Relic Acquisition

No big secret. I really dislike SE for the Magian Trials they've put together for Relic holders. While the time involved in picking up a relic is the main issue as it relates to the amount of time the Magian Trials take on top of that, the main focal point I believe a lot of people miss are the different methods used to pick up a relic. You can pretty much sum up the methods by categorizing them into one of three categories. "The Grind", "The Hybrid" and "The Hand-off".

The Grind

Without any concrete numbers, it's hard to say which of the three happen more frequently. Personally, I feel this is the one that happens the majority of the time, but I'm also aware that a lot of the relics Obsidian has created over the years were a product of this method.

The definition of this method is simple. You park your ass somewhere and grind out the money necessary, gil, by gil, by gil until you've acquired all the coins for your relic. There are a lot of creative ways of doing this. Some utilize the crafting market. Some utilize linkshell points to sell items from the bank. Some just spend hours on end farming up various items to make money. Some probably use a combination of all of the above.

In most cases and going strictly out of bazaars, you're looking at maybe picking up 4-5 coins/month on average. Taking out the 30 coins you get as a refund, this means the ~150 coins you need are going to end up taking upwards 2-3 YEARS to grind out. This method is likely the one favored by people who don't have a ton of time to invest each week. And by "ton of time", I mean more than 60 hours/week like some unemployed, basement dwellers have.

The Hand-Off

Simply put, this is when a linkshell just hands you the coins to upgrade a relic. How you earned the distinction is irrelevant. Did you put in a lot of time to earn the trust of the leaders that you'd come as that job to nearly every single event? Does the linkshell feel like you deserve it? Does your LS Bank have a mountain of gil they just don't want to sit on?

The time involved personally isn't a whole lot necessarily. You show up to a couple Glacier and a couple Xarc runs (if necessary) to make sure you get the required drops from there, then you just sit back and let the linkshell do the work for you. That or let them hand you money and you can spend time sifting through bazaars or wheeling n' dealing with other Dynamis groups.

The minimum amount of time necessary here w/o making bazaar purchases is likely along the lines of 3-4 months. At best, we've seen around 300-350 singles from the city zones. Usually we would see 1-2 100s drop. You figure 8 runs a month at around 4-5 coins each and you're going to end up finishing a relic start to finish if you just spam the city you need coins from. This isn't the method typically utilized though. Most of the coins in The Hand-Off are picked up out of bazaars by selling huge money drops from other areas or by facilitating trades with other groups. Realistically, it's 2-3 months unless there's a huge pile of coins already laying around.

The Hybrid

Pretty much what it's name implies. Your linkshell will help you do some of the heavy lifting while the bulk of it is still on your shoulders. This is pretty much what the Obsidian system does. When there isn't a sponsor, we sell coins back to the upgraders for the cost of the month's runs. Total cost of runs divided by number of coins we collected. Toss in a points cost per coin for a bit of a control means (and to keep people participating) and you end up with a means for an upgrader to get coins at a fraction of what the idiots in bazaars sell them for.

(Yes, I know. Supply and Demand...)

This method still requires an upgrader to spend a lot of time making money, but has the potential to knock a lot of time off the upgrade process by virtue more bang for their buck.

How this relates to Magian Trials

A lot of it is perspective. It's blatantly obvious that SE intended for these relic weapons to have a long, arduous process to obtain. While I can see them sitting at a table and trying to map out, on average, how long it should take to get the weapon itself, there is no way they could have foreseen how creative their user base is.

When you look at some players like Warutu and Arrow on Odin or even a number of others across the servers with 4 or 5 or more relics, it's pretty obvious they've figured out a really really good way to make money and make a mockery of SE's "intended time frame" in the process. These are the types of players I believe SE was focused on when they decided how to handle the Magian trials.

In my mind, SE took a look at that and figured they didn't grind enough, so...here's a bunch of grind quests for you to keep up with. When you look at it from a time invested standpoint, the new Empyrean are on par with the time it takes using "The Hand-Off" method. If SE has data showing most relics are completed in this time-frame, then yeah, I can understand where the logic would dictate the amount of time necessary to reach that stage through the Magian Trials.

However, the key point that SE seems to be missing is:

Relic holders have already gone through the bullshit of a grind quest. There's no real need to put another grind quest on top of it and keep piling on to the extent they have been. Few hundred killshots, ok. Few thousand, not ok. Hell, even toss in some more mat acquisition to upgrade through the VNM process if necessary, just stop with the mindless crap that's being fed to us.

On top of that, there's not much of a justification to keep going through these quests. Most relic holders likely will just cause they don't want what they spent a lot of time obtaining to go completely obsolete, but let's look at it for a minute:

Current Final Form Gungnir: DMG 112, Delay 492, Accuracy +25, Additional Effect: Weakens Defense, "Geirskogul".

Current Final Form Rhongomiant: DMG 111, Delay 492.

Yes, Gungnir has the Accuracy and the hidden damage multiplier that kicks in < 5% of the time. Having the Accuracy isn't as huge a deal as people would like to think since most Acc issues can be overcome with food or even with food, you're nowhere near Acc cap anyway.

While I won't comment just yet on the 2-Leaf Chloris whatever you need 50 of for the final form of the Empyrean polearm, I will say that if the way VNM mats were handled are any indication, it's likely it won't take anywhere near the amount of time it takes to gather all the mats for a relic on average.

Now the question to a relic holder becomes:

Do you want to spend a couple months upgrading a different weapon that amounts to relic-1 or do you want to continue to grind things out?

I spent a couple years upgrading Gungnir. I spent upwards of 60 hours knocking out Trials 1040 and 1041. I'll likely spend upwards of 70 hours knocking out Trial 1850 and 1851. I'm not saying the Empyrean Polearm would beat a fully upgraded Gungnir in a parse every time, but it'd be close and would likely pull out the win from time to time.

To a person considering upgrading a weapon, do you want to...:

A) ...spend upwards of 100 million gil, then follow that up with using the WS 1500 times, then follow that up by using the WS 5000 times to killshot various critters?

or

B) ...kill rather easy NMs 41 times then start trying to collect 50 VNM items to take a weapon that's simply 1DMG lower than the fully upgraded counterpart.

To the person considering upgrading a weapon, do you..."

A) ...understand the relic trials are likely not over and there's likely more of these asinine killshot quests forthcoming?

or

B) ...understand the Empyrean trials are definitely not over and there's likely more NM camping and item collection quests down the road?

Conclusion

Since I already have Gungnir, obviously my choice is made. To someone who hasn't quite finished a Relic yet or is considering starting one, the logical choice is pretty obvious from a time vs. result standpoint.

I can say this is not making me want to continue my subscriptions to SE's services. It's just sign of the times, but I simply don't feel like I have the time to continually go through crap like this and there really isn't anything else left for me to accomplish in FFXI. A lot of the games I've missed out on are starting to become a lot more appealing to me.

Yes, I've given feedback on the matter.

Several times.

A lot of good it's done obviously. :)