What SHOULD a relic step be?

[Turtledeluxe]

Relics are not something I think about in steps. Relics for me ideally are

- Long term investments
- Not just cosmetic
- Encourage you to play different elements of the game through required tasks and collections
- Have minimal to no RNG but instead focus on the volume of tasks and collections. If there has to be RNG it needs to be tradable.
-Have some kind of region/story element tied to certain zones and require some kind of achievements there (so a boss, a rare fate, a jumping puzzle, idk).

Forcing it in steps feels bad, as do generic tome turn ins. But the average player of XIV is ok with instant gratification, which imo is why relics have looked like crap the last few sets. ARR/HW/StB were the best. I don't think that is their fault either. XIV lacks diverse enough gameplay and world design to support a relic journey imo, it just ends up being really boring, really RNG crap. As long as the goal is accessibility and instant rewards, relics are just another tome gear and are not serving their intended function in an MMO imo.

[ForteNightshade]

Take the ARR/HW methods and simply improve upon them.

For example sake, let's look at the often maligned book phase. All they need to do is repurpose Chloe's Wondrous Tales system. Treat it like a scavenger hunt of sorts. Which is essentially what that step tried to be, but they didn't take into consideration how world mobs and fates didn't spawn fast enough to compensate for players endlessly farming them. Especially in the latter. So make some adjustments there and voila, you've fixed the step.

For the light step, just do what HW did, but with better variety. Random trails/raids will be "enhanced" or whatever you want to call it, and you need to farm them in that window. Heck, if you really want to be daring, lean into the "enhancement" idea and make the fights very slightly harder. Could be anything from speeding them up to increasing damage. Embrace the chaos!

There's so many ways to make the relic steps engaging. They've simply settled on the most boring.

[Ephremjlm]

Maybe controversial but i kinda half way think that relics should be tied to more difficult content. That said I don't like people arguing that it should only be made up of extreme content runs because that is only a single content type. (that said I know that is mostly all this game has as far as "difficult" content). It should be a healthy mix of content types, with varying level of difficulties. This would hopefully be tied to releases of content as it comes out. Think open world content for open world zones like (Bozja, Eureka, OC), Limited Jobs (BLU, or BST), Critereon dungeons, 24 mans, fates, the s rank hunts, interactions with some form of crafters and gatherers, and of course at least some savage runs. Again preferably as more content for these is drip fed, we would get relic requirements related as well.

It used to be that relics in MMO's were content that showed full competency of the game. Endwalker basically threw the baby out with the bath water on that one and I think they just need to double down on it.

It's not like there aren't accessible glowy weapons in the game already, and tombstone gear at either 740 or 750 will likely be enough to get you through the entire patch of base content, so it doesn't need to be attainable for everyone, otherwise whats the point about it feeling special?

[legg]

Unironically i want more Anemos Crystal/Protean and or Tortured/Sorrowful/Harrowing/Bitter Memories.
Peak relic step i enjoyed the most.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Personally, I think Light farms were a good relic step... Specifically the HW Relic's light farm, where you got it by just playing the game.

[Sunhwapark]

I liked whatever Eureka did, live and play in the zone.

[Nyastra]

I liked whatever Eureka did, live and play in the zone.

Eureka remains one of my favorites as well. I liked the culture around it and that you knew you were taking a day or few hours to spend time grinding in a zone. Common courtesy of waiting to pull NMs because they didn't just "respawn" vs the whole rush from one critical encounter to the next only to get there when it ends. Etc etc. But I get it's not for everyone.

[Xactly]

While Phantom weapons did bring back the 300k gil sink (I know it was multiple items) and crafting from Zodiac.

There are three method steps I probably haven't seen in a while from Zodiac weapons series (I don't know what it was like in the past as I done two weapons during SHB before flying was added in 5.3),
Though one of the methods I mention may have the same BLU complain when the Yokai Watch event returned after many years since it's last appearance in 2017 if it were in older area's.

But I do be surprised if we ever got some form of those expanded hunting logs again where you had to complete 9 of them. Which were a select number of enemies, 3 dungeons, 3 fates and 3 leves.
but the cons for two of those would be:
*Enemies - Probably requires area instances more if a lot were to hunt the same
*Fates - if I remember with ARR area's you sometimes had to some fates spawn less than others while follows up didn't always pop up.
*leves - (Wait we don't even have battlecraft leves)

Then the other two methods probably do be melding materia's on a scroll and spamming those treasure maps without a dungeon

[Jeeqbit]

I found Heavensward to be a grind that kept me busy for months. Felt like you'd earned it.

But it involved doing old content. I prefer new content, so Eureka was better. But Eureka had many problems, such as RNG stats (at the time, people had started leaving WoW due to BfA rng) so it just is not a good idea to spend days only for it to be discarded repeatedly.

Shadowbringers was a lot better, but it was more efficient to farm outside Bozja than in and forced us to do a bit of old content. It also was problematic to farm DR that much, or CLL when less people were doing it.

Dawntrail is much better due to making OC more efficient than outside OC, but obviously had the issue with the last one requiring you to wait hours for the right CE to pop.

So overall, I actually think Dawntrail's first step was the best, since it had us doing new content and that being the most efficient method. While also solving the problem of the ever-expanding number of jobs making the grind ever-longer each expansion if you do all jobs.

That said, the new content Dawntrail sends us into isn't as fun as Eureka was. Enemies barely aggro, too much of a constant train, obviously FT not being as approachable as they intended. And the new step people are saying involves old content, which I'll have to see for myself but I still prefer it to involve new Field Operation areas.

[Mikey_R]

For me, a good relic step is one that forces you to, or, at least encourage you to participate in content you might have put down to help you in completing the relic weapon.

If I were to provide some examples, the book step for the Animus step of the Zodiac weapons was a good idea conceptually and definitely something that could have been improved on. Whether it stayed as a list of things to complete or change it up so you have to complete X amount of Y things, both would be fine. Another example is the collectathon for the first Anima weapon (the step after the Awoken stage). There were various methods to get the items, some from beast tribes, beating A1-4 etc. but you could pick and chose what you wanted to do and quicken it up if you wanted to. You could do these small things daily and eventually get it, and it doesn't take up much of your time.

Another step I enjoyed is the Umbrite step, more specifically, collecting the Crystal Sands. You get given a note of the items you need in order to exchange for a Crystal Sand, these items come from various different locations in the game, so you could, again, pick and chose how you wanted to go about it. Yes, Umbrites were tome sinks, but, doing the step slower, you will easily keep up with the tome requirement to fuel the Crystal Sand, not to mention the RNG in the second half that could speed up the completion.

Light farming is also something that could be considered well made. Go and do content, doesn't matter what it is, you get rewarded. Again, another step that you can put as much or as little effort into as possible and you will eventually complete it and honestly, a variation of a light grind might have made the current Phantom Relic step seem more meaningful. First, why only 4 elements? Seems odd to miss out Lightning and Ice despite them being primary elements in FFXIV, bring them all back. Next, I would have made all duties give 'light' to a random element, skewed towards your lowest element. If you had filled an element, then it would not be picked for the 'random' element. The next thing I would do is assign each duty and zone a specific element or 2 and at the end of that duty, you would get additional progress based on that element. This 'bonus' progress would not be transferable, so now you have to take that into account if you want to maximise the gains, though it will also only come into play once you get closer to finishing anyway. It is still a light grind, but it is presented differently. Also, the unstable Aether in OC is an excuse so that each Fate/CE gives a random element, so it doesn't matter what zone you are in and it is universal.



Hopefully this gets across more of what I want from a grind. Collecting tomes is nothing special and whilst it can be part of a step, there has to be something else to accompany that grind. Something that makes that step stand out from the rest so that this is a weapon you earn, not a weapon you just stumble upon. The RNG grind (with some RNG protection) from the first step would have been fine for all weapons and it could have been the case that the required items for the second and onwards relics were reduced, either 2 or even 1 of each Demiatma per weapon. Without the distinct grind for each relic, their status is lessened.