What makes a good relic storyline / step

[ChrysOCE]

The speed, for re-doing half of the steps, I can assure you the bozja/zadnor option are not 100%. Compared to the 10 min that CT tower takes, with the certitude of getting one. It's also why people mostly ran out of bozja Fates instead of bozja fates for the augmented resistance weapons. People will prefer to do something that takes them 10 min with 100% drop rates over something that takes 5 min with a 50% chance drop rates (and it was not 50%).

Most do, but I would take the 50% chance over doing CT for anything, every time.

Also, and I know this depends on what your resistance honors are, but you can clear CLL and Dal with 3-5 people (3 if at least two have decent DPS honors). You can clear DR super easy with 5 people. Maybe some see that as a negative.

EW relic has been underwhelming. I don't care for Hildebrand so, especially this last step, was just skipping through. Some like the humour, it's not for me. I get they want to make the grind easy or up to player choice. But all it really does is cheapen the experience. The relic process feels more of a byproduct, or passive achievement, rather than actively doing something. The relic designs themselves? Underwhelming, so far, compared to other relic steps in prior releases.

[Koros]

I acquired 75% of all Resistance weapons in ShB (and like 50% of the Timeworn before the nerf), and all Resistance weapons now (except one that's 3 emotions away but I couldn't be bothered to complete it rn). I have far fewer Manderville weapons, so it just goes to show how replayable the content was for me.

By the way the memories are actually best farmed through raw mob grinding. Each type of memory drops from Z1/Z2/Z3 respectively from mobs, and that's actually faster than doing FATEs or CEs.

The best way to get all Resistance weapons is to join a group with two or three people in Z1/Z2/Z3 farming the correct mob (IIRC magitek mobs but it's been a while), so you're getting 3 memories each round of trash pulls. You can even solo it with the correct Lost Actions, like MCH or WAR Slash, if you know what you're doing. While doing so, if CLL pops, you should head in to grab harrowing.

For the final steps, the best way is to join a pre-made Delubrum run. These were actually very common and active back in ShB, and they take 15 minutes or even less for the really good ones, and 20 minutes for the bad ones. So it was actually a really fast step (after the nerf) if you knew what you were doing. This was also the most fun step for me in 5.5 because of Irregular Lost Blood Rage, which made WAR one of the best DPS, that can honestly compete with a Lost Excellence SAM with the BiS lost actions. Through this you get both Timeworn and Raw Emotions. Once you're done with Timeworn, you then exclusively do Dalriada for Raw Emotions.

If you keep all quests active you can mix and match what you do all the time. When you feel like chilling you can just wait in Zadnor and afk while eating food or doing chores, and if you want some excitement you could join a Delubrum PF. Something in between would be the memories.

The lost action crystals were also very profitable back in ShB. Farming for essences and crystals with the bozjan cluster thing made 2M gil per 20 mins if you knew what you were doing back then.

[TaleraRistain]

They wouldn't need to nerf Timeworn Artifacts if they did a better job with Delubrum and future-proofing.

Just saying.

Any relic step with only 2 options isn't really a wise idea. You don't see the same bottleneck with raw emotions even though you can get those from DR because it has 4 possible options and one of those is something you can casually get through a daily roulette if you happen to get the right level dungeon. Just need to keep the quest active.

[CNitsah]

Another idea that would be nice is too use the current system... for old relics. You get a full storyline, with longer relic to get, but when the next expansion release, you add the relics quest items to a npc vendor, so it get easier to collect old relics as glam. So they could get their completion rates up (since they seem to have interest in that), while still giving something to do to players that want to.

Or even better, when you first get the quest, you have both, you can farm specific dungeon/fate/whatever to get some relics object. once get one of that object, you can also buy it for tomestone at a npc, so you need to run the content, but using tomes makes it faster. Of course for that to work, the number of object you need has to be higher than the capstone. Like keeping 500 tomes per object, but needing 10 or fifteen of them.

So you would not only do the content to get your items, but also to get tome to reduce the farm. When the next step get released (or 2 step later, or at the X.55), you divide the number of stones needed for one item of that step (going from 500 to 250 or 200 ), and maybe once again at the end of the expansion. That way there is still farm, but you can also just use tome if you don't want/like to farm. Yet it still give you some kind of relic experience. That would also make steps like augmented law and Order - which became even worse since my original post. I mean I tried several time to run DR, and at best, we were ... 3 - not being a hard stop anymore.

[ForsakenRoe]

What makes a good relic step? Having it be a bit of a grind, so it feels rewarding to do, but not too big a grind so as to make alts hard to work on.

The solution would be something akin to the Blade's X step from SHB. One grindy 'onetime step' to unlock the vendor/process/whatever, then all the alts thereafter are a simple small grind. In Zadnor it was 'get 30 of these 6 different kinds of items, either via Zadnor stuff or old raids', and the 'easy repeatable' part was 'do Delubrum for 2 memories, Dalriada for 3, relic asks for 15'.

For the Manderville relics, since it's all about bloody aliens and space and meteorites, they could have had a section of the Thavnair map dedicated to it where FATEs spawn, meteorites keep landing in a starshower and you have to pick up the fragments and hand them in to an NPC, and you get given a share of them once the FATE ends to use for your relic. That's the 'hard, onetime step'. Then, the repeatable part is the 'buy this garbo for 1500 tomes' (which could even be lowered due to the onetime step being part of the 'grind'), make it protein powder to coat your relic in for all I care. Make the first one free as part of the questline too

[Ivtrix]

Something more engaging than the battle content portion being literally the same thing 5 steps in a row

[VerdeLuck]

The endwalker relics are fine, I don't feel as shoehorned as I did in the past. I don't want to be forced to go do Eureka or to have the options of Bozja or 30x6 normal raid clears for a single step if I don't want to grind bozja fates. I want to play content I like.
Tomes lets me pick what I want to do and do it. Alliance Raids, Roulettes, random dungeons, I can just play what I think is fun and everything contributes to the relic progresss I'm making.

Not to mention the step for timeworn artifacts is terrible. It's either content that is beyond dead, or running potd for hundreds of hours for low drop rate drops. I'd rather it be on the more boring side than have another one of those that just becomes a wall after the expansion ends.

[Mostly_Raxus]

i dont think anyone would care about the relic being easy if we had ANY form of sustainable content this xpac, at this point they need to sell sub time in days, once ever 3 months i log in and i'm done till the next micro patch 3-6 months later.

lets be real, they know it was the end of the story we were invested in, and they knew we would buy it, and so they got away with ripping us off. lessons learned.

[Nezerius]

The endwalker relics are fine, I don't feel as shoehorned as I did in the past. I don't want to be forced to go do Eureka or to have the options of Bozja or 30x6 normal raid clears for a single step if I don't want to grind bozja fates. I want to play content I like.
Tomes lets me pick what I want to do and do it. Alliance Raids, Roulettes, random dungeons, I can just play what I think is fun and everything contributes to the relic progresss I'm making.

Not to mention the step for timeworn artifacts is terrible. It's either content that is beyond dead, or running potd for hundreds of hours for low drop rate drops. I'd rather it be on the more boring side than have another one of those that just becomes a wall after the expansion ends.

To address the bolded part, that's why crafted weapons exist. Crafted weapons use materials bought with tomestones, and are augmented with tomestones in the subsequent major patch. Added bonus of patch 6.5's augmented crafted weapons likely being better than the current relic step (i650 vs. i645). And the relic won't be upgraded until the mid-January patch.
As for the rest of your post, it seems like you aren't really the target audience for relics, which is why there's various other ways to obtain weapons.

As for my two cents regarding the OP's question:
I'd say one thing that makes for a good relic step, is a step that can't be finished prior to said relic step being added to the game. All of Endwalker's relic steps can be almost instantly finished on patch day, as it's incredibly easy to bank 1500-2000 tomestones prior to the patch being released.