These Relics Aren't Relicing

[Bellsong]

Idk why people keep calling just playing the game at all "grinding". It's kinda silly tbh

[ty_taurus]

You answered your own question, you just won't accept the answer.

You cherry picked a specific part of my post and proceeded to ignore every single ounce of context for the rest of what I said. In what world is that an appropriate response?

Yes, I hear you a million times, but what I want answered is the part after your cherry picked statement: "That's exactly what the tomestone weapon was for" (and still is.)

Let's imagine that I have a small ice cream cart that fits two tubs of ice cream. Every day I'd bring a tub of vanilla and a tub of chocolate. Let's say that you love vanilla but hated chocolate. Now, all of the sudden, instead of bringing one of each, I now just bring two tubs of vanilla. Doesn't exactly seem fair to the people who loved chocolate, now, does it? But you don't really care, do you? Because all that matters to you is you like vanilla.

Well you already had vanilla, you already had the tomestone weapon which has gotten easier and faster to grind than ever before. Why do you also need the relic? Because by taking the chocolate ice cream away, now everyone who doesn't like vanilla is forced to pound sand because my little ice cream cart now only caters to one half of the people who used to get ice cream from me. So I'll ask the last question again: What are those of us who want chocolate and not vanilla allowed to have if you have to have the tomestone weapon and the relic weapon?

[Lyth]

The question to ask yourself is whether this is about the weapon itself, or about the associated content.

ARR had some fantastic weapon designs and some truly iconic name references. It's unlikely that we'll ever see that again, simply because of the increasing number of jobs with each expansion. Final Fantasy lore doesn't have hundreds of iconic weapon names to give out. It's unfortunate, because I would have loved to see an equipable Save the Queen greatsword utilizing a classical, symmetric design and the Ragnarok Zeta glow effect.

At the end of the day, though, the weapons themselves just come down to being fun glamours, and there are lots of alternative ways for players to at least get close to BiS months before they drop.

I think the more important question to ask is the type of content that you ought to attach to the relic. Ideally, players should feel like progressing towards completion of their relic takes them through new content. ARR started out strong in this regard, by having you complete the HM Primals to get to your first step. But outside of that, both ARR and HW very much stuck to having you grind out old content, at which point you might as well just be collecting tomestones like we are now.

Where Stormblood and Shadowbringers excelled was in creating unique zones for the relic. I think Eureka was a bit more ambitious, had more varied zones, and did a better job of creating a sense of overworld danger and exploration. Bozja was more streamlined and more forgiving, but had some really great innovation with the duel system. Both had some phenomenal group content, between Baldesion Arsenal and Delubrum Reginae Savage, both of which have multiple weekly runs even still from their own dedicated communities, much like all the Deep Dungeon content does. I feel like if you want to create a good exploratory zone and good relics, those are the people whose opinions should be sought first and foremost.

But the biggest thing is - they need to start it rolling early, by which I mean shortly after expansion launch. It doesn't matter if the weapon is completely redundant. I don't think the weapon 'progression' matters nearly as much as simply having access to a large zone filled with players to explore together and discover its secrets. In a way what you're really emulating is that older style of MMO where you have to be a bit more patient and rely on a sense of community.

[IDontPetLalas]

My only comment would be no- not "Delubrum Reginae Savage" but "Delubrum Reginae", while I'm sure DRS has its fans I would say that the value of DR in terms of the relic far outweighed DRS, as did CEs

[SieyaM]

Idk why people keep calling just playing the game at all "grinding". It's kinda silly tbh

I guess we can call it grinding when people also try and play the game as little as possible.

[Eraden]

Idk why people keep calling just playing the game at all "grinding". It's kinda silly tbh

In Mao opinion, grindings is doing exact same thing overs and overs again without something different in-between. Is usually much borings. Comes in 2 flavors. Hard grindings which is something likes working same gathering nodes or doings same dungeon overs and overs again, and soft grindings which is something likes daily roulettes which is basically same thing each day buts consists of bunch differents dungeons and trials and stuffs. Note that for some peoples, certain activities mights not be borings. For example, Mao nots find gatherings borings.

[Lyth]

...

No, I specifically meant DRS. Neither BA nor DRS were mandatory for the relics, but they really illustrate how you can enjoy the content created around the relics without having a specific interest in the relic weapons themselves. I was not a fan of the final Bozja Resistance Weapons designs, so much so that I only bothered to submit one (despite having enough of a stockpile of materials on my retainers from running the content to make others). My point is that I actually enjoyed the relic content (and associated achievement challenges) much more than the relics themselves, and that's where their real value lies. I don't think I've been entirely happy with a final relic step since ARR, despite making at least one weapon from each expansion, and if that was the only attraction then I wouldn't have been all that interested.

I think that Castrum, DR, and Dal are good gateways into getting people interested into this style of content, but both BA and the misnamed DRS are completely unique in terms of the group play and the atmosphere that they bring. It's similar to how only doing 30 floors of Orthos gives you a skewed perspective of what a Deep Dungeon is like, despite the fact that the average group of four players is more than capable of doing a full run with a little bit of trial and error. I think in the case of DRS, they just didn't want to repeat the situation with BA where cutscenes were gated behind completion of slightly harder (but still not 'Savage') content. But they really should encourage more people to get into it to see what it's like for themselves, as there's nothing like it anywhere else in the game.

[Supersnow845]

^i wouldn’t say DRS is misnamed, DRS is 100% at the level of ShB savage (ie enrage is the true villain not body checks on every mechanic)

Trinity avowed and queen are easily 2nd floor savages, trinity seeker, queensguard and Minotaur are first floor savages then ghost and dahu would be extremes, I’d also argue that slimes has easily a savage level of leeway before you straight up wipe the entire raid but the actual mechanic isn’t terribly hard

[Striker44]

Idk why people keep calling just playing the game at all "grinding". It's kinda silly tbh

When it comes to RPG's, the term "grinding" in general just refers to doing the same thing repetitively until you reach a certain goal. If you're pounding out roulette after roulette, for example, in order to get tomestones for the relic, you're grinding. It's not silly - it's the basic meaning of the term.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Well currently with the Bozja relics at this point in time due to the general lack of players actively doing DR normal, I'd really just suggest clipping a good chunk of the HP off the bosses to make the fights noticeably shorter with 1-3 ppl and also making that DPS check phase a bit easier to complete when lacking ppl, while also increasing the amount of timeworn artifacts awarded for finishing it. Honestly I feel like this is all the tuning the process needs as no longer current content.