Ex WoW Player learns what a REAL GRIND looks like in FFXIV 

I hope some of you will consider joining me on my adventure! Streaming daily on Twitch! www.twitch.tv/justruss VODs here: www.youtube.com/@justrussvods

im a masochist, i got all the ARR relics on free trial WITHOUT entering HW which makes it 20x worse. no one do what i did, its not worth it

When Rinon talked about Alexandrite and the tome requirements of those one thing I suddenly remembered was there is another way to collect Alexandrite if you are insane enough to do it. If you farm FATEs in ARR with the Animus weapon equipped they sometimes can drop 1 Alexandrite at about the same rate as the atma with the Zenith weapon.

I finally got my zodiac weapon back in October of last year. Oooh boy, it was a slog. For a full account player, the worst part is the book grind. But if you're a free trial player...for starters just to begin you got to have a lv 50 crafter just to make the starting weapon for the relic. Which also requires lv 50 gatherers in order to get your crafters that high in the first place. Then the next big hurdle, and the worst step for me personally, was the materia step. You need a ton of 1 and 2 tier materias, and since the tier of materia you extract from gear is determined by the item level of your gear, endgame ARR gear will mostly be dropping 3 and 4s. And because I was an idiot, I had thrown out all my 1s and 2s ages before I started the zodiac grind to save inventory space. So I farm them all out manually, which I did by crafting a full set of lv 20 gear and spamming low level dungeons with my Grand Company squadron. Finally you got the scavenger hunt which now requires ALL crafters and gatherers to be lv 50+. I say 50+ because if you stick to 50 and ARR gear you'll have to grind out the legendary crafting gear just to meet the stat requirements to make the items for this step. Ooor you can "cheat" by leveling to 54 and just buying gear from a vendor in Heavensward to hit the stat requirements, which is what I did. All of that nonsense you can just completely skip by throwing gil at the marketboard and buying stuff from other players, and it's why if I ever try and go for another zodiac weapon it won't be until AFTER I beat Stormblood and finally upgrade to a full account lol.

@13:00 you don't actually have to turn the leve in, you can decline to turn it in & keep it banked for when you do need it or your leve log is full. this will also lock that leve out of the rotation

Bear in mind that doing an entire ARR relic in 1 day is really only possible if you're overlevelled to the point that you can plow straight through all of the dungeons unsynched. It takes significantly longer if you do everything synched.

As somebody who had done his 1st relic back in ARR… and rest recently in EW … can confirm now it 10 time easier…and yes I have all ARR relicts and HW and ShB and EW …. working on eureka ones currently 15 in hydatos stage

I spontanously started my ARR relic as level 60 ninja after discovering that one version was named Yoshimitsu, which I thought was a fun coincidence, since my ninja glam was made after Kunimitsu from Tekken. It took me 3 days solo grinding without being massively OP as a level 90. The 2nd relic my brother joined me and he still had to unlock every step at a time. We took 2 days for that. But the 3rd relic we both had all steps unlocked, so it was possible to do some crisscross and preperations for later steps, which ended up only taking around 18hours with mostly some unlucky fates eating hours away. I did all 3 relics back to back and I thought to myself... 3 relics in one week is much faster than some grinds I did for WoW for one BiS item. ARR is mostly working, you can't prepare materials like in HW, where 90% of the relic is simply stocking tomestone materials and when you got everything, you just spam through the duties. SB and ShB relics are also quite a grind, but both have extra benifits attached to it, which is just not the case with ARR that will only eat some gil.

23:51 I wouldn't say it's cheating, considering how long he's been playing, to have unused GC seals or poetics is pretty easy to come by, and the alexandrite could've been bought as a currency dump in the past

The hardest part is the build up to the first relic at least if you’re on free trial. Being entirely self-sufficient requires sacrificing a lot of time to level up all your crafters, getting all the tomes, maps, materia, and so forth. But after you do it, the rest is much easier if you want to make more. Which is exactly what I’m doing for the whole collection.

Im so glad i spent the hundreds of hours getting all my Zenith weapons back in day when itnwas still current...ill never get that time back

I wish the real grinds in 14 were as easy as Zodaic relic grind

Chat was incorrect, you don't have to do the dungeons/trials with weapon equipped.. just equip it before you leave the instance.

Imagine actually doing it at 50 though, when you couldn't fly etc. Still really neat to see though. I need to do some of those someday.

i think if you hit 100 runs and lock out, it's reasonable to say 'yeah, Squeenix, your right...' For real though, had no idea there was a limit

Gotta say, Rinon got pretty lucky on the Atma stage, or at least not un-lucky. Completing it in an hour is pretty good. I've been farming the last Atmas that I need while the Yokai event is up, and I've had cases where I've gone an hour+ without getting a drop, multiple times. I think the highest number of FATEs I've done between drops that I've bothered to count was 20.

Omg, he reached queue limit lol

As a free-trialer dragoon, I've only managed to get the materials for the starting champion's lance. The _starting materials_. It took me DAYS to find the bloody lance head, and now I have to find ways to improve my CP because my carpenter is already at the right level for crafting but now I can't make any of the high tier things because my CP is too low 😭 knowing how much more I have to go is so daunting oh my god. I'm going to be as old as allagan empire once I'm done

When I did this (on War) my fastest Aurum Vale was 2 minutes 6 seconds

Wait theres more you can also become the Keeper of the Kettle and do it all over again for a house decoration, then you have the next version of the Relic that requires you doing the first zodiac at least once, then you have the Eureka Relic weapon and the Bazja Relic Weapon, ect

Zodiac took me forever, got WHM and SCH and never again. Doing it on release was terrible.

Free trial player here with all my Crafters and Gatherers at 70 cause during ARR I was grinding POTD instead 😊. Also wanted my cactus mount and all the triple triad cards :3. For ARR relic grind about to finish doing books, starting go grind for materia and farming Treasure Maps. Pray for me 😔.

On average if you do it with a maxlvl character, the second relic takes between 17-22hours if you prefarmed everything prior. Speaking from my experience as I did all 10 Zenith in Shadowbringers. Fuck the Atma-stage

Gods the Atma Farming in ARR, still get flashbacks from that. I did it before they patched it so it took forever, I think it took me a few Weeks of everyday farming Fates to get every Atma I needed for just one weapon. It really took forever to geht the Weapon to its highest lvl. but I have them, for every frigging class

And then there is me who grinded out 4 ARR relics on one character and another one on a second character.

even if you can do it in 1 day you're mental will be broken or you'll go insane

ive done it as a free trial player probably world first not gonna lie

My only AAR relic is the ninja with it being my main and during the Fate portion with me being at the mercy Rng I decided, to keep doing the atma farming until I got 2 since I was already in pain and if I wanted to get another relic I wanted to just skip that part.

As someone who's done this grind before Heavensward (before the big nerfs), it was so much worse back then. First of all, "unsynced" wasn't a thing back then. You had to do everything synced, which made the light grind a lot worse. Some of the items in the first and second steps costed hundreds of poetics each, and poetics weren't given as plentifully as they are today (being the endgame tomestone). The atma phase was horrible. You have to grind FATEs and get a lucky drop in 12 different zones. Nowadays, the rate is about 20%, but back then? Back then, my boy, SEVERAL DOZEN FATEs just for one atma was the norm. So you had to do several hundred FATEs. Expect 500+, and there was no flight so traveling from FATE to FATE took longer. The book part was similar back then (I wanna say the books costed more poetics? not sure anymore). The main difference was that you had to kill 10 of each of the 10 monster targets instead of 3, so you had to wait for them to respawn once you had killed every one of them, and I want to say Square-Enix made the FATEs respawn a bit more quickly? I'm not sure. Then the alexandrite part with the materia. Nowadays, tier 1 to 4 materia are cheap, but back then, tier 4 materia costed in the 6 digits each on the market board. If you were poor, tough luck because there wasn't a damn thing you could do about it aside for learning how to make money. As for the alexandrite themselves, you could earn them with a daily quest which required to do a roulette (one alexandrite/day), or FATE farming with the weapon equipped (low chance to obtain one). Nowadays you can trade hunt seals for them. I can't remember if you could do that back then. There was also a treasure map you could purchase with poetics to obtain an alexandrite (later improved to give 5 alexandrites). While similar to now, obtaining alexandrites was also a pain back then. And then there's the light farming. No unsync. I mentioned it at the start but it really made the light grind far, far lengthier and straining. Am I forgetting anything? Anyway, it was a lot worse back then, speaking from experience. I've redone an ARR relic weapon last year on a new character and while the book section was tedious, it was overall not too bad, I gotta agree!

Remember that when this was current content you couldn't solo anything

I kind of stopped doing the Zodiac relic when I got to the books. Heavensward Relic grind is ok for me. I haven't tried the other relic grinds so I can't comment on them.

I think it took me about 2 months to get my first Zodiac weapon

Dentist tell me I’ve been grinding in my sleep😤💯

As a free trial player I will do this

Relic Grind... god, relic grind... *ptsd shudder*

Damn it Russ, this is making me want to do another Zodiac weapon and I KNOW I'll hate myself the entire time if I do start it. I really should just stick to leveling trusts for my masochism fix but goddamn. P.S. if you complete the zodiac weapon you can trade it in at the start of an anima weapon to essentially skip the first step of the anima grind, and you can still make replicas of each step, so you should totally submit to the masochism and do the whole grind, not just stop at gae bolg. That's definitely good advice and not just me wanting someone else to suffer.

WoW Legion was Blizzard looking at FF14 and FF11's relic weapons and saying "WRITE THAT DOWN! WRITE THAT DOWN!" ... and like many good WoW ideas, never doing it again.

The zodiacs are painful because it’s all solo and mind numbingly boring. I made my first a little bit ago and of all the relics, it’s the only I won’t do again. It was technically easier than the others but more boring and just painful imo

I like how the guy in the vid lies claiming he “bought his alexandrite “😂 I’ve done 4 are relics so far and you CAN NOT buy alexandrite. So he deff pre farmed those lol making his vid a lil bit misleading. Yea you can do it in one day IF you pre farmed weeks I advance.

When will you stop being an ex WoW player and just be a ffxiv player? 🤷🏼‍♀️ Yes, I’m going to keep asking. 😋

Damn man you’re milking the (Ex wow) to much 😂😂

Your pausing is so annoying

Free trial player here with all my Crafters and Gatherers at 70 cause during ARR I was grinding POTD instead 😊. Also wanted my cactus mount and all the triple triad cards :3. For ARR relic grind about to finish doing books, starting go grind for materia and farming Treasure Maps. Pray for me 😔.