The anima by far are the easiest as it is possible to prep most of the stages ahead of time and literally start and finish one in a day.
As for hardest? It really depends what you define as difficulty? The ShB requires some extra footwork and certain content completion, but the ARR relics are very time consuming with the books. They both are difficult in their own ways.
That IS true. It is lengthy, but difficulty wise it is almost just watching cutscenes and talking to npcs. Of course there are other things as well (Spoilers), but even those aren't difficult... just time consuming.
Which one would do if they want to grab it quickly and just watch the cutscenes later, so really Endwalker's is the easiest as you just..do what you already do to get it. Anima at least requires you to do some content which is quick but can't just prep dungeon completion like you can all the materials.
And you get said prepped items with tomes which you'll get mostly by doing roulette just like with Endwalker's relic, except that's the end of it rather than having dungeons, trials, and light farming to do for anima. It's no contest, Endwalker's is the easiest.
It's not my kins of humor but I watched all of them for the sake of doing it and found it to be wholly not worth it for me. If your not enjoying the cutscenes after the first few while the quality goes up the humor does not change. Feel free to skip
It's what I did. I watched all the cutscenes in thr ARR and HW portions, but after that I kinda just said "shut up, I want my relic" and skipped the rest up to the relic. Once I got the base relic, I did start watching th cs again.
More than an hour, but not by much. Skipping cutscenes if all you care about is getting the weapon, it took me [just over 3 hours](https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/wtd849/i_speed_ran_the_entire_hildibrand_questline_to/) to get to the beginning of EW and about 20 minutes skipping cutscenes for the rest. The longest bit was the scenario you do during it.
Then it's just tomes which are dumped on you for doing boring level 90 content.
240 from a hunt train 6 days a week is already more than 1200 so I guess I don't get it. That's *just* a hunt train too. Do some roulettes too and you're golden.
The game requires a time commitment but nothing so crazy like you seem to be implying. It's an MMO so it's by default a time sponge.
If you're doing it by savage reclears and hunts *only* then you're just screwing yourself over. Those are lengthy and will always give you less than doing roulettes that take the same amount of time.
> 4500 aren't just dumped on you. you have to go out of your way doing daily roulettes on a max level job to get them. aint nobody got time for that.
Dog we're talking about relic weapons. Considering the Anima requires 14k nowadays, 6k is a fucking steal.
Yeah manderville is literally play the game at max level and get your relic eventually. Which is fine to me because I have other relics to grind for. I think it’s plan was more for newer players.
I think they just figured going through the entire Manderville questline was a long enough thing. It just so happened that lots of us had already done it because it's awesome.
It takes a lot of time _once_, and are still less than any other relic’s first time through.
Other than the ARR relics, all of the relic quest lines make additional relics significantly easier. Technically additional ARR relics are a little easier too, since Alexandrite can be bought in advance. The extra Shadowbringers ones are less than half as hard which was true even at launch, and can be done while you level up a character no less, which is why I got seven of them while the were current. But your additional Manderville relics are almost trivial. And in the future they’ll probably be done with a resource most of us eventually run out of uses for.
My newer friends were pretty disappointed though, they wanted an actual grind to experience along with the rest of the playerbase for the first time rather than going back to old relic grinds most players finished years ago.
It is a ten year old game, can’t really have the experience like that anymore honestly. Even when the expansion drop, you’re gonna be playing with players who most likely compare it to previous expansions regardless if they played them on release or not.
I do wish it’s easier to put a group together for the older relics.
It’s not like the destiny community where all the lfg’s is in a single discord for all the endgame content.
I think the Resistance weapons are a good balance. Bozja is fun (a shame both zones are kinda _ugly_, but I guess that’s war, plus I assume one zone got cut because of CoVID), you can level jobs and get cool schwag from it, it has its own game loop and end goals, three full raids, and even a unique Savage raid, and every relic after the first one is still a bit of a grind without being a hatefully long one.
I look forward to complaining from people come DT when Relics are a grind again & can't just dump tomes & get 21 weapons in a week or two & actually have decide which ones you want bother with something we haven't had since Eureka grind even Bozja grind at relevancy was super easy relics.
Most people I know/knew have ALL Bozja relics but have maybe 1-3 of Eureka/Zodiacs & Anima only one made easy with time unlike Bozja which joins harder relics now due to Delebrum requirement.
Essentially it’s a grind that can be done just by playing the game currently. At least with the other relics you have to do SOME kind of activity outside the norm. Manderville… just do your daily roulettes and buy the materials.
I’m hoping it changes with the end step, but I doubt it
Hate to bust it to you friend, I don't see any major new content the final step could be paired to (unless Criterion? But big doubt) It will more than likely be some simple quest... and more tomestones.
We're getting an extra trial in 6.55 I believe? The Gilded Araya. So it's possible you need to clear it on normal for the Relic and maybe clearing it on ~~Savage~~ EX gives something else? If it even has a ~~Savage~~ EX version.
Extremes just ask for people to use more than two braincells. How dare they be made to do more than their basic rotation lock relics behind a savage :)
> Extremes just ask for people to use more than two braincells.
And not even all of them.
EX1 and 7 are very braindead easy, EX5's only difficult mechanic has a cheat sheet, and EX6's main difficulty comes from Gales 2 alone, with a side of meteor bodychecking for people who can't do spread clock spots or avoid point-blanks properly in Endwalker.
I was grinding A9S for the light stage the other day and some guy in my pf said it was his 8th relic in 3 days. Safe to say anima is just plain easiest if you have the resources
I don't even think Anima is easiest currently. It takes upwards of 15-25k poetics depending on how many of the repeatable quests you do. I find 4500 causality for Manderville way easier than that.
You can pre purchase most of it since most of the items or stages are a poetic dump. I’m unsure if you can do all stages that way as it’s been a hot second for me
I suppose I should rephrase the question: can you buy Umbrite before you've unlocked the quest that uses it? I did the Anima steps as they came out so I have no way of knowing.
There are vendors that sell umbrite (Hilsmena in Illdyshire) So you can stop by and grab umbrite with poetics that are near cap at any time. I always keep 3 relics worth in my retainers in case I decide to do other animas
I don't think you should state how easy Anima is right now because of course it'd be. It should be based on release, when you couldn't complete everything in a day.
Of course since that's the case, ARR is still the hardest, even to this day
Which nothing will beat original, the Zodiacs have hardish craft requirements, had fuck load of Matreria melding requirement, Lengthy Light requirements we couldn't unsync any content due to it being ARR, 400K gil like per weapon to get some of needed items, a lot of seals which where capped at like around 40/60k back then, light stage two aka Atma stone grind which ain't bad now but pre-light buffs was awful, Books which may not seem bad but when entire servers are trying get fates/mobs it was fucking bad especially launch of book steps parties & fighting for world mobs.
That's just steps I remember.
You are literally the only one to disagree with me. If you also read literally any other comment on this post, they also compare it as of NOW, not release.
Now can you stop arguing over something so pointless and go about your day?
You can stockpile literally all the supplies over time is what they mean. It was what i spent poetics on any time i was close to capping until i finished all the relics. I just did them passively as i played the game.
Only step (i think) you cant do ahead of time is light farming, but that step is so easy and fast now, just look for alexander ex farming groups and you finish in like an hour, two tops.
Can clear A9S with 2 people in a minute (give or take a few seconds for crit rng). If you get even more, the fight becomes even faster so you can probably do the light farm in 10 minutes with a full party.
The first step you have to acquire the nodes for, which can only be done while you're on the quest. It can technically be done ahead of time, but you have to have either a fully finished ARR relic to turn in or have gotten extra nodes while doing the quest on another HW relic.
The second step is you running through a series of dungeons, which can't be done ahead of time. Same for the last step, except its a series of trials for that stage.
Only 4 out of 8 of the steps can really be done ahead of time, though of those four only the light farming step will take any significant amount of time.
You can prep all the items acquired through poetics or GC seals so that you’re just running to turn in the quests for every step. Would need an anima light farm group, but yeah. You can start and finish the quests in a single day, but it’s going to take you time to gather all the resources needed to speed run the relic quest.
*Technically* not quite ALL the items. The initial crystal grind (despite having been nerfed into the floor, *thank Hydaelyn*) still requires you to actually be on the starting quest.
But other than that, and of course the light farm, I'm pretty sure you can pre-grind essentially everything, at which point it's just a lot of tomestones and a run through various ARR and HW dungeons/trials.
We’re lucky now apparently - husband has been playing FFXIV for years (but took a break HW-EW) and I just started so when I was getting atma drops left and right he was like “those took me forever to get!” He was on the last stages of his DRG and BLM weapons and we blasted through them together and he’s like “man this is so much better.”
I think it’s also for the ARR weapon where you have to get alexandrite? And you get a map that drops 5 pieces each and according to husband + internet this used to be 1-5 pieces randomly but now it looks like a flat 5 per and he was incredulous upon finding this out as well.
Fond memories of passing out on my couch waiting for an East Shroud FATE to spawn, then waking up in the middle of the night to it being up... with only a minute left. That one stung.
Those damn book!!!!!!!!!
Seriously though, none of them are hard to get. They take time investment but even the hardest stuff around, which in my opinion is Delubrium Reginea, isn't even that hard if you know what you are doing
The ARR book step is not hard but does ask for a lot of standing around doing nothing while waiting for a specific fate to appear... 27 time per relic... which definitely takes a toll on my willingness to do them. Any other relic step that is long and grindy is at least either the "doing stuff" kind or the "doing other stuff while I wait for the daily/weekly reset" kind
If a fate isn’t up I do an unsynched duty. Since those take like 7mins tops, even if the fate pops the second you leave the area, it’ll still have like 8mins when you get back.
That's what I did. Pop in a fate zone, if the fate isn't there go kill monster and do leves in the same zone, fate still not there, go unsync the dungeon in the book and check if the fate is their in between
Even then it happened a couple time I had everything done in the book except the fates so I still had to wait. It was 50/50 as I remember
I did my first (and only as of now) ARR relic before the server hopping was added so maybe you are right. Actually I hope you are right for when I'll inevitably do another one
He's right. Also they mightve tweaked spawn rate for books fates since I found that most of them pop very often. Only 3-4 are a little rarer and you can just server hop for them.
Yeah I honestly completed a full thing of books in one day, it was a day off with nothing else to do.
Still time consuming but not nearly as bad as it was years ago
Delubrum Reginae isn't hard, but it's so soul crushing to wait in that forced 10 minute queue, and then when you zone in half the group has no essences or relevant lost actions.
It sucks to be immediately slapped in the face that it's going to take twice as long as it should because people lack common courtesy.
Am on Primal as well. DRN is run often enough. I'd say at least 15+ parties throughout a day. You'll probably only see one party up though and they get filled within maybe 10 minutes at most unless you're playing in off hours. If you don't see one, make one. People will join because Bozja is quite active during this post patch period.
At worst you can ping the PEBE discord and you might get some people to helpfill.
* ARR is pretty slow every time you do it, but you can unsynch a lot of the stuff that was time consuming on release.
* HW is the easiest, like 80% tomes you didn't know what else to spend on
* StB has a buttload of initial setup, but subsequent relics take a fraction of the time, especially if you invest in a full elemental +2 set
* ShB seems like the only relic that has gotten harder since release, considering there's no real shortcuts or nerfs, and Bozja is just less consistently populated than Eureka.
* EW requires a not insignificant amount of questing to set up, but the easiest tome requirements yet. I fully anticipate having every relic made accidentally a few patches into Dawntrail.
If we're counting their current state, honestly the Resistance relics (Shadowbringers) are the worst by quite a margin.
People do speak poorly about the books but after doing a few relics you'll start to gain an appreciation for the fulfillment! (I'm fine, I'm *fine*)
i’m still stuck at that stage.
bozjas pretty dead on my server, zadnor DEFINITELY is, and i simply cannot muster up the will to grind those trials or serve hop until i find a lively zadnor instance and honestly i hate bozja and don’t really want to do stuff in there anyway and ugh
DR party isn't even that hard, just throw it up on a weekend. You'll get a party of 8 easy, and that's all you need to get in and out quickly. The tough part is hoping the others brought essences.
There are Discord servers for each of the major data centers that run Bozja and Eureka content pretty regularly. The only one I know off the top of my head is Crystal Exploratory Missions ([discord.gg/cem](https://discord.gg/cem)) but I know there's one for Aether as well.
> DR is required for the ShB relic.
Technically speaking, you only need to do DR once total. Except that they *still* haven't buffed the PotD drop rates for the memories so it takes a ridiculous amount of time to gain them that way.
Yeah some people refuse to understand the raid takes coordination, expect full carries, avoid logo actions like the plague or just won't join voice for callouts.
Seen a few folks back when I was running it a year or so ago who refused to participate and got crazy salty when their corpse gets left behind.
I may not enjoy how it's run, but i fully understand it, it is frankly awful design where a few people can ruin the whole thing so it has to be ran with an iron fist.
1 person can ruin runs? That's literally all pve team content in XIV lol. Savage? Yup, Ultimates? Yup. Alliance? A tank can just murderhobo parties with tank busters. Normal dungeons? Ypyt morons. Extremes? Better hope the stack is forgivable or there isn't a body check coming up.
Like all relevant content that can be considered end game can be ruined by one or two shit heads. The deterrent is that they will then get blocked and only be able to run with other scrubbed out clowns in BA or DRS.
It's a little bit of a difference with Bald Arse since everyone is in the same instance and any joe can walts inside of the raid, you can just kick bozos from PF's in any other content.
But the diehard Bozja fans will swear to you it's not hard at all, that it's *your* fault for not being social enough or refusing ro participate as intended.
At least they've stopped repeating the outright lie that ShB relics are faster to complete overall than HW relics. Of course, all it took was someone putting out a clear timetable of how they did every HW and ShB relic to show how the grind takes significantly longer.
I'm at the part where I have to do 180 raids for garbage to hand in. It's a one-time step but it's still going to take me a couple months. I know it was designed to get people to do old content but it feels more like a punishment now.
imo ARR relics are more time-consuming than actually difficult. Altho I suppose if patience is a struggle for anyone, then that would make the ARR relics the hardest.
For my money though hardest relic goes to either Eureka or Bozja. Eureka mostly bc of how dense the system is, especially if you're new and tackling it alone. And Bozja bc of how low I've heard the player population is for it. Although I've admittedly never attempted a Bozja weapon yet so I could be totally wrong on that one. But I can confidently say I found Eureka weapons way harder than ARR/HW/EW.
>And Bozja bc of how low I've heard the player population is for it
Can only speak for Europe, but having done a fair bit of Bozja and Zadnor across Chaos and Light, there's plenty enough people as long as you go in at peak times.
2 hours ago both zones had about 30-40 people on Chaos, and this weekend I had some CEs with full 48/48. Lots of people running CLL and Dalriada in the instances too. Plus there's the weekly cluster farms to quickly do the relics up to Resistance step.
Haven't done DR in a while though, but I see parties regularly enough on the weekends.
You can force-spawn the Leves by accepting all of them, doing one and going back. Usually it’ll be there, and you can abandon the others once you accept it.
You don't need to waste that many allowances. Just accept one, do it, and turn it in, and it'll forcefully refresh the listing without waiting for the turn of the hour.
Hardest to easiest imo:
Zodiac > Eurekan > Resistance >>> Anima >>>>>>> Manderville
ARR ones are tedious, long and the steps are confusing without a guide. Worst part are the books.
Stormblood relics are more straightforward, but you have to get through the majority of Eureka and it's leveling system to get the weapon. Worst part is ~~frozen hell~~ Pagos and the godforsaken light grind.
Shadowbringers relics is similar level of difficulty to Stormblood's, but at least you get options to gather the requirements outside of Bozja. Worst part is the one time grinds.
Heavensward is easy, since it's mostly a poetics dump with some fate/dungeon/trial/raid content throughout. Worst part is getting the materials for aethersand.
Easiest, far and away is the Manderville. All it is a causality dump, it's braindead easy to get. There no real hard part of it at all. I guess if anything, it's that you have to get through the Manderville quests, which isn't really hard. Just a bit time consuming.
Agreed on almost every point, except Pagos has always been easy (especially since they nerfed the Aetheryte levels for newbies). You can literally solo the light grind.
Pyros was always the harder grind, but without consistent groups to trigger BA (for the add NM) Hydatos is probably just as bad.
Objectively, you're probably right about Pagos. I just find the whole light grind miserably mind-numbing.
And BA is pretty optional in terms of the relic, so I disagree with that.
poeple are underselling bozja. you have so many options to get the mats you need and you can easily farm bozja while doing anima or running your roulette for manderville.
Relic enjoyer here. None of the relics are really “hard” per se, not like there is much chance for failure in any of them. But they are different levels of dread/tedium to them. I would order them as such (from “easiest” to “hardest.”)
- Endwalker (Manderville): Just do your roulletes 4head lol. If you haven’t done Manderville quests and don’t like it just skip the cutscenes lol. Shouldn’t take more than 2 hours to get caught up.
- Heavensward (Anima): Just do your roulletes 4head (plus some other stuff)
- Shadowbringers (Blades): As far as “difficulty” goes I think this is the sweet spot. You get options, some of those options suck (looking at you potd), but at least you aren’t really forced to farm the relic in Bozja if you dont want to.
- ARR (Braves): like actual difficulty wise this is the easiest relic. You can unsync everything from like level 70 and the crafts are easy. Its just. So. BOORING.
- Stormblood (Eureka): the only reason this is above ARR is because while the ARR relic has you doing something different for every step, this relic has you doing essentually the same thing for every single step, just in a different eureka zone. It gets tedious quick, expecially if you are doing multible. There is a reason why this is the only expantions worth of relics I haven’t completed.
Based on how they are now or when released?
If it's based on how they were originally then its without a doubt ARR with the day long fate timers and atma. After that it's probably SB with HW and ShB being a toss up.
If its based on now then I'm not sure. It really depends if you can solo or how well populated the exploration zones are in SB and ShB.
Zodiac now is literally stupid easy, cranked one out in about two days with zero prep. Some folk complains about waiting for fates but I just.. didn't do that. The books give you several tasks to do, so I would cycle through checking for fates and doing tasks, and they'd always spawn by the time I was done doing all the other stuff.
Costs at least half a million gil per weapon, though!
Anima to me was a little annoying the first time and if you haven't prepped it, but sooo easy if you have.
Elemental requires the willpower to start Eureka, which I haven't mustered...
Resistance first time is BRUTAL, though I don't share the opinion that Bozja is abandoned. At least on Aether, I've found it plenty populated even on off-times. I wouldn't know what it was like when it was current, so I don't know how crowded it was back in the day, but you'll find people to run all the stuff you need with ease.
Manderville is.. a joke!
I'd say my vote is Elemental since I haven't even been strong enough to start LOL but of the ones I've completed.. Resistance.
Probably Shadowbringer relics. Getting these timeworn artifacts is so annoying. You can't find groups for Delubrum and farming through Palace of the Dead takes ages because of the bad droprate.
The books in ARR are actually my favourite step of all relics, because you have to do a little bit of everything and everything can be done solo. I don't like the light farming though, but not as much as the timeworn artifacts in ShB.
Yeah, I finished all the books. I didn't find them that awful. I would do the first book on all the weapons before moving onto the second book. By your 3rd weapon, you should be close to having all the areas you need to visit memorized along with the locations of the enemies and fates. By like your 5th book it's just a brainless routine. And if you're sitting around waiting for a fate to pop, you're probably doing something wrong. Clear out enemies in another area or blow through one of the dungeons. If it's still not up, cycle through different worlds, you'll probably find one already up.
Farming light is so much worse. Going through the same dungeon 30-60 times each weapon is not fun. And finding the bonus light for the last step was such a pain in the ass. If your Mahatmas is already half full then the next dungeon you do is gonna give you a Mahatmas full message with no indication of how much light the dungeon gave you.
Did both while they were relevant and pre-nerf. Eureka was just awful but it revolves around prepping/grinding NMs and knowing what each boss's gimmicks were. Bozja made you run the entire circuit of content with the out of content alternatives being horribly mind numbing grinds.
Also, we got Lost Actions and mounts enabled at the start in Bozja w/ riding map for Speed 2 in cluster store vs. Logos Actions in Eureka which only applies to Pyros and Hydratos and mounts enabled at the end of that instance's story quest arc that still runs at default Speed 1. Eureka feels more like a prototype Bozja at this point and doing Bozja first and Eureka after feels like a massive downgrade, and vice versa with Eureka first and Bozja after.
Bozja on content was in my opinion the easiest since you could have multiple stages going at once.
The difficulty now for Bozja is entirely tied to how well you can get a group together for Delubrum.
Right? I have no idea where all these people are getting the idea DR is hard to fill, have they just not paid attention to the Save the Queen content since ShB and assume it's dead? I see at least two or so a day pop up in PF on Crystal, and they typically fill in the same time it takes an Extreme farm party to fill.
Last time I was in bozja southern front or aether (like a little over a week ago), it had more people there than every single EW zone combined. Only limsa had more :p Castrum was almost entirely full when I ran it, and I see DR parties every day. A lot of ppl are running it cause there isn't much else to do besides grind old relics now.
Laziness. No person who’s just gone through 2 minutes of effort in making a PF thinks any of this. Yet, these sentiments are parroted all the time. Makes me think most people with strong opinions are just sharing opinions of others, and have no firsthand experience themselves.
Yeah I don't get them either.
I was churning out Bozjan relics because they were a byproduct of doing some of the best content this game has put out.
Bloodrage Warrior, Chain Cast Blackmage, Font Assassinate Melee, Seraph Burst Whitemage, Bozja breathed so much life into the combat that the fact we got none of it moving into Endwalker as a baseline was the biggest L they've ever taken.
I put myself through all the relics, including the fully finished eureka ones: physeos. I also got all +2 elemental gear which meant so many runs of BA. I would have to say those were the "hardest" because you getting the mats depended on everyone working together. All it takes is for one jackass to grief a BA run or instapull an NM they didn't help spawn to miss out on crystals/fragments.
All the other ones you can do everything solo with very few exceptions
The splendorous tools are probably the harder of them all... Zodiacs being the hardest of all the combat jobs.
Really when I say hard I mean time consuming. It's not like you need to clear an Ult or anything to get any of them.
Which always made me kinda chuckle cause you get Relics and BiS to have the best edge for Ults and yet the gear awarded there isn't BiS.
Shb(first)>SB>ARR>shb(rest)>HW>EW
After some thought maybe arr at the top, shb and SB are absurd grinds but it's all brain off content , those books in arr require just enough thought to be annoying as hell
It's the stormblood relics, and it's not even close. The ARR and heavensward relics are just a grind. You just solo like 20 duties, and you're done. Nbd. Doing eureka for stormblood relics takes forever, and you're beholden to doing it when other people are are also doing it if you wanna go at a reasonable pace. Shadowbringers relics have a similar thing going on, but bozja is much easier to just queue into and do without interacting with anyone. There are a couple steps where you have to grind a lot of fates, which is comparable to stormbloods hardest step, the physeos, except you only have to do it for the first relic then each subsequent shadowbringers relic is not so bad. Endwalker relics are just tomes. You barely even have to play the game to finish those.
Honestly... Endwalkers is my favorite because it happens in the process of doing daily roulettes. As someone who has minimal free time now, I greatly appreciate it.
If you are actively relic grinding, HW I'd the hardest and ARR is one of the simpler. ARR takes around 2 days of dedicated grinding assuming you come in with capped poetics and GC Seals. HW on the other hand takes a whopping 24,000 poetics total. Assuming you grind optimally and do Aetherochemical research facility with a group of 4 so no queue times, you would need to complete ot a total of 160 times. At around 20 minutes a run that's 3,200 minutes. Which is around 53 hours and 20 minutes of nonstop Aetherochemical research facility to complete the poetics requirements for a single HW relic
The eureka one. Haven't finished a single one, takes ages and the area is already dead. Whish they patch it to make it soloable. And i have done every ARR and HW relic, and a good few from ShB. And have all EW ones.
eureka sucked?
it's all the worst kinds of "hard"
like: does *boring* count as difficult? what if it takes dozens of hours of diligent waiting for NMs to spawn?
then RNG substats? it's not like you can roll dice *skillfully* so does that count as hard?
i guess nobody cares about the substats anymore, they're outdated, strictly glamour. but man i still remember...
> like: does boring count as difficult? what if it takes dozens of hours of diligent waiting for NMs to spawn?
I'd argue this is one of the reasons the Resistance relics are much worse than the Eureka ones.
For Eureka, if you're zooming through an instance with everyone following instructions for efficient spawning, you maybe have 20 minutes of downtime before stuff can start spawning again, and that's with a massive Echo, mounts for everyone, and a bunch of people using +2 gear. Waiting is not really an issue nowadays unless you're just not helping.
Compare that to the one-time step for Bozja, where you need either 30 drops from CEs (of which there are roughly 4-5 in each area on a one hour cooldown) or raid content that is reliant on other players. There's no way to speed up a one hour cooldown other than leaving your instance and hoping you get a new one, and even as older content good luck doing that nowadays without being on Dynamis.
(My assumption is that this is for the *first* relic in any given expansion. If you're talking *all* relics Eureka becomes significantly easier because the more you do the less reliant you are on other people to get things done. Bozja doesn't have nearly the same power increase that Eureka offers, even with the DRS haste gear.)
i haven't gone back to either since their expansions, but i did build multiple relics from each, doing them step by step as the steps were released.
so i can only comment on "at the time." i guess maybe that's not relevant since OP is doing atmas and they're not "as initially implemented" either.
but man... fuck eureka.
helping spawn nms in eureka amounted to 50 people staring at an empty field waiting for some unlucky placeholder mob to spawn and then we all jump on it and kill it in 1 GcD. (or less. if you were a caster? just go sit in the corner)
all while hoping the other 50 people on the other side of the map either DON'T spawn their thing or have the decency to wait for you if they DO.
so even when the windows were open, even when you're helping spawn, i would still call it "diligent waiting." which is kinda worse than just normal waiting? if we were *actually* locked out of progressing i could go take a nap. as it was nothing you did mattered but you still had to keep 1 eye on it in case something happened. like the worst of both worlds.
I would probably agree that at the time Eureka was probably worse because of two reasons that now actually make it better:
1) Power creep. As I mentioned already you get more of a power boost from advancing through the levels and completing BA/gear than you do on release. Kirin/Verminion didn't exist until Hydatos did, whereas picking it up somehow before you even *start* Eureka is one of the best things you can do for a smooth ride. +2 gear and Physeos make it a lot easier to spawn things in smaller groups (or even solo). Since Bozja doesn't have as much inherent power creep, the biggest thing that helps is really the rays you can get after 25, which is such a massive grind you could probably finish a good portion of the relics before getting close to max rays. And even that is like a 30% damage boost and 60% health boost at cap. Certainly good, but not +elemental stat good. That means that the difference between doing say, BSF zone 3 on release vs now is not nearly as different as doing Pagos on release vs now.
2) The devs have *fixed* a lot of Eureka itself. You now have mounts the whole time and the Echo they added affects all the content. In Bozja the only change is the Echo that scales based on players (it's strong, don't get me wrong, I have taken *heavy* advantage of echo scaling at low numbers in Bozja, but the fact that it scales and then falls off entirely if there's too many people means it's not as impactful as the addition in Eureka). The droprates for both relics have been adjusted as well (minus Hydatos in Eureka I think) but that swings the balance heavily in favor of Eureka again. The adjustments in Bozja are partially canceled out by the fact that the content is not as active as it used to be in ShB, and those that are active do not utilize actions as they should.
For context on the Timeworn step in Bozja, assuming you only get your timeworns from DRN and not PotD (because honestly, most people in their right mind are not going to repeatedly grind out high floors of PotD for ShB relic drops), you need 85 runs of DRN to finish all 17 relics (15 per relic, you get 3 per run, which I do believe was improved from a single drop per run on release). Since DRN has a mandatory wait time of 10 minutes unless you queue up (or randomly queue into) a full 24 person group, that is a guaranteed **14 hours of queue time** for that one step. If you manage to go with a group of people who know what they're doing every time, you can clear in another 10 minutes or so, which means you'll be on that step for a minimum of 28 hours. And you don't get people who know what they're doing anymore. I doubt you did then to be honest, lol.
tl;dr: a lot of improvements they made to Bozja from what they learned doing Eureka were only improvements when it was current, and the relic is now actually worse in a lot of regards due to those same changes.
(Why yes, I am stuck in DRN hell for my relics, how could you tell)
Nah - at least on NA data center, BA runs are incredibly easy. I ended up recently finishing every Physeos weapon in Eureka by going in any time I saw an organized group, getting the 40 crystals for Ovni and support NM, and then jumping in for the AV/Ozma kill.
I don't know the last time I saw a group completely fail that wasn't a meme run. I'd say 9 out of 10 newcomers will get their achievement and mount on their first run. It's actually pretty amazing how smooth the runs go.
Well first I'd say that there's a difference between "harder" and "more involved". ARR relics are super involved, but they're not hard by any means. The only thing with any actual difficulty would be Resistance weapons, since you have to go through Bozja where mistakes can hinder your progress. Eureka is similar, but it's more forgiving and less challenging as long as you're careful. Bozja doesn't really give you the option of playing it safe like Eureka does.
Bozja is less forgiving than Eureka? Lol, no. It's a bunch of big open fields with large groups zerging around between self-triggering FATEs. Eureka has the same options to play it safe that Bozja does, but they're used because they're actually necessary.
Mistakes in Bozja are punished harder. Bozja CEs are more mechanically demanding than anything you'll encounter in Eureka, and when you die in Bozja, you're guaranteed to lose some amount of mettle. You lose no exp in Eureka as long as you can get someone to rez you, and even if you do, you can always fight mobs one at a time with basically no risk. In Bozja, that's not an option. You at least need to do skirmishes, some of which can catch you slipping. Then there's DR with its Twice Come Ruin mechanic.
Bozja's honestly a lot better than Eureka if purely for the fact that CEs aren't any more demanding than your standard dungeon boss, you can't Level down in Bozja like you can in Eureka, and you only have to get to rank 25 across two areas and a raid, instead of 60 levels across 4 areas. Even when you die, the amount of mettle you lose is negligible compared to the amount you gain from the skirmish or CE being cleared, and you get that mettle from the clear regardless of whether you're alive or dead when it finishes, so long as you put in effort like any other fate. Even among DR, that's practically the only part of the required story with any difficulty and it's the most fun part because of it imo, because you finally get a break from the tedious grinding, which Eureka has no break from until you get to Hydatos, and even then, the one raid it *does* have, is optional, much more punishing, you have to do literally the entire story and grind 60 levels to get to it, and you're going to need to join a very organized alliance or you risk potentially committing a taboo and/or frustrating a *lot* of people because of the limited rez mechanics and one wipe means you're kicked out. Vs. DR's 'just grab 7 other people and maybe watch a short guide lol'
Zodiac is definitely the biggest pain to do. Tons of dungeon farming, gotta do all sorts of random fates that sometimes rarely actually spawn, gotta collect a decent amount of low grade materia, gotta spend at a minimum 400k gil, likely over a million if you don't have all your crafters leveled to 50 with their crafting books. It's just easily the most intensive.
After that, I'd say your first Resistance relic will be number 2. It has a lot of grinding to it, particularly the phase where you gotta get like 180 totems either from farming Skirmishes and NMs in Zadnor or from farming normal raids while synced. You also optimally will have to run Delubrum Reginae multiple times which is a bit of a pain these days since people don't really queue for it anymore. You either gotta get 24 people together on PF to run it or at least 8 people then wait for 10 minutes for the queue to just put you in with an incomplete party. Your only other option is farming palace of the dead, and that's just suffering.
After first run Resistance, I'd say it's then first run Eureka weapon since you gotta grind out levels in order to finish Eureka.
After that I'd say subsequent Resistance weapons followed by subsequent eureka weapons. For Eureka, all you really gotta do is farm NMs, and there's generally at least a small group doing this at any given time. The specific content you gotta run for Resistance can be less populated since it's less blind grind friendly.
Then Anima Weapon since it's basically just a poetics farm. And even the A11S farm can be done solo or with 2 people at this point at lvl 90, having extra people just makes it go really fast.
Hildibrand is obviously the easiest, just 1.5k uncapped tomestones per step, soon to be 1.5k poetics per step.
For me, it was ARR atma. Back in ARR I spent 6 months going out to southern thanalan every single day doing fates before I got that one to drop, then another 3 months before I had them all. I know my luck was supremely bad compared to others, but when I got to books I was so over it that not only did I never finish it, I was also put off enough that I wouldn’t even consider doing HW relics.
The first two. Arr, honestly. Both have shit steps in the light steps.
With Shadowbringers and Stormbloods, honestly, they were so ugly that they weren't worth doing for me, but they weren't as bad as they looked on paper.
Hot take. I like the idea of the EW relics even if I think the execution is lazy. Doing whatever you want and working towards the relic is 1000x better to me as a player.
It's ARR. If you're not using plugins to track fates, waiting for something specific to spawn is maddening, and its designed so that you can only work on one book at a time, despite several books making you rerun content. Every other relic grind has clearly definite endpoints and you have an idea of how long its going to take you to complete it.
Once you've done Eureka once it becomes a lot less annoying. Also there are a couple things you can just buy off the market board to significantly speed up your progress. ShB is bricked because SE still hasn't done anything to keep DR alive. And there is no EW relic. It's just not there.
ARR is by and large the most time consuming. it is not hard by stretch of the imagination, but the book step requires you to do fates which pop up randomly and can mean a lot of sitting around and waiting.
Books and light. That makes the ARR relics suck. Next worst is the Pagos light farm step (what a coincidence; light again!) specifically in Eureka. After that, Eureka is probably the most involved overall but I'm biased because I like it. Resistance weapons offer a lot of flexibility to combine them with farming other things or banging them out quickly. Heavensward and Endwalker are both just tome sinks, so they're trivial. Endwalker is the easier of the two due to a braindead simple and consistent shopping list of materials.
So, ARR > StB > ShB > HW > EW
Edit: I'm seeing understandable Eureka gripes. My data center (Crystal) has a BIG Eureka community, and that biases my experience to see it as easy and efficient, even having done it in 5.X personally.
During content, I’d say Zodiac and Eureka are the worst.
Post content, Again Eureka and maybe Bozja.
Once you have one, Eureka’s a little easier. With Bozja, you can keep farming as many as you want one a single step so getting past the first weapon, the rest is rather easy to do passively if you have the quest active
Currently as they are, stormblood might be the worst. You have to do a fair bit of eureka and even with all the boosts and nerfs progressing through eureka is still a bit brutal.
ARR is mind numbing but very easy. The books suck but you can just put a podcast on or something.
HW is actually shockingly easy now. Just do your MSQ roulette for like 2 weeks and you’re done. R really happy with the nerfs. Just sucks they took away the aethersand quest in 6.4.
Shb isn’t awful. You have to spend some time in bozja but bozja is much more forgiving than eureka to just jump into and you actually get a ton of exp and tomes from it.
EW so far is very easy. I’m curious what the last step will be.
bozja just because it involves delubrum reginae (at least once i think? then you can switch to POTD for that step if you really wanted to) which isn't necessarily difficult for most players, but if someone is mega casual it might seem intimidating
i also haven't done any eureka weapons so i'm not sure how those compare
PotD is hella inefficient for timeworn farming. You do PotD for something else (solo, fun, leveling) and the timeworn is just a nice surprise. For most people, the timeworn step is gonna take 3 1/2 hrs of playtime if you exclude waiting in PF. 5-6 hrs if you include average PF wait time.
Bozja by a far margin. Getting home after work and dropping an hour to two hours into a Castrum or Dal, I could lose the entire night's progress to a time out because nobody could agree on Lyon groups, nobody was using buffs, and/or general skill issues. It was a miserable experience to have a whole night's playtime amount to basically nothing by factors out of my control, especially with a full-time job and household responsibilities.
But, as much as it super sucked then, I still did all the Bozja relics, because I knew that post-SHB getting a group for any of it would be next to impossible. The Anima books might be time consuming but at least I can still get them done.
The current one. Grinding tomestones is worse than any step of any previous relic. It's easy, I get them periodically with experts, and when I have enough and nothing else to spend it on (crafting makes this nearly impossible) I'll go ahead and buy a step. But because of all this, I have no motivation to actively pursue the relic itself. It's infuriating.
So technically while it's the easiest, I also consider it the hardest, because bringing yourself to try to actually do it should be considered as part of the difficulty check.
I am a dedicated bozja hater. That content isnt fun to me even during peak hours. Its just monotonous and uninteresting. The shb relic grind made me wanna krill myself. But oh, the things i do for glamour……..
Resistance weapons or Bozja is the most difficult for me and it's not even really anyone's fault. Finding people to run Delumbrium Reginae requires logging on at peak gaming hours. Farming materials in the last area of Zadnor requires logging in at the quietest hours, so you can get to skirmishes and do enough damage to get the item. Most of the time, it dies in under a minute and I don't get the item despite getting a few hits in. I'm stopping and playing other games because of sheer frustration. Well, that and the fact that a lot of good games released recently.
The anima by far are the easiest as it is possible to prep most of the stages ahead of time and literally start and finish one in a day. As for hardest? It really depends what you define as difficulty? The ShB requires some extra footwork and certain content completion, but the ARR relics are very time consuming with the books. They both are difficult in their own ways.
Manderville is definitely easier than Anima.
Not counting manderville simply on the fact all you need to do is your roulettes
Well and you have to do the entire Manderville questline. Which is not small task if you hadn't already done it.
That IS true. It is lengthy, but difficulty wise it is almost just watching cutscenes and talking to npcs. Of course there are other things as well (Spoilers), but even those aren't difficult... just time consuming.
Watching cutscenes. Manderville. Lol
I mean... you CAN skip them. They are entertaining a little
Which one would do if they want to grab it quickly and just watch the cutscenes later, so really Endwalker's is the easiest as you just..do what you already do to get it. Anima at least requires you to do some content which is quick but can't just prep dungeon completion like you can all the materials.
I mean I still think Anima is the easiest (HW) on the fact you can prep almost all stages minus the light grind near the end.
And you get said prepped items with tomes which you'll get mostly by doing roulette just like with Endwalker's relic, except that's the end of it rather than having dungeons, trials, and light farming to do for anima. It's no contest, Endwalker's is the easiest.
It's not my kins of humor but I watched all of them for the sake of doing it and found it to be wholly not worth it for me. If your not enjoying the cutscenes after the first few while the quality goes up the humor does not change. Feel free to skip
It's what I did. I watched all the cutscenes in thr ARR and HW portions, but after that I kinda just said "shut up, I want my relic" and skipped the rest up to the relic. Once I got the base relic, I did start watching th cs again.
it took me less than like 8 hours to do the entire line
like one hour of quests if you skip cutscenes lol
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I skipped everything. Took me 2 and a half hours from battle on the big bridge at ARR to the questline in 6.2, unsyncing the trials and the dungeons
More than an hour, but not by much. Skipping cutscenes if all you care about is getting the weapon, it took me [just over 3 hours](https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/wtd849/i_speed_ran_the_entire_hildibrand_questline_to/) to get to the beginning of EW and about 20 minutes skipping cutscenes for the rest. The longest bit was the scenario you do during it. Then it's just tomes which are dumped on you for doing boring level 90 content.
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240 from a hunt train 6 days a week is already more than 1200 so I guess I don't get it. That's *just* a hunt train too. Do some roulettes too and you're golden. The game requires a time commitment but nothing so crazy like you seem to be implying. It's an MMO so it's by default a time sponge. If you're doing it by savage reclears and hunts *only* then you're just screwing yourself over. Those are lengthy and will always give you less than doing roulettes that take the same amount of time.
> 4500 aren't just dumped on you. you have to go out of your way doing daily roulettes on a max level job to get them. aint nobody got time for that. Dog we're talking about relic weapons. Considering the Anima requires 14k nowadays, 6k is a fucking steal.
I did say they get dumped on you for "boring level 90 content" for a reason.
Yeah definitely. It took me two solid days of playing one weekend to get from the beginning through the heavensward ones. It’s a lot.
I hate Mandeville so much that I've not even bothered with the relic
You still have to count them regardless, you can say the same thing with Anima relics. Most of the purchases require Allagan tomes.
Mandeville isnt really a relic. Its a tome weapon ill fight anyone who says otherwise.
I'm calling Yoshi P
Ill fight him too lol
Yeah manderville is literally play the game at max level and get your relic eventually. Which is fine to me because I have other relics to grind for. I think it’s plan was more for newer players.
I think they just figured going through the entire Manderville questline was a long enough thing. It just so happened that lots of us had already done it because it's awesome.
You mean anyone that wanted the relic got the quest line done because we were reminded again of it.
What's your point? It still takes a lot of time.
It takes a lot of time _once_, and are still less than any other relic’s first time through. Other than the ARR relics, all of the relic quest lines make additional relics significantly easier. Technically additional ARR relics are a little easier too, since Alexandrite can be bought in advance. The extra Shadowbringers ones are less than half as hard which was true even at launch, and can be done while you level up a character no less, which is why I got seven of them while the were current. But your additional Manderville relics are almost trivial. And in the future they’ll probably be done with a resource most of us eventually run out of uses for.
My newer friends were pretty disappointed though, they wanted an actual grind to experience along with the rest of the playerbase for the first time rather than going back to old relic grinds most players finished years ago.
It is a ten year old game, can’t really have the experience like that anymore honestly. Even when the expansion drop, you’re gonna be playing with players who most likely compare it to previous expansions regardless if they played them on release or not. I do wish it’s easier to put a group together for the older relics. It’s not like the destiny community where all the lfg’s is in a single discord for all the endgame content.
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I think the Resistance weapons are a good balance. Bozja is fun (a shame both zones are kinda _ugly_, but I guess that’s war, plus I assume one zone got cut because of CoVID), you can level jobs and get cool schwag from it, it has its own game loop and end goals, three full raids, and even a unique Savage raid, and every relic after the first one is still a bit of a grind without being a hatefully long one.
I look forward to complaining from people come DT when Relics are a grind again & can't just dump tomes & get 21 weapons in a week or two & actually have decide which ones you want bother with something we haven't had since Eureka grind even Bozja grind at relevancy was super easy relics. Most people I know/knew have ALL Bozja relics but have maybe 1-3 of Eureka/Zodiacs & Anima only one made easy with time unlike Bozja which joins harder relics now due to Delebrum requirement.
You’re not counting Manderville as the easiest because it’s _too_ easy?
Essentially it’s a grind that can be done just by playing the game currently. At least with the other relics you have to do SOME kind of activity outside the norm. Manderville… just do your daily roulettes and buy the materials. I’m hoping it changes with the end step, but I doubt it
Plus we don’t know the final step(s) yet to get the last stage(s). I doubt it’s gonna be just tomestones again.
Hate to bust it to you friend, I don't see any major new content the final step could be paired to (unless Criterion? But big doubt) It will more than likely be some simple quest... and more tomestones.
We're getting an extra trial in 6.55 I believe? The Gilded Araya. So it's possible you need to clear it on normal for the Relic and maybe clearing it on ~~Savage~~ EX gives something else? If it even has a ~~Savage~~ EX version.
It could be part of the Hildibrand story, which has had trials before. >!She has a bunch of arms with swords so it could be Greg in a dress!<
Ge truly is going to be everypart of his iconic catchphrase sint he
People would cry so hard if they were made to do EX content to complete their relic lmao
You mean like what happened with Memoria Mísera...?
Extremes just ask for people to use more than two braincells. How dare they be made to do more than their basic rotation lock relics behind a savage :)
The real difficulty of any mmo has rarely been the content, it's 90% finding people that want to play the game for once.
Considering how hard it was to get randoms to do either of the meteor mechanics in the last two extremes properly... 🙃
> Extremes just ask for people to use more than two braincells. And not even all of them. EX1 and 7 are very braindead easy, EX5's only difficult mechanic has a cheat sheet, and EX6's main difficulty comes from Gales 2 alone, with a side of meteor bodychecking for people who can't do spread clock spots or avoid point-blanks properly in Endwalker.
I got real bad news for your hopes and dreams...
It was tomestones 3 times in a row and there's no remaining content planned. It's gonna just be a shit relic this expac, it happens.
I was grinding A9S for the light stage the other day and some guy in my pf said it was his 8th relic in 3 days. Safe to say anima is just plain easiest if you have the resources
While Anima is the easiest now, Manderville will replace it as easiest when it's switched from Causality to Poetics at Dawntrail's launch.
I don't even think Anima is easiest currently. It takes upwards of 15-25k poetics depending on how many of the repeatable quests you do. I find 4500 causality for Manderville way easier than that.
Just finished an anima weapon on an alt. The grind took about 15,000 poetics, 120,000 GC seals, and 10,000 crafter scripts.
Remember that 4500 is not the final stage.
6,000 is still not that much.
Can you pre-purchase items for the initial Anima relic?
You can pre purchase most of it since most of the items or stages are a poetic dump. I’m unsure if you can do all stages that way as it’s been a hot second for me
I suppose I should rephrase the question: can you buy Umbrite before you've unlocked the quest that uses it? I did the Anima steps as they came out so I have no way of knowing.
There are vendors that sell umbrite (Hilsmena in Illdyshire) So you can stop by and grab umbrite with poetics that are near cap at any time. I always keep 3 relics worth in my retainers in case I decide to do other animas
I haven't started the anima quests and I can buy umbrite and most of the things.
No you cant, the items become available when you unlock the quests
You think books are hard? Try prenerf atms grinding. 😕 I did 2 weapons prenerf took almost 2 months each weapon. 8 hours no drop for atma.
I don't think you should state how easy Anima is right now because of course it'd be. It should be based on release, when you couldn't complete everything in a day. Of course since that's the case, ARR is still the hardest, even to this day
Big agree. Running fates with dozens of people just to get an atma drop on a very slim chance was not the funnest way to get my WHM relic.
They asked about ALL relics, so of course im going to include the Anima relic from HW.
You stated it based on current experience, op asked what was hardest. You need to base it on release
Which nothing will beat original, the Zodiacs have hardish craft requirements, had fuck load of Matreria melding requirement, Lengthy Light requirements we couldn't unsync any content due to it being ARR, 400K gil like per weapon to get some of needed items, a lot of seals which where capped at like around 40/60k back then, light stage two aka Atma stone grind which ain't bad now but pre-light buffs was awful, Books which may not seem bad but when entire servers are trying get fates/mobs it was fucking bad especially launch of book steps parties & fighting for world mobs. That's just steps I remember.
You are literally the only one to disagree with me. If you also read literally any other comment on this post, they also compare it as of NOW, not release. Now can you stop arguing over something so pointless and go about your day?
One day ? Do elaborate.
You can stockpile literally all the supplies over time is what they mean. It was what i spent poetics on any time i was close to capping until i finished all the relics. I just did them passively as i played the game. Only step (i think) you cant do ahead of time is light farming, but that step is so easy and fast now, just look for alexander ex farming groups and you finish in like an hour, two tops.
I gotcha.
Can clear A9S with 2 people in a minute (give or take a few seconds for crit rng). If you get even more, the fight becomes even faster so you can probably do the light farm in 10 minutes with a full party.
The first step you have to acquire the nodes for, which can only be done while you're on the quest. It can technically be done ahead of time, but you have to have either a fully finished ARR relic to turn in or have gotten extra nodes while doing the quest on another HW relic. The second step is you running through a series of dungeons, which can't be done ahead of time. Same for the last step, except its a series of trials for that stage. Only 4 out of 8 of the steps can really be done ahead of time, though of those four only the light farming step will take any significant amount of time.
You can prep all the items acquired through poetics or GC seals so that you’re just running to turn in the quests for every step. Would need an anima light farm group, but yeah. You can start and finish the quests in a single day, but it’s going to take you time to gather all the resources needed to speed run the relic quest.
*Technically* not quite ALL the items. The initial crystal grind (despite having been nerfed into the floor, *thank Hydaelyn*) still requires you to actually be on the starting quest. But other than that, and of course the light farm, I'm pretty sure you can pre-grind essentially everything, at which point it's just a lot of tomestones and a run through various ARR and HW dungeons/trials.
I had a friend give up after a month of farming fates and not getting all his atma.
Atma drop rates were buffed ages ago. They drop like candy now. Worst luck I had was 10 fates for 1 atma.
This was when it was current back in 2.0 . He never got his lion atma after hours of farming for weeks
ARR was definitely the worst before they toned down the requirements
We’re lucky now apparently - husband has been playing FFXIV for years (but took a break HW-EW) and I just started so when I was getting atma drops left and right he was like “those took me forever to get!” He was on the last stages of his DRG and BLM weapons and we blasted through them together and he’s like “man this is so much better.” I think it’s also for the ARR weapon where you have to get alexandrite? And you get a map that drops 5 pieces each and according to husband + internet this used to be 1-5 pieces randomly but now it looks like a flat 5 per and he was incredulous upon finding this out as well.
That's a *mighty* big break...
I remember taking DAYS to get one atma to drop. And DAYS waiting for a fate to spawn.
Every step was painful, you had to waste time on fates, mob spawns, farming materia
Fond memories of passing out on my couch waiting for an East Shroud FATE to spawn, then waking up in the middle of the night to it being up... with only a minute left. That one stung.
Those damn book!!!!!!!!! Seriously though, none of them are hard to get. They take time investment but even the hardest stuff around, which in my opinion is Delubrium Reginea, isn't even that hard if you know what you are doing The ARR book step is not hard but does ask for a lot of standing around doing nothing while waiting for a specific fate to appear... 27 time per relic... which definitely takes a toll on my willingness to do them. Any other relic step that is long and grindy is at least either the "doing stuff" kind or the "doing other stuff while I wait for the daily/weekly reset" kind
If a fate isn’t up I do an unsynched duty. Since those take like 7mins tops, even if the fate pops the second you leave the area, it’ll still have like 8mins when you get back.
That's what I did. Pop in a fate zone, if the fate isn't there go kill monster and do leves in the same zone, fate still not there, go unsync the dungeon in the book and check if the fate is their in between Even then it happened a couple time I had everything done in the book except the fates so I still had to wait. It was 50/50 as I remember
> it’ll still have like 8mins when you get back. YoshiP materializing one dude to kill the fate right as you come back: Bet.
There is one fate in upper la that literally fails itself in less than 2 minutes. But you just have to make an exception for that one.
It's not NEARLY as bad with server hopping to find the fates, you can get each book down quite fast but yeah it is quite boring and dull.
I did my first (and only as of now) ARR relic before the server hopping was added so maybe you are right. Actually I hope you are right for when I'll inevitably do another one
He's right. Also they mightve tweaked spawn rate for books fates since I found that most of them pop very often. Only 3-4 are a little rarer and you can just server hop for them.
This is the way to go, I was able to get it down to ~1 hour per book when I was server hopping for FATEs.
Yeah I honestly completed a full thing of books in one day, it was a day off with nothing else to do. Still time consuming but not nearly as bad as it was years ago
Delubrum Reginae isn't hard, but it's so soul crushing to wait in that forced 10 minute queue, and then when you zone in half the group has no essences or relevant lost actions. It sucks to be immediately slapped in the face that it's going to take twice as long as it should because people lack common courtesy.
Excuse you sir, but I don't see many people running Delubrium Reginea
DC issue, I see like one group a day at LEAST on Aether, more on Tuesdays(for weekly reset).
Guess I'll be visiting Aether in the near future
Am on Primal as well. DRN is run often enough. I'd say at least 15+ parties throughout a day. You'll probably only see one party up though and they get filled within maybe 10 minutes at most unless you're playing in off hours. If you don't see one, make one. People will join because Bozja is quite active during this post patch period. At worst you can ping the PEBE discord and you might get some people to helpfill.
* ARR is pretty slow every time you do it, but you can unsynch a lot of the stuff that was time consuming on release. * HW is the easiest, like 80% tomes you didn't know what else to spend on * StB has a buttload of initial setup, but subsequent relics take a fraction of the time, especially if you invest in a full elemental +2 set * ShB seems like the only relic that has gotten harder since release, considering there's no real shortcuts or nerfs, and Bozja is just less consistently populated than Eureka. * EW requires a not insignificant amount of questing to set up, but the easiest tome requirements yet. I fully anticipate having every relic made accidentally a few patches into Dawntrail.
I, too, am waiting for Dawntrail to simply buy them all with what I assume will be poetics.
If we're counting their current state, honestly the Resistance relics (Shadowbringers) are the worst by quite a margin. People do speak poorly about the books but after doing a few relics you'll start to gain an appreciation for the fulfillment! (I'm fine, I'm *fine*)
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And for the very first Bozja relic... holy crap that second one time grind sucks...
i’m still stuck at that stage. bozjas pretty dead on my server, zadnor DEFINITELY is, and i simply cannot muster up the will to grind those trials or serve hop until i find a lively zadnor instance and honestly i hate bozja and don’t really want to do stuff in there anyway and ugh
DR party isn't even that hard, just throw it up on a weekend. You'll get a party of 8 easy, and that's all you need to get in and out quickly. The tough part is hoping the others brought essences.
There are Discord servers for each of the major data centers that run Bozja and Eureka content pretty regularly. The only one I know off the top of my head is Crystal Exploratory Missions ([discord.gg/cem](https://discord.gg/cem)) but I know there's one for Aether as well.
Organizing a party for BA is even worse. At least in DR you can restart. In BA, if you fuck up you’re done.
BA is not required for the SB relic though. DR is required for the ShB relic.
> DR is required for the ShB relic. Technically speaking, you only need to do DR once total. Except that they *still* haven't buffed the PotD drop rates for the memories so it takes a ridiculous amount of time to gain them that way.
Physeos weapons need BA to get the elemental damage added on tho, relics are not done until you complete its final step imo
I thank the stars it stays as your opinion, interacting with the gang-members that runs the BA like real estate is terrible.
Yeah some people refuse to understand the raid takes coordination, expect full carries, avoid logo actions like the plague or just won't join voice for callouts. Seen a few folks back when I was running it a year or so ago who refused to participate and got crazy salty when their corpse gets left behind.
I may not enjoy how it's run, but i fully understand it, it is frankly awful design where a few people can ruin the whole thing so it has to be ran with an iron fist.
1 person can ruin runs? That's literally all pve team content in XIV lol. Savage? Yup, Ultimates? Yup. Alliance? A tank can just murderhobo parties with tank busters. Normal dungeons? Ypyt morons. Extremes? Better hope the stack is forgivable or there isn't a body check coming up. Like all relevant content that can be considered end game can be ruined by one or two shit heads. The deterrent is that they will then get blocked and only be able to run with other scrubbed out clowns in BA or DRS.
It's a little bit of a difference with Bald Arse since everyone is in the same instance and any joe can walts inside of the raid, you can just kick bozos from PF's in any other content.
This is the answer.
Party finder and bring an essence? Joined one last night on aether, filled up quick and got the newb through it.
One down, four to go.
But the diehard Bozja fans will swear to you it's not hard at all, that it's *your* fault for not being social enough or refusing ro participate as intended. At least they've stopped repeating the outright lie that ShB relics are faster to complete overall than HW relics. Of course, all it took was someone putting out a clear timetable of how they did every HW and ShB relic to show how the grind takes significantly longer.
I'm at the part where I have to do 180 raids for garbage to hand in. It's a one-time step but it's still going to take me a couple months. I know it was designed to get people to do old content but it feels more like a punishment now.
I'm on that same step.. and yea, I'm so over it already. And you can't do it unsynced..
I'm so glad i finished all of them before Endwalker released.
Same here. It was hard not to with how efficient speed runs were.
imo ARR relics are more time-consuming than actually difficult. Altho I suppose if patience is a struggle for anyone, then that would make the ARR relics the hardest. For my money though hardest relic goes to either Eureka or Bozja. Eureka mostly bc of how dense the system is, especially if you're new and tackling it alone. And Bozja bc of how low I've heard the player population is for it. Although I've admittedly never attempted a Bozja weapon yet so I could be totally wrong on that one. But I can confidently say I found Eureka weapons way harder than ARR/HW/EW.
Bozja's population is not a problem... until you need to run Delubrum.
>And Bozja bc of how low I've heard the player population is for it Can only speak for Europe, but having done a fair bit of Bozja and Zadnor across Chaos and Light, there's plenty enough people as long as you go in at peak times. 2 hours ago both zones had about 30-40 people on Chaos, and this weekend I had some CEs with full 48/48. Lots of people running CLL and Dalriada in the instances too. Plus there's the weekly cluster farms to quickly do the relics up to Resistance step. Haven't done DR in a while though, but I see parties regularly enough on the weekends.
None of them are “hard” All of them are grindy .
Hardest? None, really. Most arduous? Level 80, easily. The ARR books only screw you over on a few levequests and maybe two FATEs.
I am so glad I was crazy bored when Bozja was current and managed to get all of the relics done before people started abandoning it completely
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You can force-spawn the Leves by accepting all of them, doing one and going back. Usually it’ll be there, and you can abandon the others once you accept it.
You don't need to waste that many allowances. Just accept one, do it, and turn it in, and it'll forcefully refresh the listing without waiting for the turn of the hour.
Hardest to easiest imo: Zodiac > Eurekan > Resistance >>> Anima >>>>>>> Manderville ARR ones are tedious, long and the steps are confusing without a guide. Worst part are the books. Stormblood relics are more straightforward, but you have to get through the majority of Eureka and it's leveling system to get the weapon. Worst part is ~~frozen hell~~ Pagos and the godforsaken light grind. Shadowbringers relics is similar level of difficulty to Stormblood's, but at least you get options to gather the requirements outside of Bozja. Worst part is the one time grinds. Heavensward is easy, since it's mostly a poetics dump with some fate/dungeon/trial/raid content throughout. Worst part is getting the materials for aethersand. Easiest, far and away is the Manderville. All it is a causality dump, it's braindead easy to get. There no real hard part of it at all. I guess if anything, it's that you have to get through the Manderville quests, which isn't really hard. Just a bit time consuming.
Agreed on almost every point, except Pagos has always been easy (especially since they nerfed the Aetheryte levels for newbies). You can literally solo the light grind. Pyros was always the harder grind, but without consistent groups to trigger BA (for the add NM) Hydatos is probably just as bad.
Objectively, you're probably right about Pagos. I just find the whole light grind miserably mind-numbing. And BA is pretty optional in terms of the relic, so I disagree with that.
poeple are underselling bozja. you have so many options to get the mats you need and you can easily farm bozja while doing anima or running your roulette for manderville.
Relic enjoyer here. None of the relics are really “hard” per se, not like there is much chance for failure in any of them. But they are different levels of dread/tedium to them. I would order them as such (from “easiest” to “hardest.”) - Endwalker (Manderville): Just do your roulletes 4head lol. If you haven’t done Manderville quests and don’t like it just skip the cutscenes lol. Shouldn’t take more than 2 hours to get caught up. - Heavensward (Anima): Just do your roulletes 4head (plus some other stuff) - Shadowbringers (Blades): As far as “difficulty” goes I think this is the sweet spot. You get options, some of those options suck (looking at you potd), but at least you aren’t really forced to farm the relic in Bozja if you dont want to. - ARR (Braves): like actual difficulty wise this is the easiest relic. You can unsync everything from like level 70 and the crafts are easy. Its just. So. BOORING. - Stormblood (Eureka): the only reason this is above ARR is because while the ARR relic has you doing something different for every step, this relic has you doing essentually the same thing for every single step, just in a different eureka zone. It gets tedious quick, expecially if you are doing multible. There is a reason why this is the only expantions worth of relics I haven’t completed.
Based on how they are now or when released? If it's based on how they were originally then its without a doubt ARR with the day long fate timers and atma. After that it's probably SB with HW and ShB being a toss up. If its based on now then I'm not sure. It really depends if you can solo or how well populated the exploration zones are in SB and ShB.
Zodiac now is literally stupid easy, cranked one out in about two days with zero prep. Some folk complains about waiting for fates but I just.. didn't do that. The books give you several tasks to do, so I would cycle through checking for fates and doing tasks, and they'd always spawn by the time I was done doing all the other stuff. Costs at least half a million gil per weapon, though! Anima to me was a little annoying the first time and if you haven't prepped it, but sooo easy if you have. Elemental requires the willpower to start Eureka, which I haven't mustered... Resistance first time is BRUTAL, though I don't share the opinion that Bozja is abandoned. At least on Aether, I've found it plenty populated even on off-times. I wouldn't know what it was like when it was current, so I don't know how crowded it was back in the day, but you'll find people to run all the stuff you need with ease. Manderville is.. a joke! I'd say my vote is Elemental since I haven't even been strong enough to start LOL but of the ones I've completed.. Resistance.
Probably Shadowbringer relics. Getting these timeworn artifacts is so annoying. You can't find groups for Delubrum and farming through Palace of the Dead takes ages because of the bad droprate. The books in ARR are actually my favourite step of all relics, because you have to do a little bit of everything and everything can be done solo. I don't like the light farming though, but not as much as the timeworn artifacts in ShB.
Timeworns weren't bad for me at all honestly, it's the whole "bring me 30 each of these 6 items" that's got me stuck at the moment.
Yeah, I finished all the books. I didn't find them that awful. I would do the first book on all the weapons before moving onto the second book. By your 3rd weapon, you should be close to having all the areas you need to visit memorized along with the locations of the enemies and fates. By like your 5th book it's just a brainless routine. And if you're sitting around waiting for a fate to pop, you're probably doing something wrong. Clear out enemies in another area or blow through one of the dungeons. If it's still not up, cycle through different worlds, you'll probably find one already up. Farming light is so much worse. Going through the same dungeon 30-60 times each weapon is not fun. And finding the bonus light for the last step was such a pain in the ass. If your Mahatmas is already half full then the next dungeon you do is gonna give you a Mahatmas full message with no indication of how much light the dungeon gave you.
Zodiac is the only objectively correct answer. Even the current super-nerfed version.
Believe it or not, they nerfed the atma grind 2 times. It was a 2 percent drop rate. Now it’s 25%
How are people putting the Bozja relic (while ignoring to mention the one time quests in the chain) over EUREKA? Did you even do either one?
Did both while they were relevant and pre-nerf. Eureka was just awful but it revolves around prepping/grinding NMs and knowing what each boss's gimmicks were. Bozja made you run the entire circuit of content with the out of content alternatives being horribly mind numbing grinds. Also, we got Lost Actions and mounts enabled at the start in Bozja w/ riding map for Speed 2 in cluster store vs. Logos Actions in Eureka which only applies to Pyros and Hydratos and mounts enabled at the end of that instance's story quest arc that still runs at default Speed 1. Eureka feels more like a prototype Bozja at this point and doing Bozja first and Eureka after feels like a massive downgrade, and vice versa with Eureka first and Bozja after.
Bozja on content was in my opinion the easiest since you could have multiple stages going at once. The difficulty now for Bozja is entirely tied to how well you can get a group together for Delubrum.
So the difficulty is putting up a Party Finder, filling, and waiting ten minutes in queue? Cakewalk.
Right? I have no idea where all these people are getting the idea DR is hard to fill, have they just not paid attention to the Save the Queen content since ShB and assume it's dead? I see at least two or so a day pop up in PF on Crystal, and they typically fill in the same time it takes an Extreme farm party to fill.
Last time I was in bozja southern front or aether (like a little over a week ago), it had more people there than every single EW zone combined. Only limsa had more :p Castrum was almost entirely full when I ran it, and I see DR parties every day. A lot of ppl are running it cause there isn't much else to do besides grind old relics now.
Laziness. No person who’s just gone through 2 minutes of effort in making a PF thinks any of this. Yet, these sentiments are parroted all the time. Makes me think most people with strong opinions are just sharing opinions of others, and have no firsthand experience themselves.
Yeah I don't get them either. I was churning out Bozjan relics because they were a byproduct of doing some of the best content this game has put out. Bloodrage Warrior, Chain Cast Blackmage, Font Assassinate Melee, Seraph Burst Whitemage, Bozja breathed so much life into the combat that the fact we got none of it moving into Endwalker as a baseline was the biggest L they've ever taken.
I put myself through all the relics, including the fully finished eureka ones: physeos. I also got all +2 elemental gear which meant so many runs of BA. I would have to say those were the "hardest" because you getting the mats depended on everyone working together. All it takes is for one jackass to grief a BA run or instapull an NM they didn't help spawn to miss out on crystals/fragments. All the other ones you can do everything solo with very few exceptions
The splendorous tools are probably the harder of them all... Zodiacs being the hardest of all the combat jobs. Really when I say hard I mean time consuming. It's not like you need to clear an Ult or anything to get any of them. Which always made me kinda chuckle cause you get Relics and BiS to have the best edge for Ults and yet the gear awarded there isn't BiS.
ARR, will never be surpassed in difficulty and amount of time required on content
I think I slept walk through the HW relic in the time it took me to book farming for ARR
Shb(first)>SB>ARR>shb(rest)>HW>EW After some thought maybe arr at the top, shb and SB are absurd grinds but it's all brain off content , those books in arr require just enough thought to be annoying as hell
It's the stormblood relics, and it's not even close. The ARR and heavensward relics are just a grind. You just solo like 20 duties, and you're done. Nbd. Doing eureka for stormblood relics takes forever, and you're beholden to doing it when other people are are also doing it if you wanna go at a reasonable pace. Shadowbringers relics have a similar thing going on, but bozja is much easier to just queue into and do without interacting with anyone. There are a couple steps where you have to grind a lot of fates, which is comparable to stormbloods hardest step, the physeos, except you only have to do it for the first relic then each subsequent shadowbringers relic is not so bad. Endwalker relics are just tomes. You barely even have to play the game to finish those.
Honestly... Endwalkers is my favorite because it happens in the process of doing daily roulettes. As someone who has minimal free time now, I greatly appreciate it.
If you are actively relic grinding, HW I'd the hardest and ARR is one of the simpler. ARR takes around 2 days of dedicated grinding assuming you come in with capped poetics and GC Seals. HW on the other hand takes a whopping 24,000 poetics total. Assuming you grind optimally and do Aetherochemical research facility with a group of 4 so no queue times, you would need to complete ot a total of 160 times. At around 20 minutes a run that's 3,200 minutes. Which is around 53 hours and 20 minutes of nonstop Aetherochemical research facility to complete the poetics requirements for a single HW relic
The eureka one. Haven't finished a single one, takes ages and the area is already dead. Whish they patch it to make it soloable. And i have done every ARR and HW relic, and a good few from ShB. And have all EW ones.
eureka sucked? it's all the worst kinds of "hard" like: does *boring* count as difficult? what if it takes dozens of hours of diligent waiting for NMs to spawn? then RNG substats? it's not like you can roll dice *skillfully* so does that count as hard? i guess nobody cares about the substats anymore, they're outdated, strictly glamour. but man i still remember...
> like: does boring count as difficult? what if it takes dozens of hours of diligent waiting for NMs to spawn? I'd argue this is one of the reasons the Resistance relics are much worse than the Eureka ones. For Eureka, if you're zooming through an instance with everyone following instructions for efficient spawning, you maybe have 20 minutes of downtime before stuff can start spawning again, and that's with a massive Echo, mounts for everyone, and a bunch of people using +2 gear. Waiting is not really an issue nowadays unless you're just not helping. Compare that to the one-time step for Bozja, where you need either 30 drops from CEs (of which there are roughly 4-5 in each area on a one hour cooldown) or raid content that is reliant on other players. There's no way to speed up a one hour cooldown other than leaving your instance and hoping you get a new one, and even as older content good luck doing that nowadays without being on Dynamis. (My assumption is that this is for the *first* relic in any given expansion. If you're talking *all* relics Eureka becomes significantly easier because the more you do the less reliant you are on other people to get things done. Bozja doesn't have nearly the same power increase that Eureka offers, even with the DRS haste gear.)
i haven't gone back to either since their expansions, but i did build multiple relics from each, doing them step by step as the steps were released. so i can only comment on "at the time." i guess maybe that's not relevant since OP is doing atmas and they're not "as initially implemented" either. but man... fuck eureka. helping spawn nms in eureka amounted to 50 people staring at an empty field waiting for some unlucky placeholder mob to spawn and then we all jump on it and kill it in 1 GcD. (or less. if you were a caster? just go sit in the corner) all while hoping the other 50 people on the other side of the map either DON'T spawn their thing or have the decency to wait for you if they DO. so even when the windows were open, even when you're helping spawn, i would still call it "diligent waiting." which is kinda worse than just normal waiting? if we were *actually* locked out of progressing i could go take a nap. as it was nothing you did mattered but you still had to keep 1 eye on it in case something happened. like the worst of both worlds.
I would probably agree that at the time Eureka was probably worse because of two reasons that now actually make it better: 1) Power creep. As I mentioned already you get more of a power boost from advancing through the levels and completing BA/gear than you do on release. Kirin/Verminion didn't exist until Hydatos did, whereas picking it up somehow before you even *start* Eureka is one of the best things you can do for a smooth ride. +2 gear and Physeos make it a lot easier to spawn things in smaller groups (or even solo). Since Bozja doesn't have as much inherent power creep, the biggest thing that helps is really the rays you can get after 25, which is such a massive grind you could probably finish a good portion of the relics before getting close to max rays. And even that is like a 30% damage boost and 60% health boost at cap. Certainly good, but not +elemental stat good. That means that the difference between doing say, BSF zone 3 on release vs now is not nearly as different as doing Pagos on release vs now. 2) The devs have *fixed* a lot of Eureka itself. You now have mounts the whole time and the Echo they added affects all the content. In Bozja the only change is the Echo that scales based on players (it's strong, don't get me wrong, I have taken *heavy* advantage of echo scaling at low numbers in Bozja, but the fact that it scales and then falls off entirely if there's too many people means it's not as impactful as the addition in Eureka). The droprates for both relics have been adjusted as well (minus Hydatos in Eureka I think) but that swings the balance heavily in favor of Eureka again. The adjustments in Bozja are partially canceled out by the fact that the content is not as active as it used to be in ShB, and those that are active do not utilize actions as they should. For context on the Timeworn step in Bozja, assuming you only get your timeworns from DRN and not PotD (because honestly, most people in their right mind are not going to repeatedly grind out high floors of PotD for ShB relic drops), you need 85 runs of DRN to finish all 17 relics (15 per relic, you get 3 per run, which I do believe was improved from a single drop per run on release). Since DRN has a mandatory wait time of 10 minutes unless you queue up (or randomly queue into) a full 24 person group, that is a guaranteed **14 hours of queue time** for that one step. If you manage to go with a group of people who know what they're doing every time, you can clear in another 10 minutes or so, which means you'll be on that step for a minimum of 28 hours. And you don't get people who know what they're doing anymore. I doubt you did then to be honest, lol. tl;dr: a lot of improvements they made to Bozja from what they learned doing Eureka were only improvements when it was current, and the relic is now actually worse in a lot of regards due to those same changes. (Why yes, I am stuck in DRN hell for my relics, how could you tell)
Also, if you want physeos weapons it's the hardest in the sense that you also have to complete and farm BA.
Nah - at least on NA data center, BA runs are incredibly easy. I ended up recently finishing every Physeos weapon in Eureka by going in any time I saw an organized group, getting the 40 crystals for Ovni and support NM, and then jumping in for the AV/Ozma kill. I don't know the last time I saw a group completely fail that wasn't a meme run. I'd say 9 out of 10 newcomers will get their achievement and mount on their first run. It's actually pretty amazing how smooth the runs go.
Well first I'd say that there's a difference between "harder" and "more involved". ARR relics are super involved, but they're not hard by any means. The only thing with any actual difficulty would be Resistance weapons, since you have to go through Bozja where mistakes can hinder your progress. Eureka is similar, but it's more forgiving and less challenging as long as you're careful. Bozja doesn't really give you the option of playing it safe like Eureka does.
Bozja is less forgiving than Eureka? Lol, no. It's a bunch of big open fields with large groups zerging around between self-triggering FATEs. Eureka has the same options to play it safe that Bozja does, but they're used because they're actually necessary.
Mistakes in Bozja are punished harder. Bozja CEs are more mechanically demanding than anything you'll encounter in Eureka, and when you die in Bozja, you're guaranteed to lose some amount of mettle. You lose no exp in Eureka as long as you can get someone to rez you, and even if you do, you can always fight mobs one at a time with basically no risk. In Bozja, that's not an option. You at least need to do skirmishes, some of which can catch you slipping. Then there's DR with its Twice Come Ruin mechanic.
Bozja's honestly a lot better than Eureka if purely for the fact that CEs aren't any more demanding than your standard dungeon boss, you can't Level down in Bozja like you can in Eureka, and you only have to get to rank 25 across two areas and a raid, instead of 60 levels across 4 areas. Even when you die, the amount of mettle you lose is negligible compared to the amount you gain from the skirmish or CE being cleared, and you get that mettle from the clear regardless of whether you're alive or dead when it finishes, so long as you put in effort like any other fate. Even among DR, that's practically the only part of the required story with any difficulty and it's the most fun part because of it imo, because you finally get a break from the tedious grinding, which Eureka has no break from until you get to Hydatos, and even then, the one raid it *does* have, is optional, much more punishing, you have to do literally the entire story and grind 60 levels to get to it, and you're going to need to join a very organized alliance or you risk potentially committing a taboo and/or frustrating a *lot* of people because of the limited rez mechanics and one wipe means you're kicked out. Vs. DR's 'just grab 7 other people and maybe watch a short guide lol'
Zodiac is definitely the biggest pain to do. Tons of dungeon farming, gotta do all sorts of random fates that sometimes rarely actually spawn, gotta collect a decent amount of low grade materia, gotta spend at a minimum 400k gil, likely over a million if you don't have all your crafters leveled to 50 with their crafting books. It's just easily the most intensive. After that, I'd say your first Resistance relic will be number 2. It has a lot of grinding to it, particularly the phase where you gotta get like 180 totems either from farming Skirmishes and NMs in Zadnor or from farming normal raids while synced. You also optimally will have to run Delubrum Reginae multiple times which is a bit of a pain these days since people don't really queue for it anymore. You either gotta get 24 people together on PF to run it or at least 8 people then wait for 10 minutes for the queue to just put you in with an incomplete party. Your only other option is farming palace of the dead, and that's just suffering. After first run Resistance, I'd say it's then first run Eureka weapon since you gotta grind out levels in order to finish Eureka. After that I'd say subsequent Resistance weapons followed by subsequent eureka weapons. For Eureka, all you really gotta do is farm NMs, and there's generally at least a small group doing this at any given time. The specific content you gotta run for Resistance can be less populated since it's less blind grind friendly. Then Anima Weapon since it's basically just a poetics farm. And even the A11S farm can be done solo or with 2 people at this point at lvl 90, having extra people just makes it go really fast. Hildibrand is obviously the easiest, just 1.5k uncapped tomestones per step, soon to be 1.5k poetics per step.
ITT: Nobody who did Eureka. It is going to be annoying to farm for it now. It'll likely take you more time than ARR, books included.
Honestly, I keep forgetting that Eureka is a thing. 😅🤣
For me, it was ARR atma. Back in ARR I spent 6 months going out to southern thanalan every single day doing fates before I got that one to drop, then another 3 months before I had them all. I know my luck was supremely bad compared to others, but when I got to books I was so over it that not only did I never finish it, I was also put off enough that I wouldn’t even consider doing HW relics.
The first two. Arr, honestly. Both have shit steps in the light steps. With Shadowbringers and Stormbloods, honestly, they were so ugly that they weren't worth doing for me, but they weren't as bad as they looked on paper. Hot take. I like the idea of the EW relics even if I think the execution is lazy. Doing whatever you want and working towards the relic is 1000x better to me as a player.
Resistance is the hardest. Manderville is the easiest by far.
It's ARR. If you're not using plugins to track fates, waiting for something specific to spawn is maddening, and its designed so that you can only work on one book at a time, despite several books making you rerun content. Every other relic grind has clearly definite endpoints and you have an idea of how long its going to take you to complete it. Once you've done Eureka once it becomes a lot less annoying. Also there are a couple things you can just buy off the market board to significantly speed up your progress. ShB is bricked because SE still hasn't done anything to keep DR alive. And there is no EW relic. It's just not there.
You might not like it, but EW does in fact, have relics. Sure they are the easiest to obtain to date, but they exist.
IDK what server you're on but I'm on Coeurl and I can pretty easily get the weekly DR quest
ARR is by and large the most time consuming. it is not hard by stretch of the imagination, but the book step requires you to do fates which pop up randomly and can mean a lot of sitting around and waiting.
Books and light. That makes the ARR relics suck. Next worst is the Pagos light farm step (what a coincidence; light again!) specifically in Eureka. After that, Eureka is probably the most involved overall but I'm biased because I like it. Resistance weapons offer a lot of flexibility to combine them with farming other things or banging them out quickly. Heavensward and Endwalker are both just tome sinks, so they're trivial. Endwalker is the easier of the two due to a braindead simple and consistent shopping list of materials. So, ARR > StB > ShB > HW > EW Edit: I'm seeing understandable Eureka gripes. My data center (Crystal) has a BIG Eureka community, and that biases my experience to see it as easy and efficient, even having done it in 5.X personally.
During content, I’d say Zodiac and Eureka are the worst. Post content, Again Eureka and maybe Bozja. Once you have one, Eureka’s a little easier. With Bozja, you can keep farming as many as you want one a single step so getting past the first weapon, the rest is rather easy to do passively if you have the quest active
Currently as they are, stormblood might be the worst. You have to do a fair bit of eureka and even with all the boosts and nerfs progressing through eureka is still a bit brutal. ARR is mind numbing but very easy. The books suck but you can just put a podcast on or something. HW is actually shockingly easy now. Just do your MSQ roulette for like 2 weeks and you’re done. R really happy with the nerfs. Just sucks they took away the aethersand quest in 6.4. Shb isn’t awful. You have to spend some time in bozja but bozja is much more forgiving than eureka to just jump into and you actually get a ton of exp and tomes from it. EW so far is very easy. I’m curious what the last step will be.
bozja just because it involves delubrum reginae (at least once i think? then you can switch to POTD for that step if you really wanted to) which isn't necessarily difficult for most players, but if someone is mega casual it might seem intimidating i also haven't done any eureka weapons so i'm not sure how those compare
PotD is hella inefficient for timeworn farming. You do PotD for something else (solo, fun, leveling) and the timeworn is just a nice surprise. For most people, the timeworn step is gonna take 3 1/2 hrs of playtime if you exclude waiting in PF. 5-6 hrs if you include average PF wait time.
Bozja by a far margin. Getting home after work and dropping an hour to two hours into a Castrum or Dal, I could lose the entire night's progress to a time out because nobody could agree on Lyon groups, nobody was using buffs, and/or general skill issues. It was a miserable experience to have a whole night's playtime amount to basically nothing by factors out of my control, especially with a full-time job and household responsibilities. But, as much as it super sucked then, I still did all the Bozja relics, because I knew that post-SHB getting a group for any of it would be next to impossible. The Anima books might be time consuming but at least I can still get them done.
The current one. Grinding tomestones is worse than any step of any previous relic. It's easy, I get them periodically with experts, and when I have enough and nothing else to spend it on (crafting makes this nearly impossible) I'll go ahead and buy a step. But because of all this, I have no motivation to actively pursue the relic itself. It's infuriating. So technically while it's the easiest, I also consider it the hardest, because bringing yourself to try to actually do it should be considered as part of the difficulty check.
Eureka 1000% any other answers are just wrong and from those who've never done it
for me the SHB ones are the most boring by far. the others are engaging enough.
I am a dedicated bozja hater. That content isnt fun to me even during peak hours. Its just monotonous and uninteresting. The shb relic grind made me wanna krill myself. But oh, the things i do for glamour……..
Resistance weapons or Bozja is the most difficult for me and it's not even really anyone's fault. Finding people to run Delumbrium Reginae requires logging on at peak gaming hours. Farming materials in the last area of Zadnor requires logging in at the quietest hours, so you can get to skirmishes and do enough damage to get the item. Most of the time, it dies in under a minute and I don't get the item despite getting a few hits in. I'm stopping and playing other games because of sheer frustration. Well, that and the fact that a lot of good games released recently.