Fresh lvl 50

[TyrErlieden]

Hey just got 50 and reading up on the net in how to go about gearing my dragoon. Seems that you need to do a quest for your relic weapon but I'm confused that it's only ilvl 90 and I just bought an ilvl 115 spear off the broker . so are the relics obsolete now. Also as far as real gear I guess its poetic tomebstone grind from here on out correct?

Thanks ahead of time for any tips on how to get this done

[Eye_Gore]

The relic is upgradeable through a long quest chain all the way to ilvl135, i think it was 135. It is a long grind.

If you plan on getting the xpac, I probably wouldn't upgrade it more than the atma phase as your first new weapon in the xpac will exceed it.

[TyrErlieden]

Are you talking about the new majestic gear by chance? Is this gear just given through main quests of the exoansion?

[Eye_Gore]

Its gear that you would get from doing the MSQ and side quests in the expansion, plus its HQ also. It will exceed all gear from 2.0 except the Iron works (poetic) gear, but then thats only good until maybe around level 55ish in the expansion.

[Niwashi]

Relics have gone from being top end gear to being intermediate gear useful for starting on the expansion. That said, the first few upgrade stages are easy enough to still be worthwhile. The Novus stage (the one where you need to successfully add 75 materia) is still going to be ridiculously expensive if you don't have all the materia stockpiled already, so you might want to stop at that point, but I'd recommend going up through either the Atma or perhaps Animus stage. Those are i100. (Animus has better stats than atma, but both are identified as the same item level.) Going all the way to Zeta (i135) is probably only for those who want to complete things for the sake of completing them, though.



Here's a rundown of the process as I understand it (though I've only gotten through the first few stages myself so far):

Getting the initial relic involves 5 trials, a dungeon, and a few open-world mobs, along with a bit of running around (particularly if you need to unlock those trials). Fairly involved, but also interesting, and you'll want some of those trials unlocked later anyway. To me, a job just doesn't feel complete without this step, which also gives you a job-specific title. (I'm "The Godsbow" and "The Shadow" so far.) It sure helps that trial queue times are currently pretty fast, even for DPS jobs.

Relic -> Zenith is just a turn in, trading your relic and some Thavnairian Mist (purchasable for a few Poetics) for Zenith. It's so trivially easy I wonder why they even included it as an upgrade step.

Zenith -> Atma involves running FATEs in each of 12 regions. (This used to be really grindy back when drop rates were low, but now drop rates have been raised high enough to make this a fairly quick and easy step.)

Atma -> Animus is more involved again, with 9 animus books that each involve dungeons, FATEs, leves, and mobs. I've only gotten as far as atma myself so far, but so far as I've heard, the frustrating part of this is that the FATEs needed are specific FATEs so you have to wait for the right ones to spawn. (Aside from that, the rest is a fair amount to do, but each part pretty easy, rather like the initial relic quest.)

Animus -> Novus This is the stage where you need alexandrite and materia, lots of them. SE has made the alexandrite cheaper to make this step a bit easier, but there's no nerfing the need for all that materia, which keeps this a pretty expensive step unless you have a big stockpile of it. It would take a dedicated completionist to still invest so much in a weapon that's no longer endgame relevant.

Novus -> Nexus You need to earn "Light" which is essentially a currency unique to this relic stage. You can get it from a wide array of activities (dungeons, trials, FATEs, Treasure Hunt, Alexandrite Maps, PvP), at least some of which you'd likely be doing anyway.

Nexus -> Zodiac I think of this as the "collect tons of stuff" stage. Based off a wiki, you need "over 400k gil, 80k Company Seals, 1600 Allagan Tomestone of Poetics, drops from 16 dungeons, 8 3-star HQ crafted items, many desynthesis items and some miscellaneous items." Umm... yeah. It's probably a good thing only dedicated completionists would get this far anyway.

Zodiac -> Zeta Awaken 12 different mahatmas with 50 poetics and 40 light points each, the light obtainable from dungeons and trials. Anyone who goes as far as Zodiac should finish off Zeta just because who would stop at the second to last stage?

[Waveon]

snip

Holy... That's a ridiculous grind. Is there any reason to do this aside for, as you said, the sake of completing them? I would say glamour is a reason, but you could save time and just buy the weathered versions.

[m3eansean]

Holy... That's a ridiculous grind. Is there any reason to do this aside for, as you said, the sake of completing them? I would say glamour is a reason, but you could save time and just buy the weathered versions.

There was a point in time when these weapons were BiS for about 3 months, so yes, there was a point to complete them. Also for their 2 year lifetime of upgrades, they were always a competitive weapon (persistently left 5 ilevels behind the current best-tier raid weapon however, so that some wouldn't get upset from "casuals" accessing the strongest weapon outside of a raid). You get a nifty title too ^^

[Velisra]

Holy... That's a ridiculous grind. Is there any reason to do this aside for, as you said, the sake of completing them? I would say glamour is a reason, but you could save time and just buy the weathered versions.

Weathered versions?

[Niwashi]

I would say glamour is a reason, but you could save time and just buy the weathered versions.

Weathered versions?

There are weathered weapons, but not weathered versions of relic weapons.

For relics, there's an unfinished version you get during one of the earlier steps of the initial quest and its appearance looks just like the completed relic, just lower stats. You can buy another copy of your relic weapon from the calamity salvager if you've already earned it in-game before. Or if you've gotten through the entire upgrade chain through zeta, then you can buy replicas of the zodiac weapons. But you can't buy a relic (or replica of it) if you haven't earned it.

[TyrErlieden]

O.o fk me. I grinded for 3 hrs last night titan hm and almost have the poetics to buy the ironworks spear. I think that's the way I'll go