Tomestones.. Again.. for a relic..

[Elkanah]

We gave up an exploratory zone and relic quests for island sanctuary and dead content criterions.

This is what happens when the casual playerbase get a say in the game's endgame content.

Gawddamn casuals! *shakes fist*

[Supersnow845]

Gawddamn casuals! *shakes fist*

Well it certainly ain’t the mid tier playerbase who is happy with a relic for 1500 poetics

[Absimiliard]

Well it certainly ain’t the mid tier playerbase who is happy with a relic for 1500 poetics

Is... is anyone happy with it? Judging by the fallout all over various social media, this seems to be something the lion's share of the playerbase are agreeing on. You don't often see it.

I mean I did, and I certainly remember when the relics didn’t lag as far behind that they were beaten by a garden variety extreme weapon but still don’t remember then actually changing the balance when a tier was still current for anything outside of those old weird optimisation cases around secondary stats and accuracy being a thing to contend with back then but maybe I just didn’t play a class that that was relevant to back then

Point taken though

Oh, yeah, I'm not saying they were used for progression (outside of really slow groups). A lot of people just wanted to pick up their final stage each tier because it did give them a numerical advantage on subsequent clears, even if minor. Sometimes, anyway. Some of the relics did have pretty bad secondaries in ARR, in which case the raid weapon would perform better. SE eventually circumvented this issue by allowing us to choose our own secondaries, but that went out the window when Heavensward ended.

[Iyrnthota]

Well it certainly ain’t the mid tier playerbase who is happy with a relic for 1500 poetics

Potentially a hot take. I don't think player feedback had a significant impact on their decision to make these relic steps tomes only.
I think this was their plan regardless.