The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

[Cilia]

What I always try to do when I'm dissatisfied is at least try to understand where the developers/Yoshi-P are coming from. Sometimes I don't completely get why they do what they do what they do, but even if I don't, the perspective is useful for constructing feedback. Sometimes, I can't fathom why they're doing stuff they do (I had a really hard time understanding many of the crafting changes in 3.0 and had a hard time providing constructive feedback as a result). But I still think trying is worth it.

I fully understand where the devs are coming from, but it's still ridiculous. The full comments on the Anima weapon can be summed up as such:

• The Anima weapon quest was tuned to be approximately as difficult as clearing Gordias Savage.
• Difficulty was exchanged for time.
• Due to Alexander Savage being (too) hard, the Anima weapon was designed to take a long time to get.
• Revisiting old content was a key component of the Anima weapon quest.

In short, they wanted it to be as "difficult" as obtaining a Gordias Savage weapon (when it's been well-established Gordias Savage is too hard) using time as a substitute for difficulty and using old content people aren't playing anymore. Put less favorably, they made a treadmill designed to recycle old content and seem insurmountable due to the difficulty of Gordias Savage. The problem is that time =/= difficulty, and even discounting the HQ merchant goods, doing 10x Gordias section runs a day and some of the Beast Tribe dailies, it will take an excess of a month to get just the token items. Never mind the merchant goods, which are unobtainable without crafting and/or extremely deep pockets, neither of which casual / solo players are likely to have due to the overinflation of the Market Boards and the difficulty of getting into 3.0 crafting and gathering (even for people who did 2.0 not-endgame crafting and gathering).

It was designed to be a casual / solo friendly way to get an i210 weapon. I feel it's failed in that regard in numerous ways, just as Gordias Savage failed because it was too hard. I mean, it's not like I don't understand why, but that doesn't make it any less ridiculous or seem any less insurmountable. I'm not a game developer, much less an MMO developer, but this is not fun to me (and countless other people) which goes against the stated design philosophy of the game. Given Gordias Savage was deemed too hard, and the Anima weapon was designed to take approximately as much effort as clearing A4S, they had to have known this was going to happen.

Gordias Savage was too hard even for the hardcore, and it's now having a ripple effect on casual / solo content, which is more than a bit irritating. It's OK for me to be understandably upset, is it not?

TL;DR
Due to Gordias Savage being (too) hard, Anima weapons were designed to be (too) hard to get. They had to have known this, but released them as they were anyway, and should have expected the reaction they got.

[Alahra]

It was designed to be a casual / solo friendly way to get an i210 weapon. I feel it's failed in that regard in numerous ways, just as Gordias Savage failed because it was too hard.

But this is the most casual-friendly step we've ever had except for the surprisingly short Zeta stage. The Anima grind itself can be completed through nothing but Daily Roulettes in around 40 days. The Anima grind is just not that taxing: it's easier than just about every major stage we've gotten so far. Animus was about as long (gated behind FATE respawn timers that randomly ranged from like 2-8 hours), Novus was longer (and vastly more expensive), Nexus was about the same (but you were enslaved by the capriciousness of the light windows for it to be completed in a reasonable amount of time).

The older stages get even longer if you tried to tackle them as casually as you can the Anima weapon.

And as for old content, this has been a staple of the Relic questlines ever since they moved away from including difficult content. I don't know why anyone would be surprised that the trend continues. It's either revisit old content or not have the Relic line at all, because they simply wouldn't have the manpower to create a bunch of new content for each stage.

Besides all that, Yoshi's only really saying in the post that the Anima item level isn't higher because Savage's is i210: he's responding to the feedback that the weapons are possibly going to be outstripped by starter gear in 3.2 and saying they couldn't currently make the weapon higher (to make it last longer) since Savage was supposed to be the baseline. The difficulty of Savage has almost nothing to do with the length of the Anima grind--if it did, we wouldn't be completing this weapon for a very long time.

[Kallera]

...
Besides all that, Yoshi's only really saying in the post that the Anima item level isn't higher because Savage's is i210: he's responding to the feedback that the weapons are possibly going to be outstripped by starter gear in 3.2 and saying they couldn't currently make the weapon higher (to make it last longer) since Savage was supposed to be the baseline. The difficulty of Savage has almost nothing to do with the length of the Anima grind--if it did, we wouldn't be completing this weapon for a very long time.

Thing is, time and gil consuming steps do not make for interesting content(unless its a long term investment like a house, which clearly the anima is not.) The Anima weapon basically took what we were already either doing or were tired of doing, added expensive items and stuck a weapon at the end of it. Is alex normal hard? Well its failable. But you are conflating casual difficulty with tedium. If the relic does not catch up to the casual player, then it is nothing more than a trinket. The window of time for this gets shrunk on both ends(the late start because the fear of it replacing the raid, and the desire to finish its last step quickly before future patch gear overtakes it.) Which is what makes getting the relic up to speed unappealing from both a casual and raider standpoint.

"Since it is currently only possible to obtain an item level 210 weapon from Alexander: Gordias (Savage), the time and effort required to create an Anima weapon was set to be roughly the same level with this as a benchmark. "

"The same level with this" means the time and efforts required to cleared alex savage. This means, since they overtuned the raid, so they then overtuned the grind on step 3.

[Alahra]

"Since it is currently only possible to obtain an item level 210 weapon from Alexander: Gordias (Savage), the time and effort required to create an Anima weapon was set to be roughly the same level with this as a benchmark. "

"The same level with this" means the time and efforts required to cleared alex savage. This means, since they overtuned the raid, so they then overtuned the grind.

I think people are reading too much into that, though. If they were actually using Savage's overtuned difficulty as a benchmark, Anima would be by far the longest stage we've ever had (since Savage is the most difficult raid we've ever had), and it's actually one of the more forgiving ones. I have a feeling that he's just saying, in a general sense, that since Savage is i210, the Anima is i210 and has a grind roughly appropriate to that (as has always been the case for the "finished" stage for the weapon relative to its raid tier.

He just has a very bad habit of speaking very...loosely, and that makes his actual meaning unclear at times, especially when he does one of these big "responding to feedback" posts. (There were some similar awkward bits in the Diadem response from recently.)

Thing is, time and gil consuming steps do not make for interesting content. The Anima weapon basically took what we were already either doing or were tired of doing, added expensive items and stuck a weapon at the end of it.

While this is essentially true, the Zodiac questline has never been anything but exactly this, and there's no real means for it to be anything different unless they radically change their goals for the content itself. That complaint has been valid for every single step of the Zodiac weapons (except, to some degree, Novus, since it got maybe 15 unique Map fights--they just stuck a horrible Materia grind on it instead). And radically changing the content itself will upset other players (including myself--some of us do in fact enjoy grinding content). So any changes they make need to be done carefully in such a way as to not alienate the group of players that are in fact happy with the questline (and I think there are ways they can do that, as I've discussed elsewhere--but they have to be careful not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater).

[Cilia]

I think people are reading too much into that, though.

There's not a whole lot to read too much into. It was all but stated verbatim that, in order to keep Gordias Savage weapons be the quickest way to an i210 weapon, and due to Gordias Savage being deemed too hard, they purposely overdid it with the Anima Weapon quest.

The successor to the Zodiac weapons, Anima weapons, have been implemented; however, their balance is directly linked to the item levels of the rewards for Alexander: Gordias (Savage).

Since it is currently only possible to obtain an item level 210 weapon from Alexander: Gordias (Savage), the time and effort required to create an Anima weapon was set to be roughly the same level with this as a benchmark. ... Furthermore, with the difficulty of Savage being very high, Anima weapons have become the sole option for obtaining item level 210 weapons for some, and we understand there is an issue with there being no other options. ..To repeat what I said earlier, we made mistakes with the setting of the difficulty for Alexander: Gordias (Savage) and the item level of the rewards, which affected the content that came afterwards leading up to Patch 3.15. We are reflecting on this problem, and based on everyone’s feedback we will be revamping the balance of the game from Patch 3.2 onwards.

The main problem that gets me with these kinds of things is a lack of visible progress for a given quantity of effort. That's why the Atma / Luminous Crystal grind is so irritating - you can expend a huge amount of effort and get nowhere. The Animus books were not so bad, because you could hop on and see visible progress within a matter of minutes (assuming you had an incomplete book). The Novus was not so bad - a daily roulette (which most people do anyway) and a quick treasure hunt later and you were good. (It only got really bad and really expensive if you just had to have optimized stats. I put Skill Speed on my NIN weapon to help mitigate the cost of crit and DET Materia.) Again, the Nexus stage I couldn't stomach when it was current due to the excessive grind. Never got to the Zodiac or Zeta stage when they were current either, but I doubt I'd have enjoyed them due to RNG, massive money / crafting (to include desynthesis) requirements, and grinding.

The grind itself is bad. It feels excessive, even with the numerous ways you can get items. Tacking on HQ crafted merchant items just feels like adding insult to injury since, again, casual / solo players are unlikely to have the gathering / crafting skills or money necessary to get them. (Even if they went down to ~200k / item from the current sitting at ~750k / item, it would damn near bankrupt me.) The only thing we got in response to this and the RNG was "it's designed for players who want to spend time getting it instead of doing difficult content," but the time is excessive for the reward this time around and the RNG / money issue wasn't properly addressed.

... in my opinion, anyway.

EDIT
I understand the gist of what he's trying to say is "Anima Weapons are i210 because that's the current maximum item level obtainable from Gordias Savage and we don't want to exceed that," but the rest is still valid (see Yoshi-P's comments' on the excessive amount of time and again, the lack of addressing the RNG / crafted item issue). And again, it's not that I don't understand where they're coming from, but if they acknowledge they made Gordias Savage too hard, then say they wanted the Anima weapon quest to simulate that difficulty in a single-player experience, they're basically admitting they made the Anima Weapon quest (specifically Step 3) too hard.

[Alahra]

There's not a whole lot to read too much into. It was all but stated verbatim that

That pretty much means you're interpreting, or reading into, what he's saying, though. Because he *didn't* say they made the grind more difficult because of Savage's problems--only that they used it as their benchmark to gauge how long the grind should be. What other content would they use for their benchmark? It's the only raid tier they have. And given that the Anima grind is generally no more arduous than most of the previous stages, it's safe to say they didn't take into account the increased difficulty of Savage relative to the difficulty of Coil, which would have been the benchmark for the Zodiac stages.

And here's why I think that:

The Anima stage is overall no more grindy (and in fact, less grindy in some ways) than most of the major stages in the Zodiac questline, able to be completed with a relatively casual pace thanks to the high Tomestone bonuses available on Daily Roulettes, in a little over a month (about 40 days). That's only been true for one other stage (Zeta).

Animus required about half the amount of Tomestones that Anima does (effectively, anyway: the dungeons of the time provided half the Mythology that current dungeons now provide in Law). But it also had a rather long grind attached to each book. Overall the time invested for an Animus weapon was about equal to what Anima will take, generally. Roulettes do a lot to reduce the overall number of runs required for Anima and that can't be discounted. Additionally, Animus didn't provide you with a top level weapon: you got an i100 Relic when the top items were i110 at the time. Anima compares far less favorably to the equivalent step in this chain (Awoken), which requires only 10 Dungeons with no additional Tomestone costs.

Novus required more effective Tomestones (61,500 versus the 54,400 for Anima) and couldn't be progressed as quickly because there weren't two Tomestone paths for it. You could run 4 roulettes to contribute to your Novus (Expert, High Level, Trial, Main Scenario), with Expert contributing both Tomestones and a free daily map. We've got an extra Roulette for Anima (the new Level 60 Roulette), and Trial and Level 50 Roulette provide tomes for *both* stages (Level 50 Roulette in particular provides 120 Law and, on average, about 130-140 Poetics). And all that's without considering the RNG Materia melding process, which could result in millions lost to bad luck on the Grade IVs. While the crafting stage for Anima isn't insignificant, nothing about it can really compare to the Novus materia grind in terms of pocketbook impact.

Nexus was a pretty long grind, as you noted yourself. I did it twice pre-nerfs, which required near constant playtime to be around for the efficient light windows. This is one of the first stages that let us work with a variety of content, though--and you can see them applying that philosophy in the Anima stage, only in a way that's far more friendly to the player. Just for kicks: if you were to do Nexus solely on Roulettes back at original values, you'd be looking at a grind somewhere in the vicinity of about 65 days. If you hit every single bonus window on every single roulette (which would be very improbably, of course), you could cut that time in half. Somewhere in between, you could probably expect to complete a Nexus on Daily Roulettes in perhaps 45 days, which is roughly comparable to the time it takes to complete an Anima with Daily Roulettes (about 40 days).

Zodiac was another fairly grueling stage. It wasn't nearly as bad as Anima on Tomestones (6,400 total) but also required 80,000 GC Seals and a 400k "downpayment" (the vendor items). Then you had the 16 "Dungeon Atma." While I don't believe anyone ever did the data compilation necessary to get the exact drop rate, I'd imagine most folks would say the drop rate was in the vicinity of 10%, resulting in an average number of 160 dungeon runs necessary to complete that part of the quest (though it's worth noting that the drop rate may have been as low as 5%, judging by reports of some folks taking 50+ runs for some dungeons). Then you throw in the crafted portion of that quest, which was arguably worse than the Anima one. While the Anima items are locked behind Specalist crafting, they aren't incredibly difficult to craft, requiring relatively easy to acquire items, and can be made with decent success even by crafters who aren't omni-crafters, which is resulting in steadily declining prices for the items as they begin to flow into the market. The Zodiac "Perfect" items, by contrast, were locked behind harder-to-acquire Master books and required nearly complete Omnicraft status to craft reliably and required mats locked behind the much-maligned Desynthesis system.

All in all, I just can't get behind the idea that the Anima stage is worse than the Zodiac stages were, generally. It is, at worst, only *as bad* as them, and even then, it provides us with far better "casual" options to approach the grind, as well as the ability to engage with a few different avenues of content so as to further reduce burnout.

Subjectively, it may certainly feel worse to you, but there are a lot of things about it that are far better than what we've been dealt before (most especially the speed with which it can be completed fairly casually, largely at the player's own pace).

If the Anima stage was noticeably worse than the worst of the previous stages, I could see why it would look like they made Anima more time consuming because of Savage's highly-tuned difficulty, but generally, when looked at alongside the old stages, it's well within the same ballpark of time required, and more friendly to the player generally, with more efficient ways to approach the grind (while Nexus/Zeta did let us choose how to get Light, there were really only a few good duties to grind, whereas all pathways for Anima are fairly efficient ways to progress).

[Arashmin]

Alahra, I don't see it as the same at all. If you compare it against the entirety of the relic quest chain, sure. But seriously, the books I did pre-nerf, and was able to do it in about three weeks of straight work on it over 2-4 hours a day. Same with Novus, which is where I paused until light and Zodiac drop adjustments hit. If you run all 5 roulettes - MS, 50, 60, Ex and Trial (Sorry PVP, you're highly unviable, says my 55 of expected 28 minute PvP queue)- that's about that much time there, and that's still 91 days for Poetics and 44 days for Law. And then for my server, Faerie, you're looking at about 8m spent on the items, if current prices keep up, whereas I think I spent maybe about 2-3m total for my Nexus, including materia and the desynth mats (which by the way are pretty lewd in price themselves compared to where they were when the content was fresh; I also didn't worry about BiS stats on the materia, since that's really an optional cost and doesn't compare to the essential base costs we're seeing here). I've heard of prices coming down on some servers for these items yet I think this is coming from the more populous servers, which makes sense, as there's more people crafting to undercut each other and level out the market; Not so much on servers where the populations are already dwindling. And I'm in the position where if I could, I would craft all of these items myself, however the devs see fit to artificially prevent that with the 'specialist only' crafting.

Even the other options to cut down on the days of grind just tally more grind into one day... But I want something to do in this game that doesn't also dictate I spend literal months doing only that, and not benefiting my skills at all. I miss the original first relic step, where it actually demanded I demonstrate skill. And sure, I was about iL80 when I did it so it was a little bit easier than it was for most, but I felt it still asked a lot of me that I was able to then put into doing other content capably. This will never achieve that, and works to the opposite end.

EDIT: And where the heck is the lore in what we're doing? Why do people deal in bloody cakes and unidentifiable slag?

[Cilia]

Zodiac Weapon Comparison

Just because it's not said verbatim doesn't mean it's not said. If the Anima Weapon difficulty used the difficulty of Gordias Savage as a benchmark for its own difficulty, and they admitted Gordias Savage was too hard, then it stands to reason the Anima Weapon was consequently tuned to be too difficult (or rather take too much time, since the Anima Weapon quest traded Gordias Savage's difficulty for time).

The Animus stage, as I've noted, was not bad after you got the Atma. RNG always sucks, but the Animus books themselves were not bad - you could hop on and see progress within a matter of minutes usually, assuming you had an incomplete book, and would often finish it before you needed more tomestones to get the next one. That's the way it should be. It took time, but the visible steady progress (and actually getting those stats on the weapon) made it relatively bearable (almost enjoyable in some ways).

The Novus stage was not bad unless you absolutely had to have optimal stats. Casual players don't care about optimization. Do a roulette, hunt a treasure, stick a materia on the scroll. You made progress. You could do a few more and make more progress. If you only did your EX roulette, it would take 75 days (2.5 months) to get it done, but for only an hour or so a day, that's not so bad, especially given you probably ran your EX roulettes anyway and you'd accrue tomestones to get a "bonus" map as a matter of course. It only got outrageous if, as I said, you absolutely had to have optimal stats, and that was due mostly to the expense of materia and failed melds.

The Nexus step was an outrageous grind, which is where I called it quits for trying to keep current on the Zodiac Weapon. A mind-numbing, endless grind with nebulous conditions for progress is not fun. Show me just a little progress day-to-day, just a little, without undue effort and I'm happy.

The Zodiac step was probably where even a lot of "casual / solo" midcore players (the people Zodiac weapons were designed for) called it quits. 16 "Dungeon Atma" is insane, and further gating it behind HQ master crafted materials that need desynthesis ingredients is absurd. That is not something a casual and/or solo player can accomplish. Consequently, this is the step I would most compare the current Anima Weapon quest (Step 3) to, as while lacks RNG reliance the effort needed to get the 80 tokens is through the roof and also includes gated crafting materials (more on that in a minute). You called it grueling yourself - nothing "grueling" is fun.

The Zeta step was probably a bit more bearable. Slow and steady progress.

In most of those cases, except the RNG reliant ("Dungeon") Atma and Light farming, you could get on and see progress in a few minutes. It might take time to reach the goal, but you made progress quickly, which is enough to satisfy me (and most casual players). Now, let's look at the effort needed get one item to make progress with the Anima Weapon:

• 10x Gordias section runs (~55 - 75 minutes).
• 2.x non-Ixal Beast Tribe Lv48 Dailies (4.3 days), assuming you can do them.
• Vanu Vanu Dailies (6 days).
• 1000 Hunt Seals (luck / chance reliant) / ~5 - 15% chance of obtaining from a 3.0 treasure map (1 / day if you're lucky and can get them, time depends on how long it takes to get a treasure map to appear gathering).
• 680 Poetics / Law Tomestones (doing every daily roulette, 2 - 3 / day @ 2 - 3 hours).

... that's hardly "casual friendly." The calendar days may be lower or on par with the Zodiac steps, but the sheer amount of time required to make progress is far greater than any Zodiac step bar perhaps the Zodiac forging itself or Light farming (which, again, is mostly due to RNG and stupid high Light requirements / stupid low Light payouts, and the one step I absolutely cannot stand when it's current).

And, as always, that does not include the HQ Crafted Items, which casual / solo players are likely unable to make or afford. Specialist crafting may as well be Desynthesis by another name, as it locks you out of crafting items if you aren't specialized to do so much like Desynthesis locked you out of obtaining certain materials if you weren't specialized to do so. Either way getting crafting to those levels takes a colossal amount of time and effort casual / solo players likely don't have, and the prices for said items on the Market Board are simply outrageous (~750k / item on Famfrit last I checked, which totals out to 12m gil. I have a little shy of 1/3 of that, and my brother wants me to give him 90k so he can buy a sanuwa mount). This can't be fairly compared to the Novus step as getting that perfect stat version is entirely your choice; here we have no choice. It can be somewhat compared to the Zodiac step, as that was also gated behind high-end crafting requiring specialization (of a different sort, but specialization nonetheless). Keep in mind that it feels, to me, that 3.0 intro gathering / crafting was designed around players having done 2.x endgame gathering / crafting to the end, so it's hard to get into it and if I (a 2.0 Master of the Hand) cannot find a good foothold I don't know how newbies (casual / solo players) can.

... but I don't see the need for slogging essays at each other, so I'm just going to bow out here and agree to disagree. Learned this the hard way criticizing Minfilia over on the Lore board...

[RiceisNice]

TL;DR
Due to Gordias Savage being (too) hard, Anima weapons were designed to be (too) hard to get. They had to have known this, but released them as they were anyway, and should have expected the reaction they got.

A good handful of players (me included) is less upset about the time it takes (because it's roughly the same as novus, only you're doing more things per day outside of the roulette, and it's less of a indefinite money sink). It's more concerning in the design approach that they're reusing old, 2.x content that does not encourage player interaction (specifically the beast tribes and 2.x hunts, which mind you the latter rewards more than the 3.x contents as far as getting 3.x progression is concerned), rather than keeping EX primals and 3.x content relevant in the 3.x patch cycle.

Hell, they didn't even revitalize 2.x areas which need attention like CT, and we're still waiting on them to fulfill their end of the bargin when they'd said they were looking into ways to make CTing more lively again. I didn't wait for them to drop this piece of content since 3.0 just to go back to do more 2.x content, which hasn't even been retrofitted to be done as a lvl 60 other than the fact it rewards (more) currency for 3.x progression.

While this is essentially true, the Zodiac questline has never been anything but exactly this, and there's no real means for it to be anything different unless they radically change their goals for the content itself. That complaint has been valid for every single step of the Zodiac weapons (except, to some degree, Novus, since it got maybe 15 unique Map fights--they just stuck a horrible Materia grind on it instead). And radically changing the content itself will upset other players (including myself--some of us do in fact enjoy grinding content). So any changes they make need to be done carefully in such a way as to not alienate the group of players that are in fact happy with the questline (and I think there are ways they can do that, as I've discussed elsewhere--but they have to be careful not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater).

Even if you'd look at the zodiac relic, it still has the novelty of being the first relic quest for the game. While it keeps sending you back to do old content, it's not necessarily in the same manner or objectives. The content within it's scope is also current to the expansion, although that has to be a given since this their first reboot since the game. And I can also give it a pass that they'd make it open ended in the approach for some of the steps (lights and tomestone for alexandrites), and to breathe life into previous content so players can more easily catch up. You get none of this if you're targeting areas like beast tribes or 2.x hunts (in which case they'd have the durability of a wet toilet paper in the face of lvl 60s), and at that point it feels like a grind for the sake of it being a grind. Step 2 also feels like this when it sends you to lvl 50 dungeons with the option to unsync it, on top of it really not making sense from a lore perspective (within the realm of FFXIV reasoning anyway), and the quest line in general having some issues and errors, that it feels like it's been unpolished and rushed out despite the delay.

If you were to make broad strokes, you have the old content (3.0) and the old content (2.x). While I don't fully expect them to drop the 2.x areas entirely and that some quest objectives are going to send you back there, it's a different beast entirely when you're putting in things like directly requiring implemented 2.x content for currency (versus the tomestones which are more in general and indirectly rewarded from roulette) It's the things that come with an expansion; they've set standards themselves with 2.0, and those aren't being met if they're going to fall back onto beast tribes or unsynced. With things like LoV and Diadem I could give it a pass (although the heat is going to come from anotehr perspective anyway, such as the implementation and the lack of focus).

[Alahra]

Step 2 also feels like this when it sends you to lvl 50 dungeons with the option to unsync it

I don't know why anyone who knows step three has a Poetics cost would unsynch the level 50 dungeons, to be honest (though of course on day one, it made the most sense to when we weren't aware of the costs later). I actually created two further Awoken weapons for alt jobs to save on Esoterics and get some extra Poetics (and got several new member bonuses along the way--so they are helping people clear content they haven't done before with that step).

I don't know how it is on Famfrit, but Hunts in general were all but dead on Diabolos before 3.15, which makes getting things like the unique Grand Company gear for glamours and the like a rather daunting prospect (though for the life of me I can't figure out why they haven't reduced the cost of those yet). I'm glad they included them, as the carrot of Clan Mark Logs was never enough for me to bother Hunting, and now I'm accomplishing several goals at once through them. It's a good feeling.

And honestly, the inclusion of the Beastmen quests for 2.0...doesn't hurt anyone. It's a bone thrown to players who put in tons of their time to working on all of them, and the additional tokens you can get from them aren't really worth spending the time to get to Rank 3 if you haven't already gotten there. There are enough other options available to gather the tokens that it really shouldn't matter all that much. But the additional carrot might also inspire players who didn't otherwise engage with the Dailies to find some new content to try--and heck, they might even enjoy it to get into the ones for HW (including the new tribe coming in 3.2). The only negative is that it's "old," but as I've mentioned elsewhere, I'd rather the game not entirely forget all of its old content with each expansion. Makes the game feel bigger.

Do I think they should have included the CT series in the quest somehow? Yeah. They actually would have fit right in with Stage 2, to be honest (especially since three of the included HW dungeons just feel kind of awkward to go through again Lore-wise, as you mention--but to be fair, so do the CT dungeons). But putting in further incentive for folks to do HW leveling content is good for the game's health generally, so I can't really fault them much here (though it personally bothers me sort of...structurally that Great Gubal and Research Facility weren't included).