Final Fantasy 14 players have been upset with the Manderville Relic Weapons and I wanted to talk about why that is and what we can do about it.
Come rant about the Relics with me in my Discord https://discord.gg/9wRZKYY
#ffxiv #endwalker #ff14
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I honestly enjoyed the Shadowbringers relic grind, though that's due in part to the fact that i came over from Destiny which used to be grindy. Making it easy isn't too bad in my eyes but it also takes away the satisfaction of finishing the relic weapon. Its like if they were to give players the Vex Mythoclast upon completing Vault of Glass in Destiny (which i enjoyed grinding for, though getting a god roll Fatebringer was the greatest feeling ever).
I hated Eureka years ago, but once I began to more thoroughly understand it, I grew to enjoy it, finished the Red Mage relic, and even got the Demi-Ozma mount (which is apparently one of the rare mounts).
TLDR: Destiny veteran=more enjoyment with a grind for the satisfaction of completing the grind. Its like serotonin for us
Passively got all the HW animas over a span of a few months and it was like the thing that kept me going consistently cause i would always think "cool these leftover poetics/mats can go towards my next one" once i finished up my daily rotation of stuff. Once you got several down you might just say well imma just get the whole set.
"Content Drought" — never a problem for us filthy roleplayers!
A wise man once said "You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time."
I think the best option was on Shadowbringers: you can either run old/current content or go to the dedicated zone. Even if you don't like one, you may do the other or both a little bit. They lost the opportunity push the variant dungeons as a step, that wouldn't be overly hard and would encourage people to do Variants/Criterion after a while. Or even Orthos. That's really what bummed me out.
They could have easily tied it to Ethos but noo just feed it poetics, super easy when you do pvp eureka/bozja which give poetic in amass.
Ive done ARR HW SB ShB relics and the only time I felt it unfun was doing the books in ARR because it was teleportng mutliple times and waiting on specific Fates. I love PotD HoH Eureka Bozja and I had no problem doing ShB and doing PotD to get the Timeworn Artifacts, DR is fine queue every once in a while.
Its a video game, grind is to be expected but since FFXIV caters to not just gamers but afkers rpers its always unbalance
Forgot to say, they could have also tied it to Fate grinding in ShB EW, all the relics had some for of fate grinding and it would have increase the want to complete shared fates. All the other relics had you go back to arr hw, Shb and SB are p dead af especially SB
Much like everyone else, I like the Manderville relic quest(the color design for the various weapons is questionable though)and I am fine with a grind. I did enjoy Bozja since the fights there and in Zandor were challenging and fun. The one thing I don't want is an RNG grind(timeworn relic)it doesn't add to the overall relic or quest it's just annoying, lazy padding that only frustrates the player. If they keep the RNG out and running over 50 alliance raids then I'm goood.
I love this way. I just wanted to be able to work towards the relic weapons while just doing my daily shit. Bozja and Eureka were shit places and im happy they are gone. Long braindead grinds are not better or more fun than short braindead grinds. Only did the first zone of Bozja before loosing my mind but it was nothing but a zone of fate farming. They could of just done that with open world fates and i could of farmed my gemstones too.
Do people really want a bs grind for relics like shadowbringers again?
I do not like them solely cause i cannot stand hildebrand quests. They are not funny to me and just a slog. The weapons are nice though, but just not something i will put time into. Think everyone that goes through it all for em has to have more patience than a monk.
I absolutetly love the new relic weapons, grind tomestone the way you want, couldn't be better.
Grinding is boring as heck
i made every relic weapon so far and from my perspective this is actually great for once. i truly hated the hours and hours of lightfarming spamming the same broing instance for it just to get rewarded with a weapon that is ONLY better than the raid weapon AFTER patch x.55 and that for a maximum of 6 months before the new addon hits. last addon alot of players complained about having to do bozja for it, before that eureka etc. it does not matter how you do it, there is ALWAYS someone who complains. this turn they abolished the idea of doing something extra for the relic after 2 addons of people constantly complaining they have to do content they dont like. thats just the consequence of that. the only thing i personally hate is that i have to do the most uncomical and predictable hildibrand quest series for it. but nothing OX on a controller cant fix
Have you seen the new tomestone gear compared to the manderville items?
I love the Mandeville weapons; if you want a slog do the zodiac ones, if you want group content do the stormblood or bozja ones. As someone who has done most of them I am so very grateful for the lack of slog. However its early days yet: .remember there were easy (tomb hand in) steps with the anima ones too…
I would not say I hate it, but I do hate grinding so I will be happy with normal ILVL but thatg is just filthy casual like me hehe.
Speak for yourself. I love the new Manderville relic and that I don't need to treat it as a second unpaid job to get it. Plus we get to use Godbert as a character.
Honestly there is a TON of content to do in this game, especially if you have not been playing since 2.0 day one or sooner.
I love Boz and eureka. This relic just said ok no content to do enjoy doing nothing for another 3 months.
It's stage 2 like what? Stage 2 is always freaking easy. Bozja and eureka took a bit more time but they were hardly difficult
I was shocked to realize that you need to put that little effort into the new relics.
Totaly fine with that, although I love me a grind.
The only thing I "hate" is Hildibrand himself or perhaps the Mandeville.
I never took acid but I assume thats how it feels like. Damn.
FF14 players dont hate new relics, twitter players do. As savage raider i actually loved that i dont need to spend weeks killing mobs mindlessly, and can just buy it and focus on raids instead.
I don't like them because it feels like a punishment. After Yoshi P said no more Manderville. Fans complained. Now it's FORCED if you want a relic.
Eureka isn't unique – it's a throw back to FFXI. The aggro styles are all FFXI – without the tools to properly sneak by.
I really wish there was more to do with the relics. The game needs more long-term content to work towards.
Bozja relics are the absolute worst things for one simple reason, the dungeons that are not a part of the roulette. I HATE party finder. HATE IT. People are horrible, and you make groups outside of roulette and if you are not top tier meta parsing you will get kicked. You learning mechanics? Not on THEIR time, kicked. Your first time? Oh you betcha, def kicked.
This is what anyone trying to make Bozja weapons experiences pretty often these days.
FF14 has one of the best communities ever…as long as you keep party finder out of the requirements to make weapons. As you run into the worse part of the community in party finder, you start to dislike the game more and more.
its treated as a catch up mecanic now.. the relic is 35 ilvl behind BiS, why should it be hard to obtain if its not even remotely a BiS, extreme and savage weapons were always the better option anyway
well for us there started with end walker came out. i tried to get the level 80 relic weapon is now impossible, because there is a event there you need like 75 people to complete and that is just possible any more. sad in que for over 48 hours and have many times tried party finder. not a single player join or response to is.. that content is outdated and imposible to do NEED A FIX now.
while Eureka and Bozja aren't perfect, they are very much memorable, especially the way it encouraged people to be more social. I remember my experience in bozja and eureka much more than just grinding tomes, and more importantly I met so many people in eureka and bozja.
My only problem is that you need to do the entire manderville quest line to unlock them. There is no reason not to just make you do the current expansion part of the quest line to unlock the relics and if you want to know the story from before EW quest line that you can do it after or before if you desire.
Being forced to do a quest line spanning through almost every previous expansion is just a miserable experience especially since the whole manderville quest line was supposed to be an optional thing. With relics becoming BiS gear by the end of the expansion it makes no sense locking it behind an optional meme quest line.
I feel like a decent number of the people complaining about the relics this time around are only looking at it through a narrow perspective as well. Bozja and Eureka are neat zones, and cool in concept, and the people bitching about not having something similar to those this time around are likely the same people who were there when Stormblood and Shadowbringers were the newest expansions, and those zones were pretty populated. In Endwalker, Eureka is on life support at best, and Bozja is only populated more than Eureka because it's "the best" way of leveling jobs in that 70-90 range if you're trying to level a job fast. If there were more efficient methods, Bozja would also be on life support. But because the relics are tied to those zones, certain steps can be incredibly frustrating for players who joined in Endwalker (like my friends and I). For example, the Shadowbringers relics require an initial clear of Delubrum, and then 3 more clears per weapon (if you don't want to waste tons of time farming PotD that is) which finding enough people to do Delubrum is pretty hard today. Meaning the relics from those expansions with those zones are now much more frustrating and slow to complete than they used to be, purely because the content is no longer populated enough to sustain the zones in a healthy manner. And aside from the relics and some cosmetics, which the veterans from those expansions likely acquired while they were current content, there isn't a reason to go back to those zones at all, meaning they will never have a healthy enough population again.
As much as I like the idea of those zones, I'm glad we don't have a new one in Endwalker with relics tied to it (it would still be nice to have one without relics tied to it however, but I'm not bent out of shape over not getting one regardless) because while there would be a healthy population to complete the steps fairly easily at the moment, I wouldn't want new players to feel the frustration I do with Bozja and Eureka with a 3rd zone added on top of it. Having a grind associated with relics on its own isn't a bad thing, but in order to not make the grind frustrating for future players, it cannot be tied to things that will fall out of favor with a majority of players as time moves on. Meaning the only kind of grind that still works is something like the Anima Relic grind, where it's largely collecting a ton of tomes, and speed running some old content unsync'd. But at that point, it is just grind for the sake of having a grind, ensuring that you've simply wasted the proper amount of time before you can have your shiny new thing. In which case, why bother making it needlessly grindy? Which I imagine is the conclusion SE came to with the current relics. You can't give the relics unique grinds because it makes it needlessly harder if you weren't there when it was new, and there's no point in making it grindy for the sake of grind because that isn't respecting the player's time, so fuck it, 1500 tomes and you can have the weapon. Do your dailies and you get something cool looking for it.
The relics are never BiS until their final form anyways, and even then it isn't BiS for long, there are tons of other cosmetics with respectable achievements behind them in game, relics are not rare in the slightest, so being bothered by it being "too easy" is backwards to me. If you want a cosmetic you can flex, go do Savage raids, go do Ultimates, go do solo/flawless runs of PotD, HoH, or the new Eureka DD and get those titles, weapons, and mounts you can flex to everyone that says "look I did something difficult" rather than a relic that says "look I spent 56 hours in Bozja for this".
We all know the real flex in FF14 is not being homeless anyways, cosmetics be damned. I don't care about your relic weapon, I have a roof over my head and you don't, therefore take the L.
I'm surprised one of the biggest issues I've seen from people have wasn't mentioned at all: You need to complete the Hildibrand (I don't care if I spelled it wrong, I hate it anyway) quests to even access it. I HATE all of them. I hate the characters. The humor is trash. It's boring. It takes forever. It's tedious. And even if you skip all the cutscenes that only helps speed it up a bit, but doesn't make it better. I only did the minimum I needed to do to unlock certain things so I could get spells for Blue Mage, then I stopped. A simple solution to this would have just been to have it be it's own thing. Even if it involved those shitty characters and terrible 'humor', at least it would be short. Even I could deal with that if I skipped all of it to access the relics.
SE simply came to their senses. There's already a plentiful amount of relics with countless hours worth of grind available. If you're only concern is how much time you get to spend on a relic weapon then your life must be quite privileged by not having a job, allowing you to spend 16 hours a day on the game. Most of the people who play the game have a job and do not have the time for another excessively long relic grind. Thank God for 1500 tomes per step. Best relic steps they've ever made far as I'm concerned. The grind is finally gone.
I just… can't stand the entire Manderville storyline and quests. They're 1000% not my style of humor, so being forced to go through it to get my relic was more annoying to me than grinding some random mobs for shit.
Personally i love the Manderville Relics. They look good, they are easy to obtain so i can get them for all my classes without loosing years of my lifespan to the soulless grind, and its more Manderville sillyness which is always a ton of fun.
I don't mind much the look of the weapons themselves(the RPR one looks great on both steps to me at least), it's really what you can do to acquire them that needs to be better imo.
What i'm talking abt isn't about making them more grindy or easily farmable, but to have more ways to get them than simply just one. IMO, you should have the choice to have a more involved grind that is somewhat faster(like Zodiac, Anima and Bozjan where you could be doing fates, running specific dungeons/trials/raids x amount of times, farming an field instance, hell even include hunts as another alternative), but will feel a bit more grindy, alongside the one we have right now with tomes, although more segmented so it's a longer (like needing overall a few more than 1 daily worth of tomes to get it done) but still easier grind, and one similar to the Final step of the Anima Relics where you can run higher-end content to get it the fastest(it could serve as an alternative to BIS raid weapons, but that's another can of worms about gearing in the game lol) like Savage or Extremes.
I would prefer this a lot more instead of just one of those options for a single step, you know? It at least would have an incentive for people to play the game their own way rather than being stuck to only one type of farm. It would even calm down a big portion of the playerbase since it covers more types of playstyles than with one single daily grind.
Really, I feel like it's better to do this instead of what happened with Eureka relics and now Manderville relics.
So, I've done a lot of Bozja and Eureka. As someone who has played a lot of other MMO's that are far grindier than 14, I've been able to enjoy going in there and just… turning my brain off and farming casually to get what I want.
I feel like the biggest issue SE has is they dont really know how to balance the relic grind for different playstyles. If you dont like Eureka, there's no alternative in Stormblood. But if you dont like running old content, there's no good alternatives for the other relics at certain steps.
I feel like Bozja was probably the closest they came to finding that balance, with options for a lot of the stages having multiple ways to complete. The biggest mistake with it IMO is the fact that certain stages required progress in Bozja anyway, so if you were someone who elected not to do it earlier because you didnt need to, suddenly you were forced to make up all the progress before you could continue. I also found that a lot of critical engagements in Bozja were just a bit too rough for a lot of players to learn how to do properly, so many of the fights could become very, very tedious if people didn't know what they were doing. It also was not helped by the fact that Bozja gave a ton of xp as well, so there were also just a ton of people not in there at all for the relic, and it made grinds past the early content even worse in my experience as a lot of people never bothered going to Delubrum or Zadnor.
The Peak Relic grid was Heavensward. You cannot convince me other wise.
ARR Relic grinding was all RNG and you could spend months trying to get 1 item in a area and spend millions to fail infusement.
Stormblood relics were hard locked behind Eureka, just the reception was a mix bag. Some people liked it and grinding. Myself I hated the whole idea….it functionally made no sense.
Shadowbringers Relic was supposed to be choose your grind. You could either A) Grind the relic traditionally as it was in Heavenward or B) speed it up by doing Bozja. Instead due to the pandemic all instances of doing it outside the instance (since for most Bozja was not for all) was scrapped to artificially inflate the relic grind.
Endwalker seems to be more like they took what was proposed from the side option of Shadowbringers and just tacked it on. It makes sense due to the fact there was no 3rd explorable region.
Honestly they should have just built up from what worked in Heavensward and the better parts of the Zodiac Brave series in ARR relics. Then add on top the alternatives to use currency from Bozja and Eureka to supplement how to fund those relics.
My problem with the relic quest for this expansion is the fact that it's a huge tome dump. I'm already starved as it is with tomes as a crafter and constantly needing tome mats for food and pots. Being forced to only getting the relic through tomes is just making that problem worse
We got manderville relics because people complained about bozja. So the game is even more casual
As someone who's only done the ARR and HW relics and did so very recently, I can say pretty confidently say they didn't really take "Effort". The steps were incredibly braindead but required just enough focus that I couldn't just watch youtube while doing them. It was just tedious. It was just me being forced to do things I didn't want to do that weren't fun or engaging for hours a day every day. Maybe that was fine back in the day when the game had less content, and needed excessive grinds to hold player attention, but that's not the case anymore.
I very much welcome getting the pretty stuff for just as little effort, but far less time.
Personally, I'm glad that the Manderville weapons don't require a massive mind numbing grind. After completing my Zodiac and Anima weapons, I just felt drained. The Zodiac weapon actually game me a headache at times. After doing those, it made me so much more appreciative that for the Manderville, I only need to hand over a few tomes and boom, I have my weapon.
I enjoyed HW and SB relics. SHB relic was about as much fun as sticking my dick in a blender. I never finished one. I admit endwalker relic is boring but 1000x better than SHB.
remember that happy people are busy being happy and enjoying the things they enjoy. "people changed teams, we hated bozja, but we want more of it?" its literally that people who enjoyed it werent talking about it, they were happy in bozja. people who hated it were not in there, they were on reddit, complaining. now that manderville relics are out and are boring, "we changed teams" because people who wanted this just arent playing the game. they got their relics, they logged off, theyll be back next patch. they arent talking about it, theyre happy. the complaining people are complaining because they arent happy.
its the same two teams, its just that the other team is winning, so the losers are crying.
Imagine having to do an annoying that side questline that started in ARR and got almost every expansion updates and take forever to complete so you can do relics
Its forced unto us constantly the stupid comedy is bad enough in msq and putting up with shit in that really upset me after the one with spring dress….
1500 tomes is just kinda boring, hopefully they do stuff with V&C dungeons, I honestly thought the first stage was going to have something to do with it because they came out on the same patch. Part of me likes an easy Ilevel upgrade becuase I play multiple classes and roles, but part of me is kinda disappointed that it's just a tome grind, which I'm already doing every week to get gear. It feels uninspired and lame, let us do some puzzles in the new V&C dungeons or something.
I'm in the camp of hating the grind it took for a relic, something that was more work than it was honestly worth for a now cosmetic piece of gear. I ignored the relics because it was just overwhelming with all the other things I still have left to do in the game. The complaints have the same air of folks that talk about how easy people have it nowadays; the complaint that it doesn't take that much work forgets that the team has made clear their goal to allow players a chance to take a break instead of dedicating, as you said, a month on an item that will be useless in a patch or two aside from taking up a glamour prism.
Also, I like to giggle at Island Sanctuary completionists too, because it reminds me of how people stockpiled and rushed through all of Animal Crossing, which I migrated to XIV from, during the pandemic to the point where no patch could come fast enough. If they make a XIV version of Nookazon, I'll high-five a cactus lol.
hmmm the hate for them is news to me
The Manderville relics is a huge upgrade to the SB and ShB relics. Having relics tied to special zones just took away from both the content of the zone and the relic, The HW relics had a couple extreme grinds to it but it was still right in the sweet spot of how relics should be handled. Until the Manderville series is over it's too early to comment on how it is though.