What was they thinking when they did variant dungeons and criterion

[vanaii]

I'm going to cackle if they tie the relic to running this repeatedly. There's your longevity.

In all seriousness, they added a completely new tier of content with this. It's going to take some time to figure out the reward structure, and it may be necessary to question the ironclad system they've used for the last decade to truly fix it. As things stand the game's rewards are as binary as its content: Standard or Savage.

It's not an easy problem to fix, and it may take several things to fix for the long term -- something like a static level cap, an absolute ilvl cap, horizontal progression via content-specific power enhancement, and god knows what else. The 75 era of FFXI (where you do x expansion for a good ring, y expansion for a good earring) or the current expansion structure of GW2 (nothing goes out of date, but you get new features for clearing content) might hint in the direction that might fix the binary gear we have now, but I'm sure Square can come up with their own take on things-- like they always have.