Bozjan - ready to rage quit

[Kyrj]

Just don't do Bozja.
You don't actually need the relic for anything; and glowy weapons tend to be extremely ugly.
Plus - if enough people don't do Bozja, SE will see it, and maybe actually give us the *good* ARR/HW relic paths back in Endwalker. For real, this time.

Is that the one where I smashed my face against the FATE wall or the part where I whittled down what little sanity I have left running ARF over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over?

[TaleraRistain]

They were never really casual in terms of time, only in difficulty. Just look back to 2.0. Atmas, sphere scrolls and melds, 400k(a lot back then), light farms, mythflox, etc.

The big difference is that you could do your normal things, pick up this or that extra quest or equip this specific thing, and you could make progress. Some steps may have needed crafting, so you could spend some time on that or buy from a crafter, which gave those items a good market. Zodiac and Anima weapons were still a grind, but they were a grind that you tackled on your terms, doing the things you wanted to. And they're very nicely future-proofed. I got my amaro recently so I've been working on some anima for classes I didn't have at that level in HW and it's still a grind but is connected to dungeons and trials I can either do solo now or easily get into queue for.

Relic and Resistance Weapons isolate you completely from the rest of the game, giving you no choice in how you do your grind. And if you want go to do them after their expansion, you're going to be isolated *and* mostly solo.

They really need to let these instances stand on their own feet, not force us into them by tying the casual endgame weapons to them as an alternative to making them someplace people want to go into.

[TaleraRistain]

Plus - if enough people don't do Bozja, SE will see it, and maybe actually give us the *good* ARR/HW relic paths back in Endwalker. For real, this time.

^this

They will only listen to their participation numbers. It sucks a lot for me that I won't have a full Eureka or Bozja weapon, but I refuse to contribute to their participation numbers and give them the illusion that we want this and they should keep going on this path. That is the only thing that will make them listen to the feedback.

[DamianFatale]

While that is true, there is something to be said about making passive progress on your relic for people who either focus on other aspects of the game or have limited time to play. Just like how tomestones are something that you just get for playing content, I felt the HW relic was similarly passive to an extent.

Nobody who wanted their relic just sad around and waited for it to come. They grinded the ever living shit out of it.

[hobostew]

Nobody who wanted their relic just sad around and waited for it to come. They grinded the ever living shit out of it.

I completed the 3 for the jobs I played during HW by doing roulettes and frontlines. Basically stuff that I was gonna do anyway and stuff I wanted to do.

People who went full poop sock on them and then whined always struck me as kind of special.

[Vahlnir]

I completed the 3 for the jobs I played during HW by doing roulettes and frontlines. Basically stuff that I was gonna do anyway and stuff I wanted to do.

People who went full poop sock on them and then whined always struck me as kind of special.

That's basically what I did too until the light farming phase. Sure, a lot of people had theirs done much sooner but it kept me busy longer. Sadly, that is not the nature of the Bozja relics. For those it's basically get it done before you fall behind.

[hobostew]

That's basically what I did too until the light farming phase. Sure, a lot of people had theirs done much sooner but it kept me busy longer. Sadly, that is not the nature of the Bozja relics. For those it's basically get it done before you fall behind.

I got a lot of my light from frontlines while farming the Garo armor sets I think. Probably other stuff too since I would always equip it when doing anything that would progress it.

[TaleraRistain]

Nobody who wanted their relic just sad around and waited for it to come. They grinded the ever living shit out of it.

Singing Clusters are a good example of how you couldn't just grind and could passively collect items. You ran Leveling and 50/60 (or maybe just 50 back at that point, can't remember when they changed it) so you could slowly collect those. You're doing your normal roulettes and getting something for your relic. Plus no matter how much you grinded, the animas did have some measure of pacing baked in because of things like how often you could do certain quests for the items, like those quests. You're still restricted in how often you can do them but they are also available for poetics now so you could grind that step now if you wanted. IIRC they weren't available for poetics back when animas were current, though.

Contrast that with light farming. You could go grind that step out from the get go. Back in the day, I lived in A1S. Or you could passively get light from what you were already doing because there were multiple areas that qualified toward progress.

With the last two sets of weapons, you have to go to these special zones and have to get the updates/items from just one place, with a couple of exceptions with Bozja. But you don't have nearly the variety you can choose from like you did with ARR and HW. More choices mean things stay accessible in the future for those who aren't here when the content drops, and help with burn out because people can get a break from X to go do Y instead or can do that passive collection and finish their weapons at their leisure.

[TaleraRistain]

That's basically what I did too until the light farming phase. Sure, a lot of people had theirs done much sooner but it kept me busy longer. Sadly, that is not the nature of the Bozja relics. For those it's basically get it done before you fall behind.

Exactly. They've made some adjustments, but CLL was a huge roadblock for a lot of people for a long time there. While these quests always had a measure of group participation, it was group participation on your own terms.

The ideal situation if they want to maintain a separate zone (which isn't a bad idea) would probably be something like this. Have a solo only quest that involves missions/questing in the zone. Make the instances solo duties. There can still be things like CEs and such but make those optional for those who want it. And then design those encounters around what appeals to those who like that content. CLL fell flat on its face because people had to run it once for the resistance weapon so had to do it even if they didn't want to, but SE also ignored the good feedback from people who wanted to run it more than once about how to make it appealing to do. So it just turned everyone off. It's much better to keep the choice in player hands on how they interact with that content. Or not, and can quietly do the questline on their own then get their updates elsewhere.

They would also need the updates/item to drop both in the instanced zone and outside. Make the drop rate the same, neither better or worse than the other. So if it's a quest in one place to get 1 of X item, then outside there's a way to also do a quest to get 1 of X item. Like the singing clusters being tied to roulettes I mentioned in my other comment. If they're drops and they want to have some FATE farming in there, then make the chance equal. Then players can farm outside, or maybe they will get curious and go pop into this zone and check it out for a bit. If they *have* to put in something at an unequal measure, make the chance in zone slightly higher to nudge people with the carrot instead of the stick to go into the zone and interact with it without punishing those who just aren't interested with horrible drop rates.

The key idea is just having options with how you progress. If you wanna do crazy grinding, you can. If you want to passively collect, you can. If you want to do something in-between, you can. And if you want to take a break or just not work on it right away, you won't be left behind and can choose to take it up when it interests you.

[Neoyoshi]

The Relic weapon questlines have always been their own special kind of a pain-in-the-butt. Just remember the ARR Relic weapon questlines had the Titan Hardmode roadblock; which at the time, was really frick'n hard for a lot of people.

Titan was so problematic for a good portion of the community that competitive raiding Guilds like PainTrain would do paid-runs so people could get their Relic quest done. While there were a few other guilds like Celestial that would do free runs on the weekends.

If I had to choose the past or the future of how Relic's are done, I'd go with Bonzja and Eureka all the way.