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

[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.