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

Originally Posted by KaitlanKela

Hey girl, congrats!

I agree with your complaints about the grind but most of them are minor to me except the 1.stats issue (seriously, they better fix that with the materia/customization step) and the 2.crafting issue (I know they want to encourage crafting, but they should have made it faster or easier for crafters, not a gate for everyone). Hopefully they will respond to that criticism, but I'm not holding my breath.
You make a good point about having to postpone other things you like to do in game to focus on it. That is actually really sad and I bet you're thrilled that it's over (I would be)! BUT, at the same time you sacrificed those other things to meet your self-imposed time goal for raiding. It's not like everyone is forced to sacrifice things they love by DESIGN; they will just get the relic a little slower. Throwing your face against it (while I'm glad that's an option and it's not time-gated like eso) kinda is against the grain so-to-speak and there will be consequences for choosing to do it that way. Just a thought.

Thanks It's very true, the goal was self inflicted. That said, it was also strongly encouraged by the design of the game. They've made weapons be the most important factor in your DPS with weapon damage being value so much more than everything else. They then implemented a huge jump in difficulty on A3S and gated the weapons equivalent to the relic behind it. So, by their design, they made this a huge priority item.

Ultimately, this is how I can see the whole relic process being better, now that I've had a chance to complete it fully:
1. Provide more options to obtain items (GC Seals, WolfMarks etc etc)
2. Allow pre-items to interchange (i.e. allow one to make 1 item from maybe Alex 1 5 runs + roulettes or seals if they want etc) - this will help alleviate burnout on doing the same thing over and over.
3. Make the crafting an option to help speed up the process, but allow for you to grind out more items in it's stead.
4. More adequately balance the time investment for each alternative method. Alex was far faster than any other method. This will allow people to move around and do various things, again alleviate burnout.
5. Release the relic in a more appropriate time. 170 should have been 180 and released on 3.0. 200 should have been released on 3.05. 210 should have been released with 3.1.
6. Allow customized stats, but not with Materia. This just makes CRIT materia cost an arm and a leg.
7. Incorporate more of a story of how you are building your weapon. This could include part 6, i.e. in order to add crit you need to complete X objective, or DET complete y objective etc - and have the objectives make logical lore sense to the stat.
8. Just... make a better story. I know you can do it (see 2.4, 2.5, 2.55, 3.0, Hildebrand etc).
9. Being as we are building a weapon, it would actually be neat if we build it's design (at least in part) too. Allow us to modify it's appearance in size/color, addons etc.
10 (maybe?). Time gate it. If you want it to be a time investment, instead of making us run 620 runs of Alex - maybe make it that you run 100, but you can only do 25 max per week (or whatever). This will help alleviate burnout, make it a long term goal, and allow you to have time for other game interests.

EDIT: Just adding that I think the above would be modifications to the current system that would work; however, i think a completely different and more fun and engaging system would be better.