Yet more glorified tomestone weapons

[ZephyrMenodora]

So you are simply not the targeted public for relics. It always has been people who seek and enjoy long-term commitment. It suddently changed in EW, and since then they deny to the relics community the kind of stuff that they like.

It's as if you were telling "only 10% of people do savage and get drop, let's make this easier or allow people to buy raid gear with tomestone". That wouldn't pass within the raiding community. Well the same have happened for 2 expansion to the relics farmer community.

There are ways to improve the way to obtain relics without a garbage system like we had for the last 2 expansions. OC should be the place where it's the fastest to farm for relics. There should have CLL/dal kind of stuff, and duels too. They could uses the same system than for the crafting relics -> The more you have, the faster it goes for the next one.

But no, they simply take the easy way. They just don't give enough dev time for the content, ending up with super boring steps for the relic farming community.

They shouldn't try to please all the casual players. And it's ok if you just get 1 relic if you don't like the farm to get it. Relics should be hard to get. Not easy.

I have relics from ARR/HW/StB/ShB/EW. How am I not a target audience for relics?

My point is, "carry this thing around and do whatever it is you normally do until you get 1200 thingies" isn't that interesting to me, compared to more specific quest goals or the relics being tied more specifically to things like Eureka.

[Valence]

Frankly I think the second and third steps are absolutely abysmal and kind of an insult to players.

‘We’re not going to make any actual effort we’re just going to use you all to pad engagement of old content to make the game seem more populated than it actually is’

Wow thanks Yoshi, I so appreciate that.

Always has been since day one. ARR Atmas were padding and making people run fates in ARR areas to keep them alive, HW and SHB also asked to do fates a lot, we also had book/light farm of various duties or roulettes for every relic. The formula has been there since the beginning when it comes to the content that's required. If people think it has changed, well it hasn't, except in SB where they actually did something new for them - at least if you don't consider Eurekan fates and NMs the exact same thing anyway.

[DarkOmegaGod]

A.) Offloading the entire grind into one-time steps is not "balanced" or a "good middle ground". From the perspective of the person that previously managed to barely scratch out a single relic the grind has increased several fold. From the perspective of someone that enjoyed relic collecting as an activity there is no grind at all. In attempting to design content for everybody you have designed content for nobody. It would be far better to significantly reduce the grind but require the steps to be redone for each individual weapon.

B.) The steps suck. They try to dress it up but it's obviously just roulettes all the way down. Having SOME steps that you can do passively is fine but when the entire thing is passive relics are no longer an activity but a freebie that you get as an inevitability. When you are doing a relic it should require some degree of strategization and change the way you are approach content.

C.) Even as a tome grind the new relics are pathetic. People love to cite Heavensward relics as some sort of gotcha that relics were always a tome grind (they weren't). One HW relic costs 21,200 tomes. One EW/DT relic costs 6000 tomes. Even if you subscribe to the idea that the grind should reduce in proportion to the number of jobs (it shouldn't) I do not believe that we now have 3.5x the amount of jobs that we had in HW.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Outside of Eureka and Bozja, relic weapons have always been "tomestone weapons" though. Go count up how many you need for the ARR and HW ones, it's not much less than the EW and DT ones. Books and light farming just gives the illusion that it's somehow more "effort" than it actually is, and you'll spend almost as much time grinding poetics as today[…]

If you glean closer enough, those ARR/HW relics aren’t ‘just poetic’ on patch. You can use crafting script. You can use moonstones (from leves IIRC). You also need to craft, which was also far more merciless than today’s DoH/L system. You can use god-too-many-to-list-lmao-things that you can simply look up via google.

Saying them ‘lol it’s also tomestone’ is a viewpoint borne as these relics becomes outdated. It’s a bit disingenuous when we’re comparing the EW/DT relic at their on patch iteration that literally spat you pure tomestone steps from the get go. DT iteration seems to be their attempt to 'marry' the ARR/HW busyworks with EW's 'metric chasing'-tomestone steps.

[Raim]

Tomes are actually a great way to implement it, but it should be a ton of tomes. The EW tomes should have been like 5-6k per weapon instead.

[AlliciaCapulet]

DT relic weapons ARE pretty funny though with how they gave people exactly what they wanted apparently; Mindless grinding coupled with frustrating RNG…

That’s a common misconception. The relic-focused community didn’t ask for this. What people disliked in the past wasn’t “grind” itself, but bad grind.

RNG-heavy Atma-style steps were widely criticized in ARR and are still considered one of the worst relic designs ever. Bringing back that kind of RNG isn’t “giving players what they wanted,” it’s repeating a mistake everyone already hated. Step 2 being nothing but roulettes isn’t engaging either, and step 3 following the same logic just reinforces the problem.

Eureka and Bozja were popular precisely because they replaced pure RNG and passive grinding with structured, goal-oriented progression in dedicated content. People enjoyed working toward relics when the effort felt intentional and tied to meaningful gameplay.

This isn’t about wanting mindless grind. It’s about wanting relic progression that actually feels like relic progression, not something you finish accidentally while doing unrelated content.

[Valence]

Meaningful gameplay are you kidding me

[RedLolly]

I thought rewarding players to go and do old content they've otherwise outgrown was the entire point?

[AlliciaCapulet]

I thought rewarding players to go and do old content they've otherwise outgrown was the entire point?

That was mostly true in ARR and Heavensward, largely because the game didn’t yet have a better formula and was still experimenting with what players actually enjoyed. That experimentation led to Eureka in SB, which was a success for many players, and was then refined into Bozja in ShB. A significant portion of the community genuinely enjoyed that type of content.

In Endwalker, however—likely due to a mix of listening to some very casual voices and probably budget constraints—they introduced the 1500-tomestone relic formula. Yoshi-P later stated that it was a “success” because more players obtained relics, but that metric is misleading. When players have excess tomestones and nothing else to spend them on, relics become something you acquire passively, without actively engaging with relic content. That doesn’t indicate good design—just inevitability. Still, there were enough complaints afterward for Square Enix to promise a return to “Bozja-like content” in the next expansion.

That brings us to Occult Crescent: an instance that feels empty and unengaging, essentially a shallow copy of Bozja without its defining features. There are no CLL or Dalriada-style encounters, no duels, and no real incentive to farm relics inside the instance at all. In practice, this repeats the exact same mistake made in Endwalker.

That’s why we’re seeing so many discussions right now pointing out that relics, in their current design, are still unsatisfying.

What many players want is a return to a formula that actually worked, rather than continuing with what we have now. With the growing number of jobs, I’m not opposed to the idea of catch-up mechanics or relic boosts after completing a certain number, similar to how crafting relics work. But the primary place to progress relics should be inside the dedicated instance—in this case, Occult Crescent—not outside of it.

The fact that the third relic step is significantly slower inside OC than outside is simply absurd and completely defeats the purpose of having a dedicated zone. And falling back on tomestone steps afterward is just repeating the same Endwalker mistake all over again.

I can only hope that there will be enough feedback on the forums for Square Enix to recognize that there is a playerbase that enjoys Bozja-style content, just as there is one for Savage and Ultimate raids—and that in 8.x they finally deliver the relic experience they promised, but failed to provide in 7.x.

[Brandr]

That’s exactly the issue: Square Enix often ends up reacting to the loudest voices on the forums, not necessarily to feedback that represents the wider playerbase. Many players who enjoy grind-heavy content don’t post—they’re busy playing it. Silence doesn’t mean dissatisfaction. But some people came on the forum and complained.

One of Yoshi-P’s biggest weaknesses, in my opinion, is trying to please everyone. That’s simply impossible in an MMO. Long-term, grind-focused content has always been something a large portion of the community enjoys. Removing or heavily reducing it doesn’t suddenly make everyone happy—it just alienates those players instead.

Rather than breaking or flattening grind-based systems, the better solution would be to add parallel, casual-friendly alternatives. Give casual players something extra to do, instead of stripping depth from content that others actively enjoy. You can support multiple playstyles without erasing one of them. Relics should stay a long term grind-focused content, the same way savage should remain harder fight that are not fits for everyone.

This text should be pinned at the top of the forum.
Excellent assessment!