Umbrites are terrible.

[Vidu]

With the last patch the price of umbrite was cut in half... this step is about a year old and has already been nerfed - I think this complaint is coming a bit late...
If its any consolation: the steps afterwards are a lot easier

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Its the main reason I don't understand how people can do 2-3 relics

I have a friend who has completed six relics all the way to 260; a couple are now at 275. And no, she didn't wait for nerfs.

[Moomba33]

You can do more than spam one dungeon continuously. The design of it being Lore is to let people play the game as they normally would and accumulate the Lore to buy the items. It wasn't intended to be done in a day by people finding the quickest dungeon and spamming it over and over. While they could of added different options for it, it's not so much a flawed system, as it is flawed mindsets of "must have now".

^This pretty much. I never spammed ARF or Gubal HM for Lore. Just like I never spammed Brayflox HM for Mythology to buy Animus books back in the day.
Tomes naturally accumulate through playing the game.

[Elim]

I did every relic step before umbrite (since 2.0) without complaint. Even the original atma farming didn't phase me because I could zone out or AFK at any point without worry. But holy crap that umbrite step was insanely painful even when I didn't spam one dungeon. I casually got lore for months and still did not complete it. After awhile I stopped doing relic until that step was nerfed. I had cleared everything(savage) and gotten my ilvl275 alex weapon so it wasn't a big deal but...I had never given up on relic before umbrite. It's not so much what the step is(farming for lore) but the sheer amount needed was horrible. Now that its nerfed its better tho.

[LunarEmerald]

If you do every roulette that's about 600 lore or 4 umbrites. You can casually make 4 umbrites a day without too much trouble. In ~19 days, you'll have enough umbrite to complete the step.

The sands are actually much worse to acquire if you don't have a gatherer or crafter at 60. You'll accumulate umbrites 4 times faster than sands and sands will become your bottleneck. You can only earn 1 sand a day doing the beastman dailies. You can earn ~20 by burning through 100 leves but accumulating 100 leves takes a month. Buying the materia to exchange costs you about 400k per sand. Considering you'll need around 70 sands for the step, that's a lot of gil and definitely not recommended.

Gatherers on the other hand can LITERALLY make 4+ sands every diadem session (60 minutes). It's ridiculous. The umbrite step really screws over people who don't level their gatherers.

[Zojha]

Personally, I did 2 relics by now and found the sands more annoying.

For the lore grinds, I simply hopped into the daily roulettes as tank or healer and after that did whatever I felt like - Even 20 tomes is progress after all. It's what I did with the unidentified stuff as well, only difference being that I also did beast tribes on the side. And one of my alts could even have a relic solely from PvP >_>
The sands was only leve-farming and using the poetics from 50s roulette for me, though I heard people who had gatherers leveled just did that instead for max efficiency.

I'm struggling more with the Condensation/Light step truth be told - I don't like running dungeons as DPS and grinding A1S or A9S doesn't sound fun either. So I slowly creep it up by doing a Frontline or two a day >_>

[LunarEmerald]

Personally, I did 2 relics by now and found the sands more annoying.

For the lore grinds, I simply hopped into the daily roulettes as tank or healer and after that did whatever I felt like - Even 20 tomes is progress after all. It's what I did with the unidentified stuff as well, only difference being that I also did beast tribes on the side. And one of my alts could even have a relic solely from PvP >_>
The sands was only leve-farming and using the poetics from 50s roulette for me, though I heard people who had gatherers leveled just did that instead for max efficiency.

I'm struggling more with the Condensation/Light step truth be told - I don't like running dungeons as DPS and grinding A1S or A9S doesn't sound fun either. So I slowly creep it up by doing a Frontline or two a day >_>

The light step is a joke with A1S grinding. It took me 6 hours to do it. 111 AS1 runs altogether with the bonus windows. It's not so bad because a run is only 3 minutes long.

[Voltyblast]

Not sure about that but I found the Umbrites "okay" to be honest: I could just do dungeons with any class for one thing and the price for each umbrite was acceptable.

I think the Light farming is worse in comparison: now I'm stuck using my job and farm the same raid everytime and while reasonable to a certain degree, I wish I could do the dungeons and stuff with other jobs to break the monotony. It's an understandable choice but I had more freedom with the other steps: feels like a step backwards.
Heck the crystal sand step was worse too and even if it had more freedom, I had to save leves and was forced to do older pre-50 dungeons for 50 tomes as well as have 60 tomes to obtain one item each time. Because using one tome instead would've been too fun and as we all know, doing dead content is always fun no matter what!

Ah well at least it's no 80 items + 16 hq crafting crazyness...

[Texa]

The sands were really easy for me, I mainly did them through bluescrip tokens. Felt like less of a scrip grind than getting all of my heavensward masterbooks in one go, but I haven't done the math to check if it is or not.

Umbrites were annoying but I did that step in like 9 days before the nerf.

[Kurogaea]

You can do more than spam one dungeon continuously. The design of it being Lore is to let people play the game as they normally would and accumulate the Lore to buy the items. It wasn't intended to be done in a day by people finding the quickest dungeon and spamming it over and over. While they could of added different options for it, it's not so much a flawed system, as it is flawed mindsets of "must have now".

You need around 80 umbrite, and for those who started before the nerf, they costed 300 lore. I'm at around 60 mark now and I run alot of PvP (because everything else is redundant). Just do pvp and lose a bunch (or try winning), you get lore either way. frontlines is the easiest way to get them in imo.

And btw, the system isn't flawed, its BS. Still have to buy some specific items just to turn the damn umbrites into sands anyway. I gather, but its still mind numbing-ly boring.