Why is "It's something to do" apparently a valid defense?

[Alahra]

-snip-

I'll agree I was hoping for more weapon-specific Lore as well, though honestly, we don't know that there won't be any. If they don't at least talk a bit about what the Anima stage is when we get it for each weapon, I'd be pretty surprised (I'm sure the text has been datamined of course, but I'm sure most people have avoided it like the plague for spoilers). It does seem like we're not remaking an old legendary weapon this time though, so in a sense we're *making* the lore--so we wouldn't get a lore dump at the start anyway.

I was also surprised by the inclusion of 2.x dungeons, though I wasn't particularly surprised by the inclusion of Snowcloak and Keeper of the Lake, since those are story dungeons. It felt really odd to me that Great Gubal Library and Fractal/Neverreap weren't included, honestly, and I would have rather had those than the 4 Hard Mode dungeons we did get. However, they probably skipped Fractal/Neverreap because people complained so much about being burnt out on them.

But most of the content used in the Anima line, outside of the dungeons for the 170-200 stage, is still "new" content that came out this raid tier, which has been par for the course with the questline ever since they introduced the Zodiac Saga during SCoB. It's almost never engaged with the absolute newest content except in indirect ways. As I said above, I'm still rather surprised Diadem doesn't have anything as of yet to do with the Anima questline, but I'd lay money that it will be involved with whatever the next stage we get in 3.2 is (if there is one in 3.2, anyway).

Beyond that, they're kind of in a catch-22: one of the longstanding complaints about the game is that it is too quick to abandon old content. The Relic's a rather effective way to create reason to run some of the older stuff, as people aren't going to run outdated content without suitable carrots (cosmetics simply aren't enough for a lot of the population). However, putting old content in the Relic line is seen as a disappointment to some players--but if they didn't, they'd also have to find suitable ways to get people interested in the *older* stuff. And they also have financial incentive to milk content for as much as they can, since the team is small--I don't mean that as an excuse for them, but just a reality of the situation. Given the team's size, we're lucky we do have so many things to do with what content we do have (hell, WoW's team is probably 3 or 4 times the size of FFXIV's, and they have *less* content).

Edit (for a brief aside on lag and Titan): Some of the complaints about lag were in part because people hadn't yet realized that you have to be out of the marked area when the *cast bar* finishes, rather than when the visible animation for it finishes. That's the case for all AoE's, but in Titan, it's of special note because of how weird Weight of the Land is. Something in its visual effect causes a lot of animation display, so it frequently displays late or lingers for a little longer, creating the appearance that it's still "safe" when it's not. Similar things actually could happen in Leviathan with the water spouts before his Dives (especially on PS3) and we haven't seen attack animations of that nature since then, either.