The zodiac weapons scream "we are trying to delay while we try to make the expansion"

I completed the Warrior axe recently and it awakened something in me too. The urge to find out if it's possible to weep openly and vomit at the same time. It is.

Once you get past book step, it's smooth sailing from there tbh. There's just something so jarring about having to teleport all over the place, look for the FATEs, and then teleport back if it wasn't there the first time.

Myself upon being about to finish the last book seeing the rest of the quest: *”Goddamnit.”*

As someone who did all 10 ARR relics, can confirm. It sucks, but some of the glams are the best in the game. Pro gamer strat, after your first weapon, you can take the 4 quests for the 2nd to last step during your first light grind in the 3rd to last step and knock them both out at the same time. If you're planning to do the HW relic next you can also do the quest in Revanant's Toll asking you to do the ARR alliance raid series for an aether oil during your light grinds. You need 5 aether oils for a step in the HW relic, and if you're gonna turn in your ARR relic to skip the first step in HW, might as well skip a second step as well. Normally it'd cost you a bunch of poetics in an already massive poetic sink.

A good thing to do to mitigate the process of completing any extra Zodiac Zeta weapon is that once you have done your first relic, you can purchase the exchange items ahead of time (Bombard Cores, Alexandrite, and completing the 4 repeatable quests for instance). However, you still have to do the book step legitimately, one at a time.

As a masochist when I first got my 1st Zodiac Weapon, it was during my ARR playthrough this year. I told myself to not even start HW as long I finish my ARR relic first. It was rough, gil was scarce, and having the lowest rank in my GC ain't helping it either. Never been a crafter so splurging all my hard earned MSQ gil was really weighing me down. But I pulled through, I persevere! Going through my 2nd Zodiac now in EW, and it really made me nostalgic. Thinking back that shit decision I made but a fulfilling one nonetheless.

gonna point out that for light farm it's significantly faster to do ultima EX than tamtara or AV now. it's under 30 seconds for ultima (closer to 20 actually) for 32 light. AV is on average 2 minutes and tamtara is 3 minutes. so they're only really worth doing if they have bonus light. I just finished my 2nd zodiac relic last week so this is pretty fresh in my brain

I finished my Zodiac Weapon for the bard as far as the Yoshi Bow and then vowed "Never Again!" But the bow looks awesome dyes well, goes with all outfits, and is just beautiful. It was designed by Yoshi himself based on the traditional Japanese bow.

I got the ARR relic for EVERY class. I had to take a break from the game...it took such a mental toll on me.

I've done 3 and on the book step for 4th zeta, not wanting to do more. I don't know how people find the motivation to do all the zeta weaps

As the absolute loser who completed all 10 zeta relics on the free trial... This grind becomes something else. On the first step already, the lack of a market board forces you to gather (timed nodes) and craft the weapon. Additionally there are items you need to farm from amdapor keep which can have bad rng, multiplied by the speed of a lvl 60 unsync at best. Beyond that the materia you need will require you to run content sync with certain ilvl tiers and a healthy amount of rng to actually get the materia you need. That level 60 sync also makes the zodiac trials impossible to solo with dps relegating you to the dreaded dps queue in duty finder. 2nd step on the other hand is an absolute joke of a skip phase which you ended up combining with the 1st. It really is a whole stage to spend 75 poetics and trade up your relic to a furnace so it glows. 3rd stage with the fate grind is definitely not 1/4 this number was actually sourced from a reddit thread based on "feels like" for someone with good rng. Based on the numbers I got, I would estimate it at 1/8 which the same thread even stated as the official rates in another comment that links the SE patch notes. My tip for anyone aiming to complete multiple zeta relics is to save a job (I chose bard) with this phase so you can grind the area when your book fate inevitably doesn't spawn for 5 hours, helping to encourage the spawn while hopefully gaining some atma. (which if you didn't know, stop dropping if you have 80 total in your inventory) Speaking of book phase.. :D That limit of 1 book only, extends to all the weapons. So if you planned on doing all relics from the start, you can't even pick up the 1st book on each weapon for example. This is also the phase you want to be combining with 7th stage repeatable quests. All but 3 of the quest dungeons appear in the book set for each weapon and done in the right order you can combine these phases into one, saving a lot on repeats. You can even solo stone vigil hard for 7th by joining as a blu with some kind of death/flat damage which I hear is otherwise unkillable even for level 90. Regarding materia phase, specifically with free trial in mind, it is without a doubt the single worst phase of the relic. The requirement for certain grades of materia will have you running ilvl 15-30 for grade 1, ironworks 130 for 2-4, and usually also 45-54 to fill in grade 3 rng that 130 doesn't provide so much of. At minimum, this is 28 dungeons worth of perfect rng meaning: precisely the exact materia type you need and no failed melds (which is heartbreaking to lose upwards of 4 materia towards the end of the tier). Even using only the daily quest to obtain alexandrite, you will quickly have so much more than the materia you are able to farm and wish that the alexandrite was lost in place of the materia. Factoring in extraction rng, I'm not sure I can even guess how many additional runs I had to do because the required materia didn't drop. It was very common to get 0-2 materia that you needed per spirit bond of 11 gear items. Of course you can't unsync to spirit bond for materia and with the required ilvl, solo is basically impossible so, with the interest of time, you abuse that sweet healer insta queue only to take care of the most lost sprout tanks imaginable who are not strong in their mitigation or gear. (not trying to bash but this becomes super draining and demotivating very quickly) Tying into that, I ended up designing solo strats towards the end to sync with blu and managed to hit out sub 6 runs on the sunken temple of qarn + halatalli. Thankfully for us, between losing our minds and sanity grinding out materia, and quitting duty finder a couple times in the process, the final 3 stages are almost as much of a joke as the 2nd. With all the materia grind, poking for bonus light and running unsync 20 times.. Really it's a blessing to get a stage done in a couple hours instead of days or weeks. Throughout the past 2 phases, the amount of gil, poetics, and gc seals you will earn means you have more than enough to buy the required items ahead of time and with the aforementioned combining of book phase, this one really is a genuine skip, item turn in, speak to npc. The downtime between duty finder runs is also plenty to gather materials and craft hq for the repeatable quests, only costing a further 288k~ for desynthesis rng of the vendor material that's required for each craft (300k gil cap btw). From the perspective of making multiple weapons, it actually helps your gil with rng edge cases to buy the desynth materials in bulk and have ingredients stockpiled. Following this, because you were able to skip 7th phase and ideally have light bonus still going from 6th, the 8th and final phase is really just a case of 1 run mahatma completion continuing to unsync something easy like tam tara / toto rak. This ends up with the final 3 phases being done in a couple hours, making for a genuine victory lap relative to the grind before. For anyone who made it this far and is wondering, I am also finishing off the anima relics which I have slowly been amassing stockpile for during the zeta grind and they are by far the easiest relics to complete, taking only a couple hours per weapon. I am also excited to see, whenever I sub and decide to grind the zetas on any alts I make, just how much easier and probably underwhelming the grind becomes by comparison, likely going on to call it "fake". ...and to anyone that made it here, thanks for reading. I'm kinda just dumping this into the void not really expecting anyone to read. Mostly getting the experience off my chest to share the hate and pain and suffe.. I mean umm journey and uhh things I learned that can maybe help any aspiring grinders and perhaps even motivate you to give a go at the relics yourself seeing the upcoming challenge relatively dwarfed by comparison, because genuinely the zeta relics are some of my favourite weapons in the game and I honestly think I might grab them on alts when that becomes a thing for me.

now imagine doing all that... ....while on the free trial

Got my BRD, PLD, and DRG relics. Currently working on MNK. Tedious, sure, but damn do I love the final Zeta glams. Hell, even some of the earlier stages are pretty good. Nexus and Novus stages look amazing.

This came out just as I began to put serious effort in finishing the book step of the relic I had begun a while back and starting work on the relic I actually want... which meant that I finished my books with one and went right into doing them with another :P I've settled into one book a day, and I'm so much happier for it. Anyway, enjoyable video and fantastic timing!

Makes me glad that the first stage weapons are iconic enough that you don't feel much pressure to go past that. It's hard to beat the basic stardust rod, curtana or gae bolg if you're all about the class fantasy.

0:01 yes yes no(never played any of the destiny games) I recently completed my ARR Relic on my lalafell BLM, and it was every bit as painful as described in this video. Surprisingly the longest step for him was the Zodiac Brave stage, because my lala blm is still in Stormblood and the Zalera MB heavily overcharged on the crafted items (i'm talking over 200k for each item) so I had to spend a considerable amount of time farming gil. Thankfully I was checking out the MB with my femra on Balmung and saw the prices were sooo much cheaper there (this was also when I realized the MB items vary depending on server), so I just server hopped for the last couple crafting items I needed.

Me and my hubby finished getting all arr relics this year! Was a fun journey

One note on the light farming - the revised Thousand Maws of Totorak is also fairly fast now since you don't need to go down other paths or deal with the floors. So you can add it into your rotation to speed it up.

Did arr relic for ninja recently. Aurum vale speedrun is about 1:44 by myself, definitely the best class to run through it with. Good luck out there grinders

I'm glad I did finish mine Longinus Zeta when I just started playing the game and still passionate about it.

The leve step isn't so bad if you check all the leves you need for a given book - they're usually all the available ones from a specific levemete, and the book just cares about turn ins. That means you can significantly cut down the time for them and not have to run any unnecessary ones by taking every relevant leve at once in a zone and turning in the completions on just the one for the current book so on the next book it's just a matter of turning in the next ones.

Great intro! 😂 I’ve pretty much given up on relic weapons. Maybe one day, when I have nothing left to do in the game, I’ll get back into it. Maybe.... Thanks for this video! 👍

for both of the dungeon steps, it only took me a few runs of aurum veil to complete the charging. especially for the mahatma cause one run of aurum got me to robust

just finished my monk ARR relic weapon last month, and ugh never again! this was for my alt, made the character in mid 2018 and kinda ran through the story. did two steps of the relic weapon and pretty much forgot about until mid 2022, and thought "hmmm i should finally finish the stupid arr relic weapon since there isn't much to do (at that point). found a guide on yt and pretty much dragged my feet through the process. the books were so tedious and just... argh... after i finally finished it, did the other relic quest for monk to get the glowing pots (might as well). i'm probably never going to do another arr relic weapon again, even doing all of shb relic weapons were more fun than those. i have 2 hw relic weapons, maybe i'll go for sb relics but i just don't want to go through eurika . props to those who have done more than 1 arr relic weapon, true gamers omg

This grind is still rough but it was definitely nerfed alot over the years. You used to have to kill more enemies for the book steps, the fates used to not show up as often as they do now (believe it or not I spent a week trying to get 1 fate back in ARR for my paladin relic) and the alexandrites used to be 1 per map rather than 5. The light farming also was tougher since it gave less and you couldn't unsync things back in ARR. Still these weapons are great and I've done the grind about 5 times. I do play destiny 2 and hate myself lmao

for the last step i did it with Ifrit its just so much nicer cause you just make some clicks and your done^^

As someone who's done 2 zodiacs and endlessly procrastinating on the 3rd, for the light step, if you've got 1 level 90 friend, just do t5 a billion times, it's actually faster.

Randomly got on this video, somehow. I use to play FFXI, first 4 years. I remember running dynamis with my HNMLS and there were 3 of us in the group up for our Relic weapons (priority system, since you needed a full alliance just to farm materials). Took about 8 months just to get to second to the last stage, sinking all my gil into it too. Quit without getting my Katana, though. Good times~

best lightfarm i found after they remade the old dungeons is The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak. No stopping, no interacting with stuff. just a straight run to the end.

Literally on my 4th relic, doing all the relics at the same stages so I’ve finished one relic completely and the rest is either done with the books or currently in the middle of doing it. It’s a pain but I just break it down by doing 1-2 books a day.

You had my like at the first song choice.

Ah I remember the atma grind at launch. Took two week to get them all. What a time it was.

I've gotten to or past book step on all the weapons. Getting all the atmas wasn't that bad, I crunched it out in 2 days of casual fate grinding... But the books, man...the books really killed my progress. I've purposely gone past the books on a couple weapons so I can be checking off the repeatables dungeons even as I'm doing books, or getting light while doing repeatables, etc....but it's still an absolute pain.

LMAO the intro, coming from Destiny 2 I knew exactly why you would put that in there.

The ARR one is a pain, but I've still gotten three of them, whereas I haven't finished one Shadowbringers because of that second/third last step of getting 180 items. I know it's non repeatable, but it's killing me

I'm currently on the Atma step but grinding it for all 10 weapons at the same time. It is OK with a TV series oj while grinding but becomes a bit mindnumbing after a while. 😅

I did my drg but it took years for me to complete it. I had it when it was recent but stopped playing right when they started putting content out and only came back in the middle of hw somewhere, and at that time once I got into HW, I dropped drg for mch. I'm glad this once doesn't have achievement for every weapon past the first steps(something I wish they kept doing). So all I did was drg all the way and all the other weapons just for the first steps.

I felt so called out when you specifically mentioned d2.

I have never felt so called out as I have by the first 7 seconds of this video.

You forgot to mention the Kettle Ultimate that comes after the Zodiac weapon.

I've been doing this for warrior as well......and I'm on the book part.......and I started this in stormblood

I’ve done 5 so far. They can make you want to take a extended break from the game at times. But they are super nice looking weapons. I would recommend at least doing it once for your favorite class.

Currently at the book step, at 7 out of 9. Knowing that the grind will get marginally easier after it has me motivated. ❤

So much PTSD from remembering doing my one and only ARR relic. Took me like literally three months to finish because it was so tedious and monotonous. Later in roughly the same amount of time I was able to complete 7 anima relics.

As someone who farmed GOS, and played Black Desert, this feels like home.

I would sit on a fate and just turned on certain audio for being tabbed out so I could hear the fate pop.

Thanks saw the axe on the glam homepage and wanted to get it. This video alone told me no. (got the bozyja gunbreaker and the hw paladin one already)

Underrated channel

The 4 repeatable quests are what I like to call "Test of Wealth".

i got the smn relic in shodowbringers because it was my main back then. since endwalker came out tho i dont really play it much anymore😆

I completed 2 weapons on the free trial, so I have no MB access and a 300k gil cap. However the worst step by far for me was the sphere scrolls, since you can't just buy the materia. It did give me a real appreciation for spiritbonding, but having to pray that the materia you retrieve is the one you need, then repeating that over and over was such a mentally draining process. Definitely the worst step for me. Luckily I was already an omnicrafter aside from armourer at the time of starting my first one, so the crafting step wasn't bad for me, though if you're on the trial and haven't done any crafting, that would definitely be the biggest obstacle. Having to earn gil multiple times in between buying the needed items due to the 300k cap is also a bit of a pain, but manageable. Overall, despite it being extremely tedious, I loved doing it both times, for WHM and BLM. I don't know about doing a 3rd any time soon though. Maybe once I've upgraded to the full game.

I finished the atmas today - van take 10 hour's not 2; I'm doing the books now. And these Fates are extremely rare to see.

Yeap, I thought about doing those relic weapon quests once... Then I looked at all the steps required, and time required for all of them. Then I looked at all the models for those weapons. Then just thought to myself "this is not the reason I enjoy playing "Massively Multiplayer" games in the first place and I'd rather spend all of that time on socializing with other players", so I just gave up the whole idea and instead just bought Suzaku's Flame-kissed weapons off the marketboard for glam, they look attractive enough to me and don't require me to torture myself for hours in complete solitude. Sadly SE decided to abandon the idea of adding such Primal weapons for all new classes including DNC, GNB, RPR, SGE.

After you first ARR relic books only need you to keep 3 of each enemies instead of 10 of each.

Dude when you said “Do you play D2?”I lost it so hard. Great comparison!

I did the war and the pld for arr and i just wanted to die by the end of it... then i decided to do the war heavensward relic and the drk eureka relic...

I don't hate myself enough for this.

For the books FATES you can clear fates to force new ones to speed it up.

"Do you play Destiny 2" at the start really got me rolling LMAO

this is honestly convincing me to do all the fate stuff while the yokai event is happening

These were some of the most exhausting grinds. And expensive imo.

As someone who has 5 of these relics, I can vouch that this video is very accurate.

The only part of this quest line I actively hate doing is the scroll phase: materia melding. It's the worst.

I know your pain, I have 3 zeta completed, gathered atmas for all 10 of them and completed book step on 4.5 of them

That list of atma locations was up for just a second...but enough to make me scream and lose my fucking mind. I spent over an hour in South Shroud grinding awful FATEs wondering why it wasn't fucking dropping. THERE IS NO SOUTH SHROUD ATMA

Due to my experiences in getting a Zodiac back in 2.x, I still can’t go to East Thanalan or Halatali(Hard) without at least a modicum of frustration

I’ve been playing since ffxiv released on ps3 in August 2013, I only have 2 arr relics vs having 1 of all the others except the HW relics, of which I have all of them. I originally got the BLM relic on release, I just recently finished my second one, the SCH one. Never again lol

I’m on the book step on my first relic now. It’s boring but I thought it’d be worse. On book 6 now.. I’m taking about one hour doing one book. So glad I’m stopping at the Nexus stage as the weapons look the best In my opinion. So luckily I won’t have to spend all that Gil either.

I'm stuck on the light farm after the scroll as a ninja. I've done this twice now for scholar and white mage and I actually like doing the books. Its the mindless repetitive unsync arr dungeon runs that get me.

When I was going through ARR I wanted the dragoon relic but only the stage that you get after you do the books...I did it all on free trial which meant half the book dungeons I actually did them synched since the lvl 60 cap wasnt quite enough for some of the lvl 50 dungeons. Looking back that was a dumbass decision

Books was crazy, but for some reason a really soul killing expirience for me was last step, because I've decidet to grind all Mahatma steps at The Tam-Tara Deepcroft, cause I found it faster unsynced than Sastasha. I remember running same dungeon again and again for feels like a 2-3 hours. It almost made me hate the game :"DD

Just finished my first (paladin ) it was terrible to do but once your done it feels like " oh not so bad " 😂

I think it's about perspective. As former WOW player there is nothing as tedious in FFXIV as the least tedious stuff in WOW. Arcadian War Turtle. 150 curious coins, 3-6 MONTH farm time if you're lucky and constantly farming. 1 in 12 chance the turtle is even on the vendor per day. Thats a short grind in WOW. Go play WOW for a year. You'll be so much happier with FFXIV for it.

I did my first relic (longinus) at level 60 I started while on free trial. I bought the game to be able to trade and get help halfway Most of the time there wasn't any unsync. Unless a friend was available, but that wasn't always the case Wholesome fact. My now fc leader helped with the craft oriented steps, that's how i got into my fc

I also did all ARR relics and like others have commented, you can do quite a lot of the stuff ahead of time. You can't do the books ahead of time and that's why its the most sucky thing. I think it would have been much better if you could just pick up all 9 books at once, and considering some of the nerfs to other grindy stuff in the game including Anima, i feel like the fate part of the books should just be *any fate* in a specific area, like just any fate in Outer La Noscea for example. The light farm for me also sucked though, i feel like the coils of bahamut should just give max light no matter what. It was SO.MANY.RUNS of tam-tara (just cause it was the easiest/fastest dungeon to speedrun)

I stopped playing due to financial reasons and totally forgot about the NINE books. So I was like: “could you please upgrade my weapon now?”. So I read the quest again, and dear lord. My heart dropped. I guess I will take it chip again. I literally do one page per day, sometimes having weeks between. At the end, is just glamour, so there’s not pressure

I still think this relic grind is bad, because this is one of the first relic grind new players will see.

i discard my zeta thinking i can easily replicate it like newer relic, but its NOT, you need to give the zeta to the hw relic skip npc first for you to be able to replicate normally, if not you need to bring the actual relic weapon then replicate, i tried ask SE for the item but they cant get item if it lost more than a month

Well Imagine no further, as my brother hath done it, he has all the zodiac zeta weapons. And he's STILL on the trial. next he's gonna grab the replicas, stuff them in the glamour dresser, and then work on the anima weapons.

almost finished my blm zodiac almost a year ago XD only the final book then onto the light gathering XDXD also my atma took me 3 hours i was unlucky.

I have the Zodiac weapons for my warrior and Paladin. Ugh....The books were painful enough to do but then you meet a certain female lalafell..

As someone who has nearly 5k hours in destiny 1&2 I did kinda enjoy the ARR relic weapons.

1. Maybe, 2. A little, 3. Yes all the time. Oh my god, no wonder I have been grinding all the zodiacs...

maybe when I get my dragoon to 90 ill start my grind to get the the Longinus

Im recalling my trauma from those books

after tanking throgh the last 6 books after today the materia step was such a breeze it felt like a nice break since i already had all the poetics, oh and the light step is going pretty quickly so far, i found a way to farm ifrit ex in 23 seconds with war

I gave zodiac a shot after watching your video. I kept hearing how long and grindy it is and I gotta say it's not that bad, especially the fact you can solo every step without relying on doing group content like in other Relic weapons. With ZodiacBuddy and sonar you can get each book within ~40mins. For resistance weapons I kinda gave up after seeing second one time grind step. Zodiac was quite chill experience, surely boring sometimes but not as boring as bozja instance.

My experience with the Zodiac weapons is that the final form, final stage axe is totally worth it, but the final form, 2nd stage spear is better than final stage spear.

just finished mine, what a nightmare

Even the first step is a doozy on free trial. No market board? Go get a drop from an optional chest in an optional level 50 dungeon and craft it. Easy craft at level 51 with access to HW resources but at level 50 it required you to have begun the crafter gear grind. If you have unlocked the Ehcatl materia vendor, not a problem. If not...

ARR zetas are by far my favourite relics to get so far. It feels like an actual task to get all this shit having to go to different specific dungeons and getting crafted items from desynthesis and spending company seals. You really exhaust as much from ARR as possible to make a weapon and it feels like a celebration of all the content the game had/has to offer at that point in time. It's a shame they never quite stuck with the format, and they also never gave you another title for completing other relics like they do with completing a zodiac.

I did one ARR relic in 2019, WAR. Never again period

I'm on the book grind. I hate it. I'm probably only going to get my whm weapon and then get the rest after I have done everything else in the game haha

I just completed it in 2 days and it took around 22 hours

"Do you play Destiny 2?" This video is perfection

Need a limited job that can equip any other job's weapon, like an Onion Knight, and that also is limited like BLU is, but make it have an advantage where if you are running old content like relics you can do it on this other job, thus letting you level it and make progress on a relic. Make it so that exp the job earns in old content counts as progress on your current relic step, from any relic. That way you can progress on new content with the old. Would make the relic grind more fun in my opinion.

one of the most horrifying and sickening story I have ever heard on the internet

My 2.7k hours in destiny say yes to ALL 3 questions

I have 5 zeta weapons done and 5 on soulglazed novus. The books are the most tedious step for sure. I found, though, that working on these is a great filler activity. Just want to kill some time in a low stress activity? Work on your zeta weapons. Tired of running Aurum Vale and Stone Vigil? Put it down for a couple weeks and come back later. I'm glad the game has an activity like this, though.