Design your relic weapon grind

[Avoidy]

I was looking forward to more grind centered around the stormblood, shadowbringers, and endwalker patches. In roulettes, there's soooooooo much happening in the background that tips the scales in favor of ARR/HW content. The free trial players basically drag everyone in there no matter what, but then you also get stuff like crystal tower being an msq requirement and a relic grind option of its own, stuff like dzemael being a GC requirement, etc. I wanted this relic to be an attempt to even the balance. I was hoping it'd ask us to run the nier raids or maybe even ivalice. I really wanted a reason to revisit the eden/omega raids. Hell, we just got variant dungeons and they're already super duper dead. Why not nudge people back into that, using the relics as the carrot on the stick?

"Just gimme more tomes bro" is such a boring, wasted opportunity. "Oh but this lets you do anything for your relic progression!" No, it doesn't. All of the pre-EW content that begs for relevancy today, doesn't give you the desired tomes when you queue it directly. So realistically, people are just gonna do their dailies, where they'll be pushed into ARR/HW tier content, or they'll do hunt trains. And nothing about the gameplay loop changes. Nothing different happens. Imagine if the devs just went "there's certain content that people want to do, that isn't getting done and isn't popping in the dutyfinder. Let's connect that content.. to the relic... so people do it... so it pops in the queue for people who need it to progress." Hell, I couldn't even get barbariccia (normal) to pop the other day when I was trying to help a friend run it for the msq. We had to get a group of 7 people and even then we sat for 8 minutes waiting for an 8th dps. Imagine if Endwalker trials were just connected to the relic grind. "Go slap Barb's shit 10 times." then all of a sudden we're incentivized to return to one of the most enjoyable fights in the expansion. Or what about the EW extremes? Imagine a system similar to the light grind, but tied to those. Suddenly all those people who never got to do endwalker extremes while they were current, get a second chance to run them with people experienced enough to consider farming it. "Why would anyone take a learning player on a farm run" I'm glad you asked. Now imagine if runs with first-timer bonuses ... simply counted for more credit towards the relic! Bam, all of a sudden players are incentivized to run niche content that gets no action anymore, for something that is valuable to them. For example, step 2 might say "one of the ways you can get [resource] for [relic] is to beat up Endwalker's second trial 10 times. OR, you can do the extreme 4 times. And if you do the extreme with a first timer, the run counts for double." Now all of a sudden people who already know the fight are going out of their way to find an 8th person who's never bothered with it and wow look at that, new and exciting experiences are happening revolving around content people never had a reason to think about last week.

This isn't rocket science, the tome route was such a bloody waste. Think about all the experiences we could be having. Instead, people are just gonna spam a hunt train probably. Such a waste. Lazy as hell. They didn't even go with poetics. If they really cared about giving players the freedom to run whatever they wanted, they'd make it require poetics instead.