying Zodiac Weapons are "Less monotonous, but has some monotonous parts."

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by worldofneil

Sorry just combined with the original light farming and original dungeon drop rate, I just don't agree at all with your saying Zodiac Weapons are "Less monotonous, but has some monotonous parts."

---

I see. I did know that the original drop rate was not 100%, but I didn't realize how low it was.
And I didn't know that 10 enemies were required, and not only 3.

That does sound more monotonous.

I had no idea it had been nerfed that much.

However, despite the amount of effort required for each, I still feel the ZW quest line is more interesting than AW. The interactions between the characters is more interesting as well.

Despite the nerf, it seems to me that ZW required more fighting through challenging content than AW.
Doing AW felt like just collecting countless items.

I don't like at first anima step weapon is just copycat of eso weapon, also for SCH, Last Resort > every Anima SCH book

What I like about Anima is that it doesn't involve long waits specific FATEs like the books part, materia melding RNG (and its gil cost) and the RNG for dungeon atmas.

Other than the FATE grinding, there has not been any RNG-based mechanic for the Anima weapon. Atleast, not yet

Ugh...personally, I found the Zodiac questline worse in many regards.

I only did it in it's nerfed version, but I can easily imagine the materia step was literally a present to crafters, but screwed battle class players over. Not only does the spiritbonding require items to spiritbond, you have to willfully downgrade your gear during the process. The fact that the materia AND the process of attaching it involves a good amount of RNG seems like a huge middle finger. Especially when you consider that the later steps required gil (and crafting mats) again.
Waiting for a FATE to pop was, uh...annoying. More than annoying. It was literally two hours of "No gameplay involved here".
I don't even want to imagine what Atmas and the Zeta drops were like when they were recent. I imagine Luminous Crystals cranked up to eleven.

I, uh...also must admit I actually "like" roulettes being the go-to option and found one of the biggest flaws was having aetherochemical research facility give more esoteric tomes than leveling and 50s roulette. Roulettes outside of expert allow for a wide variety of dungeons at least and it helps keeping the stuff populated. Whether this is facilitated via the tomes they give or via "light"...I honestly don't care.

The one thing I don't understand however is why people claim tomes have less variety. Nearly everything outside of leveling awards tomes. Some ways are more efficient than others, sure, but, uh...the primary difference here is that you didn't get to choose which ways you want to go in the Zeta. The game told you to do Haukke (hard) and no other dungeon would do. You might rather want to run Brayflox HM, since you could finish it faster, but you couldn't. The main difference seems to be that the game forced you to do inefficient options, whereas now you force yourself to do efficient ones (or don't, which I do).

Can't comment on the challenge thing - I know people who struggle hard in normal mode raids because they have focusing issues. I wager it's subjective.

I prefer the Anima questline. I have made more progress on the Anima weapon than any Zodiac weapon despite how nerfed it is nowadays. Apart from the 2 unique trials the Zodiac quest just isn't that fun.

1) No need to wait for specific fates or run around the world killing specific mobs.
2) Less RNG.
3) You can level alts when grinding a weapon for your main.
4) You can make progress on multiple steps at once.
5) You can passively make progress on your Anima with your daily/weekly activities on multiple steps.

A few things where Zodiac wins:

1) Appearance. Anima weapons have not yet looked as appealing as the Animus step for Zodiac weapons. Impress me, SE! :P Lets get some dripping blood or pulsing void effects on them.
2) No new instanced content among the grind.

Well I personally think the Yoichi Bow is one of the best bows in the game.... but hey whatever
I really like the plot of both.... I actually LIKED the zodiac grind. The only part I really hated was... Alexandrite. Before that was nerfed I wanted to die it was so bad.
The books? Fine. Set goal. Kill 10 of these things. Easy.
The dungeons? Fine. Monotonous, especially if a certain item wouldn't drop (COPPERBELL HM IM LOOKIN AT YOU...) but still a set thing. Easy.
Light farming? More than fine, I finished both those steps in like a week.

The anima...it's okay. I do really enjoy the story for it but... IDK.... there ARE more options for getting the Sands and the Umbrite but. the thing is. I have all the sands I need in the form of the red scrips. I haven't had to grind for that at all. In fact when I'm done I'll still have some left over (that's what you get for having 100+ tokens). But the umbrite? I'm not a fan of tome grinding so...ugh

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Warlyx

the 1 step of the relics were good , after primals.... all went downhill....to grind hell of not fun allowed

---

Commenting just to say this exact same thing. When they removed unique battle content in favor of making it a "dead content revitalizer to fool people into thinking old systems don't get dumpstered in this game" I have never been interested in advancing a relic again. It's not even about the faceroll-easy content we grind (though I don't think the old relic was THAT hard...), it's more about the fact that the devs basically showed they have no interest in making the content we spam viable again by it's own merits, when they can just shoehorn us into it for the relic.

I'm sure when interest in PotD wanes it'll be part of the next relic step somehow, if the new floors fail to breathe life into it. LoV? Coming soon to a relic quest near you!

As someone that's done them both pre-nerf. They fairly the same. They both ask you to run dungeons, do fates, beast tribe quests, hunts, turn in company seals, craft HQ items ect.

To me the anima is slightly better because only half the steps require any real time commitment. Right now the only time consuming step of anima is the 240. When zodiac was out, almost every step was comparable to the 240 step. Every step took around 50+ hours to complete. If you look at anima, only the 210 and 240 steps were time consuming.

Not only that but but the Zodiac atma part was terrible. Once you got all the atmas it bumped the item level up 10 but didn't actually change any of the stats from the zenith.

I guess the part that gets me is if ppl think that relic is too boring, then your basically complaining that 90% Of FF14 is too boring, because anima is basically asking you to do everything except raiding. And honestly, I'm kinda starting to agree.

Zodiac/atma by far the worst. There was no need for the rate to be so darn low when first introduced. Had they learned from it? Not really
Some of you have not done atma before any nerfs, otherwise you would know how bad it was :(
Anima i much prefered and only thing would have been nice is multiple options to obtain Umbrite just like there was for sand.

Zodiac pre-nerf was so much worse it's not funny; most of it was due to the bad RNG with Atmas and the dungeon drops (I got really lucky with both these steps my first zodiac, but even then it was still terrible). Light farming, even doing garuda/t4 speed runs on bonus, was insanely monotonous and boring. And then there were the hours waiting for that one fate per book to spawn (speaking of monotonous, this step is the reason I don't grind dungeons for tomes. BrayHM farming for hours...)

And yet I did this twice...but I learned my lesson; my second animus will be almost 240 if I could be bothered to run the dungeons (queue times are my issue right now)

I don't miss the materia stages with the first relic. That cost was way too much for many and this Umbrite/Sands phase is a neat way to accomplish the personalization of stats. It's a grind but personally it keeps me busy. Working on my Sphere of the Last Heir now.

Here's the big difference between Zodiac and Anima: less RNG. Aside from the Luminous Crystals stage, all of the Anima steps are guaranteed. Zodiac had horrible RNG in terms of Atma, Book Fates, and dungeon Zodiac drops.

Zodiac.

I think it has aged far better than the Anima weapons can possibly... Anima weapons is essentially just a constant currency grind at this point, that'll get easier with time but not more entertaining, it doesn't remotely feel like an epic quest at this point... Zodiac weapons? Epic probably isn't the right word, but it at least feels like a quest in parts, and the inclusion of the Undersized Party option, along with general nerfs to its RNG/etc., have made it a lot more entertaining in my eyes. I'm definitely more incline to complete Zodiac weapons, than farm Luminous Crystals...

If you completely ignore item levels (and this is XIV, so why not), I'm incline to go with Zodiac weapons from a glamour perspective as well... Especially with the most recent additions... Christ most of those are ugly, even the names... Hope these are the final forms of the Anima weapons, I want "traditional" ultimate weapons, didn't much like how Kannagi looked, but Kannagi was a "traditional" ultimate weapon name... Thank f*ck for the glamour system, if SE didn't slap achievements on all these weapons I'd probably not even bother beyond the i210 stages...

Even pre-nerf, I'm incline to prefer Zodiac weapons... Some of the stages were particularly sh*tty, Atma and Sphere Scrolls spring to mind (although I enjoyed Alexandrite maps, something I think Unidentified items could have benefited from a lot), but the quests at least had direction for the most part... Luminous Crystals were worse than Atma IMO, 10 dungeons was just... OK... The Unidentified items stage was a condensed and much less interesting version of the quest for the actual Zodiac weapon... Oil from Crystal Towers quest is just boring... The current stage I only remotely like because of the characterization the Anima gets in that little page, that's the best I can say about it... It's just farm Esoterics... OK, there is nothing annoying like the RNG the Zodiac Sage had, but there's also nothing remotely engaging about it either... At this point it's just grind tomestones for weapon, in which case I'd just get the tomestone weapon... Even the Anima itself, while interesting, is not going to be interesting on repeated attempts... What engages me with the Zodiac weapons now is the actual process and seeing what I can solo from various parts of it, the Anima questline has nothing like that, save the 10 dungeons... Zodiac weapons were hit or miss at the time, but they've aged well and removed the RNG a lot... Anima weapons are just a lifeless grind that'll get shorter over time, but never any more entertaining...

The FIRST step (getting an i80) - challenging the 3 Hard Mode Primals - was great, outside of that step the Zodiac weapon quest was garbage pre-nerf. The team took the right steps forward with the Anima - allowing multiple paths during "grind" phases, or use of alternate classes - to make it a bit easier (and faster) pill to swallow.

Right now the only issue I saw that carried over is the Gil barrier (in Zodiac it was the materia/sphere scroll, in Anima it was the 4x 4xHQ items) - for those who only focus on battle classes (like myself), and dont have the time to develop a high income flow - the high cost to attain these items prevents this group from progressing their weapon.

TL;DR: Anima > Zodiac

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by decoy_effect

T
Right now the only issue I saw that carried over is the Gil barrier (in Zodiac it was the materia/sphere scroll, in Anima it was the 4x 4xHQ items) - for those who only focus on battle classes (like myself), and dont have the time to develop a high income flow - the high cost to attain these items prevents this group from progressing their weapon.

---

Then its a good thing that you now only need NQ versions and can get them for 5k GC Seals each from the GC vendors.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Then its a good thing that you now only need NQ versions and can get them for 5k GC Seals each from the GC vendors.

---

Yup the 3.38 nerf this week really helps this issue in the Anima quest line, so will finally get around to the 2 alt Awokens that have been sitting in my retainer inventory.

I liked ZW through Zenith step. That's it. Everything else was boring/miserable.

Your point about the books step: Essentially we are doing that now with the 210/230/240 step. You can get esoterics and unidentifieds through so many different methods it's like all the crud you could do for books but you're free to do it anyway you want instead of having to stick the constraints of the book.

I do like that each of the beginning steps of ZW had a unique story, but I feel closer to my AW since it is actually alive.

Overall I prefer AW to ZW gameplay wise. I appreciated the lore of the ZW more though.

Zodiac had more work involved, and was more difficult to obtain than anima. I do like the anima only because I got to skip the fate grind, but as far as story goes, Zodiac is better

The Anima questline is much better designed from a mechanical perspective overall. I do wish the Anima questlines had begun with a unique story for each job, as the Relic Reborn questline did, but beyond that I've liked the Anima much more.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Daemius

I do like that each of the beginning steps of ZW had a unique story, but I feel closer to my AW since it is actually alive.

---

See, I'm not particularly attached to my Anima at all... I like that SE tried, and the characterization it gets is nice, but... They're not unique... It doesn't feel alive to me because I've done multiple weapons... Perhaps it changes with later quests, but right now the Anima just feels like Siri or something... It talking to me is a novelty, devoid of any real personality and it comes as standard on every Anima weapon... Perhaps A Dream Fulfilled changes that, I really need to get that finished...

Really wish they didn't mess up the Zodiac Zeta weapons honestly... The quests made it sound like we were finishing our Zodiac weapon by giving it sentience, and we get absolutely nothing out of that except a glow... For the best, since the role of the Zeta weapons was to be desynthesized to let us skip a FATE grind, but damn... I was really hoping for a little bit of personality from the weapons, sort of what like XIs original Relic weapons displayed... It was a fairly brief cutscene, but those weapons felt much more alive than the Anima weapons IMO... I think in Wings of the Goddess, when we could see their original owners wielding them, we could even see them talk on the battlefield... Those weapons were alive... These weapons... Meh... Doesn't help that they gave the Anima its own model... Would have felt much more like my weapon was alive if the weapon itself floated about and spoke to me, though then we couldn't have had the meaningless "The NPCs can't see it yet!" plot point...

Both were pretty equally horrible, though anima didn't have an interesting first step like Zodiac did-and nothing has ever been worse than the unidentified items, so I guess I'll go with Zodiac.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by FinaSel

....So which did you prefer? Do you have a different perspective on these quest lines?
What type of relic quest line do you want in the future?

---

Below is what I experienced for my Zodiac weapons.


ATMA
a lot of ppl did 1000FATE for 12 ATMA, heard that less than 5% drop rate.
farming 13 yoikai weapons is definitly a lot easier than this step.

Animus
each book 1500 tomes of Myth, so speedrun brayfoxHM 100+ times,
some book FATEs just didn't pop for 4-6hours, and end within 2mins.

Novus
75 Alex. mainly came from daily Expert roulette(get a map for 1 Alex), so it took around 60days.
Infuse materials, Critical4 was 400-600K each and you needed 11 pcs for max state, the last infusion was at 60% success rate.
Good news was when fail you would not lost the Alex but ONLY lost the 600K material.

Nexus
kill GarudaHM in bonus window for double lights = 4lights and you just needed 2000 lights.
each kill around 4min at that iLV.

Zodiac
ATMA2.0, grinding dungeons instead of FATEs, heard that 10-15% drop rate.
10 runs for no drop was not a big surprise.

Zeta
More lights!

------------
3.x Anima:

Beastman fantasy.
Beastman fantasy.
more beastman fantasy.
Crystal tower 123 every week, ESO ESO and ESO.

This week my best friend just quit, I am sad.

Anima is far better. It is true that the third and fifth steps are long (well ,the third are no longer anymore), but with the exception of 2nd step, you can do the weapon without any class limitation, most steps of ARR relic lock in your class to progress. Also, you can take quest from other Anima relic while you doing one. Only the first step have RNG (last Step RNG only affects how many points you get per Umbrite), the last step is like the Alexandrite, but without the nightmare of the RNG making fail you like shit and losing lots of materia. And no gil expend on materia IV to have the perfect stats. Now you can have the stats you want with the same efford.