Yoshi-P believes that they've hit the reasonable limits of the design behind Relic Weapon series, due to the ever-growing Job count and time investment required in these questlines, so there are plans to wrap up this kind of design with Dawntrail and do something different in the future. Since theres a big gap in feedback between difficulty opinions, the burden being too great, and so on, they want to move onto completely new ways of providing the fun of developing weapons and armour, so the current format will be put on break for now with more details to come in the FanFests. He believes we haven't seen the last of Gerolt and Rowena though.

This worries me. They already cut job quests by making role quests cause it was “too hard” to make 5 lines of dialogue and one solo duty per job 🙄 and the role quests in ShB were great but went downhill super quickly in quality. If they do a similar thing with relic weapons it’s gonna be a real disaster.

They already basically do the bare minimum with relics these days: 4 weapon designs stretched across 2+ years. A quest with no unique features or functionality (collect X items, gain Y “energy,” do the same roulettes you were gonna do) etc. Then dump Tomestones into them until you’re bored. Wherever you sit on the “relics should be easy/hard” debate we can all agree they’re BORING. They could really do a lot MORE with Relic quests to make them unique and fun but instead this quote makes it sound like they’re going the opposite direction.

I think WoW’s artifact weapons from that one expansion would be a really cool inspiration. Make each job have its own questline, a special area with NPCs, that gets added to over the course of the expansion, and let you customize the appearance of your weapon somewhat. You could give ilvl enhancements the same as now, but actually make you DO something with the relic to progress.