The real reason you're mad about Anima

[Melch]

Honestly, I'd put money down that the original plan was to make Thordan drop a ilvl200 weapon, and be an overall easier fight with a bunch of the fat chewed off, but instead choose to up the difficulty and offer an ilvl205 weapon to help band-aid midcore groups that couldn't meet A3S's DPS check. Too little too late when a majority of the midcore raiding scene has already abandoned Savage and better weapons still doesn't help the fact that the latter half of Savage are bad fights on top of being hard fights.

A3S is actually a really good fight, one of the best designed. It's just that the difficulty gap between A2S and A3S is so big that it requires a huge step up from all the party members.

[Maero]

I did not expect a hand out and do not mind it for the most part (compaired to the bs that was previous Relic) but the crafting portion is the only thing annoying.
This is simply added so that players have something to do.
Also i have blm Relic atm, on the dungeon portion for my Dk and still have the skip the first step for when ever i decide to start Bard Relic

[Callback]

So what brings you to this "garbage" game then?

Duress originally. Now I'm stuck crafting till I can max those all out.

[OmegaStrongtan]

The real reason you're mad about Anima

But I'm not mad at Anima
I'm just disappointed. We had to wait forever for... this?

I'm 40/80 on my 'please don't unsub until 3.2' weapon

[Alahra]

Those complaints, once again, were not about the grind itself though. The point of that argument was that if you can't finish the relic before 3.2 (which you won't without doing all of your roulettes and beast tribes almost every day)

That's actually not true. Assuming 3.2 launches sometime in mid February, doing Expert Roulette, L60/L50 Roulette, Trials, and Main Scenario Roulette daily gets you your weapon just before that (with roughly 60 days of Roulettes). If you're actually doing Leveling Roulette as well *and* Beast Tribe Dailies every day, you'd get the weapon before it with time to spare.

There's been a lot of knee-jerk overestimating of the length of the grind on the forums. And I've seen plenty of complaining that the grind is too long for "casual" players, made under the assumption that the relic is "for" them—but the rub is that it was never intended for players with limited time to play. From the getgo of the Zodiac questline, Yoshi was clear in interviews that the questline was about investing a lot of time.

[Nalien]

Well, I'm not particularly mad about Anima, but if I had to have a complaint, it's that it is all recycled content...

"But that's always been how Relics were!"

Sure, and it was always terrible... I'm not saying I'd rather have Hydra, because I really agree with getting people to do old stuff to keep it relevant and accessible for new players, that doesn't mean it has to be entirely recycled though...

Take Beast Tribes as an example. Granted, they have nothing to do with helping flesh out old queues, but the concept is transferable. Right now we do Dailies, get more inventory-clog currency, and trade that in for the required item. That is entirely recycled, there is nothing new there, we're literally doing content from as far back as 2.1.

What I'd have done, is have the currency traded in for Coffer Keys. You then run around the Beast Tribes area looking for a Coffer to open and obtain the items from. Similar to Treasure Maps, you can even have an encounter tacked on, to actually make things interesting/challenging. Ideally, and this is where I get unrealistic as heck, the Coffers wouldn't be in, for example, Sylphlands. They'd be in entirely new zones. New zones which are essentially open world dungeons, scaled to Lv60, one for each Tribe (they all have regions we could expand into, some even have dead end gates leading there already, like the Amalj'aa) in which you can also participate in new content to obtain Coffer Keys.

Similarly, for something like dungeons, you could tag something on extra. Something which arguably improves the dungeons by breaking up the monotony. Rather than tomestones buying you the items directly, have tomestones buy you a Treasure Map, like we had with Alexandrite. The twist? The Treasure Map is in a dungeon. Rather than opening the map, going to Western Coerthas Highlands, and soloing it, you're opening the map, going "oh, it's in Hullbreaker Isle?", queuing up for that old content and doing the map there. Terrible idea? Well, people are certainly terrible, but it shouldn't be too hard to add rewards such that people will want to slow their Hullbreaker Isle run down to do the map.

Imagine if you could, for example, queue for Crystal Tower, only to have someone spawn an extra boss, which defeating nets everyone extra rewards (and the spawner their unidentified whocares). It would spice up the currently linear runs, and make them more rewarding for all involved. Might want to avoid putting that in Crystal Tower, since a few out of 24 could all want to spawn it and you'd time out doing just that, but there is a fairly easy solution to that; Keep the spawn item in players inventories after spawning the extra boss. When the boss is defeated, it drops its alliance rewards and leaves behind a "thing" that players can trade their spawn item to to get their individual reward. That way 10 people can have the spawn item, but it only needs to be spawned once.

I mean heck, at its simplest this is exactly what they did with Alexandrite, and I liked Alexandrite for that. Hated it for the materia, but doing old content so I could pop something "new"? Great. They should have expanded upon that concept, not recycled the bloody Zodiak quest... You know what would work better than "Bring me this HQ item"? Hakutaku Eye Clusters. That is how you keep crafting relevant without pissing off nearly everyone.

[Umbreon_skystorm]

I'm not mad, I just love to get some popcorn and read this post with ppl complaining :3
I'm fine searching a way to get more money to buy the HQ items

[Vivi_Bushido]

Let's prepare ourselves for this.

3.0 content books are next.