That was what I was pointing out in one of my earlier posts. We have to wait until Tloch and Wiggin release details about the defiance augs. If it is on track with my post, the CoW gear will be a viable path for all levels of raiding and will not further trivialize group content, while providing both an alternative and upgrade path for gear progression. All hangs on a post from them.
Not to beat the dead horse, but I think the concerns everyone have expressed need addressed. Atm there's a LOT of players sitting at their computers wondering if there's any point in staying with Vanguard because it looks like any effort they've done in the last few years of raiding, and grinding are going to be worthless. It was my understanding that CoW was to be a further progression of the game as is, not a total flip in a different direction. How is what we were given a screen shot of in any way in line with what is currently in-game? Every aug that people have busted their rears to get are going to be vendor fodder now? How is CoW , from what we got a peek at, in any way like the transition from PotA to CoB? Most of us are still sitting with CoB gear in our bags waiting for the mysterious set bonus that has yet to come. I'm just as excited as the next person for more NEW content to come out, but please, help us understand what the heck is going on here!! Y'all have seriously got to communicate better with this sort of stuff! Every veteran player I've spoke with only has one thing to say so far "Looks like Virak, what the heck were they thinking?!". Can we please get some clarification on how our current augs are going to transition into the new armor pieces, & if the answer is "they don't at all" y'all may want to go back to the drawing board.
Yea, whatever happened to that? Would be nice to see one of the developers first identify the shortcomings and flaws regarding Vi'Rak's essence/sealed item system and then show how their new system addresses ALL of those flaws and adds more to whatever would be possible with unique loot creation.
looking at this information and the responses to it (along with the years of complaints about itemization especially class restrictions) makes me wonder if there was much of anything that the developers can do... they are basically dratted if they do and dratted if they don't. as far as the rorr issue, i honestly have no problem with them going the way of the dinosaur, the general cdb not capping always looked fishey and you had people saying so for multiple years so if it bites someone in the anus, they gambled and it paid off in high parses for years so they got their time/money back in spades. not to mention that a lot of the old gear will be useful in catching in the initial stages of burning through the new content when it is initially released. or you could just fire sale it all off and take advantage of the prices before they drop a bit. basically it just reenforces that vanguard's stats and gear are rather wonkey and could use some rather large tweaking and reworking from close to the ground up stage. will that happen... doubtful that our devs have the time to sink into that completely... i think moorgard was the last to mention that in my knowing but maybe it is talked about in the best buff stacking which i haven't been following. so this new armour system seems to me to be a way to address stat issues across the board while giving people to blur the line around their archtype a bit more than the last few sets of gear allowed (ie a disc/shaman who want to gear full dps and can't because of class restrictions). again it kind of hinges on issues that graye mentioned several posts above. a question that i have is will ALL equipment from CoW follow the non-traditional aug path and will whole range of equipment drop/quest in CoW? maybe the CoW armour is just the 5 pieces that pota covered, leaving jewelry, and arms/wrists/belt to be filled via other options. it all depends on what they put where and if they toss us an overland or two in the process (heck for some reason i remembered giddoo mentioning the dragon in craigwind along with cob, might have been timeline link or a content link, it was ages ago).
I don't see why the base item has to have no stats whatsoever. When I see something that drops that has no stats on, I get the same feeling that I get whenever we kill a hard mob and all the loot rots. That is the feeling that drives people away from the game and is not the one you want to be giving with new content.
In order to replace a piece of my current gear (armor, for the sake of argument, since that's what has been shown), my current assessment would look something like this: a) does the new piece have a better EE, set bonus, or activated ability than my current piece? b) does the new piece have better base stats (ac, attribute points, hp, other modifiers) on it than my current piece? c) does the new piece have better slots than my current piece? d) does the new piece's appearance match my character's current outfit? In all seriousness though, I go through this mental checklist each time I window shop at any of the loot databases. First the item needs to offer an immediate benefit the moment I put it on (a better EE or more attribute points/hp, say). If not, I need to see the future value of it (often in the form of being part of a set bonus or having augment slots to be filled later). This gear system makes me feel confused. While I get a multi-stage approach to building a "better armor set" I wonder if 8 slots with 0 base stats is a bit over the top. It would be like promising your 16 year old kid a 2014 Mustang for his birthday, but then giving him a junker that will need a new battery, and the brakes fixed, and new tires, and a replacement door, and a rebuilt transmission, and the leaky sunroof sealed, and all the upholstery replaced due to mildew from the leaky roof, and...
With the right augmentations that ring can be amazingly good... and nobody uses it. This should have been enough to make SOE understand that gear that relies in augmentations is not a great idea.
Overall I don't really mind the idea myself, but take my opinion with a grain of salt as I haven't really played much the last 6 months. I think the concept is ok overall but it needs a lot of refining to make it viable. I guess from looking at that chest item only I would ask, why are we renaming rune slots to enrichment slots? Because to me that is what it looks like, there is already an evasion rune that is almost exactly the same and it seems the cdb is basically the same as well but 5-10% better? Why can't we just call them rune slots and then you can create new rune type augments to go in those slots that are about 50% stronger than before, perhaps even more if our base armor starts as a blank slate. This way we can still use our old augments until the time we get new ones. The other major issue I have is the lack of flat hp displayed on that chest item, I mean jeez the t3 pota has 456 base hp. What aug are you going to make that gives 400 hp? This was one of my gripes with some of the new gear like tharridon's belt having 0 hp, what kind of raid gear has 0 hp on it? Perhaps it would be best if there was hp assgined to the blank slate item, like tank could get 500, melee 300, healer 250, caster 175 or something like that just throw out an example. The only problem would be that the healers use 3 different armor types, so idk how that would work exactly. The other problem to me as has been mentioned earlier is the fact that the raid augs are so powerful that replacing them seems very very hard to do. These augs were not as crazy powerful in todays game as they will be when the stat caps are changed because currently I am sure half of the stats provided by each one fall under the caps and therefore provide 0 benefit. However to remove the caps and to make every aspect of these augs useful makes them incredibly powerful, perhaps too powerful overall. To toss aside say the IWG rune aug in favor of 2.5% cdb new enrichment aug is just not going to happen. I personally would like it if some the new augs gave incredibly strong bonuses but also some sort of major downside. Maybe you can pick up 5% dmg augs, but then the downside is you lose 2% mitigation. So while you may be able to go full glass cannon and kick some *** on a few encounters, it might also be likely to get you killed in a tough encounter where you are taking heavy damage. Maybe there is a tank specific aug that allows you to gain 5% mitigation but causes you to produce 10% less hate. The possibilities would of course be endless and they wouldn't have to be the only kind of aug, there could still be standard types, I just think it would be a cool variation. However it would require closely balancing the augs so as not to make them imbalanced for any one class or person. I think the devs just need a better understanding of where we are today so that they can create useful upgrades for players down the road. The system seems ok to me but the augs that go inside the slots need to be signifigantly stronger than they are currently to provide a meaningful upgrade as well as some sort of customization.
This. Graye has something like 30 different stats on that robe, 1 EE, and 1 AA. How are we going to get an upgrade or even a sidegrade when there are only 7 slots available? Minus the Core stats on that robe, I still don't know if the new system could even reach the augmented stats. Not much of a progression piece.
Can't pretty much all the issues we currently have be corrected by simply increasing the amount that stats scale vs say lvl 60 mobs? It's not a long term solution by any means, but with Vg's limited resources at this time wouldn't it be the quickest implementation that didn't get completely off track from what we have been working on for the past few years?
I think a level increase is about the only solution to our current stats paired with a change in stat scale. However it would take forever to get enough content out to warrant a level increase so it seems its really a no win situation
That's why i suggest the scaling vs lvl 60 mobs maybe even 59 but I am sure people would crap a brick if suddenly Shendu wasn't so lame.
If they'd make everything scale to target level with soft caps it would diminish a lot of the power scaling at endgame at this time. Right now the only things that scale to target level are defensive modifiers and (maybe) accuracy? Depending on the scaling it may or may not change the difficulty. With PotA gear and various raid drops/augs, I come in at 33% spell damage rating from gear while the cap is at 25%. Critical damage is around 38% and that's with being short a couple of MysDoms. I'd much rather see this change before rolling out a new itemization scheme. I still like the idea of being able to create your own gear through augments but the rules (only three variations of stats) just seems far too limiting and confusing.
Crit scales to level. Not the same mechanic though, and it swings both ways over 10 levels. I don't recall if damage did also, but I think so. Totally different mechanics though... Weapon skill scales also, though linearly. Not many people address this skill though.
Going to retest again - but in the tests I have done I have observed the following: If I take the crit chance shown in my character sheet and multiply it by the CDB shown in my character sheet e.g. 0.46 X 0.85 = 0.39 If I then add up all the attacks that say "for an additional... Points of damage" I assign this to total crit damage done. The total damage done includes this crit damage so I subtract it and restate it as a base damage + crit damage% This crit damage % over say a 10 minute or longer parse is within 1 % of the character sheet calculated value (there is also typically a 1% epic in there as well). The values in the character sheet do not change based on target level and this seems repeatable if it is the stone statue or level 55+ mobs. I have tested this on primarily melee based toons. In the tests with a 2H it did not show any further bonus on crits either.
Here's what I don't understand about the whole deal from strictly a problem solving standpoint. Blame the Big 3, this is how I roll. We are starting on itemization when stat caps are clearly going to affect what we are discussing now. Even more so, the BBO hasn't been clearly defined yet and it will have impact on both Stat Caps and Itemization in my mind. So we have never fully discussed step 1 and now we are talking about step 3. So either, the roundtable is merely a forum for devs to present what they have already decided on or we are being asked to give feedback blind. We need to finish BBO and then explore stat caps and itemization as a whole or caps should be first so that we can provide relevant feedback on future gear. I think the world of our devs, they have my full respect, but to me this is created by the constant revolving door that was the Vg producer. You build a house from the foundation up.
In my opinion the BBO is not really a factor here since it's not going to modify raid strength... on the other hand the stat cap change is the most gamechanging feature, stats provide more advantages than damage bonus therefore this may change how we perceive equipment. SOE should have started by talking about the new caps... without that information we lack enough data to judge this change fairly.
We're talking grapes and grapefruit here. I'll hop in the FR vent tonight before we raid. You would never see this stuff calculated on your character sheet anyways.
