Square Enix should retire the relic quests with Endwalker

[Xlantaa]

Just the opposite. Make them available from the very beginning of the expansion, like the ARR ones. Without requiring crafters, of course. That was stupid.

[Lunaxia]

Just the opposite. Make them available from the very beginning of the expansion, like the ARR ones. Without requiring crafters, of course. That was stupid.

Just noticed this, and had no idea about ARR's relics since I joined right as HW dropped. I seem to remember doing the quest at 50/ 60 and presumed that's when they were available to be unlocked. Was that not always the case, then?

[ForsakenRoe]

Just noticed this, and had no idea about ARR's relics since I joined right as HW dropped. I seem to remember doing the quest at 50/ 60 and presumed that's when they were available to be unlocked. Was that not always the case, then?

One ARR step required items to be handed in (the one that changes the weapon to Zodiac form, eg Excalibur/Ragnarok/etc). Said items have to be HQ, and one of the ingredients is only available via desynth (a system added either in that same patch, or one before). HW's 210 relic step was infamous, because it's the one that asks for things like KingCakes, Adamantite Francesca, etc from the GC. Originally, however, these items were not available from GC. They had to be crafted, using materials which may or may not have come from ONLY the Diadem (the original version so bad it got removed), and to top it all off, those 4 items have an ingredient that is linked to a different crafter. For example, KingCake uses a tiny ornamental crown (forgot the name), which is a GSM recipe. Francesca, a BSM recipe, uses an ARM recipe metal plate, etc. And, all of these 8 total recipes were specialist locked, of which you can only have 3 at a time. Effectively, the idea was for people to make friends with people who had different specialists, and form 'supply connections'. What ended up happening was that players said 'sod that' and made two alts to cover every specialist themselves, across three characters

We don't need to go back to that terrible time. But we could very comfortably do Blade's X step from Bozja, where the first relic has a nice sizeable grind to do (get 180 total items from Zadnor or raids), and then every subsequent relic is a much more manageable grind (do 5 runs of Dalriada). In todays terms, the '1500 tomes' would be the easy repeatable part, we are just missing the initial 'long grind phase'. And no, the 10 minutes of Hildibrand quests you have to do does not count