Square Enix should retire the relic quests with Endwalker

[VerdeLuck]

In elemenary school we had a sportfestival with prices and what not. I got a price for placing 4th, a little trophy made by students. An absolut hideous, ugly thing... but i keep it to this day because its earned. I did go to a seminar for the company i work for and at the end we had a teambuiling exercise and we all got a trophy handed because "we all are winners".... i did throw away this thing the moment i reached the parking lot of the hotel. It never reached my home, not even my car.

Endwalker relics are handouts without any meaning or purpose besides to populate the pf. Mandervill is something i love and find funny to no end but to make it mandatory is nonsense and lazy. Everything SE did in EW after 6.0 patches is recycle, repeat, stretch and reduce. I cant wait when we reach the point where relics a quest rewards are with just clicking on a NPC and thats it, done in 5 minutes. No i got one better: MOGSTATION.

Relics are normally for the collectors crowd and min/max for what ever but relics are by no stretch a good or meaningfull way to get BIS besides some special cases. Go savage and be done. So can i have my cool, exploration bling bling back ? You can craft, fish, huntrain, triple triad, etc. to youre hearts content - i want the exploration Zones and their Relics back. I love Eureka and Bozja, you can dislike it all you want but the game has your back with other stuff.

Relics have always been handouts, ARR was a handout for grinding fates for dozens of hours, HW was a handout for grinding duties for dozens of hours, SB was a handout for doing eureka for dozens of hours, SHB was a handout for doing bozja for dozens of hours.
Endwalker is no different, it just doesn't require doing one specific thing. I can earn half a relic doing all 12 paths of a variant dungeon or I can do hunt trains and do the same. It's freeing.

But lets not kid ourselves and act like relics were ever some holy thing or were ever meaningful to earn, they were a grind and a handout for casuals to catch up and have glam during an expansion.

Though I have to say the community's 180 on relics from when they were originally revealed to be manderville is very funny. In a year we went from "This is unfair why are you making me do hildbrand quests?" to "This is unfair why aren't you making me do more specific things?"

[Nebelheim]

Relics have always been handouts, ARR was a handout for grinding fates for dozens of hours, HW was a handout for grinding duties for dozens of hours, SB was a handout for doing eureka for dozens of hours, SHB was a handout for doing bozja for dozens of hours.
Endwalker is no different, it just doesn't require doing one specific thing. I can earn half a relic doing all 12 paths of a variant dungeon or I can do hunt trains and do the same. It's freeing.

But lets not kid ourselves and act like relics were ever some holy thing or were ever meaningful to earn, they were a grind and a handout for casuals to catch up and have glam during an expansion.

Though I have to say the community's 180 on relics from when they were originally revealed to be manderville is very funny. In a year we went from "This is unfair why are you making me do hildbrand quests?" to "This is unfair why aren't you making me do more specific things?"

Previous relics weren't handouts you had to work for them and actually do/run content not just your daily roulettes for 1500 tomes which most people do daily anyway. Endwalkers relics were handouts. At this point in endwalkers i would rather have the various grinds arr and heavansward relics had us do rather than what we have now. There is no grind or achievement in grinding daily roulettes for a current relic other than making it super easy to grind with poetics next expansion which will make it even easier to get. We already have tome weapons we can get for 1500 tomes and doing the normal 8 man raids for the weekly thing it drops for an equivalent ilvl weapon.

[Kacho_Nacho]

Bait thread aside, I will admit that I pretty much wrote off relics after learning they weren't going to be forever-best like they were in XI. There are a few that I've grabbed for glams over the years, but this game's itemization means I have no reason to use anything but whatever the highest iLvl is that I can acquire the laziest way.

That's my take as well. I'd like to see relics become forever best and scale in combination with your character level and the ilvl of your other gear.

It's silly players grind to obtain an amazing relic only for it to be surpassed by easily obtained items later. In fact, I wonder if it's even a good idea to continue the rate we experience power creep in FFXIV. Perhaps, it's time to throttle everything back and introduce gear which is only one or two ilvls better than the previous step of gear and emphasizes different substats so that it's a meaningful decision whether or not to switch gear or keep the one you have now.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Don't worry. They will make relics a log in reward in 7.0, and I'm sure according to their metric it'll be the biggest, most successful relic questline that they've ever implement of all time!

And y'all gonna like it! /s

[...]Though I have to say the community's 180 on relics from when they were originally revealed to be manderville is very funny. In a year we went from "This is unfair why are you making me do hildbrand quests?" to "This is unfair why aren't you making me do more specific things?"

Do you think the "This is unfair why are you making me do hildbrand quests?"-crowd in the past are effectively the same group that screams "This is unfair why aren't you making me do more specific things?" today?

[Lunaxia]

Just the opposite. Make them available from the very beginning of the expansion, like the ARR ones. Without requiring crafters, of course. That was stupid.

Just noticed this, and had no idea about ARR's relics since I joined right as HW dropped. I seem to remember doing the quest at 50/ 60 and presumed that's when they were available to be unlocked. Was that not always the case, then?

[ForsakenRoe]

Just noticed this, and had no idea about ARR's relics since I joined right as HW dropped. I seem to remember doing the quest at 50/ 60 and presumed that's when they were available to be unlocked. Was that not always the case, then?

One ARR step required items to be handed in (the one that changes the weapon to Zodiac form, eg Excalibur/Ragnarok/etc). Said items have to be HQ, and one of the ingredients is only available via desynth (a system added either in that same patch, or one before). HW's 210 relic step was infamous, because it's the one that asks for things like KingCakes, Adamantite Francesca, etc from the GC. Originally, however, these items were not available from GC. They had to be crafted, using materials which may or may not have come from ONLY the Diadem (the original version so bad it got removed), and to top it all off, those 4 items have an ingredient that is linked to a different crafter. For example, KingCake uses a tiny ornamental crown (forgot the name), which is a GSM recipe. Francesca, a BSM recipe, uses an ARM recipe metal plate, etc. And, all of these 8 total recipes were specialist locked, of which you can only have 3 at a time. Effectively, the idea was for people to make friends with people who had different specialists, and form 'supply connections'. What ended up happening was that players said 'sod that' and made two alts to cover every specialist themselves, across three characters

We don't need to go back to that terrible time. But we could very comfortably do Blade's X step from Bozja, where the first relic has a nice sizeable grind to do (get 180 total items from Zadnor or raids), and then every subsequent relic is a much more manageable grind (do 5 runs of Dalriada). In todays terms, the '1500 tomes' would be the easy repeatable part, we are just missing the initial 'long grind phase'. And no, the 10 minutes of Hildibrand quests you have to do does not count

[VerdeLuck]

Previous relics weren't handouts you had to work for them and actually do/run content not just your daily roulettes for 1500 tomes which most people do daily anyway. Endwalkers relics were handouts. At this point in endwalkers i would rather have the various grinds arr and heavansward relics had us do rather than what we have now. There is no grind or achievement in grinding daily roulettes for a current relic other than making it super easy to grind with poetics next expansion which will make it even easier to get. We already have tome weapons we can get for 1500 tomes and doing the normal 8 man raids for the weekly thing it drops for an equivalent ilvl weapon.

Really? Getting a relic from doing 50 or so Fates isn't a handout but doing it through however many variant dungeon clears is suddenly no longer "working for it"? Doing a dozen or so clears of current Alliance raids is no longer working for it?
It's just laughable to say that mindless fate spam was somehow "less of a handout" or "meant anything", it's just contrarianism and MMO boomer stuff to say that old=good and new=bad.
these were never hard to do, there was never any working for it. It was an annoying grind in the past and they listened to feedback to make it less annoying.

The removal of one time steps was some of the best parts of this one as well. Having to do a grind, getting 0 reward from it other than the "right" to start another slogging grind was not fun. In the current steps they listened to feedback and there is no part where you think to yourself "this sucks why am I not getting progress towards my relics?", if you're doing level 90 content, you are getting at least some progress given towards your weapon.

[Absimiliard]

The only tier where this was the case mid-expansion was at the very end of SCOB, going into FCOB (with the i115 Nexus weapons). BCOB didn't have a tome weapon, so the i90 Zenith Relic was functionally the tome weapon for that tier, at five ilevels below the raid drop.

That was definitely not the only time relics entered into a state of parity with raid weapons. Even if it were, if we compare "normal" item levels for each, the relics didn't used to lag as far behind as they do now. They would get within striking distance on the latter the end of most content tiers. This no longer happens. Mind you, I also don't think it should happen under the current method of obtaining them. If they're to return to any semblance of being useful, then it should come with being more difficult to obtain. Strong equipment should be earned, not given.

This is a non-issue now because there are so many parallel gearing systems for players to get caught up. The new crafted set replaces all the previous raid gear on patch release, and you have the Primal weapons working in tandem with that. There are plenty of existing catch-up systems for even very casual players like yourself to make use of. Five ilevels isn't going to make you suddenly clear content that you can't already.

Who said anything about catch-up gear or increased odds of clearing? We've always had catch-up options of a sort, and by your own admission five item levels isn't going to make or break a run. No, what I want is something to kill time with after I've burned out on the raid tier. The old relics gave me just that, but no more. Between how ungodly boring it is to unlock them via tomestones alone and how much they lag behind, there's simply no reason to bother with them outside of throwing together some hodgepodge set on an alt I'll never do anything worthwhile with. I've no interest in collecting glamour or whatever it is people busy themselves with these days. I'm not going to waste my time on it if there isn't some actual benefit involved. Something with more challenge would be preferable to what we have now, for certain. Time-consuming is an acceptable substitute for challenging if the grind is grueling enough and the reward commensurate, as I did quite enjoy FFXI's relic system.

if you want Relics to matter, they have to be tied back to interesting content. Exploratory zones like Eureka and Bozja are the perfect environment for this, because they often introduce in new actions and mechanics that don't work anywhere else. You could have a Relic that is functionally just a tome weapon outside, but grants you unique job-specific effects when you're in the exploratory zone. Perhaps the relic strengthens a specific job action or grants it a second charge, giving you more power to fight dangerous mobs and unlock later zones. You could make a case for creating zone-specific effects to justify the existence of other parallel weapon systems as well, like the Deep Dungeon weapons.

This I can agree with. I would even go a step further and say it would be nice if they included optional savage-level+ challenges in those zones, for those wishing to do more than run around like chickens with their heads cut off. BA, Bozja as a whole, and even Variant/Criterion should've already given them plenty enough data on how to tune this stuff around larger and smaller numbers of players. For my part (and yes, I'm well aware this will probably never happen), I'd like to see this kind of thing scalable even for the solo player. After spending hours each week with seven other people that all hate each other, sometimes all I really want is something challenging I can tackle entirely on my own. ;P

[ChrysOCE]

Really? Getting a relic from doing 50 or so Fates isn't a handout but doing it through however many variant dungeon clears is suddenly no longer "working for it"? Doing a dozen or so clears of current Alliance raids is no longer working for it?
It's just laughable to say that mindless fate spam was somehow "less of a handout" or "meant anything", it's just contrarianism and MMO boomer stuff to say that old=good and new=bad.
these were never hard to do, there was never any working for it. It was an annoying grind in the past and they listened to feedback to make it less annoying.

The removal of one time steps was some of the best parts of this one as well. Having to do a grind, getting 0 reward from it other than the "right" to start another slogging grind was not fun. In the current steps they listened to feedback and there is no part where you think to yourself "this sucks why am I not getting progress towards my relics?", if you're doing level 90 content, you are getting at least some progress given towards your weapon.

Sure, I guess some people could decide to actively go out and farm variant dungeons, but that is an individual decision. I genuinely do not understand why this is so hard to understand. Being given a specific task - farm 50 FATES, clear DRN 5 times, clear Alliance Raids 4 times, obtain these specific times with GC currency or gil or 20,000 poetics, whatever the task is, it gives it meaning. You are obtaining a relic by doing a quest which then becomes an earned reward. It's a completely different thing to someone deciding, on their own, to give themselves their own individual head cannon journey to obtain their relic.

The vast majority of people are not spending their Causality tomes on anything so, when a new step releases, hey presto: you have your next relic step within a few minutes of the patch releasing. And then, if you are doing your roulettes or pvp (which you probably were going to do anyway), you can get another relic. And another. And another. There is no sense of achievement which this relic and it becomes no different to a standard tomestome weapon. Hell, the Comedy tomestome weapon is more of an earned reward, due to you having to do P12N X times and spend a limited tomestone currency on it.

[Zairava]

The comparison of the amount of skirmishes, critical engagements, in-zone raids for bozja and spamming the same dungeons is comical. I at least feel like the areas are a threat in the likes of Bozja and Eureka and I can keep engaged with the area on a moment to moment basis. The areas are large scale with lots of encounters and the fact that a LOT of other players will be doing it is a massive boon when you consider that, yes, there are MMO players here who would like to keep that one content that allows for us to have that MMO feel. The community engagement is inconceivably higher than spamming 4 man instances. This is a reason why you don't just look at solely completion rates.

"Yeah that's bad but these steps aren't" No you just aren't a fan of field zones and doing the encounters in them (fates or otherwise) to acquire the relics. We will continue going full circle because, shocker, people like different things and methods.

The one-time steps weren't great imo but at least they were only there for ONE relic. Let that grind exist for one relic and every relic after easier. I'm even an open advocate for having branching paths to acquire them.