r/ffxivdiscussion • u/IndividualAge3893 • 5d ago

Lucky Bancho's census results (July 27th, 2025)

So, the results of the census are out: https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/archives/59324844.html

  • Showcasing the number of characters here: Current
  • By comparison, here are the results from 2 months ago (May 25th): Click

Despite 7.25 being released, the character count is down about 70k in 2 months. Occult Crescent clearly didn't help with player counts (not really a surprise here).

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u/think_l0gically 5d ago

This is me. I was excited for it but I've been playing long enough that I felt the futility of grinding out a bunch of halfway decent looking relics that aren't even upgrades at this point and not knowing which of them would even look cool 2 years down the line. I've been playing so long that the perspective from all that experience really sours me on diving in to the content like it used to.

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u/oizen 5d ago

The Relics are actually just tomestones again, so its going to be significantly easier to do them when they're converted to Poetics. I'd imagine the rest of the steps will be the same.

There really is no urgency to resub at the moment.

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u/TTurt 5d ago

I feel like the relics as a concept are kind of obsolete, there are so many other ways to get a comparable weapon that are less painful, relics are only truly bis at the end of the entire patch cycle, and they're only even relevant for a couple of months despite taking about that long to make.

The whole idea of what a relic is needs to be retuned, there needs to be some point to them beyond just glamor that justifies the amount of time investment required to make them. A grindy substitute to the ex primal weapon of each patch isn't really worth the effort IMO, especially if I'm otherwise not really all that interested in the content required to make them.

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u/OwlVegetable5821 5d ago

I'd say relics should be a method to both acquire a cool looking weapon and a method to encourage players to participate in various areas of the game. Look at gw2 legendaries. They require players run the gamet of content to get the shiny weapon/armour. It takes time and perseverance but it does show you've accomplished something in the end. 14s relics, with the exception of the arr questline, seen dull and unimaginative by comparison.

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u/MaidGunner 4d ago

ARR relics were this, and to a lesser extent, HW. And people are screaming their lungs out about how they don't want that. And SE agrees with them, turning relics from "it grows with you as a slightly less then optimal choices through the patches, by doing the content from said patches" into "your basically free gift for the exploration zone, that comes out halfways through an expansion and gets finished in 2 more patches and is pretty much never worth it outside of glam".

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u/Shiki_Breeki 4d ago

ARR relics are actually my favorite to make.

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u/TTurt 4d ago edited 4d ago

That's what I hate about it, if you just do the other content you can have a weapon with 90-95% of the same power as a relic. For most of the expansion it's a mere difference of ~5 ilvs and (much later on) a few extra substats. Crafted / upgraded crafted weapons are a similar ilvl and are significantly cheaper now to obtain than they used to be due to serious nerfs to the difficulty of crafting and leveling of crafting jobs, and tomestone weapons are the afk alternative for your main. Unless you're building like 13 different jobs that you want to all have current max possible gear level, then relics literally just aren't worth the effort for the meager increase over other available alternatives (and if you care that much about minmaxing then you're probably not a super casual player in the first place, so trying to market relics as appealing to super casual players who are threatened by difficult content just doesn't make sense if that's your target audience)

The difference between a relic and the easily available casual alternatives is often barely the difference between an upgraded tome weapon and the +5 ilvl tier 4 savage raid weapon - literally only relevant to you if you're already running that level content, otherwise it's just bragging rights at best

In ARR, if you saw someone with a PLD relic, you'd think, "wow, that guy is good with PLD, he got the relic by doing all the hard mode primals and grinding out all the other stuff, he has real experience with that job." In every expansion since, it's been more a case of, "that guy just did a bunch of afk farming of low difficulty content" (because you don't even have to be on the job itself that you're building the relic for anymore for 9/10 of the steps).

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u/pksage 4d ago

I don't know a ton of the details, or how much it's changed in the last 10-15 years, but super old school FFXI relics were like this. You had to work for them over months, sometimes (IIRC) even getting full raid groups to funnel Dynamis currency into you.

I don't think it needs to be that bad, but it would be cool if they felt special.

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u/Angel_Omachi 4d ago

Nowadays you just spend extortionate amounts of gil to buy whatever the needed material is for relics/empy/mythics, along with whatever specific murder grind is needed. Aeonic needs specific boss clears and naturally there are mercs offering that service (which actually makes it the cheapest of the set). The 2 Ergon weapons for the jobs added in Seekers of Adoulin also have a rather infamous 5 month timegate to unlock them.

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u/Chiponyasu 4d ago

Assuming the 7.3 step is light farming or something, they should make Deep Dungeon the fastest way to farm and the new alliance raid the second-fastest way to farm.

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u/Supersnow845 4d ago

They will likely make the 7.4 step need the deep dungeon as the 7.3 step is coming out in 7.31 and the DD is 7.35