Manderville Relic Criticism

[Syln]

I did 1 zodiac weapon and completed it. That was not fun.

Absolutely, it was annoying as fuck, both Arr and Endwalker relic farm are boring in their own way, one is actively tedious, the other is passively easy but both aren't fun at all and brought nothing to the table in term of actual content after the first step.

Eureka and Bozja were awesome though not perfect but still really good, bringing some fun to the game with dozens of players making party to do stuff, it was a reminder that there was other people actually playing the game and not just being afk at Limsa or whatever, l loved that and that's coming from someone that prefer to play alone most of the time.

It's just baffle me that they chose not to do it again for endwalker, as i said before in this thread, tomestone grind would have been ok as an alternative for people that don't like this kind of content or could even work in synergy with it.

Relics aren't supposed to be hard to get and the idea that they should be tedious to farm, some kind of insufferable ordeal, is absurd to me but that doesn't mean an half-assed tomestone grind will be an alternative either.

As far as i am concerned, relics were actual content and the source of days of entertainment for the last 2 previous expansion, what we get for Endwalker is the epitome of laziness from Squeenix.

[Kazhar]

...

No joke it seems actually fun and the kind of checklist-based activity I'd expect from relic content.

[Xeronia]

Again I just want an alternative method other then tomestones as I got to run into this one "I would love to play my dancer for some FATE grinding for bi-color gemstones to make raid food/gathering food (Garlean Cheese needs Ovibos milk) but I should probably craft up some gear for it. Ah yes 1360 causality down the drain". Oh and if I wanted to make potions to go sell with that raid food? Yeah tomestomes start to become in real short supply real quick then. This is why I really liked other relics having options. I would gladly go do each wing of Nier/Ivalice/Mhach for one ore for example.

[Remember_The_Name]

No, it isn't. Look at all the people who buy things from the cash shop and proudly show them off. Are you going to claim they achieved something by getting the cash shop items?

Oh, you do not compare this to the cash shop. This is whole another problem. The only thing I can claim when I see people with cash shop items is... that they have some money to spend. And games putting good stuff exlusively for cash shops is a festering problem in modern gaming.
I was talking about achieving something in-game by playing said game.

Back Shadowbringers, I grinded out Castle in the Sky.

Congratulations on getting the achievement. That was your personal experience and your right to how much you wanted to brag about it. Also there are not so many places outside of cities to show your mount (thank goodness they are disabled in cities, remember WoW with its clustertruck of mounts)

The mount weapon was never the goal for me - completing the achievement was.

Thanks for proving my point yet again. You see, relic weapons were not just shinies. When you were showing them around, people realized that you dedicated your time to the game, you traveled to Eureka, Bozja, etc.

With Manderville weapons, the only thing to realize that you managed to insert your 1500 tomestone quota several times. Thrilling.

And, once again, please pay attention - tying relic progression to EW new content is a nice way to make them more popular and give them some form of future proofing.

[Reinha]

It's a lot of endwalker but not exclusively. Hope you have fun with it:

Going by time stamps it took you 3 hours max to come up with this. Now, I wonder why the dev getting paid to develop this content couldn't be bothered to spend less than a day's work to develop something more complex than 4 X 1500 tomestones that could've lasted an entire expansion.

[Kazhar]

Going by time stamps it took you 3 hours max to come up with this. Now, I wonder why the dev getting paid to develop this content couldn't be bothered to spend less than a day's work to develop something more complex than 4 X 1500 tomestones that could've lasted an entire expansion.

It's probably not just lazyness because as you said, a relatively fun checklist doesn't require much from the dev team.
The issue I can see with Saraide's list is that once you done something like that for one expac, how are you doing something similar next expac while still feeling fresh? But then again, CBU3 don't seem to care much about recycling content usually.
Or maybe they just got the impression that tomestones is what the playerbase actually wants. Something so flavorless and dull nobody can complain about it. (Or so they thought)

[Zumi]

I liked the Manderville weapons because it was simple just get tomes, lets you do whatever content you want that drops tomes. I feel it was better than the more grindy ones like get light by killing garuda ex 200 times, or get light in eureka for hours on end killing random monsters.

[Toutatis]

So they are still glad that they got such beauties into their possession, right? Isn't that the same as "achieving something"?

Old relic weapons only mean an insane amount of time. There is nothing difficult about getting them and I don’t see any achievement to be proud of in doing that. It’s just a mind numbing grind and time sink. If you find any sense of achievement in this, then so be it but I never will.

The only thing I’d take from the past is the dungeons (CLL, Delubrum and the Dalraida) as it was new content that added a bit of variety but the relic weapon requirements (such as 15 Delubrum to reroll stats) were ridiculous. Bozja’s CE were fun too at first but it became quickly repetitive and boring (the alternative such as 15 CT wasn’t inspiring either) and being stuck in an instance running into circles killing mobs ad nauseam to spawn CEs and waiting for CLL to pop was no fun. I abandoned that quest for a while and slowly picked it up again after SE adjusted the grind. Still, I got only one final weapon which I immediately hid with an old glamour from a Stormblood regular dungeon.

Although I don’t prog 8m savage as it’s a scheduling nightmare for me atm, I don’t do only casual stuff as you wrongly assumed. I’ve been doing some Criterion given that it’s a lot easier to work around schedules with a group of 4. Criterion doesn’t reward gear and the new weapons which I can get without having to spend my entire gaming time being stuck in one instance, grinding old fates or repeatedly doing the same dungeon over and over are welcome. Atm, I’m also using a few of the stage 1 non shiny weapons as glamour simply because I personally like how they look.

. You see, relic weapons were not just shinies. When you were showing them around, people realized that you dedicated your time to the game, you traveled to Eureka, Bozja, etc.

Dedication to the game lol. That’s the weirdest thing I’ve read today. Not everyone feels the need to seek validation in the eyes of others. I don’t even look at what weapons other people use. Can’t even tell you what my regular group of friends uses.

There arguably isn't really anything 'unhealthy' about a relic grind so long as one learns to pace themselves.

Unfortunately not everyone paces themselves and we see a lot of obsessive behaviour in the game. Huge grinds tend to exacerbate this in people prone to that type of comportment. Also, it’s not just a matter of pace. It’s also a matter of total time invested on insanely repetitive and mostly unchallenging content (challenging parts were optional).

I am not part of those that demanded things like Bozja or Eureka be removed but am quite happy that relics are not tied to such content. While the Eureka zone is too grindy no matter what for me, the Bozja zone in itself without the relic grind is ok. Although I didn’t want to re-enter Bozja again for a long while, I decided to try it again on an alt rather recently. I never completed the weapon quest beyond what was necessary to unlock Bozja. I just did the story which requires only to collect enough mettle to unlock the next segment. I found that much more enjoyable.

As for the new weapons, there’s no need to do roulettes and hunts every day either. I do max 3 roulettes per day, sometimes none, plus the occasional hunt (haven’t done any this past week) and S rank when the timing is right. I enjoy some PVP and a few hours of Deep Dungeons per week with friends which provides a decent quantity of tomes.

[Rolder50]

I liked the Manderville weapons because it was simple just get tomes, lets you do whatever content you want that drops tomes. I feel it was better than the more grindy ones like get light by killing garuda ex 200 times, or get light in eureka for hours on end killing random monsters.

On the flip side, I don't like it because it has zero lasting power. Heck, in most cases you will already have the tomes when the patch drops and you can get your first one literally immediately. Boring.

[Seraphor]

Counterpoint, I love that I can choose to grind tomes in whatever I want instead of their narrow prescribed list of new thing I may hate or specific old content.

Especially in a game of now 19 jobs. Relics can much more easily be accessed for players interested in gearing alternate jobs for current content.

Options are great. But this isn't a relic weapon anymore, this is a tomestone weapon. In fact it's less involved than a tomestone weapon which requires swords from the latest raid tier as well.