What MMO Grind is WORSE than relic/zodiac weapon grind?

[Rayeda]

AION farming the level 50 Fenrir's/Miragent gear. And everything else in that game. I did however love that game and the grind in it.

[SgtPepperUK]

That masochist says hi. I feel like Legendary Weapons were far more grindy when introduced in LOTRO than Virtues, merely because 1.6 million experience only from mobs with a level 60 cap was... brutal for merely one freaking level on the weapon.

Oh yeah, forgot about those. Yeah, those weapons were a complete grind too.

[Nepenthe]

Ragnarok online, the legit servers the one with x1 exp only. A Korean mmorpg
No quests, no leves and no "dailies" just pure grind from lvl 1-99 then you can transcend your character and you have to begin at lvl 1 then climb your way back to lvl 99 but it takes x3 longer to get there. That's just to max out your character

People complaining abou atma? Heh try the card grind there. There's a socket system where a monster will drop their card to enhance your equipments. Ranges from +1 atk to spell immunity and everything in between. Each monster has a different card.

What's the drop rate? .01% this includes the cards that bosses drop. Also there's no "chest or loot" system. If the monster dies it drops the items to the ground so you better pick it up. It takes around a year or two of playing it regularly just to catch up to others. That's only the tip of the iceberg XD that's old school mmo right there. It makes the relic grind a walk in the park.

This exactly! When people first started complaining about Atmas, the card grind was the first thing in my mind. Now, to clarify, RO *does* have quests that give exp, but a lot of people don't really do them anyway (they are a hidden gem on higher rates especially). And the level grind as certain classes is extremely painful. Creators are a blast to play, but leveling merchants is one of the most boring grinds I have done in an mmo. Soul Linker taekwon too. With that said you also have to craft all of your items as a Creator for attacks, and the items are all made with farmed mats.

Then there is the matter of having best in slot. You want to upgrade your items, which have a [high] chance of breaking and being lost forever, or adding slots to an item, then finding the cards. Particularly MVP cards if you're going BiS. There's also the "god" item quests involved with WoE (guild vs guild). Or the cosmetic hat quests! I have made many winter hats and lazy smokie hats over the years, and they require over 1000 items ; ;

Despite all that I absolutely loved the game, as did my friends. We played many servers of all different kinds and they all had some sort of a grind that had us work together and enjoy it, even if we didn't get even halfway to the finish line. It could get boring, but at least it felt more like an adventure than a lot of the relic grinding Regardless it's peanuts compared to that and other Korean MMOs!

[Eardstapa]

Oh yeah, forgot about those. Yeah, those weapons were a complete grind too.

What happened to make them worse? If you didn't get the desired stats or level ups, and had to start from scratch. Leveling two legendary items to have them turn out as crap... Was demoralizing.

[Slappah]

Any of the legendary weapons in WoW.

I know many people who have run the raids each week since they launched and still don't have the weapon.

I'm talkin about YEARS later. 2-4 expansions later, and they still haven't gotten the drops for the weapon.

[Noshpan]

Level grinding in every. single. Korean MMO. Ever. Even the Westernized ones.

[Xatsh]

The relic grind in XIV is honestly really really mild compared to other games. The difference is Relic in XIV is not a BIS weapon it is a solid downgrade from the BIS. Honestly everything in XIV would be considered a gear/weapon handout if you talk to people who played the original mmos.


Those that did not play XI. this is how relics worked. You get the base item (Common drop) from dynamis. Trade it in stages with dynamis currency and easy to obtain items. The last 2 stages require 1 rng drop from a higher level dynamis and the final stage is requires a dps check and boss kill of the final dyna but item is 100% drop rate.

XI the relic was honestly a joke to get in terms of content difficulty, but ungodly hard to obtain due to the sheer amount of work it took. Simple as collect a ton of dynamis currency you could even buy it from ppl. Only 1 RNG element was a single item from dyna which was about a 30% drop rate.

Issue is it was equivalent of what the average person who actively tried to make money earned in approx 2yrs. Not counting profitable high level crafters (Smithing/Gold/Cloth)... which cost about a years worth of gil to level up to cap... but they could turn out a mill gil in profits a day once they did the initial investment of 150-300mill. To put the cost in equivalent to XIV it would be paying more or less 1.5-2 billion gil for a relic. Less then 1% of the population ever completed one in XI until they nerfed the game into the ground with abysea and following updates.

The reward was a weapon that litteraly changed how your job worked. It was not a simple 3-4% improvement in DPS, Ability, or dmg reduction it was gamebreaking. Double refresh potency from Brd,a near 90% overall dmg reduction for pld, increasing plds damage over time by 500% (not a typo), ability to spam solo light skill chains on sam, thfs dmg increasing by 300%, Rng being able to triple thier dmg and remove 90% of enmity generated (Tank in XI got about 1/5th the enmity generated as in XIV). These were weapons that were 2-3xs better then thier best counterpart more or less. So your honestly thousands and thousands of hours spent was well rewarded by a completely gamebreaking item.

Both Linage and EQ had weapons that were more or less equivalent to this as well, if not in some cases much worse. Like a 0.1% drop rate on a mob that spawns once a day worse.

Everything in XIV is extremly casual. leveling, Gear, Weapons, Crafting, Gathering. You can get every job in XIV to cap quicker then you could cap 1 job in XI. You can get a whole set of Top Tier Coil gear for 3 jobs rng issues included in XIV before you could get 2-3 pieces of BIS gear for a single job in XI. In XIV you fail a fight you try it again no wait. In XI you fail a fight you lose potentially up to one to two weeks of work (Real penalty) and have to start over. Average Fight in endgame XI utilized 18 ppl average fight in XIV endgame uses 8. Average raid in XIV takes 15mins once you learn it 30-40 mins for WoD, in XI the average raid took between 1.5hrs and 3hrs. Hell going from 1 city to another in XI took 5-10 RL mins if you have teleport or Airship, 30+ without.

TLDR: Everything in the mmo genre pre-wow Wrath of the Leach king was more of a grind then XIV is currently.

[kyuven]

I'd like to detail the EQ1 situation, as literally everything there was a grind.
Let's start with the first grind: leveling.
At launch and until the great WoW shake-up the idea of soloing past a certain level was, unless you were specific classes (namely Necromancer, Druid, and MAYBE Magician, Shaman, Wizard, and Bard as time went on), as foreign a concept as requiring groups to do so nowadays.
If you weren't one of the above classes, you grouped to get EXP. And this wasn't the fun dungeon crawls we have today. You plopped your ass down in a safe spot and killed things in a fixed area, one at a time, until you leveled up. Then you moved on to the next area where you repeated the process. FFXI players had it the same way.
The original level cap was 50, and it took several months to get that far, namely because of the following two gameplay "innovations": Experience loss upon death, and corpse retrieval. And now you know why camps were in safe areas.
And then you have raiding. Once you hit the cap, you pretty much continued doing group content, except this stuff would be more involved and actually difficult, with the same exp loss and corpse retrieval risk.
Now, back then there was ZERO instancing. The very concept was a pipe dream until 2003. What did this mean? Well...let's put it in perspective for you: Imagine that every single endgame boss was a Hunt target that spawned once or twice a week, tops. This meant that only ONE piece of a certain boss's gear would enter the game per server per week.
Then they added AA points.
Oh, did I mention the level cap is now over 100? With literally THOUSANDS of AA points you need to spend to be viable? Free accounts have a cap of 1200. It's not even close to enough.
Now, to top this all off, there were the epic quests. Each of these quests would result in a weapon that was usually the best weapon available to a class, or had an effect that made it extremely valuable. For example, the Cleric epic weapon could be activated to cast a mana-free resurrection effect. To put it in perspective, this was like mana-free Raise, with the addition of restoring 96% of the lost EXP. This is STILL one of the most worthwhile items in the game to get, even almost 15 years after it entered the game. Other ones range in value from "nice to have" to "nigh-worthless," but they all share one important aspect:
They require drops off monsters that spawn once a week, require(d) a raid to get to, and required a raid to kill. Moreover, some of the items dropped were for multiple epic quests, and some mobs ONLY dropped a piece for a specific one. For the cleric one, due to its value, people bent over backwards to help the clerics, and since theirs only involved one contested mob (all the others for the quest had a spawn time measured in hours and could be done with a single group) that required a cleric to actually activate.
So yeah, you had to fight mobs that required a ton of people, only spawned once a week, and may not actually drop your piece (though after a while, all mobs that COULD drop epic pieces were fixed to do so every time) and even if it DID, there was a strong chance you'd have to compete with someone else for it.
And then in 2004, they added the Epic 1.5 and 2.0 quests. Fortunately, these actually used instances and force spawned mobs with low respawn timers.
I myself have completed about 4 of the epic weapons. one of them was when they were new, the other 3 were long after they had become obsolete. Even with no competition, the amount of running around and waiting for stuff to spawn was unbelievable.

[Thayos]

In addition to that, more than one group could not enter a particular dynamis zone simultaneously. So often you would have to wait for another group to finish before you could start. Many servers had an unofficial dynamis schedule but there were still plenty of groups that completely ignored these schedules if their group could not adhere to the times available.

Many of those rogue hijackers of Dynamis zones eventually moved to Eorzea; they're now known as "early pullers."

[Chihaya]

Eh... FFXIV relic stuff is so casual compared to all the other games I played before... FFXI, AION, TERA, and fking Dudu in PSO2 stealing all my Grinders QQ