How would your Anima Questline look like?

[UnstablePersonality]

People will never do coil. I'm sure they'd do CT again if it had purpose, though.

That's why I said either.

[Dhex]

Step 1;

Travel into the depths of Azyz Lla to retrieve potent ancient materials; Shattered
Allagan (Weapon Type) - Solo ver. of The Fractal Continuum Dungeon.

Travel to several locations throughout Dravania & Coerthas seeking out ancient
Dragons for lore about crafting Weapons of Eld - Call a Council of Elder Dragons.

Complete a series of trials to prove you are worthy of their knowledge; defeat the Elder Dragons in a series of three battles - 4-man, 8-man, and 16-man encounters.

Reward - i200 weapon

Step 2; (Can be skipped w/ Zeta turn-in.)

Gather five Tier V materia. (240 Brass Sky Pirate Spoils)

Complete; (Old dungeons can be whatever but has to be Unsync. & Solo) Ex: Quicksand Caves, Aurum Vale, D. Darkhold with your weapon equipped. (Unsync. solo)

Speak with each of the Guildmasters. Return to Gerolt with your findings.

Reward; Pick custom secondary/addtional stats.

Step 3;

Complete; Alexander Gordias (x1) (Unbreakable Gordian Rivets) w/ Weapon Equipped
Complete; Ifrit EX, Titan EX, Garuda EX, Leviathan EX, Ramuh EX, Shiva EX (Ever-Molten Ore, Undying Flame, Whirlwind Bellows, Deep-sea's Quench, Levin Spark, Diamond Dust) w/ Weapon Equipped.

Return your weapon to Gerolt; your weapon awakens.

Battle your awoken weapon to prove yourself worthy of wielding it's power. (1-man encounter)

Reward; i210 Weapon

[RyuDragnier]

A few ideas I had just as I've been doing the fates:

1. Playing off the original relic quest a bit: EXPLORE the Diadem for your weapon's components. Maybe it's in the caves. Maybe it's in a buried coffer. It's DEFINITELY there, but you have to find the pieces to have it constructed. This would encourage more than the usual dino-zerg, and introduce actual exploration to the Diadem.

2. Regional/Lore-based logic: White Mage? Run the Amdapor instances to find your relic piece. Machinist? Infiltrate a Castrum for Magitek components. Paladin? Perhaps your relic piece could be buried within the Sunken Temple of Qarn, or one of the many Sil'dihn/Belahdian ruins in the open world? Something different and INTERESTING for everyone.

3. Playing off the Last Ones mechanic in Lightning Returns: A bit grindy, but not FATE oriented; players are given a set target within different areas and through eliminating more and more of that type of creature, you give rise to a demi-primal of sorts. Essentially, you'd create an NM that successfully defeating awards you with the "soul" of said creature within your weapon.

Most if not all of these ideas are half-formed, but would still be at least more interesting than Atma 3.0, dungeon bucket list, and component/craft grind.

Best suggestions I've seen here. Though for Step 3 I can think of something a little more out of the book. Solo instance fight against the manifestation of the anima weapon's souls itself. Basically using all you know at your class to defeat it and help pull out more of its power. This would be a bit hard to balance for, but I think setting them at the level 60 job quest difficulty would work...except the minimum ilvl requirement is i180. So it'd prove a challenge while at the same time soft nerfing it as more ilvl equipment is released. That or make it a special trial similar to how Chimera and Hydra were.

PS: Remove the character limit already SE, we can already bypass it via editing, it's a nuisance to have.

[Whocareswhatmynameis]

Step 1: Login
Step 2: Do something really easy for a few hours
Step 3: Get lvl 210 weapon in one or two days
~"80% of FF14 NA community"

[Eloah]

Why couldnt they make they use the primals in the relic, that would of been a bit different, but similar to the original and wouldn't feel as horrible as the item stage. The last step is the worst since, while its not a give, it basically would "force" people to bjy the items and posible buy gil to get the items. If the items were 1x and non-specialist, yeah maybe okay, but 4 all HQ and specialist only, SE must be smoking something.

[Granyala]

I'm not sure why that even matters, SE and everyone who has sense knows full well that all that is just the "start" and no one is going to do the crystals only and then call it a day, as the next step which is incredibly easy dungeon runs will get you to 200 quicker then that 170.

Because it is idiotic to put HOURS of work into something that is vastly inferior than what you already had for months?!

Do you value your free time so little, that you need further explanations on this?

The first step would have made perfect sense if this questline had been released with Heavensward. Now it's simply "we want you to waste 5-10 hours of playtime (depending on RNG luck) just because we can".

[WellFooled]

One thing that I appreciate about the Anima quest's 2nd step is that there are little bits of story between the dungeons. It kepts the intrigue up, which motivates you to continue, because each new dungeon held with it the chance to see a new cut scene. I would appreciate it if the longer steps were broken up with cut scenes and story in them to help keep things moving. As it is now there won't be any story progression during step 3 for what will likely be months.

[Nihility]

The thing i think a lot of people completely glaze over is this is FFXIV; a game that not only allows but encourages you to play every class
at the rate this quest goes it will be an all consuming task to keep up anything more than a single one when someone could potentially want all 12

the way it was done for the first ones was just about perfect it had you doing a bunch of interesting things and you got a top end weapon.
Then the time consuming 3 weeks to upgrade to zenith didn't actually take too much actual time and involved high end content you would want to do anyways

it got you into the weapons and then the maintenance of keeping it up was the grindy stuff

It never mattered if it wasn't super time consuming because you have so many classes to do it for

Another thing I feel is worth noting is if they have a need to bribe people into doing content, the content itself is the problem and should be looked at.
Old content should not be a requirement either, doing it for no reason than "the quest told me to" is pretty silly
the level 50 dungeons actually have decent pop times in the duty finder anyways and didn't need to be boosted

they could have very easily done something more streamlined

exploration: go to this area and search for a base item
fates and hunting: go do a fate in each HW zone for a drop and hunt some A rank mobs in HW zones for soul energy
dungeons: do a few HW dungeons for items that drop off end bosses or are sparklies to interact with
trials: fight a boss or two like the hydra fight
have some solo things woven in like how story driven instanced fights and world fights occur

etc etc like so, most importantly no RNG. You do the task and you get credit for it

The point is to make it feel like your doing some heroic questline
as it is now it's like "dig a 6 foot deep hole with this garden trowel, now dig another 6 foot deep hole, now fill the first hole with the dirt from the second and the second with the dirt from the first"

[Selli]

Step 1:
I'd change this to 1 crystal per zone, honestly. Yeah this step is skipable, but the i80->i90 relic encouraged people to get all the classes to 50 for titles and easy end-game weapons. I think having a fairly easy i200 would encourage people to try out more classes and considering the changes the jobs went through from 50->60, I think it'd be worth it to make this step a bit easier for the sake of having people try out the new jobs and differences in existing ones.

Step 2:
I'd keep this the same.

Step 3:
Since SE doesn't want us to get the relic in one day (which is understandable), I'd keep that idea but make it a bit easier.

I'd add the rewards to Roulettes. To get your relic you need to run each roulette 14 times (so two weeks if you do them all 8 in one day) or longer if you can only do 1-2 a day. This way no one could "rush" their relic and at the same time it's still friendly to those who are more casual and have a heavy work schedule/busy household. And then when the nerf comes (which happens when the next relic step comes out), just put it at 7 instead of 14.

And I'd also put the stupid items in the Key Items menu and make them un-sellable so they don't take up inv space and people stop QQing Idyllshire about how they accidentally sold them.

[Asaya]

For example: "Sastasha Normal within 15 Minutes" or "Beat Ifrit Normal within 5 Minutes"

great idea - i've done it before solo - Novus > Nexus