First stage of Resistance weapons seems like an awkward bottleneck

[Iscah]

I've finally ventured into collecting some of the Resistance weapons, and the initial stage of collecting 3 x 20 memories feels like a difficult slow point – doubly so when it's beneficial to have a half-finished weapon at each stage so you can continue to collect the various tokens for future weapons.

The tokens drop in Bozja but very slowly, and having reached max rank it is actively detrimental to my progress to spend time in there now, other than filling in time waiting for the weekly Castrum run. A single death in a standard CE costs me more mettle than I gain from completing it.

So that leaves the only alternative of Heavensward FATEs: generally solo now, and not something I can do while achieving other objectives (besides maybe acquiring more luminous crystals than there are anima weapons to purchase).

It feels wasteful doing just FATEs for this step over and over, while the steps calling for more interesting content (raids and the less-populated alliances) are one-time-only and not long term to encourage people to engage with them regularly.

I feel like the memory drop rate either needs to be considerably increased in Bozja, added to Zadnor, or added to some other standard game activity that people want to run regularly.

They could drop from level 50 dungeons to complement the drops from 60 and 70 dungeons, therefore making the 50/60/70 roulette always beneficial to run. Or they could drop from trials. Or Castrum Lacus. Just make them drop from something that we can work on without having to set apart time purely for FATE farming.

To be clear, I didn't think it was too bad for a one-time process. But for trying to get additional weapons started, it's something that takes a lot of solo FATE farming every time and is incompatible with any other gameplay.


Edit to add: Perhaps memory drops could be guaranteed in Bozja and with a small chance in Zadnor? Both keeping the older zone relevant and not making you feel like you're not earning anything from Zadnor skirmishes and CEs once you're past the 6 x 30 trinket farming stage.

(Come to think of it, instead of requiring 6 x 30 of everything in one shot, needing two of each item per relic would have been a lot better for pacing. The current setup basically guarantees a mad rush at the start and no lasting value for queues.)

[weebtext]

Completely agree. It feels so strange to me that basically every other step was far easier/more enjoyable than fate farming yet it didn't get any kind of change. Personally I would've liked to see the amount of memories go from 20 each to something like 10 each since doing 60 fates just really isn't fun or engaging, it just feels like a damn boring chore. Maybe even making them drop in Zadnor would help but I can't remember if something else already drops there.

[MilkieTea]

I'd like to note that the memories are fairly easy to get if you join a cluster farm party in bozja - after 2-ish hours of cluster farming, people in all 3 zones, I got around 90 memories total (some more than others)

[Rowde]

I'd like to note that the memories are fairly easy to get if you join a cluster farm party in bozja - after 2-ish hours of cluster farming, people in all 3 zones, I got around 90 memories total (some more than others)

This pretty much... I really like the construct mount... so I wanted to have it on my main and all 7 alts... and I didn't want to pay for that money so I did cluster farm parties and double dipped. I got more memories than I needed for all 17 weapons while I got all the clusters I needed to buy 8 mounts + all the other things in the store for my main (hairstyles and such for "completion") + 50 each pure essence fragment type.

and actually, it's even better if you have one weapon with the blue, yellow, red memories quest flagged and another with the green bitter memories quest flagged so those will drop too.

[Iscah]

Maybe even making them drop in Zadnor would help but I can't remember if something else already drops there.

Zadnor drops the 6 x 30 miscellaneous objects but apparently that's a one-time-only step? Which again seems back-to-front in the long term because those come from raid roulette, an activity I do regularly. I'd be very happy if the 3 x 20 memories dropped from those and I could continue to passively earn them over time. I can do that with the green memories from levelling roulette and the ones that drop from the CT raids (like it's some kind of consolation prize that I got it in alliance roulette again) and the 60/70 dungeons when I get those.

On the other hand, having the "Stormblood FATEs or Mhach/Ivalice raids" as a blocking step felt like really bad timing. If it was a final step or something that I could trust over time for alliance roulette to sometimes throw me into those raids? Great, I'm happy to do that and fill spots when I'm needed. But at that immediate middle point in the quest chain I just needed it out of the way so I rushed through doing FATEs and moved onwards.

If the relic steps were intended to get people doing old content, I don't think they thought it out thoroughly enough about what will keep motivating people to run them in the long term.

Even if the Mhach/Ivalice raids were the only way of collecting items for that step, they also messed up by just making it drop from any of the raids and not implementing a "Gift of the Archmagus"-style requirement to run all three raids and trade in sets of tokens. I suspect a lot of people have consequently just unlocked the Void Ark and ignored the later parts.

Likewise for the raids, with the drops not requiring people to unlock the later raids.

[Iscah]

Perhaps a better requirement than "30 tokens from any raid" would be sets of one token from the final raid in each set of four.

So you'd need to do A4, A8, A12 and so on for the other raid series.

Or perhaps even one from each of the twelve unique fights in each raid. Twelve is still better than thirty and it keeps every fight populated in the duty finder.

If you've already done the quest chain, congrats – you've got an easy path to the relic now.

If you didn't, now you need to go through everything at least once instead of spamming the easiest level ad nauseum.

[Iscah]

Additional progress collecting the 6 x 30 trinkets tonight, and it feels like it restricts what I can do in Zadnor. I can't join CEs because I already hit 30 of those. I can't raid the Dalriada because I'm stuck on this step knowing the next one will require me to run it, so doing it now means I'll be one step closer to being sick of it later, even though right now I want to join in.

I just want to be able to move on to the next step and come back to do the rest of this collectathon while I wait for the Dalriada raid to start with permission to collect the next round of arbitrary items.

[AnotherPerson]

I've finally ventured into collecting some of the Resistance weapons, and the initial stage of collecting 3 x 20 memories feels like a difficult slow point – doubly so when it's beneficial to have a half-finished weapon at each stage so you can continue to collect the various tokens for future weapons.

The tokens drop in Bozja but very slowly, and having reached max rank it is actively detrimental to my progress to spend time in there now, other than filling in time waiting for the weekly Castrum run. A single death in a standard CE costs me more mettle than I gain from completing it.

The initial way the memories were designed to be farmed was by farming enemies: specifically the garlean legion so you can get clusters at the same time. Skirmishes in the past did not drop any memories and CEs rarely dropped them. Farming the legion enemies helped with the spawn timer of the FATEs/Skirmishes in the area. FATEs were alternatively, a faster source to get memories, but you would not be able to get clusters.

Nowadays, the drop rate for farming clusters and memories is a lot higher. Imo, just spend a bit of time hunting the garlean legions in specific zones with a group to get memories faster. These enemies generally drop memories for multiple quests - so it becomes very efficient to just farm them for multiple quests at a time while waiting for CLL or another CE to pop.

Alternatively, you can farm memories in FATES outside if you just want memories for this particular quest. The speed will always drop though since you can only get one at a time while waiting for FATEs to respawn as opposed to big wave pulls in Bozja with multiple groups of people attacking multiple zones.

[Xtrasweettea]

They could drop from level 50 dungeons to complement the drops from 60 and 70 dungeons, therefore making the 50/60/70 roulette always beneficial to run. Or they could drop from trials. Or Castrum Lacus. Just make them drop from something that we can work on without having to set apart time purely for FATE farming.

To be clear, I didn't think it was too bad for a one-time process. But for trying to get additional weapons started, it's something that takes a lot of solo FATE farming every time and is incompatible with any other gameplay.

Why don’t we just make the memories for the first repeatable stage to be purchasable with Poetics?

Instead of just adding a drop, we can add a way for the first stage to be done while doing other stages of the weapon:

You can get Bitter Memories of Dying from 60 dungeons and you can get the Raw Emotions from the 70 dungeons, you could work one three different weapon stages at the same time in 50/60/70 if you allowed the first repeatable stage of memories to be purchasable by Poetics. For fairness, have the level 50 dungeons drop one or two of the first repeatable stage's memories.

Also, if we go the Poetic route, when we spam CT for Loathsome Memories, we could also be building up our Poetic stash to purchase memories from the first repeatable stage.

Another option would be to allow those memories to be purchasable by Bozjan Silver Coins. While running DR, getting Timeworn Artifacts and/or Raw Emotions, you will also be getting silver coins to spend on memories for earlier stages. So, three weapon stages being worked on in one event.

If you do both Poetics and Bozjan Silver coins, every stage of the weapon that comes after the first stage would help get those first stage memories. No more FATE farming.

[AnotherPerson]

Why don’t we just make the memories for the first repeatable stage to be purchasable with Poetics?

Because the first repeatable stage of obtaining your relic weapons already require you to use poetics - and there's no way to avoid this stage unless you stockpile poetics ahead of time. Only the first relic weapon is free of charge, the proceeding ones require you to exchange poetics for Thavnairian Scalepowder. Telling someone that they're immediately stuck from continuing to upgrade their relic after getting their relic and emptying out their poetics unless they farm even more poetics is a terrible feeling. Immensely so when you cleared all your roulettes that gave extra poetics only to find out you need to go back and farm even more ... but this time there's no additional poetics from daily roulette.

And they're trying to incentivize encouraging people to do Bozja content, not make it obsolete by making other methods easier to obtain the relic weapons. It's just a lot of people complained Eureka relic weapons had to come from doing Eurekan content (go figure), so they offered a way to make the Bozjan relic weapon without Bozjan content. However, it's still required to do Bozjan content if you want to complete the relic.