Manderville Relic Criticism

[TheMightyMollusk]

Oh, that's a pretty cool minigun. Looks like I'm ready to whip it out and blast up a jungle trying to find the Predator.



......Aaaand the magic is gone. Or rather, I wish it was gone. Stupid particle effects.

[AwesomeJr44]

......Aaaand the magic is gone. Or rather, I wish it was gone. Stupid particle effects.

I'm really hoping that the 'Matte Replicas' are brought back from Bozja and given for these weapons and the Amazing ones. (And also for any other relic that has no non-glow version too)

[Astrahime]

......Aaaand the magic is gone. Or rather, I wish it was gone. Stupid particle effects.

Yep.
"We won't change relic progession" my ass, this is completely different from SB and ShB.
Even if we ignore the superfluous step in the beginning of ShB, ShB was
1: Weapon
2: Weapon but glowy
3: New Weapon
4: New Weapon that's glowy also you can adjust your stats now
5: Newer Weapon that's glowy but if you don't like this, here's a vendor who sells replicas of this that don't glow!

For the first two steps, we were progressing at the same rate as ShB, but with completely different requirements.
We have now completely skipped stage 3 for stage 4, and we don't even have the Matte Replica.
Additionally, let's just look at item levels for a sec.

ShB started at IL485. This was the same IL as the EX4 weapon at the time. EW started at IL615, and that is also EX4.
ShB then went up to IL500 - 5 IL above the EX5 weapon! EW moved up to IL630, which is also 5 IL above EX5. (Or equal to the 3rd tier augmented tome.)
ShB next goes up to... IL510. In order to ascend it to IL515 (EX6), you need to do the second part of the questline added in x.45.
EW goes up to IL645 straightaway.

I can think of several reasons to make the weapon start at 640. Maybe Godbert tells Gerolt that actually we needed another chunk of Achondrite to power up the weapon.
Maybe Godbert says that the true extent of the weapon's power must be brought out through battle. Maybe Gilgamesh breaks into Radz-At-Han and interrupts the forging process so now you need a second item to properly reforge it into the weapon that Godbert was actually talking about.

And there's also the fact that we don't even have the main selling point for relics every expansion has had before - Fully Adjustable stats.
ARR let you put anything on everything.
In HW and ShB, you chose what you got, stat point by stat point.
In SB, you repeatedly rolled the RNG both to get stat types, and the amount of them. Personally I don't like this one, especially since you don't see anyone use a Eureka Relic anywhere, or a Physeos Relic outside of Eureka itself.
In Endwalker... You get asked if you want to change the 2 substats the weapon's maxed on, and the 2 materia slots become magical and are now carried over with you even if you're IL synced.