My feedback on the method of obtaining relics in Endwalker

[strawberrycake]

I take the opinion of people who didn't like the previous relic grinds and throw it into the trash bin.

Not every reward should be easily and quickly obtained by people who don't enjoy the type of content that reward was meant for. Relics were a cool little reward for people who enjoyed long time commitment type of MMO content.

Just like savage gear is made for people who enjoy practicing and clearing hardcore boss fights that require good group coordination.

Just like pvp rewards exist for people who like partaking on pvp.

Just like gold saucer rewards exist for people who like playing minigames.

For people who didn't like the grind or field operations because they complain about 'not having time' for that kind of thing, there already was a type of weapon for them. It's called tome gear. And the final tome gear of each expansion's cycle is more than enough to carry them about as far as a relic would in terms of item level.

I'm not whining that I can't get pvp glamour without doing pvp. Because I'm not entitled to every reward in the game despite not liking the content that locks it. Neither are any of you.

Feel free to disagree. But at the end of the day your whining about how relics used to be is just more irritating noise that makes this game a little worse each expansion.

We sadly don't live ina time where people wanna actually involve themselves with content to earn things. And I honestly blame MMOs trying to cater to types who don't actually enjoy MMOs. As a whole MMOs right now are trying to appeal to groups who can care less for prestige and making memorable moments by playing the game itself. And this isn;t to say theres no room for social interaction as a focus, but, theres second life, imvu, VRchat, like if you wanna stand around and look pretty you have an entire genre of games for you where all you have to do is buy what you want and look pretty and have fun.

[NekoMataMata]

Assuming this is in good faith, and not trolling, I'll say that I would love everyone to be able to do whatever they enjoy to get progress towards relic weapons. PvP? Sure, go for it. Island Sanctuary? Yup, that's alright too. PvE dungeons with trusts? Sure! Hardcore raiding? That too. Field operations? Yep yep.

Everyone gets the kind of ice cream they want, they just pay for it a bit differently.

Then at this point it's not really a relic. It's not a freebie sure, but it's not much of a relic either. It's more of a "this is whatever weapon you want it to be."

The relic isn't meant to be for everyone and we need to stop trying to make it as such. It's nice to give people options, but at some point the original concept just becomes lost.

I’m not sure how people can argue field content isn’t designed for longevity when you can literally go into both field content zones now and be able to do everything in them that you could do in them day 1

Hell both zones are more active than most of the content EW introduced, if field content isn’t an example of content that’s been correctly evergreened that’s not in a roulette I literally cannot think of an example of something that is

Whataboutism. EW content isn't that impressive of a standard to compare against anything.

I had to do the one time steps for the last ShB relic step through duties because I'd be sitting around spawning CEs on my own all day otherwise. I assume that earlier on in Bozja's release that people actually did spawn them due to how many people there were. I say I like Bozja a lot, but the truth is I only really like the raids it introduced: CLL, DR, Dalriada.

The actual field content is essentially skirmish spamming with a bit of cluster farming.

And before anyone asks, I'm halfway through the mats needed for all ShB relics, so yes I'm somewhat active there and I know what I'm talking about.

[Striker44]

So, Endwalker was closer to what I like but still missed the mark on several things. The first, and most obvious, is that 1500 Tomes per "step" is really small. Just a few days of Dailies is enough to fully cover a single relic from beginning to end, and you can do that even faster with things like Hunts or even Crystaline Conflict. I do like all the ways you can get Tomes to cover these so I'm not limited to a dead zone like Eureka, but instead of using Tomes, I think it would've been better to have unique currencies that you obtain much slower doing the same things. This is why steps like the Books, or Atma, or Crystal Sand/Umbrite were all much better. Even after they had their amounts reduced, they're still grindy enough to be long term goals and payoff. And the methods of obtaining them are still viable today without needing external resources like Discord groups or depending on other peoples' interests.

I wonder how much the over-abundance of classes has to do with this...personally, steps like Atma are the reason I only ever progressed one ARR relic beyond that step. Endless FATE grinding for a low-% drop that you need a dozen of? No thanks. And now there's probably about double the classes you could progress.

The tomestone approach, on the other hand, has done what was likely its design job of enticing me to play more. Having something straightforward that I can make steady progress on while doing a wide variety of content makes me...well...do more content! I've done more roulettes each time a new relic phase begins, continued doing hunt trains well after I stopped in ShB, and so on. Meanwhile, I never even finished one single ShB relic because Bozja.

[Fawkes]

I'd prefer something like Bozja, but also I find the 1500 tomes to be too much. It's boring to just grind tomes not doing unique content, I don't want to do more World of Darkness or do PvP after getting all the rewards for the season. Also every step shouldn't have been the same 1500, it should have been like 1000-2000-2500-500 or something. Even though it's the same amount of tomes it has a different psychological effect to have the final step be a little "victory lap".

I guess it's a least nice that there's a mog tome event starting so I can grind that and relics at the same time.

[Supersnow845]

I’m not sure how people can argue field content isn’t designed for longevity when you can literally go into both field content zones now and be able to do everything in them that you could do in them day 1

Hell both zones are more active than most of the content EW introduced, if field content isn’t an example of content that’s been correctly evergreened that’s not in a roulette I literally cannot think of an example of something that is

[Jeeqbit]

I’m not sure how people can argue field content isn’t designed for longevity when you can literally go into both field content zones now and be able to do everything in them that you could do in them day 1

Hell both zones are more active than most of the content EW introduced, if field content isn’t an example of content that’s been correctly evergreened that’s not in a roulette I literally cannot think of an example of something that is

It's very true how they are all still active. The interesting thing is that people used to say it was going to die after the expansion was over. I always disagreed with them because there was evidence to the contrary even at the end of Stormblood.

At the end of Stormblood, grinding old relic weapons was a massive endgame content for people. ARR and anima weapon grinds were done all the time by people. It was in PF and it was mentioned in FCs and linkshells all the time. It was a thing a casual player could just work towards over a long period of time after work, without being pressured to spend a certain amount of time on it per day. Although you wouldn't think Eureka or Bozja could be done long-term due to it being large-scale content, the fact of how old relic weapon grinds are a popular content allowed me to know they would not be dead in the long-term.

My prediction was Eureka would initially sort of die, then grow in popularity as people (especially new and returning players) wanted to grind their relics, as well as due to nerfs and that all seems to be what happened.

[Supersnow845]

^its not field content’s fault that DC travel encouraged everyone to go Aether/light/mana but then again I have never struggled to get things done on light, light is busy as hell with field content, if you are struggling that it’s that empty at your time of play I might suggest moving data centres, because if Bozja is empty you can be damn sure monestary, TAPB and any non Alexander raid is also completely empty

The content holds up fantastically well considering it doesn’t have a roulette

[Mithron]

^its not field content’s fault that DC travel encouraged everyone to go Aether/light/mana but then again I have never struggled to get things done on light, light is busy as hell with field content, if you are struggling that it’s that empty at your time of play I might suggest moving data centres, because if Bozja is empty you can be damn sure monestary, TAPB and any non Alexander raid is also completely empty

The content holds up fantastically well considering it doesn’t have a roulette

It is the content's fault because it only exists to serve one purpose and relies on others having the same interest in that purpose, which is to do grinding for old content that's no longer relevant and only exists for glamor. What are you going to do 4+ years from now when even less people have interest in those glamors and not even Aether is populated enough? And that's not even mentioning all the worst things like spawn timers and cryptic information you have to depend on external sources for.

For the vast majority of players, this content was instance hopping asking "Is Penny/etc. up?" and AFK'ng next to the Aetheryte as everyone else did the work then you'd alt tab back in, show up to the FATE and join a party then repeat until you were done. That's not good, and it was even less fun actually doing it the way it was meant to be done.

[Supersnow845]

^i mean you can make the same arguments about any content not on the roulette

The answer to evergreening everything isn’t “roulette or make it soloable”

[Sunhwapark]

Wouldn't care if relic wasn't tied to the exploratory zone for EW & Dawntrail.
The rewards from Eureka were pretty good, housing items, hairstyles, emotes and mounts among other things made it a nice place to farm.

The current method is alright if you hate doing anything more challenging than daily roulettes, I guess.