Tomestones.. Again.. for a relic..

[alibutterfly]

While I do like not being locked into a separate field area where I can't queue for anything else, a la Eureka or Bozja, in order to grind out my relic stuff, this does feel... not great.

As others have already pointed out, Eureka Orthos released today. The Variant/Criterion dungeons are still very new. Why not try to funnel people into that content?

Heck, why not try to funnel them into ANY specific content to try to keep player engagement up? Wasn't that part of the point of the grind steps on older relics, to keep people running older content so that the queues wouldn't die and newer players could actually get through it later, since people would always ostensibly be working on a relic at some point?

My long-term goal is to have every relic weapon for every class in the game (maybe minus the final step of the SB ones that require BA runs in order to complete). This is what I usually work on in "down-time" between new content patches. At this point, the finish line is somewhat in sight, so to have this that can just be completed very easily is kind of... disheartening? It will give me less reason to keep playing on my main.

[ForteNightshade]

As others have already pointed out, Eureka Orthos released today. The Variant/Criterion dungeons are still very new. Why not try to funnel people into that content?

Because they flubbed Variant/Criterion so badly neither would actually work.

Variant is comically simple to the point it can be effortlessly soloed. That isn't to say it's bad content per se because it isn't. The whole exploration aspect worked, albeit with very minimal longevity. Par for the course with this game, evidently. The issue is it means players aren't queuing into Duty Finder necessarily, which is what they want for the relic. Criterion, on the the other hand, is way overtuned to be a relic step. Instead of the more Extreme difficulty they originally announced, they made it equivalent to low tier Savage. This meant it was dead content for the overwhelming majority of players who, while may want something with some teeth to it, aren't looking for a Savage fight. They certainly wouldn't lock a relic step behind it. Not to mention, unless Criterion could be unsynced at a later point in time, it'd require some heavy nerfing to not lock out players as the expansion(s) went on.

Basically, their very shortsighted planning made both a non-option they can only really rectify in the next iteration.