Quote Originally Posted by Winterfang View Post
They already tried a compromise with ShB relics. Alternatives outside of Bozja, 1-Time only steps, even having people finally have a use for Blue Mage made the ShB relics some of the easiest and less grindy relics. The results? People still complained the game would have the audacity of having players go out of their way for relics. So now it's logging in, doing a quests for an hour and watching the funny man explode, then gib shiny.
Sad part is that i personally i found ShB very good with the relic in how you wanted to tackle the zone or outside, it still failed because they really didn't work out on the drop\difficulty ratio.

A rant example list with ShB:
-Of course people are goin to pick the HW FATEs over Bozja, they're guaranteed, faster and safer than RNG unless you formed a dedicated party to grind all those mobs + skirmish.
-Of course people are going to spam Crystal Tower vs. Castrum, the latter, back then, was nowhere near inviting to be replayed, it offered poor rewards and you would lose Mettle with possible wipes without gaining anything. Also it only rewarded with... what? 1! No one wanted to queue there, it was so bad that new players couldn't clear it and ended up buffing the rewards including the memory with 5 per clear!
-The 1 time step with HW\SB 24 raid was great imo, the drop rate from the FATEs were abysmal though and only later got improved.
-The Timeworn Artifact is the one i hated the most due to only getting 1 per DR clear and heavy RNG for 10 floor of PotD which might as well not bother unless you are grinding for Aetherpool stats or going for Floor 200. Only later they buffed the amount you get to 3 in DR, it's still bad due to the nature of the duty (waiting 10 minutes with a premade of 8 people for example).

I guess no wonder Square decided to just dump another 1.5k tomes and call it a day, they either do not have people that can help them out with this kind of thing or just can't be bothered.