New Relic weapon quest - are we down to 1 hour content already?

[Ramesses]

It takes about 1 hour to get, provided you have the Poetics ready, 3 relic weapons. Of that 1 hour, the vast majority is watching cutscenes, with just one pretty cool-looking long solo instance - which apparently can even be put on Very Easy so that the moderately cool fights (of which there are only 2) are also semi-AFK wins.

Is this the level of content we are down to now, SE? 1hour to not just invalidate the entire weapon tier from Ruby (for most classes, sorry GNB), and hand out multiple relics, but also to have content that is so uninspired, boring and non-interactive? Half the writing is atrocious and boring, and the instance (which, again, is a good piece of content by current standards) is much more style over substance.

People need content to sink their teeth into. We need playtime, after you drained so much out of the game with the 5.x patches already (shortening almost every progression, levelling process and gearing substantially was bad for the game already), we want to be entertained, not just passively watching the same NPCs from the last 6 years to spam well-known emotes in cutscenes without voiceover, blathering lines full of magitek mumbo jumbo that we have all heard before. And then the weapons are just freely given out to everyone.

I sincerely hope the Ex trial provides more fun tonight, even though the gear is (as usual) released already outdated and more or less worse than the free stuff all of us already got handed to us in the easy Eden version.

Along with the Easter Event, we are looking at a truly bleak, sad, minimalist effort on behalf of the company that just half a year ago released an amazing expansion - and now seriously botches the lifecycle.
EVERY OTHER RELIC WEAPON QUESTLINE was better than this. EASILY.

I'll just post this here-- (taken directly from the patch notes)

Future Resistance Weapon Quests:
Resistance weapons can be enhanced further by completing the story quests that will be added in future patches. Please note that enhancing these weapons may require players to invest a significant amount of time.

[Maeka]

I'll just post this here-- (taken directly from the patch notes)

Future Resistance Weapon Quests:
Resistance weapons can be enhanced further by completing the story quests that will be added in future patches. Please note that enhancing these weapons may require players to invest a significant amount of time.

Yup, let everybody get a small taste, and some will go further, others won't, but at least Most people will get something out of it, rather than it being an exclusive club for Hardcores-only.

[Ramesses]

Yup, let everybody get a small taste, and some will go further, others won't, but at least Most people will get something out of it, rather than it being an exclusive club for Hardcores-only.

Exactly Maeka, exactly!

After the going through the crazy days of Atma in 2014, then the insane relic quests of Heavensward, and THEN the mind bending crap that was Eureka-- now SE gives us suspiciously wonderful relic base weapons but they leave that particular sentence quietly tucked away within the patch notes?

Be rest assured that the Devs are going to put us through a seriously mad grind. Definitely be prepared but at least this time people will be able to do aspects of it solo and at their own pace.

[Krotoan]

I'll just post this here-- (taken directly from the patch notes)

Future Resistance Weapon Quests:
Resistance weapons can be enhanced further by completing the story quests that will be added in future patches. Please note that enhancing these weapons may require players to invest a significant amount of time.

This line gave me hope.. but I was kinda disappointed when the end of the quest just handed me the weapon and was like "You can also just go practically buy more of these with common tomestones". ... done.. No growing the weapon or logging kills on it for the next stage.. just.. we're done for now.

.. super psyched it's not linked to eureka though, that sucked.

[Gula]

Come to think of it. FF7 was supposed to be out. But it was delayed. And it would be stupid to delay XIV's release schedule to line up with 7's release. By all means, a solid chunk of the player base wouldn't even be online.

[Boa-Noah]

As someone that preordered the game and really enjoyed the relic steps up to Zenith I'm really really really happy that the first step of the new relic isn't a boring grindy slog that some people seem to really enjoy, especially given that relic weapons aren't even all that great, there's no reason for them to be this disgusting time-waster in the game. If you want a weapon to tout your own horn you're way better off with Ultimate content since pretty much any relic in the entire game can be summed as 'repeat boring trash content ad nauseam' until you finally have enough of whatever plot relevant guff Gerolt told you to grab and that's just not something to really brag about.

Might be an unpopular opinion but farming mobs until your fingers go numb isn't content I want to get from an MMO.

Meanwhile the first step is a fun little jaunt through scenic locales with some NPC interaction and a little world building, it's enjoyable and you can bang it out in a half hour if you just want to rush through it and watch all the cutscenes later, nothing to really complain about since it's balanced so that basically anyone can do the content themselves.

I am sincerely not looking forward to whatever comes next since the developers have this weird idea that relic weapons shouldn't be enjoyable.

[Maeka]

I am sincerely not looking forward to whatever comes next since the developers have this weird idea that relic weapons shouldn't be enjoyable.

You gotta keep in mind that this is the same company behind Final Fantasy XI.

Even the ARR and Heavensward Relics, and especially Eureka, are child's play compared to what they expected you to do in FFXI. Have fun grinding up millions upon millions of gil in buying thousands of coins that only drop in a weekly raid-type content that you can only do for an X amount of time (which had an absurd entry fee to begin with, back during its day before the price was nerfed), and then have to kill ludicrously hard bosses for some of the other items needed to actually finish the weapon.

And they know that some of the FFXIV players are former FFXI players, and some of these people have Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to ludicrous grinding in Korean-style MMOs, as some of them played back during the days of Evergrind and the like, back when MMOs were all about grind and absolutely nothing else.

I suppose those people deserve to have their "fun" grinding just as much as we "younguns" deserve to have what we would call meaningful content (fun battles, nice cutscenes, good story, beautiful locales).

The only problem is with past relics, the grind-loving people got theirs... and the rest of us, didn't. This new approach is genius, it allows us both to get what we want.

[Xatsh]

most ppl who got relics in ffxi got them with the assistance of their guild, some ppl did grind the whole thing out. But that was a rare exception.

Typically guilds pooled money in guild banks and such and bought currency which was rewarded for player coming to content or some similar system. A higher tier endgame guild could churn out a relic every 1-3 months depending on activity lvls at content.

And I do not think anyone wants that style grind back, even us "Old Timers". We just want a meaningful non-short lived content that last more then a few weeks.

[Barraind]

I am sincerely not looking forward to whatever comes next since the developers have this weird idea that relic weapons shouldn't be enjoyable.

Whats enjoyable about 2 mindless minibosses and an EX trial that you may not even need to do for armor you actually want (given that Anemos armor was decoupled it from the good stuff) being the entirety of the relic content for 3-6 months?

Eureka and the previous relic steps by this point in the expansions life were at least content that got people doing things with other people beyond the 1 roulette you need to do every other day to cap your weekly tomestones.

[Boa-Noah]

Whats enjoyable about 2 mindless minibosses and an EX trial that you may not even need to do for armor you actually want (given that Anemos armor was decoupled it from the good stuff) being the entirety of the relic content for 3-6 months?

What's enjoyable about grinding 10 mindless dungeons/following a train all day for weapons and armor that you may not even need since Raid gear is better stat-wise anyways?

I'd rather spend an hour having some small modicum of fun than spend 3-6 months on a soul sucking and literally mindless grind just to slap a glow effect on a weapon skin I already unlocked, heck, I'd rather spend 10 minutes doing something enjoyable than spend an hour doing something that's about as thrilling as watching paint dry. People already have things to do, they do it every single day, do we really need to spend half a year doing the worst content in the entire game for some excuse to have high level characters running through low level zones?