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

[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).