Can you please Ease Up on Atma now?

[BreathlessTao]

So, from what I see in this thread...

Some people still mistake easy/hard for short/long. If beating up low-lvl mobs with your 1-5 combos is actually hard for you, you probably haven't even done the Relic Reborn questline when AK was not yet nerfed (not to even mention the other parts of it).

Some people seem to think that some others just "want an easy way out of it". On one hand, that's understandable if so: Atma is outdated content, and stuff that came even after that has already been nerfed a lot, so why not this? On the other hand: re: easy/hard and short/long, the problem isn't the difficulty level, it's the lack of sense of progression. In every other part of the whole relic questline, you know where you are at any given point in time. (Animus might be "harder", but you'll know how much you have left to do. Novus melds can fail, yes, but you still retain the alexandrites.) With atma? Yeah, you might have 11 already and only need 1, but that one might as well take longer to acquire than the 11 before - as good a chance of that happening as getting it in the very next FATE. It's just stupid.

Some people seem to justify it with being rewarded by the Relic Atma weapon. The only true part of that is for the level of difficulty, the level of "reward" seems to be in balance: a recolor and an ilvl number bump for beating up low-lvl mobs. The problem is that it's not a "reward", it's a win. You haven't been training to get better to eventually finish something that requires skill, you are just throwing yourself at a rock with the label "luck" on it. That's something casinos are for. Not to mention that by the time you win it, you're most probably sick of even the markers of FATEs on your minimap and you don't even feel happy about it, just sigh and feel relieved it's over. (Compare Zenith: that recolor + ilvl bump, which actually bumped stats as well, was far more straightforward to obtain, even when you couldn't yet pick myth tomes off every orange tree in La Noscea.) And hey, if you love farming FATEs so much, there's nothing stopping you to just go out there and do it. You'll also be adequately rewarded with GC seals.

Some people seem to think that because they "worked hard" for it, it shouldn't be made any easier for those who are still to do it. Well... sorry, but you haven't worked at all (especially those that claim they got theirs in a matter of few days, with like 1-200 FATEs). You showed perseverance, I'll give you that - but anyone who commits themselves to the relic questline, commits themselves to doing just that. But, once again, atma is outdated content and it will continue to grow even more outdated - or are you saying nothing you've managed to do in its original form should ever be changed? (And hey, if they do drop out halfway, why would it hurt you? It'll be their lost time and energy, not yours.)

FATEs were designed for casuals - anyone can pop in any time, everyone's free to ignore them. The fact that they were turned into grinds by hardcore powerlevellers is one thing (XP rewards being higher than what you could get in dungeons, for example), but that doesn't mean everybody loves this kind of grind. In fact, like I said, many I know have hated it back then already. You think open world would be so dead that we have to be forced back to such content if people liked doing it? But it's not a solution to the problem; it's a band-aid slapped onto it that if you scratch, you'll see the ugly wound beneath.

[Granyala]

Some people still mistake easy/hard for short/long.

Well in an MMO there are 2 reward schemes:
Reward time invested.
Reward skill.

Both have their purpose and both appeal to a different audience.
There is nothing wrong with an easy but time consuming grind. You still need to put in effort and show dedication in order to succeed.
However if only raw RNG decides whether you get your reward or not, while making dude A do 3x the amount of work dude B did, because dude B got lucky, that's crappy and unfair design and shouldn't exist in games.
At least not w/o a safety net to keep the amount of effort similar for everybody.

Real life is often unfair enough when it comes to luck, we don't need that in games. (personal opinion of course)

[BreathlessTao]

There is nothing wrong with an easy but time consuming grind. You still need to put in effort and show dedication in order to succeed.
However if only raw RNG decides whether you get your reward or not, while making dude A do 3x the amount of work dude B did, because dude B got lucky, that's crappy and unfair design and shouldn't exist in games.
At least not w/o a safety net to keep the amount of effort similar for everybody.

My point exactly; I'm just baffled at people saying it's "hard work" to do hundreds of low-level FATEs. Had they told us to do, say, 30 FATEs in 12 zones (so 12×30), I don't think many would have issues with it - would still be time-consuming, would still not be hard, would still contribute to open world life, could have an actual representative progress bar (figuratively).