Atmas.

[Belhi]

The anima weapons have 5 steps to them. Even if they do have an 'atma' phase, I doubt it will be as long or time consuming as the previous version.

I wonder exactly what highly time consuming content people would be ok with. People don't want books. They don't want RNG. I'm almost certain people would complain if there were lights. What exactly are people hoping for?

[Gunspec]

People don't want books. They don't want RNG. I'm almost certain people would complain if there were lights. What exactly are people hoping for?

Lights were bad when there were 2000 required for nexus, AFTER the nexus weapon was no longer relevant. A long hurdle in the middle of the relic quest that only boosted the weapon by a measely 5 ilevels. Mahatma lights were a lot better, since the process was shorter overall, it was worth 10 ilevels instead of 5, and you felt faster progress due to the lights being split across 12 items.

Books and 2.0 daily hunts had the terrible mechanic of waiting for a specific fate to spawn. That sometimes meant waiting in one spot (because the fate icon for some, like "taken" "tower of power" and "enemy of my enemy" didn't appear on the zone map) for as long as 2 hours. Waiting is not content.

And RNG is nasty when you can theoretically farm for 50 straight hours and not anywhere close to finishing. 2.2 atma drop rates, and to a lesser extent, zodiac dungeon items, ticked off those unlucky souls who had to fail a hundred times before they succeeded.

The 2.X relic had a lot of good ideas, just taken to a bit of an extreme for the sake of padding the game content. When you consider where and how they've applied nerfs to the old questlines, I think the FFXIV is aware of some of the problems in the old quests. Fingers crossed they do a better job this time.

I'm pretty sure Dhorme Chimaira can be considered a "battle waged on Coerthas central highlands"

You think they are adding 6 new trials in a .05 patch? I'm not even going to look for a "let me laugh harder" image. At most, they will be drops from the special "boss" fates like darkscale and "let's buy a zoo", but that could be worse than atma, since I've still never seen a few of those pop. Or maybe they come from hunt mobs... S ranks you will never see. Yeah, just give me atma.

[Reynhart]

You think they are adding 6 new trials in a .05 patch?

Fighting a big monster is not restricted to "trials", they could be solo fights that you pop, like in job quests.
Or, it could have been too long to add 6 new trials to 3.1, explaining why Anima weapons have been pushed back to 3.15.

I'm not saying that there's no chance we'll end with an Atma type grind, but claiming that this is definitive proof is a bit early.

What would be very ironic, though, is for the first step to be an Atmas grind worse that the initial one, and that having the Zeta finished was suddenly praised by all the people feeling that their dedication was rewarded. The same people that felt so screwed when 3.0 gave better weapons, and denied the "Zeta owner will have a head start on the next Relic" as legitimate counterpart.