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

[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).