First stage of Resistance weapons seems like an awkward bottleneck

[weebtext]

Completely agree. It feels so strange to me that basically every other step was far easier/more enjoyable than fate farming yet it didn't get any kind of change. Personally I would've liked to see the amount of memories go from 20 each to something like 10 each since doing 60 fates just really isn't fun or engaging, it just feels like a damn boring chore. Maybe even making them drop in Zadnor would help but I can't remember if something else already drops there.

[Iscah]

Maybe even making them drop in Zadnor would help but I can't remember if something else already drops there.

Zadnor drops the 6 x 30 miscellaneous objects but apparently that's a one-time-only step? Which again seems back-to-front in the long term because those come from raid roulette, an activity I do regularly. I'd be very happy if the 3 x 20 memories dropped from those and I could continue to passively earn them over time. I can do that with the green memories from levelling roulette and the ones that drop from the CT raids (like it's some kind of consolation prize that I got it in alliance roulette again) and the 60/70 dungeons when I get those.

On the other hand, having the "Stormblood FATEs or Mhach/Ivalice raids" as a blocking step felt like really bad timing. If it was a final step or something that I could trust over time for alliance roulette to sometimes throw me into those raids? Great, I'm happy to do that and fill spots when I'm needed. But at that immediate middle point in the quest chain I just needed it out of the way so I rushed through doing FATEs and moved onwards.

If the relic steps were intended to get people doing old content, I don't think they thought it out thoroughly enough about what will keep motivating people to run them in the long term.

Even if the Mhach/Ivalice raids were the only way of collecting items for that step, they also messed up by just making it drop from any of the raids and not implementing a "Gift of the Archmagus"-style requirement to run all three raids and trade in sets of tokens. I suspect a lot of people have consequently just unlocked the Void Ark and ignored the later parts.

Likewise for the raids, with the drops not requiring people to unlock the later raids.

[Iscah]

Perhaps a better requirement than "30 tokens from any raid" would be sets of one token from the final raid in each set of four.

So you'd need to do A4, A8, A12 and so on for the other raid series.

Or perhaps even one from each of the twelve unique fights in each raid. Twelve is still better than thirty and it keeps every fight populated in the duty finder.

If you've already done the quest chain, congrats – you've got an easy path to the relic now.

If you didn't, now you need to go through everything at least once instead of spamming the easiest level ad nauseum.