The current system has 2 major design problems:
- It punishes players for switching activities like AFK skilling between PvM hours
- It makes QoL perks essentially useless for anyone serious about PvM
For ages we have requested adrenaline stalling to be obsolete as a QoL update, and instead of implementing it as a reward you could get and forget about forever, they went ahead and made it compete with damage boosts. What kind of design is this? There is nothing difficult or challenging about adrenaline stalling. It is a relic (no pun intended) of outdated game design and unforeseen emergent gameplay. The game would be better off without it wholesale. Ideally, it would be a toggle in the combat options whether adrenaline drains out of combat or not.
Making damage boosts compete with each other for relic spaces makes sense because you can choose situationally per encounter, but there is no reason we shouldn't also be able to use LotD and adren stalling relic on top of them because there is no power increase. The meta for Solak and Telos, for example, is literally to grab your LotD after the fight (very challenging mechanic to teleport to the bank). Both of those perks should be changed to QoL/Misc category since they do not grant any power increases.
No serious PvMer is going to sacrifice a DPS increase for QoL.
Additionally, if someone does clues or herb runs in between their PvM, they should be able to just have pharm ecology (for example) because the PvM perks don't impact the herb runs and the herb perk doesn't impact their PvM.
I know some people will push back on this idea with all sorts of really bad arguments like that "it encourages choice" or that it's fine because you CAN just choose not to use the QoL perks but it really defeats the purpose of reward spaces and QoL if you make them de facto useless for their very target demographic and nothing about this game design is either fun or challenging. It's just frustrating. It doesn't encourage choice; it just encourages you not to use perks you would otherwise love to use if it was worth it.
The solution proposed in the title solves all these problems and still makes sure the relic system does't allow any more power creep than it was originally intended to.
Edit: An increase in the energy pool alone is simply not enough, as the problem would persist. You'd use a third or fourth DPS perk. The root of the problem is that DPS/power relics compete with QoL relics and that is what has to be solved.
Edit2: People are worried about chronote sinks. As a compromise, I'm fine with a weekly upkeep cost if it would let us have these separate categories. That would sink more chronotes than we do now, because the system encourages you to just pick the 3 best relics suited to what you do and not switch.