Quote Originally Posted by Alahra View Post
Given how badly they screwed up this patch cycle, I don't think they had many good reasons to make many of the decisions they did, and so arguing that there's no good reason for them to do X or Y doesn't help much since they don't seem to have been relying on good judgement for the entire raid tier. It was probably being too cautious about the availability of better weapons relative to Savage's difficulty, and also, potentially Thordan EX. If they had released the i200 step alongside it, it might have lessened interest in the fight, and given how content-lite the game has been the past half-year, that may have concerned them.

There's also just the fact that, if they *had* released the i200 steps in 3.1, players who already had Esoterics weapons likely would have been pretty disapointed. The questline at that point would have had absolutely no use to anyone except catch up content. Given that there was a lot of excitement and buildup surrounding the release of the quest, it would have likely resulted in its own wave of anger on the forums.

None of those things amount to good reasons for the delay of the quest. What they ultimately should have done in hindsight was have the Relic be available as an alternate means of progression as early as say, 3.0, with the 170 step being available alongside Law Weapons, and the i200 step being released alongside i200 weapons. But that's something of a departure from the way the Zodiac questline functioned, what with it always being delayed relative to other options. It's just that, since they positioned part of the quest as a catch up mechanism, they really should have moved to a different philosophy for the release schedule. They didn't, likely because they were overly cautious regarding the impact of Savage's difficulty on the game as a whole, and so on.

It's a complicated mess of factors, all of which pretty much come down to Savage.
Releasing the 200 relic on esoteric launch would mess up progression. They intended for no one to have 200 weapons until the third week of esoterics.