Thread: The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

Originally Posted by Ibi

No, what makes them valuable is that they're far and away the best weapon you can get without raiding and, in many cases, on par with or superior to the weapons you can get from raiding.

This in itself seems to be a problem they noticed and are now going to fix. From the OP:

Similar to Zodiac weapons, Anima weapons are based on the following concepts.

• Will not be the strongest weapon at the same time as the rewards for clearing the hardest difficulty content.
• Clearing the hardest difficulty content will not require you to obtain Zodiac/Anima weapons.
• Creating these weapons will require you to put in effort over a longer period of time.

Originally Posted by RiceisNice

Except that isn't a problem (or at least they are making it out to be a problem and making a big deal out of it when it shouldn't affect content release), and literally everything they've said in the bullet point is already in effect. All it really does is justify why they made it so grindy, and never touched in why they insist in utilizing existing, old 2.x content for 3.x progression, which doesn't really line up with how long they've delayed it for because it wasn't apparently ready.

The top bullet point was a mistake they said they made, and it will be fixed future patches, so that the relic will never be the same as the max ilvl raid weapon at any time. Sure they can raise it to the new cap (e.g. 230) when the next tier (e.g. 250) get's released, just like what they did in 2.0, with the exception of the couple of weeks nexus was out before 2.4. They already showed how they were going to do this at launch, when they made the mistake of matching allagan and zenith (fixed in the next patch).

Originally Posted by Tint

they also raised the ilvl of the titan weapons from 70 to 80 (you got the lvl 80 relic weapon after the fight, making the ilvl 70 titan weapons useless). so not sure if pointing to the early days is really that meaningfull :x

They raised the ilvl for the specific reason that immediately after completing titan you would get the relic weapon (which was 80), which made the weapon not have any use. They have a history of changing ilvl when they feel that the content does reward appropriately. Luckly, it happens to be the case that they always adjust upwards.

Originally Posted by Alahra

Right, that's sort of my point—I don't think it was really development time at all.

Even though they seem to imply it is the case when you're looking at steps 1 and 2, there can't be any good reason to delay that except for developmental time.

And well, their idea of catch up seems to be misplaced throughout the expansion; crafted recipes, diadem, or even making the first step lower Ilvl than what was already available on 3.0s release.

Originally Posted by Alahra

Given how badly they screwed up this patch cycle, I don't think they had many good reasons to make many of the decisions they did, and so arguing that there's no good reason for them to do X or Y doesn't help much since they don't seem to have been relying on good judgement for the entire raid tier. It was probably being too cautious about the availability of better weapons relative to Savage's difficulty, and also, potentially Thordan EX. If they had released the i200 step alongside it, it might have lessened interest in the fight, and given how content-lite the game has been the past half-year, that may have concerned them.

There's also just the fact that, if they *had* released the i200 steps in 3.1, players who already had Esoterics weapons likely would have been pretty disapointed. The questline at that point would have had absolutely no use to anyone except catch up content. Given that there was a lot of excitement and buildup surrounding the release of the quest, it would have likely resulted in its own wave of anger on the forums.

None of those things amount to good reasons for the delay of the quest. What they ultimately should have done in hindsight was have the Relic be available as an alternate means of progression as early as say, 3.0, with the 170 step being available alongside Law Weapons, and the i200 step being released alongside i200 weapons. But that's something of a departure from the way the Zodiac questline functioned, what with it always being delayed relative to other options. It's just that, since they positioned part of the quest as a catch up mechanism, they really should have moved to a different philosophy for the release schedule. They didn't, likely because they were overly cautious regarding the impact of Savage's difficulty on the game as a whole, and so on.

It's a complicated mess of factors, all of which pretty much come down to Savage.

Releasing the 200 relic on esoteric launch would mess up progression. They intended for no one to have 200 weapons until the third week of esoterics.

Originally Posted by Alahra

My apologies for not going into more detail. The grind would naturally need to take a month or more to get the item if they released it immediately alongside i200 Esoterics weapons (ditto for 170 weapons alongside Law ones), or they would stagger the release in a minor patch, if they were to do something like that. I re-posted elsewhere in this thread (probably several pages back now) a sort of breakdown of the kind of thing I had in mind.

Didn't know doing 6 dungeons less than the level cap took 3 weeks, rather than 3 hours. For people who have the zeta, the first step is skipped.

Originally Posted by RiceisNice

Yet they repeat it again with nexus and high allagan, as well zeta with dreadwyrm, not just zenith with allagan.

Nexus was out in 2.38, literally a couple weeks before iLvl increase in 2.4. Zeta (lol) was at the end of ARR, where nothing matters anymore. In fact way before Zeta got released in 2.51, they already uncapped final coil.

Originally Posted by Alahra

I was suggesting that they would need to make the grind longer not keep it exactly as it is.



Nexus was out on 9/16 and patch 2.4 released on 10/28, which isn't "literally" a couple weeks in any way. Zeta was released in 2.51 on 2/24, and Final Coil was moved to the Duty Finder in Path 2.56 on 4/20, almost two full months later, which isn't "way before Zeta" at all—it's actually a significant amount of time after it.

December 8th, patch 2.45:
http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...cf56b933b99601
Final coil was unlocked. Final coil was moved to the DF at this point to remove lockout. What you are referring to is when you can queue solo. I specifically stated uncapped. Yes, coil was uncapped more than 2 months before zeta was released.