What makes a good relic storyline / step

[CNitsah]

Conclusion (and TL; DR)

So in the end, what makes a relic questline good. First of all, I think having its own story is an important part of keeping the player involved. A lot of old relics steps have been “do older dungeons” or buy this with tomestones. That said it was always recontextualised. The content was a mean to get what was needed. In EW, relics were Frankenstein’d to the Hildibrand storyline, and the whole depth of the relics story is “Godbert found a book”. There is no involvement from the players. I’m pretty sure a good part of the complaints about the relics would not have happened if there was an effort made with the story of the relic.

When it comes to the steps themselves, I feel avoiding a braindead farm of 60 to 120 dungeons for one step is pretty obvious. It seems to me the 6 to 15 dungeons/trials they used in both HW and ShB seems a good choice, as long it’s not repeating 15 times the same instance.

It also needs to be easily accessible. If you need to do something that’s not so popular (like deep dungeons), the drop rate has to be close to 100%. Spending 25 min in a potd queue, then 10-15 min running the content, to not get anything 3 or 4 times in a row, that’s basically 2 or 3 hours, to not get any items when you actually need 15 of them is just a no go. .

One time step seemed like a good direction to explore. EW relics could have used those to unlock the Tomes items you have to use. It feels to me this would have been a good middle-ground to make relics engaging and feel like you have to work to get them (at least the first time) without changing the current system that much. Even what I labeled as the worst steps would feel ok if they were one time only.

Another important point is making older relics more easily available. For that, HW is an example, and ShB is the thing to avoid. Another way to do that, that would go in the direction EW relics went, is to make them buyable with the exploratory zone money once the extension ends. Bozja had 4 or 5 kinds of pieces that stacked and that stopped being useful as soon as another patch arrived. Make the items buyable with those. Or if you don’t want new exploratory zones, put a one-time quest that unlocks the items needed in the bicolor gemstones vendor, for example. This would have the side effect of keeping the zones relevant and alive.

Those are only a few idea, but I think there is 3 points that are important to keep the player engaged :
- A story : the current relic story doesn’t feel like a relic story at all. You just took an existing content and artificially added a relic to it.
- The feeling of having to work for it. I just mentioned a few propositions to make that while keeping the core of the current relic loop.
- When it comes to the step the steps themselves avoid repeating the same content again and again. The 6 to 15 dungeons/trials seems like a good scale, as long as the drop rate is 100% for those contents. As much as possible, choose the content, to avoid forcing people to farm the same content again and again. They also need to be active content.


I think following those would make the relics enjoyable for most of the players. Of course some hardcore people that have the Savage weapons anyway would complain it’s too easy, but for me, those feels like good guidelines for relics steps.

So what do you think about that? Do you think having the relics having one time quests is a good idea? Do you think my ideas are awful? I tried to go a little further than “current relics sucks” that we too often see here, so I would appreciate you also doing so. The whole point is trying to go further than the observation than the EW relics are disapointing. Thank you.