Anima Weapons and You: A Guide for Killing Yourself Again

[Warren Castille]

Patch 3.15 ushered in the new Relic Weapon quests, and man are they a doozy. This is a guide intended to help people get started.

 

An Unexpected Proposal

The quest begins in Idyllshire, where a chat with Rowena will clue you into the new situation. After the cutscene, rendezvous with Gerolt in Azys Lla. He'll direct you to Mor Dhona, where the pain will begin.

 

Soul Without Life

You need an Astral Nodule and an Umbral Nodule to continue the quest. Your new friend Syndony has what you need, but she needs a few things first. Crystals, namely. Very rare, very specific crystals. Crystals that only come from completing FATEs in Heavensward zones at a low rate. Eighteen of them. No, they're not at all related to these "atma" things, what are you talking about? Anyway, you'll need:

 

3 Luminous Wind Crystals from the Sea of Clouds

3 Luminous Fire Crystals from Azys Lla

3 Luminous Lightning Crystals from Churning Mists

3 Luminous Ice Crystals from Coerthas West

3 Luminous Earth Crystals from the Dravanian Forelands

3 Luminous Water Crystals from the Dravanian Hinterlands

 

If you happen to have a Zeta weapon from the previous chain, this is where your advantage comes in. Syndony will happily use that instead, but you will actually lose your weapon if you trade it in! They warn you three times. Yes, it will still hurt.

 

Once you've got your nodules, you can return to Gerolt. You're rewarded with a very impressive item level 170 weapon that's identical in appearance to the esoterics weapon. Hey, what gives?

 

Toughening Up

Gerolt suggests again that you start slapping things with your weapon to make it resonate harder, better and faster. Why not go busy yourself and see what comes of it? It's dungeon time! You'll be sent to the following places:

 

Snowcloak!

Sastasha Hard Mode!

Qarn Hard Mode!

Keeper of the Lake!

Wanderer's Palace Hard Mode!

Ampador Keep Hard mode!

Dusk Vigil!

Sohm Al!

The Aery!

The Vault!

 

You have to have your weapon equipped when you finish the dungeon and the level 50 versions can be done unsynced. The Heavensward Dungeons cannot be done unsynched, so strap in.

 

When you're done, you'll get some dialogue with your new friend and then you're prompted to return to Gerolt. Doing so will nab you a (Weapon) Awoken, an item level 200 weapon that cannot be dyed, but has a nifty new glow! Wait a minute, though, that's still not a relic weapon!

 

Coming Into Its Own

Gerolt points you to a new friend in Mor Dhona who can get you the goods to make your weapon into an actual i210 piece of equipment. You're not going to like it very much, though. She has what you need, but she's not interested in selling. She wants to barter. Welcome to the grind. First rule: No shortcuts. You'll need

 

Enchanted Rubber

Fast-Drying Carboncoat

Fast-Acting Allagan Catalyst

Divine Water

 

but in order to get those, she wants

 

20 Unidentified Seeds

20 Unidentified Shells

20 Unidentified Ore

20 Unidentified Bones

 

4 HQ Dispelling Arrows

4 HQ Adamantite Francescas

4 HQ Titanium Alloy Mirrors

4 HQ Kingscakes

 

...hoo boy. Let's break that down. Unidentified Items are the new hotness, and they only come from a few locations:

 

Purchased for 1000 Allied Seals (from the OG hunts)

Purchased for 680 Law (Ore and Bones only)

Purchased for 680 Poetics (Shells and Seeds only)

Purchased for 10 Precision that drop in Alexander wings (once per KILL, not a lotted item)

Purchased for 18 Vanu Whitebones (New items that come from your Vanu dailies)

Purchased for 13 . Each faction has their own reward for completing the 3 highest-tier dailies in the form of one new token. Thirteen tokens gets you an item.

 

Amal'jaa : Unidentified Bones

Kobold: Unidentified Ore

Sahagin: Unidentified Shell

Sylph: Unidentified Seeds

Ixal: No rewards!

Vanu: Any unidentified item

 

You're able to run 12 dailies a day, so you can get one item from the Vanu every 6 days and one from the other factions every five days.

 

This is a slow burn, folks. Don't make yourself hate the game by pushing hard to grind! You can just do a little every day to make progress. At a relaxed pace of just doing roulettes and dailies without extra work, you can knock it out in a month or so.

 

Will update as I clarify information!

 

Edit: Updated Sylph rewards, thanks Sounsyy!

 

STEALTH PATCH 3.25: THE EMBIGGENING

 

So! You've ground yourself to a nub accumulating currencies and tokens and trading them for nonsense just in time to render your weapon obsolete. What comes next? Well, Patch 3.25 has you covered! Now, a mere week away from being able to purchase an i230 Hellfire/Torrent/Otherthings weapon with your hard-earned Alexander tokens, Square Enix is spitting in your eye with the ability to upgrade your relic to an i230, no-materia-slot-enabled glowstick!

 

Returning to Gerolt in Azys Lla will allow you to pick up the next quest, "Finding Your Voice." A brief cutscene informs you that you need to collect five bottles of Aetherial Oil. No, they don't tell you where to obtain it. Fortunately, this was discovered fairly quickly.

 

*Purchased for 1800 Esoterics in Idleshire.

*Received as a reward for completing the CT/ST/WoD weekly quest

 

Your options are to grind tomes, or to take 5 weeks collecting jars. As mentioned, if you've been clearing Alex 8 every week you should already be one week away from the token portion of the Lore weapon. Oh, and those Alex weapons have materia slots in them.

 

Thanks, SE!

[MBajihri]

Adding here that Hunts and Alex are pretty viable time-wise. Hunts reward Allied / Law / Poe, and Alexander if you DF can result in a new player (more Law) as well as Law + Currency. Daily roulettes are an obvious benefit, but those two stand out for me as things that you can do with moderation that won't cause you to quit the game in frustration!

[Trigonxv]

Damn glad I can skip that first step, the final honestly does not sound all that bad but if you have to do the first step then def sounds nightmarish

[Sig]

And always remember in your epic quest for PVE glory that all the time grinding could be directed towards delicious RP content.  The grind can always wait.

[Ashe]

Out of curiosity...

Would it be easier to finish a zeta weapon than farm those crystals at this point?

[Oli!]

...Hot button topic incoming, but after reading all of this stuff, does anyone else think this new quest chain sounds unfun and awful?

[BumblingSeaBiscuit]

Out of curiosity...

Would it be easier to finish a zeta weapon than farm those crystals at this point?

 

Hit or miss. It depends how far in your zeta you are (as there's atma farming in this, too). It's a lot of RNGesus. So one way or another you need to pray to your lord and savior. . .

 

 

. . .And even then he'll probably hate you.

[Ashe]

Out of curiosity...

Would it be easier to finish a zeta weapon than farm those crystals at this point?

 

Hit or miss. It depends how far in your zeta you are (as there's atma farming in this, too). It's a lot of RNGesus. So one way or another you need to pray to your lord and savior. . .

 

 

. . .And even then he'll probably hate you.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I didn't do the atma farming....

I had 130 augmented and then final coil weapons later...so I didn't see the point

hrmmmmmmmmm

Argh I donno.

Well, I leave the country for two weeks tomorrow and won't be able to deal with this anyways...so fuck me I guess haha

[Warren Castille]

...Hot button topic incoming, but after reading all of this stuff, does anyone else think this new quest chain sounds unfun and awful?

 

The most disappointing part of it for me is that there's no reason for you to do this shit. You're literally doing dungeons, exiting, and reflagging. That's not to say the original quest had a whole ton of good story, but they at least explain why you need atma and Alexandrite. Reading through the quest log to get the locations in the right order, they half-ass in a bunch of "You sat in the belly of Sastasha and wanted to be someplace warm. Why not Qarn?!" kind of shitty leaps of logic to explain why you're doing everywhere.

 

This is basically all chores with no dressing.

[BumblingSeaBiscuit]

...Hot button topic incoming, but after reading all of this stuff, does anyone else think this new quest chain sounds unfun and awful?

 

The most disappointing part of it for me is that there's no reason for you to do this shit. You're literally doing dungeons, exiting, and reflagging. That's not to say the original quest had a whole ton of good story, but they at least explain why you need atma and Alexandrite. Reading through the quest log to get the locations in the right order, they half-ass in a bunch of "You sat in the belly of Sastasha and wanted to be someplace warm. Why not Qarn?!" kind of shitty leaps of logic to explain why you're doing everywhere.

 

This is basically all chores with no dressing.

 

I'm interested in the overall story (I mean, I like soul weapons) but the little "in between" bits -- as Warren pointed out -- feel forced to me.

[111]

Yeah this seems pretty lame. 

 

You can tell they're trying to play catch-up since they were so late in getting it out the door. I wonder why it took them so long, there is nothing special going on here.

 

At least the original had all the cool stuff with the sphere scrolls and the books. I thought it was kind of neat. 

 

This is sort of a blatant grindfest to make people play the game longer until they can put out new content. 

 

Blegh.

[Altitis Acquired]

Yeah, so... I'm not gonna do that.

[Coatleque]

Out of curiosity...

Would it be easier to finish a zeta weapon than farm those crystals at this point?

 

From what I heard this morning by someone already grinding, the drop rate from FATEs is considerably higher than the original Atma grind was. 6 were obtained in the span of an hour.

 

I would say no, it's not worth finishing Zeta just to skip.

[111]

Getting more and more disappointed with how Square Enix seems to be dropping the ball on these things. 

 

Everything has been really disjointed since the 3.0 launch, and they seem to be throwing away a lot of their good ideas and doubling down on their bad ones. 

 

Oh well. Maybe 3.2 will be better.

[Ashe]

Out of curiosity...

Would it be easier to finish a zeta weapon than farm those crystals at this point?

 

From what I heard this morning by someone already grinding, the drop rate from FATEs is considerably higher than the original Atma grind was.  6 were obtained in the span of an hour.

 

I would say no, it's not worth finishing Zeta just to skip.

Mmkay o7 Thanks for letting me know <3

[Kage]

When they said that the update was so small that it didn't need a read or live letter etc I was expecting it to be so lackluster it would essentially be the atma stage.

 

I was mostly proven correct.

[Warren Castille]

It goes both ways, really. Someone was complaining loudly in Coerthas West that they'd been there for six hours and had one drop. For posterity, I finished all of my original atma in the first night, so some people do get lucky.

 

FINISHING a relic might not be so bad if you're already at 125 or higher. Starting one is kind of pointless aside from getting the achievement and replica.

[ɴᴘᴄ]

Grinding this sounds like a ripe slice of Hell. On the other hand, slowly accumulating this 'stuff' over the next 15 months sounds like a cakewalk. Of course, by then the relic will again be vastly underpowered...

[mongi291]

And meanwhile I can't even get past the first stage because I'm an idiot and I haven't unlocked flying anywhere but Sea of Clouds and Azys Lla, making grinding FATEs literally impossible~

[Coatleque]

[...] I haven't unlocked flying anywhere but Sea of Clouds [...]

 

Well, at least you have the most annoying one done already.

[mongi291]

[...] I haven't unlocked flying anywhere but Sea of Clouds [...]

 

Well, at least you have the most annoying one done already.

Yeah, but I unlocked it only because it was mandatory to unlock Neverreap. But I'm in no rush, anyway. I have three weeks of holidays, it should be more than enough to do this.

[Swashbuckler]

...Hot button topic incoming, but after reading all of this stuff, does anyone else think this new quest chain sounds unfun and awful?

 

Yeah, so... I'm not gonna do that.

These two posts pretty much sums up my feelings on this new string of relic weapons quests.

 

As it is, I still have to finish my Zeta.

 

I may do the atma grind ver.2 and the dungeon crawl. At least it's nice that you don't have to be lv 60 for these crystals to drop.

 

ADDENDUM:

Also Warren! You might want to change the title to "Anima", since "Animus" is a stage in the 2.0 relic quests.

[Jana]

The relic chain has always been about grinding easy content for the stats, as opposed to doing a difficult raid for the stats. I've never set foot into Alex HM but I honestly don't think I need this either... I still have my old relic about 40% through the Garuda HM lights stage.

[111]

Between this and the ridiculously overtooled As3, and how much I hate the new dungeons, I'm mulling over unsubbing for now. 

 

 

It really feels like Square Enix just doesn't give a fuck about the average player now, and is just focusing on super casuals and super hardcore. 

 

Like you either fuck around with minigames and do dungeons, or you are super hardcore and have to pour untold hours into it. Everyone who wants more than minigames and dungeons, but doesn't want to be hardcore 360 no scope grindmaster raid dude has nothing for them anymore. 

 

2.0 wasn't like this, and that was the game I fell in love with. 

 

Oh well, I guess I just have to accept that. 

 

Sorry for whining in your thread Warren.

 

Edit: I was looking on reddit and the mood feels pretty similar :c yoshi p why u kill this game?

[Nero]

That last step is a tad irritating. Assuming that 3.2 comes out in March-ish of 2016 and it takes three weeks of new tomestones to get an i220 weapon, people will probably spend more time grinding this weapon than actually using it while it is relevant. And God knows how long it'll take for the next step to make relics relevant in 3.2's PvE content.

 

BUT GLAMOUR FANTASY XIV AMIRITE