Quote Originally Posted by SentioftheHoukai View Post
Hildibrand is..... a thing, yeah. But you know what the real sin is?

The new relics being an ARR-style grind. Once upon a time, the near entire community loathed this manner of relic acquisition process. Wonder what changed?

Oh, right. Endwalker happened and suddenly no matter what, Yoshi-P became an infallible god overnight and literally nothing ever went wrong with FFXIV ever again.
You mean Stormblood happened. More specifically Pagos (but also Anemos to a lesser extent). Pagos was absolutely disliked on its release. Mainly for its slower spawn rate of NMs, and the fact that it put a higher emphasis on getting a chain bonus up to 30 without breaking it (which was almost carpal tunnel inducing). Anemos was generally regarded as boring. Most people quickly ended up on NM trains, where the majority of the train wasn't even able to help spawn NMs.

The general opinion regarding both of these zones, is that players disliked being forced into them as the only option to progress their relics. Players preferred having multiple options to progress their relic, rather than an instanced zone with a singular goal.
This is exactly why ShB's Resistance weapons didn't have their progress exclusively tied to the Bozjan Southern Front/Zadnor. But even with this system, there was a portion of the playerbase who disliked the fact that they were forced to complete Castrum Lacus Litore.

So they gave players what they were asking for during SB/ShB.