Another relic thread

[Sylve]

You know what this Relic has done extremely well?

Cut the queue times for Alex and Leveling dungeons by more than half.
I now get A4 Queues as DPS in 3~5 minutes. Prior to Relics, My average was 15~20 minutes.
My NIN now gets Aery queues in less than 10 minutes where prior to Relics it was 30+ on some days.

Say what you will about the grind heavy nature of it, But it did a fantastic job of pushing people back into that older content we no longer required for gear/exp.
Now if only they added Aetherochemical Research Facility into the pool of places we could get drops from or needed to do in general, we'd solve that particular bugbear for newer players struggling to get DF queues to finish their MSQ.

I'm curious if they made the intro questline as grind heavy as they did specifically to the purpose of revitalizing "obsolete" content for newer players or those leveling/gearing alt Jobs. Because it certainly seems that way to me.

[RiceisNice]

Say what you will about the grind heavy nature of it, But it did a fantastic job of pushing people back into that older content we no longer required for gear/exp.
Now if only they added Aetherochemical Research Facility into the pool of places we could get drops from or needed to do in general, we'd solve that particular bugbear for newer players struggling to get DF queues to finish their MSQ.

I'm curious if they made the intro questline as grind heavy as they did specifically to the purpose of revitalizing "obsolete" content for newer players or those leveling/gearing alt Jobs. Because it certainly seems that way to me.

It's not so much the case on smaller servers, and the rush will die off eventually once people actually finish their anima weapons. It ends up becoming a bandage rather than a solution. It's less about the grind, but more on the implementation. Everything in Step 1 screams that it should have been done in 3.0, even the Ilvl reward is less than that of an upgraded law weapon. And that's not touching on how it affects FATEs, because of the scaling being based on the amount of players that cleared the previous one, rather than the ones that are currently active on it. If you miss a FATE wave, you're SoL and your progression slows down to a halt.

Step 2 only works to revitalize 3.0 dungeons, because honestly with the increased exp the queue times aren't that bad even for dps on some days. The entirety of 2.x dungeons is utterly pointless other than to be fluff because people can just unsync it.

Step 3 has you revisting 2.x content again, with Alexander being the only option to express your progression. But like I mentioned earlier, it's only going to be like that for the initial flood of people that want to rush their anima. We had this before in the form of novus light, and within the first 3 weeks, garuda queue times shot up significantly once people obtained their nexus. It's trying to patch a problem which I honestly don't think is the bigger issue at hand (that being the lack of new content for existing players to do, and making them revisit content from the previous expansion isn't addressing that)

And well...keep in mind that all of this was delayed from 3.0 and 3.1 because reasons. At this point of the game, a good amount of players have already capped or near capping their combat jobs, or even have the option to skip out on step 1 FATEs completely (which really conflicts with the purpose and design intent of it making FATEs more populated again). The only thing we had to show for the delay was that they were using 2.x content in a 3.x patch cycle, and most of them (specifically the level 50 dungeons and beast tribes) don't even serve the purpose of making the world more lively for players who are new or otherwise not working on the anima weapon. To me, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to consider that content that reuses content from the previous expansion, and it was delayed for so long due to developmental reasons could be passable, especially in the perspective of a player who is already losing faith in updates for new ever since 3.07.

[Vaer]

I'm curious if they made the intro questline as grind heavy as they did specifically to the purpose of revitalizing "obsolete" content for newer players or those leveling/gearing alt Jobs. Because it certainly seems that way to me.

Pretty much what they did with the 2.0 relic, too. Seems like a "drag new players/undergeared players through stuff" weapon. The 2.0 FATE grind took way longer though as the drop rate was way lower. Even with the illusion of needing 3 times as many items per area with a higher drop rate (lower amount of areas) it still seems higher than 2.0.

The rest of the relic steps in future patches will probably be similar. They might throw us back into Bismarck[h]/Ravana[h]/Fractal/Neverreap/Void Ark/more HW leveling dungeons, Diadem and other nonsense. What they usually don't do is add something like Ex primals or anything that has a bit of difficulty involved. Just a bunch of low difficulty stuff to grind.

This time around at least you're not stuck on the same job for atmas/crystals and 2000 pre-nerf lights (agony). There was a frontline loophole on lights but that was about it.

This questline is not so great if you only play one job. If you are in the process of leveling and gearing other jobs it's decent cause you can level and gear other jobs and still make progress on it.

[Sylve]

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Yeah, Its probably the fact that we can gather the final step materials before even getting the FATE Crystals that caused that step to require so much.
As a career altaholic in all my MMOs, I can never understand people who focus exclusively on a single Class, So i don't have that issue personally. That and I'm pretty happy to just passively pick up the materials over time, So i don't run into the problem others have with the "OMG thats 800 Alex runs!" since I'll probably have run Alex that many times for gear by the time 3.2 rolls about.

Another thing they could do to reduce the complaints is to add the materials for Wolf Marks. I don't even PvP so it wouldn't really affect me (outside of my desire to get that Bearliege chest for my Warrior XD) but if they set up the MArks cost to be equivalent to the Law cost then it'd be just one more piece of content that gets its queue times reduced.