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[iammeiam]

This is a terrible top of page post, and I am sorry.

Does this mean this is going to become a thing until 3.2?

I'm not sure if we'll be able to try GAF's patience that long, but the obvious goal is to get the one-day-a-week raid dream going as soon as possible so we'd only need it once. A3S was easy after the first kill, so I'm hoping 4 follows suit, but when asked I did list days in a prepare-for-the-worst scenario. The other hope is that the others in GAF with A3S down (we're up to 4 groups with all or largely GAF membership at this point I think?) past A3S subject themselves to 4 to the point of needing it too, and hopefully there's a day a bunch of us raid that overlaps so it's not just us.

Also since I'm not sure everyone inGAF understands what's going on with weakness:

If you don't do Nisi passing (which almost nobody does), you deal with Royal Pentacle by throwing 3 of your members at it. They die, get rezzed, you continue. Pentacle happens two to three times in the final phase of A4S, so you need to sac 3 people two or three times. We sac me and our off tank every time. Weakness buff means that Weakness falls off between sacs; without it after the second sac we'd come back with Brink which is no good.

If it was just incidental deaths we could try to stop being bad, and I was sort of half hoping nerfs would make it manageable with Brink so we could stop harassing people.

 

[Eldren]

Yeah, buing up items and selling them on the new server is probably the easiest way.. You could always make a alt character on the new server first to check how prices are there. If you should decide to transfer to Cerberus, feel free to shoot me a message

I actually made an alt on Cerberus when I first got the game like a year and a half ago because I wanted to see the story for all 3 starting cities, so I just logged in with her instead of making a new character (it would probably be full anyway). The prices were higher than on Ultros which is nice for selling but not as nice for buying, but I guess it balances out. I got a Lesser Panda minion last night so I'm going to see what that sells for. Which are the most populated EU servers? I checked out Zodiark and Limsa was packed, even more so than Cerberus, but I thought it was supposed to be a smaller server. That character is only level 15 so I couldn't go to Ishgard which may be more representative.

Thank you for the offer! The more I think about this the more I'm convinced it's probably for the best (except the annoying gil limit). What FC are you in?

 

[ebil]

I actually made an alt on Cerberus when I first got the game like a year and a half ago because I wanted to see the story for all 3 starting cities, so I just logged in with her instead of making a new character (it would probably be full anyway). The prices were higher than on Ultros which is nice for selling but not as nice for buying, but I guess it balances out. I got a Lesser Panda minion last night so I'm going to see what that sells for. Which are the most populated EU servers? I checked out Zodiark and Limsa was packed, even more so than Cerberus, but I thought it was supposed to be a smaller server. That character is only level 15 so I couldn't go to Ishgard which may be more representative.

Thank you for the offer! The more I think about this the more I'm convinced it's probably for the best (except the annoying gil limit). What FC are you in?

According to this one month old thread: Ragnarok, Cerberus, Phoenix, Odin, Shiva, Moogle, Lich and Zodiark in this order. That being said, all of the major EU servers seem to be decently populated.

 

[Wilsongt]

My feeling about the relic is that it was probablt suppose to be released at 3.05 along with AF and Savage so that people had three choices for weapons. But they didn't, and they releasd in near the end of thr Estoeric cycle with no changes and a giant shrug emoticon.

If I weren't a casual player, i'd be more pissed. At least now I have a reason to do all those beast tribes I neglected and have a reason to do roulettes again. Also, can make some money crafting the items.

 

[Tabris]

If you don't do Nisi passing (which almost nobody does), you deal with Royal Pentacle by throwing 3 of your members at it. They die, get rezzed, you continue. Pentacle happens two to three times in the final phase of A4S, so you need to sac 3 people two or three times. We sac me and our off tank every time. Weakness buff means that Weakness falls off between sacs; without it after the second sac we'd come back with Brink which is no good.

If it was just incidental deaths we could try to stop being bad, and I was sort of half hoping nerfs would make it manageable with Brink so we could stop harassing people.

I'm just curious about this as my FC doesn't use the weakness buff. Does that mean they are doing a different strategy then? I thought everyone was needing to use the sac strategy? Or the buff isn't required, just helps DPS output? Or they may cycle the people they sack?

Honestly, it seems silly to me to not have food and weakness buff full time. The other buffs aren't as big of a difference. Happy we do food buff fully but it would be nice to have weakness full time as well.

 

[Sandfox]

My feeling about the relic is that it was probablt suppose to be released at 3.05 along with AF and Savage so that people had three choices for weapons. But they didn't, and they releasd in near the end of thr Estoeric cycle with no changes and a giant shrug emoticon.

If I weren't a casual player, i'd be more pissed. At least now I have a reason to do all those beast tribes I neglected and have a reason to do roulettes again. Also, can make some money crafting the items.

If you aren't a casual player then you shouldn't have much reason to try and get the weapon asap since it's never going to be stronger than your raid weapon.

 

[Ken]

I'm just curious about this as my FC doesn't use the weakness buff. Does that mean they are doing a different strategy then? I thought everyone was needing to use the sac strategy? Or the buff isn't required, just helps DPS output? Or they may cycle the people they sack?

Honestly, it seems silly to me to not have food and weakness buff full time. The other buffs aren't as big of a difference. Happy we do food buff fully but it would be nice to have weakness full time as well.

Eanae doesn't sac. The other members of his group that do are in Awake and they have weakness buff up most of the days of the week since they have two A4S groups.

I'm sure there's more Spike Flail players on A4S but it's probably the same deal if you guys really do never have Weakness buff up: just not being the sac because mixed FC groups and all that.

 

[Sorian]

I'm just curious about this as my FC doesn't use the weakness buff. Does that mean they are doing a different strategy then? I thought everyone was needing to use the sac strategy? Or the buff isn't required, just helps DPS output? Or they may cycle the people they sack?

Honestly, it seems silly to me to not have food and weakness buff full time. The other buffs aren't as big of a difference. Happy we do food buff fully but it would be nice to have weakness full time as well.

It's probably the bolded if I had to guess.

Edit: Don't mind me, I'm a scrub and Ken knows his shit. All hail.

 

[Tabris]

Eanae doesn't sac. The other members of his group that do are in Awake and they have weakness buff up most of the days of the week since they have two A4S groups.

I'm sure there's more Spike Flail players on A4S but it's probably the same deal?

That makes sense.

 

[Frumix]

If you aren't a casual player then you shouldn't have much reason to try and get the weapon asap since it's never going to be stronger than your raid weapon.

Nexus was potentially stronger due to secondaries mattering more in ARR for like... 1 patch? And Zeta was eventually stronger than DW but by that point it's like who cares lol

 

[QisTopTier]

If you aren't a casual player then you shouldn't have much reason to try and get the weapon asap since it's never going to be stronger than your raid weapon.

Atm this is far from the truth for SCH

 

[iammeiam]

Edit: I'm slow and wrong but I typed it up anyway so oh well.

I'm just curious about this as my FC doesn't use the weakness buff. Does that mean they are doing a different strategy then? I thought everyone was needing to use the sac strategy? Or the buff isn't required, just helps DPS output?

Honestly, it seems silly to me to not have food and weakness buff full time. Happy we do food buff fully but it would be nice to have weakness full time as well.

You could work around Brink by swapping out who sacs on first and second pentacle, which some groups have done. We make the BLM sac on the first set and a healer take those the second/third (the second set of rezzes is healer LB3, so killing off a healer there means they get to come back with full MP, and there's no real planned rez on sac set 3 since not a lot of damage happens between there and enrage.), but beyond that murdering the low man on the DPS totem pole and the OT seemed safest so it's what we started with and have just kind of stuck to. They could also be doing Nisi I guess? Which if so is impressive.

It's not even really the DPS concern with Brink that makes it a killer for me. It's mostly just HP things; I'm pretty fragile with just weakness alone, have nothing in the way of usable defensive CDs or self heals (I think I'm the only MCH clear on Ultros? so other ranged had at least Second Wind for scary moments), and there's a section where I'm getting auto'd from a Jagd Doll, there are two Carnage Zeroes fairly close together, and then we have to feed all three dolls very quickly so three Reducible Complexities in a row. I'm pretty sure our WHM babysits me in that section as-is, with Brink there's a good chance I'd just explode. There's also a sequence where the OT potentially takes ~17k damage from Carnage + Doll Cleave so Brink would suck there too. Brink also makes locking down doll aggro an adventure. DPS concerns would be a thing if we were sacrificing a melee, though.

The buff thing is tricky; I mostly just wish they'd given FCs a third slot alongside HW. Teleport as a background buff is nice since literally everyone gets some sort of usage out of it; raid-centric buffs are nice for me personally but pretty useless as more and more people fall out of raiding. MGP and PVP buffs are personally useless but a lot of people use them. It'd be nice to do something like perm Teleport buff, semi perm Food Buff, and then rotating third buff for things like big MGP cash out days, weakness, etc. One day I will math out if food buff even really saves me money. I tend to clip aggressively if I think we'll go the distance in a long fight, and usually end the night with leftover time on my food, so no idea if it even saves me a Pipira.

 

[Ken]

Time to break out those free Aetheryte tickets that I know everyone has from Veteran Rewards.

 

[Sorian]

Time to break out those free Aetheryte tickets that I know everyone has from Veteran Rewards.

You can buy them with centuro seals too! No excuses! Hunts aren't dead!

 

[SliceSabre]

Eww hunts? I'd rather clean a catgirl's littlebox.

 

[Ken]

You can buy them with centuro seals too! No excuses! Hunts aren't dead!

Truly the Golden Age of XIV.

I can now teleport from the FC house bell to the FC house without guilt.

 

[rubius01]

Eww hunts? I'd rather clean a catgirl's littlebox.

jacknicholsonnod.gif

 

[Ken]

Eww hunts? I'd rather clean a catgirl's littlebox.

I'd do that for free.

 

[creid]

I don't think the dev team is going to create new trials or content for relic weapons ever again. If they did do it, people would complain that they have to work on a relic to see the content, and they would kind of have a point. Any trial they come up with would be better used elsewhere. Relic-style questline is a method of making sure long-time players keep doing old content, disguised as a quest. If I'm right, people are going to go through the same cycle of complaints each time a new quest step is released.

 

[Ken]

I don't think the dev team is going to create new trials or content for relic weapons ever again. If they did do it, people would complain that they have to work on a relic to see the content, and they would kind of have a point. Any trial they come up with would be better used elsewhere. Relic-style questline is a method of making sure long-time players keep doing old content, disguised as a quest. If I'm right, people are going to go through the same cycle of complaints each time a new quest step is released.

They don't really need new trials when they could just re-use stuff like the 3.0 primals, the latter 2.0 primals, or the 24-man series. A ton of content that could be revitalized instead of 800 Alex Normals, especially when I don't think most people even made it past 4 or 5 weeks of keeping up with lockout Alex Normal. I suppose getting back into different roulettes is the point of making poetics relevant again, but bleh.

Then again, they'd probably make you do 400 Bismarks and 400 Ravana so I should go buy the Witcher 3 instead.

inb4 it's not 800 Alex normals

 

[HylianScribe]

While the Hunt (old ones primarily) is an option (it gives you THREE currencies per kill towards relic items - Allied Seals, Poetics, and Law), it still feels like making headway is pretty slow. I got bored eventually and moved on to Alex normal runs for a bit before work. Also, I worry when people actually care about doing old Hunts for this, it will be the same as always where they'll be pulled quickly -- so if you're not even in the same zone when the shout goes out, you're already too late. Also nobody will waste time to pop some of the S ranks (S Than no fail fates for 60 mins - LOL good luck finding people to do that).

Even surefire newbie bonus every time trials like Steps and Thordan Story don't give the greatest bonus.

I would actually suggest getting 7 people and queueing for Main Scenario stuff (Prae/Castrum) and zerging it while the likely newbie just watches cutscenes. They give good rewards already for doing it plus a huge bonus for a newcomer. Should try to get people queueing for scenario roulette at the same time, too. Not sure how long it would take with 7 people knowing what to do. I think maybe the first one is faster than the last, so would probably want to spam that one?

Also running low level dungeons (not even DR) queued as 60 might be worth it? Like Tam Tara (it's faster than Satasha - we did unsynced SR tests of it at 60, it's like 20-30 seconds faster to do Tam Tara).

Kind of wish some people had figured out some optimal grinding options rather than crying over "so many Alex normals waaa" and not realizing there's multiple paths to completing the more tedious part of the last phase of this relic step. Combining Beast Dailies, Alex Normal Runs, Potential Bonuses, etc.

Edit: I'm really wish one of the steps, EX primals would be a primary method to advancing. It would be too hard I guess...

 

[WolvenOne]

Just realized that I can use my desire to bypass A2N, to farm Brayflox normal and get a Baby Oppo Oppo.

#twobirdsonestone

 

[Wagram]

Yoshida is a great Producer, but he's not a very good Director. The content cycle for 2.0 - beyond has been extremely awful.

 

[MogCakes]

I just got back into XIV after a 3 month hiatus, and I am not looking forward to the new relic. I think I'll just stick to my paltry i200 gear and be a filthy casual from now on. Holy Lance is still the best looking lance anyway.

 

[Wilsongt]

If you aren't a casual player then you shouldn't have much reason to try and get the weapon asap since it's never going to be stronger than your raid weapon.

Who wouldn't want a weapon called Draconomicon? I wish It glowed, though. Love the Awoken glow.

 

[WolvenOne]

I just got back into XIV after a 3 month hiatus, and I am not looking forward to the new relic. I think I'll just stick to my paltry i200 gear and be a filthy casual from now on. Holy Lance is still the best looking lance anyway.

Eh, it'll be nerfed in awhile, and its not as if you're OBLIGATED to do this grind. So don't worry about it.

 

[Ken]

Kind of wish some people had figured out some optimal grinding options rather than crying over "so many Alex normals waaa" and not realizing there's multiple paths to completing the more tedious part of the last phase of this relic step. Combining Beast Dailies, Alex Normal Runs, Potential Bonuses, etc.

Beast Dailies are dailies so they're limited. Potential bonus is a potential so it's not consistent. Same with maps and thats limited. Hunts are prone to downtime and just not making it to them in time. So for "optimal grind" you're probably left hitting your poetics dailies during downtime and grinding specific Alex Normal turns.

200 A1N and use the law on 3 or 4 item.
Do 200 A3N or A4N and the law for the other turn's item.
Hope that many days of law finished the other item, and the poetics got you a bunch of A2N items and then spam A2N or fish for poetic bonus?

Also last I checked unsynced anything gives you no tomes.

 

[MogCakes]

What's the current best gear endgame? I'm told it's no longer Eso gear.

 

[Tabris]

Kinda glad we did the relic dungeon run synced so we got poetics before people had figured out how it worked.

 

[Ken]

What's the current best gear endgame? I'm told it's no longer Eso gear.

Simplest answer is mix of anything i210 so Gobtwine'd Esoterics, Gordian gear from Savage, or Aetherial gear from Diadem.

 

[MogCakes]

That's quite a bit less grind than I thought I'd have to do for gear. I hope ilvl requirements don't increase too much over the 3.x patches.

 

[iammeiam]

Since anima is just a reworked version of the Zodiac step, I can't help but compare the grinds. Zodiac was a grindy but relatively well-designed step because it had you do a lot of things, but generally you were working towards a bunch of goals at the same time. 12 dungeons with atma, atma at a drop rate of 1/9, so looking at around 110 runs of dungeons. You needed 80k GC seals and 6400 sold for the necessary items, but you'd earn a lot of those while grinding out your dungeon atma (dungeon drops for seals I think means I never had to grind.) The sold requirement overall was so low you could do whatever you felt like. Some people went with the queue spamming old primals for bonus, the T5 carries, whatever, but you did it for a short period and then were done.

Zodiac had its issues, but compared to Anima is top tier game design because you never felt trapped. The way anima is designed, at some point you're probably going to end up straight grinding something hundreds of times. Buying the items with tomes is 54,000 tomes. That's insane. Divide it between Alex and tomes--400 alex runs, 27,000 tomes--and it's still insane. Assuming you went into things with all beast tribes maxed, you're earning slightly under one item per day from beast tribe grinding. So say you get half your items from that.

200 alex runs, 13,500 tomes, and over 40 days of doing max beast tribes? So around 5 Alex floors, 300-340 tomes split between law and poetics, and all your beast tribe allowances, and you can have it in around a month and a half assuming you go 7 days a week with no breaks. The numbers finally seem manageable, I guess, but that's an insanely long timeline of pretty boring chores for a weapon that is going to be matched either prior to getting it or immediately after by something that could be gotten for no effort.

Then again the chores aspect of MMOs has always been my least favorite part. AND the content it actively encourages you to do is either solo (Beast Tribes) or was well populated beforehand and actually really recent.

 

[Eldren]

According to this one month old thread: Ragnarok, Cerberus, Phoenix, Odin, Shiva, Moogle, Lich and Zodiark in this order. That being said, all of the major EU servers seem to be decently populated.

Thanks for this, I remember seeing this thread a while ago. If I'd thought to look for it I could have saved people the trouble of doing it for me. I went back and checked out Cerberus again earlier and it seemed really busy and the MB prices were actually pretty good, so I probably wouldn't struggle too much to recoup what I'd have to spend before the transfer. Another thing to bear in mind too is that playing during EU primetime instead of US primetime means that there would probably be proportionally more people playing even if I were to move to a smaller server, which is nice.

 

[Sifl]

I still don't understand why stuff like pvp, or red scrip turn ins weren't made ways to progress the final relic step. All endgame content should be viable, not just dungeons and raids we've already been running for months.

Spoiler

Yes, I am upset the 1 thing I actually enjoy (Seal Rock) can't be used other then getting law tomes to progress the relic. God forbid I have any fun and get something done at the same time.

 

[WolvenOne]

I still don't understand why stuff like pvp, or red scrip turn ins weren't made ways to progress the final relic step. All endgame content should be viable, not just dungeons and raids we've already been running for months.

Spoiler

Yes, I am upset the 1 thing I actually enjoy (Seal Rock) can't be used other then getting law tomes to progress the relic. God forbid I have any fun and get something done at the same time.

Agreed, they wouldn't have to spread the grind out much further to make this a lot more reasonable. So I'm not really sure why it didn't occur to them.

Wolf Marks in particular would be nice, since I still need to get from rank 40 to 50 anyway.

Edit: They did let people PVP for light farming in the past, so it's not like they're allergic to the idea or whatnot. Either it didn't occur to them, or they didn't want to further spread out the grind for some reason..

 

[iammeiam]

Really, them having it so everything you do counted towards relic progress would have been the best answer. Let you buy items with eso and wolf marks. Let you turn in Savage Pages or Primal Tokens for items. Sell items for MGP, buy it with scrips, add them to Gift of the Archmagus, Primal Focus. Sell them for Machi farthings. Go back and patch the Precision Gordian Thingies in as drops on old Coil. Add them with insane GC seal cost, let you turn in atma from the new and old relic towards it, etc etc etc (just make the old atma exchange rate terrible.)

If you're going to make it a grind for a game that's struggling, make it so the game rewards you just for doing anything.

 

[MogCakes]

I would much rather all these disparate elements of progression be consolidated into a more enjoyable type of completion. Since the game's meat and potatoes is combat, why not have the relic weapon's entire questline and upgrades be done through combat achievements? It worked for the initial relic quest during the parts where we had trials. They can be individual trials, even, like the job quests.

I suppose it'd be much easier to blow through content that way, but when you attempt to pad playtime with menial artificiality like having a separate currency for every type of endgame gear you know something is wrong with the game. If I were part of the decision-making team for this game I'd embrace the fact that people would blow through these weapons/armor quests and instead focus more on variety of trials and challenges. Challenge through grinding is something MMOs should have moved on from long ago.

 

[studyguy]

Spoiler

Yes, I am upset the 1 thing I actually enjoy (Seal Rock) can't be used other then getting law tomes to progress the relic. God forbid I have any fun and get something done at the same time.

 

[Sorian]

right-click -> save as...

 

[Wilsongt]

Need to post this next time people are bitching about Alexander being too hard. It's not suppose to be fun. It's suppose to break your soul and make you hate yourself.

 

[irfaanator]

.

 

[WolvenOne]

Need to post this next time people are bitching about Alexander being too hard. It's not suppose to be fun. It's suppose to break your soul and make you hate yourself.

But I've always hated myself, and loved myself, and was kinda apathetic towards myself...

...I'm sorry, what was my point again?

 

[Zhao_Yun]

I actually made an alt on Cerberus when I first got the game like a year and a half ago because I wanted to see the story for all 3 starting cities, so I just logged in with her instead of making a new character (it would probably be full anyway). The prices were higher than on Ultros which is nice for selling but not as nice for buying, but I guess it balances out. I got a Lesser Panda minion last night so I'm going to see what that sells for. Which are the most populated EU servers? I checked out Zodiark and Limsa was packed, even more so than Cerberus, but I thought it was supposed to be a smaller server. That character is only level 15 so I couldn't go to Ishgard which may be more representative.

Thank you for the offer! The more I think about this the more I'm convinced it's probably for the best (except the annoying gil limit). What FC are you in?

As Ebil already said Cerberus should be one of the biggest EU servers and it mainly consists of UK players. Other UK-heavy servers are Odin, Phoenix and maybe Ragnarok?

In-game name is Tyr Silverbergh. FC is called "The Divebombs". It's a not so big FC which I founded with some ingame friends.

 

[iammeiam]

Speaking of self loathing, Krael posted our A4S clear. You can watch me be bad and almost wipe us at the very end because jumping in straight lines is surprisingly challenging.

Spoiler

secret to clearing: self-loathing before you step foot in the raid. 50% reduction in Alexander's powers.

 

[Wilsongt]

But I've always hated myself, and loved myself, and was kinda apathetic towards myself...

...I'm sorry, what was my point again?

To run more Alexander.

 

[WolvenOne]

To run more Alexander.

What's Alexander? Where am I? Where's my soup?

 

[Kenai]

Tank pulled...4? 5? of trash, died instantly. I kept everyone else alive and cleared it. But I got kicked. Noice.

Then i get in in progress on last boss so i actually saved time. Noicer

 

[aceface]

Still better than anything with RNG involved. I'd never do atmas or dungeon atmas at original drop rates. I may do this. Whether or not I get to the end, who knows. That's just me though.

If SE really wants to make it interesting and/or piss people off they will never put gob dip in void ark and gate the i220 weapon behind a drop in A6S.

 

[iammeiam]

If SE really wants to make it interesting and/or piss people off they will never put gob dip in void ark and gate the i220 weapon behind a drop in A6S.

Eh, the i210 aspect of the relic is probably the worst reason to do it at this point. You could just straight grind gil to buy yourself an A4S carry in much less time doing things equally as tedious (People in Ultros PF are selling 4 now, so the option exists), and the i205->i210 upgrade is going to be incredibly minor in most cases. And when 3.2 hits with the new gearing and echo in 4 carries should be much easier than 9 or 13.

If you're doing Anima, it's because it's the relic/something to do/someday in the future it might end up BiS, not because i210. You're also probably not doing alt job Anima to i210 any time in the near future, so providing no other method would mean non-raiders are pretty much only able to get an i210 weapon on one job.

 

[Haman Karn]

Over/under 4 weeks until Myra or Haman post a picture of their relic?

I don't know... I'm considering just doing beast tribe dailies every day. But, I'm sure I'll get in a mood some days wherein I'll just grind, so I guess it's possible.