Alliance raids have no business being a relic step.

[TaleraRistain]

Relics have always taken you back to previous content, at least until Eureka. Yes, even ARR took you back to places you had been earlier in your game life.

[Jennah]

Can we all agree that the one place that has ZERO business being a relic step is the Palace of the Dead?

[TaleraRistain]

Can we all agree that the one place that has ZERO business being a relic step is the Palace of the Dead?

I'm fine with it. Options are good. Though it does weaken the choice since they tied it to floors you can't often find people for.

[Kaurhz]

Can we all agree that the one place that has ZERO business being a relic step is the Palace of the Dead?

I'm inclined to disagree, what I will say, however, is that it was a mistake not to allow this specific stage to be obtainable in leveling roulette 1 per day, for a simple leveling roulette.

[Listrella]

yes ques are somewhat slow but they are far from being dead
puppets and Factory ques will get better when next nier raids out

it'll get better temporarily, then go right back to being dead once endwalker launches, not that i'm complaning, not a big fan of those raids.

[Iscah]

The only mistake they made in adding HW/SB alliance raids was not adding a mechanism like the Gift of the Archmagus quest for CT that requires you to do all three raids equally before you can trade in for your rewards.

I still have one character that hasn't unlocked CT, and he used to get a variety of the six raids, but now it's a coin flip between Void Ark and Rabanastre and I am absolutely over both of them. Especially Void Ark, which is probably my least favourite of all the alliance raids.

[Arkevorkhat]

The only mistake they made in adding HW/SB alliance raids was not adding a mechanism like the Gift of the Archmagus quest for CT that requires you to do all three raids equally before you can trade in for your rewards.

I still have one character that hasn't unlocked CT, and he used to get a variety of the six raids, but now it's a coin flip between Void Ark and Rabanastre and I am absolutely over both of them. Especially Void Ark, which is probably my least favourite of all the alliance raids.

I had completely forgotten about that, that would be good as well, if the goal is to get more people into those raids, but doesn't fix the core issue that it's impossible to pass the once-per-character step inside Bozja.

[Arkevorkhat]

Relics have always taken you back to previous content, at least until Eureka. Yes, even ARR took you back to places you had been earlier in your game life.

Yes, the Anima weapons had a couple steps where you had to do a few duties from a previous expansion. The difference here is that the developers have made it so that you have a 100% drop rate, guaranteed progression for doing content from a previous expansion, and the drop rates from Shadowbringers content are absurdly low, I've seen estimates as low as 10% to get the first step's memories from skirmishes in Bozja. The other difference is that the number of duties you have to complete is second only to the ARR relic's book step, for your first Augmented Law's Order weapon, you have to do: 60 Heavensward FATEs or an indeterminate (but all but guaranteed higher) number of Bozjan Skirmishes, 6 Level 60 dungeons or Levelling Roulettes with daily bonus, 15 Crystal Tower alliance raids or 3 Castrum Lacus Litore, 18 Return to Ivalice Alliance Raids or an indeterminate number of Othard FATEs, 18 Shadow of Mhach Alliance Raids or an indeterminate of Gyr Abanian FATEs, and 15 Delubrum Reginae or Palace of the Dead clears.

That's between 60 and 72 instanced duties and between 60 and potentially an infinite number of FATEs. It's *Ridiculous*.

It's like they hired in some scumbag fresh out of business school and he said "Give your players the illusion of choice, push them towards the most profitable content for you, but tell them that they could choose to do the content they actually want to do instead if they wanted, but make that content be far and away the worse option, to the point that even people with a die-hard hatred for the profitable content would grit their teeth and do it anyways."
SE have told us that we can do this mostly in Bozja, excluding the couple of steps where they don't even hide it, and just lock it to progression outside Bozja, Looking at you, level 60 dungeons and HW/SB Alliance raids. The issue at hand is that nobody in their right mind would ever do so, and the people who actually enjoy Bozja have to suffer through content that they don't want to do at all.

[LaylaTsarra]

We didn't have to do it with Eureka but enough people complained they wanted to do in world out of zone content so here we are. Running old content is nothing new for relic by the way.

[Naoki34]

Let's be real here, the Shadowbringers relic questline is an extension of the Blades of Gunnhildr story, it's the story of Bozja's liberation, and a core part of one of the few major sub-plots in ShB.
There's no excuse for making it so that the only way to progress is to do alliance raids from already completed stories. Even worse is choosing alliance raids that have generally had an extremely poor reception; Crystal tower has trouble filling to this day unless you're doing a PF for BLU, and the Mhach and Ivalice raids were so dead that people were struggling to get access to bozja in the first place because people would rather strip off their jewelery than risk getting a Heavensward or Stormblood alliance raid.

The decision was made that it was important to the development team that they prop up dead content by making it the only effective way of progressing. (good luck convincing anyone that you did Stormblood FATEs for 35 hours to progress past the roadblock in the current relic tier, we all know you did the Alliance raids like an obedient little WoL). It's been shown time and again that someone high up in the FF14 team has some kinda boner for 24-person content, and that we're never going to be free of it until we, as a community, decide to not run it at all. The only way to win is to not play, to make the metrics on Alliance Raids so terrible that SE decides they're not worth the development time.

The reason is to make yourself useful and help new players or go play Bozja.

It's always been like that.

- Mentor system with unique mount rewards
- PF leveling
- Event mog when there is no more content
- Relics 5.35 go Bozja or go HW fate (helps newbies to Xp)
- Token to get materia VIII with PF Raid alliance / Leveling

Square Enix always needs new players out of those hard-working people to make the two MSQ dungeons so big rewards, in tomestone/time to farm ratios, it's profitable and you can do something else while the new ones watch their cinematics.

The free trial is between ARR and HW in its entirety. It is true that why Crystal Tower and not Voids Ark raids. Maybe because you have to finish the Crystal Tower raids before doing Shadowbringer, why? Well you had to do the MSQ of the extension, you know why.


Either you're going to farm in no brain mode, or you help the new ones, it's always been like that. There is no other logic.