What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Vyrerus]

When was the relic questline not a joke? As far as I'm aware drunk smithy the kettlemancer has been in all of them. Did he skip eureka relics?

The first relic questline in 2.0 was meet Gerolt, who happens to be an extreme alcoholic, but he's the best smith in the land. You go through a serious process of killing a Chimera, Hydra, and the three primals at the time as well as crafting a base weapon yourself in addition to raiding a select beastmen stronghold for the old relic. There's lore about prior relic users, where the relics come from, and it has a serious tone all over, with Gerolt being a smidgeon of comic relief. As it continues, his assistant Drake and the Thavnairian Alchemist Jalzahn are introduced. The process then becomes collecting crystallized souls to feed to your weapon resulting in hundreds of battles killing things with it. There is an optional joke questline afterwards where you can do the same for a kettle, and the complete comedy of it is that Drake makes a better kettle with little effort.


The second relic questline for an Anima weapon involves Gerolt again, because as established by the first questline, he is the BEST smith in the land. That noble kid who I can't remember if he's Hannish or Sharlayan, has you go through a laborious process that is mostly 100% serious that involves all sorts of crystals, soul energy, battles, and eventually imparts a soul into your weapon itself making it a living weapon. Comedy is again kept minor, and mostly relegated to Gerolt wanting for booze or going into debt by getting an extreme amount of booze.

The third relic questline involves the Eureka weapons. Gerolt's back at it again, and Drake's along for the ride again, but now they also have understudies who make the Eureka armor for you. He's working off his debt to Rowena, and there really isn't a lot of comedy in it(more drinky drinky more he ordered a whole crate and didn't account for shipping costs). You have to collect hundreds of elemental crystals and then pieces of the strongest monsters from each Eureka zone for each stage. There's very little story around it, and also very little humor. It's almost solely just the process itself.


The fourth relic questline is for the resistance relics. The Queensguard weapons or whatever from Bozja. Gerolt's back on scene. There's more comedy, but again it's all about booze and his relationship to Rowena. The process for relic creation is gathering memory crystals, soul crystals, and battling a lot of stuff. There's some more comedy interplay with Gerolt interacting with the resistance smith(adorable Hrothgar with glasses), and a little bit of comedy around the people trying to make deals with Rowena's but it's funny due to being about a vicious business tycoon.

Here we are at fifth relic. Same old Gerolt. But now Manderville hijinks are added to the mix. We find a rare meteoric ore. Ok that's pretty serious. Oh but to make its properties come out we need... Mandervilleman Sweat. Oh by the way, here's some naked Highlander man servants to help you with extra makes. It begs the question, what will the next step be? Manderville Spit?
This is much more overt, and while it is mildly interesting if you're interested in perhaps finding out why the Mandervilles are so powerful, it's smacking of possibly discounting every possible serious portion it may have.

We'll have to wait and see, though.

[Striker44]

The first relic questline in 2.0 was meet Gerolt, who happens to be an extreme alcoholic, but he's the best smith in the land. You go through a serious process of killing a Chimera, Hydra, and the three primals at the time as well as crafting a base weapon yourself in addition to raiding a select beastmen stronghold for the old relic. There's lore about prior relic users, where the relics come from, and it has a serious tone all over, with Gerolt being a smidgeon of comic relief. As it continues, his assistant Drake and the Thavnairian Alchemist Jalzahn are introduced. The process then becomes collecting crystallized souls to feed to your weapon resulting in hundreds of battles killing things with it. There is an optional joke questline afterwards where you can do the same for a kettle, and the complete comedy of it is that Drake makes a better kettle with little effort.

The quests in the relic storylines themselves have usually been of a serious nature, but all of the conversations surrounding them have been straight-up humor. The HW ones, for example, almost every quest end/beginning was some kind of Gerolt and that other lad we worked with getting frustrated with each other in a way that we as the observer were intended to find amusing. We haven't really seen much at all of the actual quests in the new EW storyline yet.