450/1500...

Past couple of nights I've descended into the depths of amorph madness and started mauling leeches in Bostaunieux Oubliette. I had knocked out about 50 of them just goofing around as I would run out to Nashmau for Einherjar, so in about 3.5-4 hours of non-stop killing with a PLD/DNC and DRG/SAM, I've averaged about 100 Geirskoguls/hour.

For you non-math majors, that would mean I have another 10 hours of work left at that pace.

And that doesn't even include the time I'm going to have to spend on the second trial.

Still pissed off about this, but doing it just to keep Gungnir from being obsolete.

Part of me is seriously just considering upgrading a regular Trial weapon since it comes out close to begin with...

Oathkeeper path requires killing a number of NMs and VNMs which would be irritating, but not all that time consuming as you can go do other shit while the critter you're waiting to pop shows back up. The end result is the highest base DMG polearm in the game short of Gungnir.

Oathkeeper: DMG:87 Delay:492 DMG:+12

Just for comparison:

Gungnir: DMG:100 Delay:492 Acc+20 Additional Effect: Weakens Defense

Now am I dumb enough to believe a fully augmented Oathkeeper would out parse Gungnir in any situation? Maybe in a Merit Party, but anything that actually matters, it probably wouldn't. The Accuracy bonus is too huge.

There's also the hidden damage multiplier. A lot of people will point to that as the primary difference between a normal weapon and a relic weapon. While the numbers those pop out are humorous at times (<3 seeing it kick in on a crit for 800+ on a leech...), don't fool yourselves into thinking it's something that's constantly going off. That feature of Gungnir kicks in around 5% of the time. Something like this can be overcome or beaten by things like 5/5 Overwhelm merits, copious amounts of Double Attack or even 1-2% more haste.

And before someone points out the whole "Weakens Defense" thing, let me remind you that everyone gets to take advantage of that feature when it kicks in, not just the guy using Gungnir.

The problem I have with the quests is that Oathkeeper's is way too simple or Gungnir's is way too difficult. You can theoretically finish up Oathkeeper in a couple days and end up close to Gungnir's level of production for next to no monetary investment. There are some crazy (and I'm guessing unemployed) players out there who have already finished up both relic trials, but even at their max, it took them at least a week for the most part to do so.

At current bazaar prices, Gungnir would take a minimum (assuming you know someone to lend you the last 30) of 197,600,000 gil to upgrade.

That would be 1.2M x 74 Jades, 1.6M x 61 Silvers, 700K x 16 Bynes.

On average, I'd even suggest that your normal person could upgrade damn near all of the Magian weapons in the time it takes for someone to produce that much gil.

Forgive me for feeling like Relic holders actually ended up getting the shaft with Magian Trials. Way too much time and money invested in the damn things already only to have to go spend exponentially more time trying to augment them to keep them way ahead of the curve.

I'll do your damn quests SE, but you keep this shit up and I can't imagine too many people who actually stayed around long enough to upgrade relics staying around much longer.