What MMO Grind is WORSE than relic/zodiac weapon grind?

[Talia_Hailwind]

GW2 Legendary sunrise, the charged lodestone drops at launch were horrible.

It was so bad I got into an argument with the games designers about it and it made me quit the game, as shortly I ran out of stuff to do.

[Talia_Hailwind]

GW2 Legendary sunrise, the charged lodestone drops at launch were horrible.

It was so bad I got into an argument with the games producer about it and it made me quit the game, as shortly I ran out of stuff to do.

This is why I love FF14, yes there is a relic/legendary weapon grind. But you atleast have some fun doing it and there are other things to keep you busy.
Endgame GW2 (On launch) is just the legendary grind.

[Nekodar]

I believe EverQuest epic weapons were more of a grind than FFXI... I didn't play it myself, but it's what I've heard at least. Or if it was just harder to obtain due to rare drops from NM's being required.

[CGMidlander]

Lineage 2 and Maplestory before the "Big Bang" patch were pretty grindy.

[LineageRazor]

Years? Literally??

Yes, literally. Real-life years.

The process involved, among other things, collecting roughly eighteen thousand pieces of Ancient Currency from an instanced event called Dynamis. A typical Dynamis run would drop somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred pieces, and on rare occasions a special piece with the value of one hundred regular pieces would drop as well to bring the total to two hundred. Dynamis could only be done once every three days, so if everyone in the Dynamis group cooperated and poured all the currency into building up one person's Relic weapon, it'd still take around 150 runs just to build up the proper amount of ancient currency. 150 runs with one run every three days adds up to around a year and a half. Dynamis was not something you could run solo, either - you NEEDED those other people in order to earn your currency.

And that's speaking of an ideal situation, where everyone in the group is happy with building up one person's weapon - often it was the case that several people were trying to build weapons, and so the currency would need to be split among them. Most serious relic-builders needed to purchase some, if not most of their currency from other players in order to get their relic done in less than five years - and currency was not sold cheap. I sold around 200 currency at one point, and that was enough to purchase a Cleric's Briault for myself, at the time the best of all healer body armors and one of the more expensive crafted items in the game. Being seen with a relic usually meant that you were REALLY good at earning gil in FFXI.

And, of course, while currency was the grindiest part of the relic, it was not the only part. You also needed to present a large number of crafted items as part of the quest, many of which could only be created by top-tier crafters. You also needed to defeat specific notorious monsters in Dynamis to obtain special items needed as part of the relic process. These monsters were difficult to pop, and in the case of the monsters for the final stage could actually warp out of the fight if not defeated in a specific way (for many, that specific way was never actually puzzled out by the FFXI community; the preferred solution was to pop all cooldowns and zerg the thing fast enough so that even if it tried to warp, it'd die before the casting animation finished).

The so-called "relic grind" in this game is a complete laugh compared to the utter horror of the FFXI relic. I never would have touched the Relic grind in FFXI. In FFXIV, I'm working on two, with the Atmas stored up for two more if I ever feel the urge.

On the flip side, though, as a result of this ridiculous difficulty, there was no expectation in the FFXI community that a player should go out and obtain a relic weapon. They were powerful, yes, the strongest weapons in the game by far at the time, but no one would ever call you a bad Warrior just becuase you had no plans of obtaining a Bravura (the WAR relic). It was recognized that Relics were special, an above-and-beyond kind of thing that took a special kind of player and the cooperation of a lot of people helping that player to achieve.

[Brannigan]

I believe EverQuest epic weapons were more of a grind than FFXI... I didn't play it myself, but it's what I've heard at least. Or if it was just harder to obtain due to rare drops from NM's being required.

EQ epic weapons weren't really grinds for the most part (each class had a different quest so maybe a couple were), but most of them required killing stuff that was already competed for like raid bosses. Some of them had long prerequisite quests too. On a server with 0 competition where everything was up you could probably bang most of them out in a day if you got lucky on drops.

[Ladon]

Most MMOs I have played save for maybe WoW had far worse gear ultimate reward grinds.

FF14 really is not that bad in terms of required time or effort. The bigger problem that they basically force players into under utilized content which is likely under utilized because the content is terribly boring to begin with.

[DoctorPepper]

Yes, literally. Real-life years.

The process involved, among other things, collecting roughly eighteen thousand pieces of Ancient Currency from an instanced event called Dynamis.

Also, don't forget that for a long time there was a 1 million gil entry fee for the timeless hourglass. The timeless hourglass gave a single entry to dynamis so every 3 days you would need a new one. It's been reduced to 50k now but back in the day the fee was pretty significant. The value of the ancient currency you got from a run was more than the cost of entry but it was still pretty pricy if you weren't selling any of that currency.

In addition to that, more than one group could not enter a particular dynamis zone simultaneously. So often you would have to wait for another group to finish before you could start. Many servers had an unofficial dynamis schedule but there were still plenty of groups that completely ignored these schedules if their group could not adhere to the times available.

[Deathscythe343]

I believe EverQuest epic weapons were more of a grind than FFXI... I didn't play it myself, but it's what I've heard at least. Or if it was just harder to obtain due to rare drops from NM's being required.

Not really. I played for a number of years. Some of the things you needed dropped from rare mobs so there was some camping involved for those. Most of it though, especially the 1.5 and 2.0 epic weapons were fairly easy to complete. With the exception of one fight, I did my entire war 1.5 epic weapon quest in under a week. I immediately started on the 2.0 version. It took a bit longer due to 1 item being a raid drop and I had to wait my turn for it. But even with that, it only took about a month to complete.

[Senliten]

EQ epic weapons weren't really grinds for the most part (each class had a different quest so maybe a couple were), but most of them required killing stuff that was already competed for like raid bosses. Some of them had long prerequisite quests too. On a server with 0 competition where everything was up you could probably bang most of them out in a day if you got lucky on drops.

took months to really even get things like Phinny and VS drops back when RoK was released, not to mention breaking into the plane of fear took nearly an entire server, and if failed it was i think a week lockout. now and days it's practically cake walk.
But something far worse than that was the frigging hell levels when 60 was the cap. 50 to 60 was such a pain. Even after hours of killing, you'd get what, half a bubble of xp <_<