Quote Originally Posted by Khalithar View Post
I believe this is the wrong mindset to have in regards to the relic. I'm going to go ahead and say it, it being equal to a raid weapon at that early point in the xpac is irrelevant (not to mention the fact that if you were a raider you got the 210 weapon way before the relic was out anyway and since you got it first, people having a 210 weapon later shouldn't matter), the relic steps should have been designed on the time of release, i.e. the first relic steps should have had an incremental difficulty increase from the beginning and gotten harder later. The excessive and painful grind should be saved for the mid to late stages, the earliest stages (up to the 210 point) should have been the easiest out of all them and THEN ramped up as you went to the 230 and to the 240.
I don't understand this mindset at all. Why does the point in the expansion pack have any bearing whatsoever? Are you saying that the final Relic OR Raid weapon in an expansion pack is somehow "ultimate" in any way? Of course it isn't - it, too, will be rendered obsolete by the next expansion pack, just a few months later.

There is NO DIFFERENCE between the 210 weapon, the 240, weapon, the 270 weapon, and whatever ilvl the first endgame weapon in the next expansion pack will be. They are ALL "ultimate" weapons for the narrow frame of time that they top the list, which means making any of them easy to get is a terrible idea.

I might be willing to grant that they waited too long to apply the nerf to this stage, but for the 210 stage to be as rough as it was was entirely reasonable. It was troublesome enough to get folks enthusiastic about the hellishly difficult Alexander Gordius Savage raids (whether Savage was too difficult or not is a debate for another thread); allowing for an easily-accessed 210 weapon would have been the nail in the coffin.

Bottom line, it's a mistake to think of any stage of the relic weapon to be just another step in the process to some ultimate stage that hasn't been implemented yet. Whatever the final stage is at any given time - THAT is the ultimate Relic weapon.