Quote Originally Posted by Mikey_R View Post
On the case of relic weapons, they have NEVER been classed as catch up weapons. The grind for them was too much for them to be classed as catch up weapons, until the current weapons that is. The catch up weapons would have been the older tome weapons, in this case, spending 500 tomes of causality and clearing P8 4 times for a weapon, which you can then use to clear p12, this is assuming you don't want to use crafted weapons.
This is clearly from the perspective of a savage raider. Do you really expect players that are scared of extreme fights to tackle P8S, even a full tier later? And all of that for a weapon that's 5 itemlevels behind the un-upgraded crafted weapon? Referring to the prior tier's 4th raid weapon as a "catch up" is actually laughable.

The relic weapon is a "catch up weapon" not from ease of access, but because it can and always could be gotten without having to tackle any form of difficult content. It was always the most powerful weapon a character could get without ever having to set foot in any extreme or savage content. It's what WoW players call a "welfare epic", ie. an item of similar power level to raid drops that is given out to basically anyone that wants it without requiring completion of difficult content, just delayed by many months, either in preparation for the next raid tier or next expansion.

The only thing about that that has changed is the magnitude of the grind associated with it. I mean, let's be honest here: clearing 60 different fates from 2 expansions prior just for a single step of a single relic is neither engaging content nor even remotely an "achievement", except perhaps of mindless persistence, and that's an order of magnitude more if you're farming multiple of these relics. And I think that's the piece lost in all of this. It took me several months of relatively casual grinding to get my ShB relic done, and that was for a single relic, and the mere thought of doing another has made it so that I've gotten through exactly one step of my next ShB relic in all of EW. And that's annoying, because I swap jobs a lot, so being forced to do that entire grind on each job, or just entirely forswear those frankly quite good glams (Augmented Law's Order weapons are, imo, quite amazing), is a rather terrible place to be.

Perhaps instead they can make the grind for it in the current expansion more significant, though still for tomes. Say, 5-10k tomes per stepinstead. You can get ~750-850 tomes per day if you clear all of your roulettes, but you'll only get about 400-600 per week if you just do the roulettes to cap the gated tomestone, plus maybe clear the normal raid floor and the a-raid, so 10k is ~2 weeks if you focus grind it and ~15-25 weeks if you do it passively. And then they can drop the cost by like 80% or so once the next expansion (or raid tier, even) is released.