The relic weapon quest is OBSCENELY boring...

[Kotemon]

I wouldn't say boring.. It does give me something to do. However after reading how lights work. It just dawned to me that its a lot like the first stage for Mythic in FFXI. Where you need to build points based on weapon skills and skill chains. Except its more or less being done without ever climbing 100 floors in Nyzule or having someone to chain off of. Boring no, excessively repetitive maybe, but its not as bad as it could have been. The RNG on Atma (better), fate Alex (meh..??), Dungeon drops (not even close yet), and materia farming/melding, for each relic is nothing like what folks had to do in XI. Especially before the nerfs to make it almost more accessible. To give a hint; try farming 10,000 Alexandrite 5 years ago for that one mythic stage. Or currency farming 8 years ago. Maybe that's why I'm not completely out of my mind on these Relic quests.

[RichardButte]

I wouldn't say boring..

I dunno. To me, if I can do something 90% asleep and/or drunk while also watching netflix, it's not engaging me and is therefore boring.

Not that YOU said this, but a lot of people don't seem to understand the difference between "challenging" and "tedious". If it has a skill check, meaning that you need a reasonable amount of competency as a player to accomplish it, it's challenging. If the ONLY thing separating you from achieving whatever it is is TIME, it's tedious.

There were some things that were probably even more grindy than this questline in Aion, like grinding up piles of Balur parts, but you did it in the abyss where an enemy player could jump you at any moment so it DEFINITELY wasn't boring.

You know whatever it is is boring when getting ganked while doing it might actually IMPROVE the experience...

[Battlewrench]

I dunno. To me, if I can do something 90% asleep and/or drunk while also watching netflix, it's not engaging me and is therefore boring.

Not that YOU said this, but a lot of people don't seem to understand the difference between "challenging" and "tedious". If it has a skill check, meaning that you need a reasonable amount of competency as a player to accomplish it, it's challenging. If the ONLY thing separating you from achieving whatever it is is TIME, it's tedious.

There were some things that were probably even more grindy than this questline in Aion, like grinding up piles of Balur parts, but you did it in the abyss where an enemy player could jump you at any moment so it DEFINITELY wasn't boring.

You know whatever it is is boring when getting ganked while doing it might actually IMPROVE the experience...

To be fair, I've done a number of hard mode and ex dungeons drunk / asleep and still made it through healing them.....Take that as you will. Bad quest is bad though.

[RichardButte]

To be fair, I've done a number of hard mode and ex dungeons drunk / asleep and still made it through healing them.....Take that as you will. Bad quest is bad though.

Ah, but were you Netflixing at the time as well?

IMO, healing the Midgardsomr fight is the minimum level of challenge tht any fight should have, including the between quests for the relic weapon (if there were any, I mean).

[IfritReborn]

At least add some damn story/lore to these relic quests to keep it somewhat engaging.

As it is now there's nothing relic/ancient/legendary about it. Oops I lied, it's actually a legendary waste of time and an ancient bore.

[RichardButte]

At least add some damn story/lore to these relic quests to keep it somewhat engaging

I think this might actually get me the most: if the legendary weapon chain was even half as interesting as the Hildebrand questline, it might actually be tolerable.

As it stands, it has an uncharacteristic lack of storyline, actually...

[Zfz]

Being working towards my first Animus the past few days and its...boring. Plus the story is just lacking. There's a minimal superficial story, but it has no depth. We can only stop at the surface and there's no way to dig deeper into it.

Yes the whole idea of books is acceptable, 3 dungeons per book is acceptable, doing FATEs and Leves are acceptable. What I find boring is repeating all these 9 times and the pattern starts to show itself in a very bad way.

Every book sends me to the same places, just slightly different mobs. That's seriously boring. It's become just a laundry list. I want some variation. For example the Fire books could focus on more mob grinding, the Water books could be dungeon grinding, the Wind books could put up Leve quest goals, and the Earth book could be FATEs. It will feel much less monotonous this way because there isn't an obvious pattern of 1 low level, 1 high level, and 1 end-game dungeon for every book.

Imagine the original relic organized so that we kill 8 mobs in South Thanalan, then do Ifrit HM, then meld 1 materia and hand that in. Then we kill 8 mobs in South Thanalan again, do Garuda HM, and meld 1 materia and hand that in. Then we kill 8 mobs in...you get the idea. It becomes like a daily (or weekly, if you want).

Small scale repetition like "kill X of this mob" is just repetition. But repeating the same "workflow" is monotony. In putting the "same variety" in each book, you kill off the variety.

And RNG...it's perhaps about time we put a cap on the RNG. The drop possibility increases slightly each time we do something, giving us a reasonable expected number of times would be great. After all, it is a game, and getting bad streaks is life, not game.

[Meier]

Relics were nice in 1.0 and when the game first came out. Then...they became something to keep old content relevant.

Thankfully SE said that they know we want boss fights and Yoshida was all for putting back in boss fights instead of this reused old content junk we have now.

[IfritReborn]

Relics were nice in 1.0 and when the game first came out. Then...they became something to keep old content relevant.

Thankfully SE said that they know we want boss fights and Yoshida was all for putting back in boss fights instead of this reused old content junk we have now.

When did he say this? Please provide me a source I would really like to believe you on this

[Welsper59]

We're honestly at a point of the game where content is overly abundant. Not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, the good outweigh the bad noticeably, but it changes the approach people have with content. Besides certain straight forward activities, the grind aspect of traditional MMORPGs is taboo. Things are readily available now, but being bottlenecked to the point of tedium. Mind you, this is NOT a comment on lockouts and raid specific gear. This is simply a remark on development philosophy.

I can appreciate the grind, but the grind only truly existed on the players terms. With Atma, it was about as close as this game got to the old grind. It honestly felt very nostalgic. When you reached Animus, it was back to the newer model, where the focus was the end, not your actual progress. An example of what I'm getting at is player reaction while progressing between both Atma and Animus. Did you cheer when you killed 10 of X mobs for your book? Heck, did you cheer when you finished a book? Maybe, but probably not. Did you cheer when you finally got that one Atma? I'm willing to bet you did. THAT is the feeling of the old grind. You appreciated every progressive outcome of the grind. The thing is though, it was no longer on our terms once the Atma step was complete.

When you start to force players into grouping with each to support this grind, that's where it starts to weigh heavily on us, even from old school MMORPG standards. We no longer have the choice to play by our terms, but are forced to submit to not just the system, but other players. The grind is daunting enough that we don't need to be harassed, griefed, or otherwise subjected to failure because of someones intentional attempts to ruin the play of everyone (not just the relic goer). Due to the system this game follows, and the point of content we are currently at, the style of grind that the relic weapons are do not promote much in the way of "fun". Truth be told, the relic weapons (Zodiac) are a testament to ones accomplishments in getting it. There's no denying that. But we're not playing a game that keeps these items on level of importance (like FFXI, vanilla WoW, etc). The relic weapons are constantly changing along side newly introduced weapons that are generally better or more efficient to obtain. The bragging rights are nowhere near as satisfying for this reason, and as a result, it's not so much the weapon as it is your journey that you brag about. "I endured more of a PITA method to obtain a weapon than others"... grats? Even the lore behind them in XIV is rather lackluster. Godbert's hammer strikes me as far more interesting of a weapon to wield.

I'm not aiming to demean anyone's accomplishments, in fact, I extend an honest admiration to them. I'm just pointing out that, while it was fine in 1.0 and the first half of ARR, the lack of a shift in design philosophy (to compliment how much content is available). This isn't so much a jab at what is required, so much as it is a lack of intent to change what worked. We don't need more people to do FATEs. We don't need more random people doing relic quests to queue for early dungeons (since there's a very high chance that any 50s you encounter aren't there for relic). Keep in mind, I say that within some context. Of course there's a need for people to queue, but the amount of people who do them for relic isn't exactly the sole reason why people actually get a queue.