At this rate it'll take ages for me to 200-210 my relic.

[Ebonwings]

As the people said here, don't rush step 3 is a grind fest. Just alternate between beast tribes, dailies,hunts, Alex/CT and you will be done in no time. I completed my relic already and not going after second one... Too much trouble to go through for step 3...

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I'm almost done with my 3rd set of items, and I haven't really been grinding them. A friend and I have been getting them through our normal daily playing, its not overly awful.

[Fynlar]

I'm not even sweating 3.x relics until they nerf this step way down, because this one quest is utterly ridiculous for what it gives you.

I'm almost done with my 3rd set of items, and I haven't really been grinding them.

No, you have been. You maybe just tolerate it enough that you don't notice.

It's not really possible to have that many by now unless you grind them.

[CarnivalNights]

I really don't understand why anyone would complain on how long it takes.

You're given the option of getting a high tier weapon without having to raid. Do you have any idea how much time and effort raiders put into achieving end-game goals? All you have to do are a few dungeons a bunch of times which requires nowhere near the commitment, effort and skill raiding does to get a weapon equal to what the raiding scene strives for.

Think of this as just another way of earning something, this one through time and effort as opposed to skill, time and effort raiding requires.

[Kaurie]

Yeh I just got my sch 200 relic and was greeted with the really fun 210 relic part, they want me to grind 14 thousand estorics for half the materials, then if that wasn't enough they want me to grind 14 thousand poetics for the other half, if you do the math it works out to over a year if you play everyday, no glamour is worth that much time no matter how sparkly it looks.

If your math is to be believed, you get less than 38 esoterics and 38 poetics per day if you play every day. [14,000/365 = 38.35]

I am assuming you mean if you do your roulettes?
Expert: Esoterics (60) + Esoterics (80)
60: Esoterics (100) + Estoerics (30-60)
50 Esoterics (120) + Poetics (100) + Poetics (20-100)
Leveling: Esoterics (100)
Trial: Esoterics (60) + Poetics (0-20) + Esoterics (0-12)
Main Scenario: Esoterics (120) + Poetics (10)
Frontline: Esoterics (60) + Esoterics (20)

(Ranged values are due to depending which instance you get, for the below calculation, I used the middle value)

So that gives you ~771 esoterics and 180 poetics per day. That takes ~18 days for esoterics, and 77 days for Poetics.

That said, there are many many other ways to get your pieces and tomestones. Hunts and Beast Tribes are great ways to do this.

[Vaer]

If you try to binge it, you're probably gonna have a bad time unless your grind tolerance is high.

I would do roulettes daily and leave it at that, and buy items using the eso and roulette tomes you get while capping lore.
Beast tribes I would wait 2 weeks they are gonna buff the rep gains unless you have them all at max rank already then do them every day. Really fast way to get items if you do 4 sets of them every day for very little effort. Pretty much kill mobs in seconds, click on some stuff, only crap part is some of the FATEs but most of them spawn pretty quickly.

The real sticking point is really the crafted items if you don't have any gil but you can sell the materia from beast tribes or the weekly V from void ark to buy them if you need to.

Depending on the next relic step and how grindy it is there will be more people playing grinding the new step.

[VirusChris]

People who raid and are highly skill are capable of getting the best weapon within a few weeks and Casual who do the Tomes can get Lore Weapons in 7 weeks.

It took me since December to May to finally get the NIN Relic Weapon for my main and it's such a "weak" weapon compared to its Raid and Lore counterparts which is why I continue to use the Lore and glamoured over it with my i230 Relic. It's a longer grind than most weapons in this game for a lot of people and some of the Relic are NOT on par on the Raid weapons. I recall Yoshi-P saying that Relics will NEVER be as good as Raid Weapons after the Zenith Weapon during Coil and thus the Relic was weaken and then only at the end of it's questline does it match or be superior to the Raid Weapon.

Then you got the Crafting items on top of it as well. Some people don't like to craft and some of the items are gated behind Diadem which in the Primal server I hardly see more than 3 other people queing for it randomly and I can't get any with PF.

I do everything and it still feels too much for one step even though I did take it nice and slow to do it. I don't plan on doing another HW Relic until this step is nerf to a more reasonable level, though I continue to do the BT Quests to earn some of the tokens for the future and I finally got all my Crafting classes to 60 so I can make the items myself (but I need to get the gear to make them too) when the time comes.

I'm amazed some people have gotten 3 or 4 or more HW Relics to i230 and it's an impressive feat, but how many people compared to the ones who have done and/or gotten one HQ Relic at least did it again or how long did it take them? It varies from people to people, but I only see like less than 20 people on the forums here with more than one Relic.

I'm just saying that some weapons are more "instant" to get than the Relics which I find humorous that people think the Relic is instant gratitude which it's not. Some people tolerable the grind, I barely did and do not wish to do it again. This was hardly a fun step to do. I did skip the Crystal part with my Zeta and I enjoy doing the 10 dungeons, those were fun, and doing CT again which nice for the Oils though I did it three times and bought the other two Oil with my tomes.

Well I have a very time consuming job and on top of me working on trying to get all my classes to 60 so another factor why it took longer for me, but still I feel burnt out with doing the step even when I had a lot of free time. More power to people who don't mind and have gotten more than one HW Relic, but there's a good portion of us that didn't enjoy this particular step too much when it relies on a lot of factor and people who have free time to help you as well with the same content.

[Awful]

I finished mine awhile ago was it fun? No, it's not the grind I have an issue with it's the design and how they did it. We had ALL of HW that we could have been doing to get the relic weapon but instead they give it to us much later down the road and then the next step is just 5 weeks of LoTA/ST/WoD or grind the Esos (which you could do in a day tbh) the issue is it's one extreme to another. Some tips I can give for the grind is if you're doing Alex Gordias:

- Do only floors 1 and 4, 2 and 3 are not worth it as they're the longest
- Poetics and allied seals are your friends here they are probably the most precious resource out of the whole grind
-Beast Tribe dailies are optional but they help with the grind by switching it up don't neglect them!

I know this is off topic but the next relic grind i'm dreading as well since it's basically Alexandrite 3.3 why don't the developers see that this is just tedious and boring? Why couldn't they tie it in with Palace of the Dead? Or the new Map Dungeons? Surely i'm not the only one who sees the relic is more about how much gil we can shove down our throats with 500+ hours attached. It's kind of sad.

[Thayos]

Yeah this shouldn't take forever, should just take two or three months.

The good news is that once you get caught up, it's easy to stay current. Most people I know in game have had no problems getting a relic. But, most people I know also only go through this process once.

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

The relic step isn't overly long, IMHO. I only just started grinding for a second and third relic a week ago and I already have a little under half the pieces I need for the second relic, and that's just doing my daily routine. It's really not that difficult of a step unless you let it drive you to distraction! You'll get there OP, chin up! o/ Course, I might just be a nut, since I was actually hoping the i210 step would be harder.