Why bother with ATMA now?

[The_Last_Dragoon]

That....the analogy.
When you upgrade, you're throwing the old one away for a new one.
When you grind a new weapon, it's the same thing.
The difference is the time involved.

In fact, I think you'll miss the point of that too.
When you upgraded to Atma, where did your Zenith go? Obviously not in your inventory or retainers, so we're left to assume that the Zenith is gone and the Atma took its place. Which is the equivalent to straight up getting a new weapon.

There's actually a vendor in the game that will sell you the previous incarnations of your relic weapon, but what makes the relic weapons unique to any other upgrade is that you have to follow the line of progression. In normal players, this creates a sort of awe, and bonding to the weapon, especially since it's customizable in it's Novus form.

Atma farming is hardly the worst thing that people have been grinding in this game. If you hate going from FATE to FATE where the atma RNG can have you pinging around anywhere from 15 min to 48 hours. The exception though is that you don't have to be on consecutively to grind the Atmas and you can take breaks to dungeon or do tasks with friends. After the Atmas you get the Zodiac Books which require you to do certain specific FATES, some of which have 4 hour cooldowns in addition to requiring a party in order to accomplish since they are easily failed (I'm looking at you "Enmity of my Enemy").

This isn't to say that these are impossible though, and to be honest, it's really not hard to get the alternatives that can be obtained through farming Hunts now. Regardless of what you may think now, I can 100% assure you that at some point in this game's future, the Zodiac weapons will be the strongest option due to the massive amount of work it takes to upgrade them. As more and more steps are added on, it becomes less and less worthwhile for newer players or players who simply chose not to upgrade their weapon. Even one of the developers mentioned that he did not expect very many people to complete a relic weapon all the way to it's final form.

[RiceisNice]

Atma farming is hardly the worst thing that people have been grinding in this game.

This is the main topic of discussion when relic weapons are considered though. I already finished my Atma and working on the animus books, but even I feel that the Atma portion is completely unnecessary, partially because of how it is executed (completely RNG dependent) and the end reward (or lack of) for that particular step.

I was incredibly confused and a bit annoyed (by the lore/story) when I found like that the step from Zenith to Atma has absolutely no upgrade to the weapon, but instead unlocks the portion that allows it to gain additional stats to match an Ilvl 100 weapon, and eventually turn into another ilvl 100 (animus) with the stats to match.

http://puu.sh/as6E8/967c5774eb.png
"...savior the newfound power that courses through it!" This is the part of me that got annoyed by the lore context. What new found power? It's exactly the same stats as the Zenith, minus the glow. And it doesn't even get passed off as "the power to absorb the souls of the fallen", because Jalzahn straight up tells you immediately " I have more plans to empower your weapon even further!", making me doubtthe possibility that the "new power" from earlier is infact, its ability to gain additional strength from slaying enemies or following the exploits of the zodiac heroes.