Farming for the Relic quest seals is about as pain in the ass as it got.
You needed 9 hamlet seals to START the relic quest. If you have a group that is able to pull off a perfect run, there's a roughly 50% drop rate for your whole group, which you then need to out-lot 7 other people for.
That means each run you had about a 1:16 chance of getting a seal. To complete the set by pure chance, and again this is assuming you pull off perfect hamlet runs with a good group that knows what they're doing, you need to complete around ~150 hamlet runs. One of these "perfect runs" took about 25 minutes, and there was a 15 minute cool down before your group could enter again. So these 150 runs took approximately 100 hours. Sound ludicrous? Yeah it is.
There was, however, a second way.
In the days leading up to a hamlet raid, you can trade in goods to the hamlet NPC for points. The server also had a leaderboard for traded in points. If you could get to #1, you would automatically obtain a hamlet seal after every run you did (providing you did a perfect run), separate to the loot pool.
However, there can of course only be ONE person on the entire server in the #1 spot. So this was highly contested. You very often needed hundreds of thousands of points to become #1. Lets just say if you didn't have 10,000,000 Gil spare to completely throw away that day, just go home.
And the entire process worked like an auction: you don't need a specific number of points, you need to be TOP. This meant the entire thing ended up working like an eBay auction snipe, with everybody dumping their loads into the NPC at the very last minute. Trading took time, and you couldn't keep an eye on the leaderboard AND rapidly trade your goods to the NPC at the same time, so it was one hell of a gamble. You might overspend and waste tons of money securing the top spot, or you might not trade enough and not hit the top 3 at all. Or worse yet, you might dump 10,000,000 gil into the NPC, only for three other people to dump 11,000,000 Gil into the NPC at the last minute, completely wasting all of your 10 million gil. Gone, just like that, for nothing.
There was another situation that was just as devastating. It wasn't feasible to get lucky and be the only guy willing to dump points that day. There was a minimum amount of points required for the hamlet to reach "Level 2". If there weren't enough people dumping points and the minimum is not reached, the hamlet stayed at Level 1, and the "perfect run" isn't possible. Level 2 hamlet was harder but doubled your hamlet score, which was required to hit the score needed for seals to drop. So it was possible to dump 10 million gil worth of points, but if nobody else bothered (because they didn't think there was a chance of them beating you to #1) then that 10 million gil just got wasted again.
Assuming you get the #1 spot, you are pretty much guaranteed your 3 seals, once you get a few people to help you do a few hamlet runs. Wait, 3? Didn't I say 9? Yes, yes I did. There are three separate hamlets. You need 3 seals from each one, not just 9 overall. That thing above about trying to win hamlet via a huge gamble on gil-sink points?
You gotta do it three times.
Once you'd done all that, whether it be via sweat, blood, or tears, you can finally START your Relic Quest. Excellent. Good luck with the double meld, that's another story.
On a more positive note, as mentioned, the relic quest has supposedly been made easier. But we don't know exactly how much easier. Easier as in everyone can get one? Or just easier that a few more people can get them? We'll find out soon I guess.
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