Genuine friendly advice: For those looking to start their relic with the atma nerf, from an efficiency standpoint, I'd rush to get to the Novus phase ASAP. Novus (and Nexus to an extent) is a great place to be upon the release of new tomestones as your daily progress towards Novus (expert roulette) will also see that you max-out your weekly Poetic Tomes (two birds with one stone). Atma farming and doing books is the worst - because your progress towards these are exclusive to upgrading your relic from 90 to 100 (during your atma farming, 27 dungeons, 900 mob kills, 27 fates and 27 leves) you'll earn minimal poetic tomestones at best.

That in my opinion is why the atma and animus phase are the worse. They are a huge time hog that can really cause you to fall behind if you only get an average amount of time to play each week.