They going to be upgradable and keep being useful to the end of the game yoshi-p said that relic should be the most powerful wep in the game. Like Curtana would later become Excalibur by doing lot's of painful hard quest and the final step would be turning your Curtana into a powerful Excalibur and later it can be upgrade better and better. It's not like we going to have a lot of level caps rise so not so many relic updates. It be years before we even get to level 70+