Manderville Relic Criticism

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I did not have “relics should be balanced around people who want to get all 19 so each individual one should be vanishingly easy” on my ffxiv 2023 bingo card but here we are

Even as somebody who always go hard for relics (I have all expac's relics completed, working on Mandervilles right now), the EW relic steps has been a disappointment after disappointment.

[Maplelink64]

Hey guys, seasoned relic grinder here. This relic has been the worst because it's not a "relic", its a free bis weapon given to everyone equally. There is no grind, and that's the issue. People saying that this is good don't actually care about what relics were meant to be: an alternative to doing savage for expansion BiS Weapons (for the more casual crowd) and the grind is meant to be a long-term goal (which gives you satisfaction when you complete it)
"Manderville quests are the grind!" no? lmao you can just skip them? and I didn't consider them to be a grind initially because iirc Yoshida told us that the questline would be required ahead of time, skip it if you didn't like it then
"You can do any content like old relics" not really, the most effective ways to complete these relics are time gated. Daily roulettes and hunt trains based on real-time timers aren't "grindable". Yes, you can do current content at lv90 but the issue is the lack of variety. I've done current content more than enough at this point and giving a incentive to run older content OR other current content, like implementing a reason to do V&C dungeons as part of the relic steps. As a side note, doing the lv70 dungeons for Bozja relics was fun because we had a speedrun duty, Hells Lid with a party of Blu. That's fun and gave us a nice use of Blue Mage if you had it
"If you want to run *insert duty here* 100x you can do it yourself!" I don't understand the point of doing something with no incentive? Relics give a reason to revisit old dungeons for me atleast, and I would think thats the case for many others. Also, yes let me queue for void ark or ivalice- oh... 3 hour queue... if only people ran it...
To me most of the praises for these non-steps of 1500 tomes are people that don't do relics. You could have the grind but make it better? Yes I agree 15 alliance raids is bad but I think they were alright because it was variety. I expected them to also do 1-time steps too because that was a good addition for bozjan relics. I don't even have an issue with tomes, its just we are doing the same exact duties for the Entire Expansion.
All in all, seeing people say that "relics are good now" is upsetting because that was never the point to them lol they weren't meant to be handouts. I understand if people enjoy them because they can get them easily this time, I get it! but to say this is "better relics" is missing the point.

[Absurdity]

This is the reason why you only ever read negative opinions on this forum, because posting them on reddit is utterly pointless. The people on the main sub would probably still struggle to call an XIV expansion bad if it replaced all content with 20$ store purchases.

[Kewitt]

I do agree in seems like they didn't put any effort into it but working on older relic I never finished fills a lot of my game time.

[Zsavooz]

having completed 17 Relics in EW, I welcome this change.

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

The relic questline I enjoyed the most was the HW one, with ARR being second place if only due to how tedious the book part was. Prune that part down a bit and it would be perfect. I absolutely despised Eureka and felt similarly about Bozja. I don't mind if those types of content exists, I just don't want relics gated behind them. Relics were content for me until Stormblood and Shadowbringers, and I can't even go back and rofl-stomp my way to get them since the unique zone leveling mechanics and hp sponge mobs are still a thing. Now they are content for me once more, though I do admit it seems less story driven. But I'll take Manderville relics over Eureka relics any day.

If I could have my way, future relics would work entirely like the initial stages of Bozja that had alternate means/story elements to advance the relic that didn't require engaging with Bozja directly. Then the people who like that style of content can enjoy it and people like me can still do the relic grind without engaging with content we abhor.

[dspguy]

Yeah, I think people have a valid reason to complain. The HW relic was equivalent of 14000ish tomes per relic. Of course, there were options to obtain about 8000-poetics-worth of those items by other methods (dailies for example). But in reality, think about it. How different is it? Either you run a leveling roulette 3 times to get 18 Singing Clusters or you spam dungeons to earn tomes to buy them.

I don't think people realize that when you break it down the ARR, HW, EW and to some extent ShB relics were pretty much all the same. After you cleared Bozja, you could obtain most of the memories from doing non-Bozja content. If anything, at least the EW has an actual parallel quest you do along the way. There really wasn't anything to ARR and HW. Just an NPC that said "gee, can you now go fetch X items for me?"

It's all the same.

[MsMisato]

Yeah, I think people have a valid reason to complain. The HW relic was equivalent of 14000ish tomes per relic. Of course, there were options to obtain about 8000-poetics-worth of those items by other methods (dailies for example). But in reality, think about it. How different is it? Either you run a leveling roulette 3 times to get 18 Singing Clusters or you spam dungeons to earn tomes to buy them.

I don't think people realize that when you break it down the ARR, HW, EW and to some extent ShB relics were pretty much all the same. After you cleared Bozja, you could obtain most of the memories from doing non-Bozja content. If anything, at least the EW has an actual parallel quest you do along the way. There really wasn't anything to ARR and HW. Just an NPC that said "gee, can you now go fetch X items for me?"

It's all the same.

Its all for the tea kettle in the end with the ARR relic.

[Supersnow845]

Yeah, I think people have a valid reason to complain. The HW relic was equivalent of 14000ish tomes per relic. Of course, there were options to obtain about 8000-poetics-worth of those items by other methods (dailies for example). But in reality, think about it. How different is it? Either you run a leveling roulette 3 times to get 18 Singing Clusters or you spam dungeons to earn tomes to buy them.

I don't think people realize that when you break it down the ARR, HW, EW and to some extent ShB relics were pretty much all the same. After you cleared Bozja, you could obtain most of the memories from doing non-Bozja content. If anything, at least the EW has an actual parallel quest you do along the way. There really wasn't anything to ARR and HW. Just an NPC that said "gee, can you now go fetch X items for me?"

It's all the same.

Except that wasn’t how the HW relic was at launch, this come up way too often, launch anima for example had a step that required you to craft items that needed materials from old diadem and required pretty highly geared crafters, another step required an item you could trade sets of materia for, crafting scrips, demateria, beast tribe items, gathering scrips, extreme tokens or fate rewards to get

The idea that anima was just another poetics grind is pretty much exclusively created by people who did the relics when all the steps had been replaced with “buy the item that used to have 6838582? Ways to collect with being accessible by poetics

[Aniya_Estlihn]

Except that wasn’t how the HW relic was at launch, this come up way too often, launch anima for example had a step that required you to craft items that needed materials from old diadem

No it did not. That was one of the options to get the item, but not the only one. As someone who did all Anima Weapons steps as they dropped, I can assure you that they didn't require any crafting for them specifically; you could craft to get sand but that was one of many options, nor was Diadem even relevant to the relics.

That aside, I think people really need to consider that the relic direction was set in stone from the start and wasn't going to change. Back in February of last year we were told that 6.1 thru 6.3 were already fully planned out and in development; if not already complete, and that 6.4 and 6.5 were in the planning stages and 7.0 was already in light development. The live game is always at least a year or more behind where they are in development, so changes between patches aren't going to just "happen" because of our feedback, as the things we are criticizing and their follow-up are likely already complete by the time we see the first iteration.

It sucks, yes, but people need to really pay attention to how things work. They're incredibly transparent with how they approach development and that information is readily available, so we should know when and how much to temper our expectations.