Quote Originally Posted by Chihaya View Post
Dev made the original Zenith too easy to obtain and regretted it - everyone can get it easily and therefore it had no special value to it.
No... it just has no special value to it. Period. There's nothing unique about the weapon besides appearance, nothing special about the primary statistics either. Sure, you can play around with the secondary stats, but they amount to so little that it's barely worth a footnote, and also require a huge expense in tier 4 materia to cap them.

The irony now is that the fully upgraded relic actually takes more time and effort than getting a raid weapon of equal or greater strength. Merely getting to Novus requires a gargantuan amount of time and effort to grind through the various books, atmas and alexandrites. Getting the equivalent 110 weapon requires a week. If that.

This isn't 'casual' content. Anyone who deems it otherwise has no idea what the term casual is supposed to represent, or is stretching the interpretation so far that any content could equally be considered 'casual'. The Novus to Nexus grind alone requires a minimum of around 500 Garuda runs or 1000 fates, a massive time investment alone, to say nothing of doing other content which would take far longer to complete.

Whenever someone brings up the obvious flaws in the grind, there are always defenders who assume that people just want them given away like candy from a pinata. Simply untrue. However, there's a big difference between a meaningful climb and an obvious grind. To use one perfect example, while working on Nexus you have absolutely NO clear indication of how far you have to go. Each 'progress report' is only given after each 10%, and those steps can take some time to reach. You could grind for quite some time and see no discernible change.

No, what we wanted was something meaningful. Something fun. If you can make the grind fun, people don't notice it and actually praise you for it. When you make it as obvious as a red light in a blizzard, people will complain and rightly so. SE forgot to make fun grinds somewhere along the way, and that's why the zodiac quest suffers. People don't realize how long something takes, while they're enjoying the ride.

This zodiac grind, however... is not fun.