atma drop rates

[Avarghaladion]

More seriously though, this confirms that there's nothing wrong with my character and I'm not doing it wrong, which is something I've worried about for a long time. I had thought that maybe there's some game bug or that I'm missing something really stupid.
Nope, it's not me, Atma is just incredibly stupid and unfair.

I had the same concern during my last dry spell. I finally got another Atma to drop after about 80 hours of nothing. During that time it felt like my character was glitched or something. I submitted a bug report and got an Atma a few days later. This doesn't confirm that there was anything wrong with my character but it does highlight another major problem with the Atma system: the absolute lack of transparency. You have no way of knowing if you're falling victim to a bug of some kind unless you actually get the Atma drop. This is true of most RNG except Atma is so incredibly rare that it's difficult to verify.

An effective solution would be to do something like they did for DoH/DoL i70 grinds. Make an item called "Atma" or "Uninfused Atma" drop every single time you complete a FATE with a Zenith on. The sole purpose of the item would be to trade it in to the quest-giver for a food that can bolster your Atma drop rate. This solves the problem of transparency by showing players that there isn't anything wrong with the programming or their character and it would actually make it semi-bearable by ameliorating the system overall through a Lore based boost.

I can't help but see the same problem being repeated in the future; There's always an alternative which is both more accessible and more-or-less the same stats (ST and hunts giving tomestones and allied seals for unweathered weapons)

This is a major concern of mine. The implementation feels very F2P-esque. I want to say that at some point SE is going to have to stop screwing around with relic, given that with each stage it becomes, increasingly, the most difficult weapon option to acquire. I don't have a lot of faith in SE right now when it comes to content balance though.