Atmas.

[Laerad3993]

What exactly are people hoping for?

Anything other than FATES.

Atma had a ridiculous drop rate, and it was attached to content everyone I personally know, and a majority of posts on the forums state, disliked, all for the sake of forcing us to help"New/low" players.

The same goes for the books. Who the heck wants to sit and do NOTHING for 2 hours or more for a FATE to spawn?

I waited 7 hours for hero of the 2nd or wtfe it is called.

Didn't hate books. Didn't hate lights. Didn't hate dungeon low drop chance items.

Hated FATES.

[Ageofwar]

We also don't know what step we can skip with the use of our Zeta weapons, it might be this step with the crystals

[Reynhart]

I'm pretty sure Dhorme Chimaira can be considered a "battle waged on Coerthas central highlands"

[Gunspec]

People don't want books. They don't want RNG. I'm almost certain people would complain if there were lights. What exactly are people hoping for?

Lights were bad when there were 2000 required for nexus, AFTER the nexus weapon was no longer relevant. A long hurdle in the middle of the relic quest that only boosted the weapon by a measely 5 ilevels. Mahatma lights were a lot better, since the process was shorter overall, it was worth 10 ilevels instead of 5, and you felt faster progress due to the lights being split across 12 items.

Books and 2.0 daily hunts had the terrible mechanic of waiting for a specific fate to spawn. That sometimes meant waiting in one spot (because the fate icon for some, like "taken" "tower of power" and "enemy of my enemy" didn't appear on the zone map) for as long as 2 hours. Waiting is not content.

And RNG is nasty when you can theoretically farm for 50 straight hours and not anywhere close to finishing. 2.2 atma drop rates, and to a lesser extent, zodiac dungeon items, ticked off those unlucky souls who had to fail a hundred times before they succeeded.

The 2.X relic had a lot of good ideas, just taken to a bit of an extreme for the sake of padding the game content. When you consider where and how they've applied nerfs to the old questlines, I think the FFXIV is aware of some of the problems in the old quests. Fingers crossed they do a better job this time.

I'm pretty sure Dhorme Chimaira can be considered a "battle waged on Coerthas central highlands"

You think they are adding 6 new trials in a .05 patch? I'm not even going to look for a "let me laugh harder" image. At most, they will be drops from the special "boss" fates like darkscale and "let's buy a zoo", but that could be worse than atma, since I've still never seen a few of those pop. Or maybe they come from hunt mobs... S ranks you will never see. Yeah, just give me atma.

[Belhi]

Anything other than FATES.

Atma had a ridiculous drop rate, and it was attached to content everyone I personally know, and a majority of posts on the forums state, disliked, all for the sake of forcing us to help"New/low" players.

The same goes for the books. Who the heck wants to sit and do NOTHING for 2 hours or more for a FATE to spawn?

I waited 7 hours for hero of the 2nd or wtfe it is called.

Didn't hate books. Didn't hate lights. Didn't hate dungeon low drop chance items.

Hated FATES.

Ok, so no FATEs or Books.

Then what exactly? This is the thing. People keep demanding something 'fresh' but the problem is with such vague feedback the devs are left taking shots in the dark. The Gold Saucer stuff and the Diadem were early attempts at the devs trying something new and people post saying 'they should have just spent the time making a third dungeon'.

So I'd genuinely suggest people actually start discussing what they would want. Relics have to be time consuming cause that's both the point of them and the reason they can be competitive with High level raid drops.

Lots of people keep telling the devs what they don't like. So what is it you do like? What gets you playing FF14 and MMOs in general in the first place? The devs need positive feedback as well as negative.

The 2.X relic had a lot of good ideas, just taken to a bit of an extreme for the sake of padding the game content. When you consider where and how they've applied nerfs to the old questlines, I think the FFXIV is aware of some of the problems in the old quests. Fingers crossed they do a better job this time.

The nerfs came in after the relevance of the weapon dropped. Now you can do those 2000 lights in about 4 solid hours.

When the weapon is current its going to be very time consuming. That's because they are usually on scale with the very best weapons available in the game and having a weapon on par with something from the last boss in Savage for anything less than either a lot of time or a lot of skill is unbalanced.

Although we have little to go off, it looks like this anima weapon will have multiple but smaller steps rather than one grand one like the others have. So there likely will be something like Atmas but a lot less. It looks like there will be a crafting component you have to get and also its likely that there will be something you have to get from the beast tribes that you can only buy with currency earned in the Beast tribe dailies.

Personally if it is like this I will think its a step in the right direction. Multiple smaller steps with different goals is better than one monolithic overarching I personally think.

[Laerad3993]

...

If they had tied atma to any and all dungeon content, even the extreme primals, I wouldn't have complained. I like playing with people. That's a reason I play this MMO.

At least you have a fair chance at an atma that way, being in an 8m group in a dungeon, as opposed to not, and running up as 100 people just zerged and annihilated the FATE before you could get any credit. Hunts anyone?

Now do that for 12-14 hours a day everyday for 10 days straight. Fun? What about the people that took even longer?

[Eidolon]

Guys, I wanna say that - let's wait a little before we bring out our pitchforks.

For one thing, this is a fate that Yoshi-P himself would skip, "Given the chance"
We are given that chance, if we have the zeta.

Considering we can skip it, I doubt it's gonna actually be that bad.

[Reynhart]

You think they are adding 6 new trials in a .05 patch?

Fighting a big monster is not restricted to "trials", they could be solo fights that you pop, like in job quests.
Or, it could have been too long to add 6 new trials to 3.1, explaining why Anima weapons have been pushed back to 3.15.

I'm not saying that there's no chance we'll end with an Atma type grind, but claiming that this is definitive proof is a bit early.

What would be very ironic, though, is for the first step to be an Atmas grind worse that the initial one, and that having the Zeta finished was suddenly praised by all the people feeling that their dedication was rewarded. The same people that felt so screwed when 3.0 gave better weapons, and denied the "Zeta owner will have a head start on the next Relic" as legitimate counterpart.

[Gunspec]

Lots of people keep telling the devs what they don't like. So what is it you do like? What gets you playing FF14 and MMOs in general in the first place? The devs need positive feedback as well as negative.

The point of relics to the community is to keep content relevant for lower level players. We did fates in 2.2, because new players were struggling in zones without more experienced players running content with them. Then we did dungeons, including the early level 50 dungeons, so that fresh ilevel 50 players would have more skilled players in their parties to help them clear dungeons and score better gear. We bought items from crafters so that the crafters had something worth selling. We bought materia, so that every player in the game would suddenly have items in their possession that were worth something on the marketboard.

And when the devs couldn't come up with anything else, they had us earn light from all of the content in the game, to ensure we were out there DOING things rather than AFK in town.

It was all planned well and good for what the FFXIV devs were trying to accomplish. Low level dungeons had the occasional veteran on a relic quest who could ease 3 newbies through the fights. Most zones had a fate group running a year after 2.0 launch, which low level players could join for some xp farm alongside the veterans.

The problem was that the devs weren't designing the relic quests to AMUSE the players who were working on them. What was the satisfaction of failing to get atma 100 times in a row? Where was the satisfaction of grinding for a month just to earn enough light to get a 5 ilevel increase? Where was the fun in waiting over an hour for a specific fate that spawns only in one spot?

Overall, I think the 2.X relic questline was decent, but needed some work on the above points. The Mahatma phase was a perfect example, in my opinion, of what the Nexus phase should have been. The zodiac weapon phase had some diversity in what it required, which kept it interesting, despite the initial annoying RNG in dungeons. Even the books were kind of cool at first, until I ended up spending most of my time waiting on fates that never spawned.

[Umo]

I guess you just wanted your babble to be first reply or something :/

Posting about something we haven't even played yet... I guess you just wanted your babble to be first post or something.

PS. :/