There have been a lot of complaints from raiders about a lack of valiants in raid chests, leading to frustration over not having BiS gear for every slot for your character. While it is fun to have BiS for every slot, the question I pose is- Why do you think you *need* BiS for every slot? The game nowadays is so number bloated that numbers rarely mean much anymore. The difference between a T1 wrist and a Valiant wrist is around 1k HP or so. Raiders are nowadays running around with 650k-800k hp, maybe even higher with some short term buffs for short term situations. Throw in runes, delay death, etc... 1k isn't going to make or break your character in 99.99% of situations. And yet many players feel that their character cannot play properly if they cannot get that Valiant wrist and have to settle for 1k HP less on the T1 wrist. Which is confusing to me, because I am quite confident you could go with a couple T1 items instead of Valiant and your results are going to be the same whether you had Valiant or not. So for myself (and any others like me) who think it is not necessary to have full Valiant gear... I would like to be educated on why you feel it is necessary to go full Valiant/BiS. To me, outside of a Magelo ranking... there is no difference between 720k HP and 723k HP in 99.99% of situations.
I 100% agree. And I was at fault for not specifying weapons in the OP. But there are a lot of players who feel they absolutely need Valiant, and all other loot is irrelevant. I don't understand that mentality.
Becaue we arent in the 1990s anymore and EQ moved away from the old school style of loot in every way but two, with the idea of "you can raid every raid every lockout for the full expansion and still never have BiS" (the second being that raid gear is still roughly 3 expansions better than group gear, and not "its slightly better than the current bis group gear". T3 LS group armor is, as an example, slightly better than CoV t2 and markedly worse than ToL t1) having stuck around. You have to have noticed at this point that everything that made the old style of loot interesting and unique now exists only in the group game, and only on non-vis + weapons, on loot that is almost entirely irrelevant outside feeding it to pets outside the first week or two of every other expansion. And even then, between the 3 or 4 different droppable, mob-unique, non-vis pieces that dont have class or archetype restrictions (tank masks, belt effects, and you can argue the check on charm stats here), the difference is a whopping 3 heroic stats on classes that are starting to not care about heroic stats because even in 0 raid gear, you're already starting to crit-cap a few melee classes. BiS is the only actual thing that matters in the current gear setup. We arent in the days where you had to figure out how to upgrade and what pieces you need where, everything is literally formulaic 1-for-1 upgrades in every slot, once or twice per expansion. You dont actually need the gear, but youve NEVER actually "needed" the gear outside some very specific situations. Unless you're actively tanking raid bosses, you can get by in t1 droppable group armor (or last years t1 group armor in non-level cap raise years), everything else is just making your healer(s) hate themselves less. Theres just nothing else to care about but getting the 21-24 pieces of t2 raid gear and 8 group drops that matter every expansion, besides being there the one or two times you do some of the raid achievements that arent auto-complete. Even your t5's just auto-complete from farming whatever chase mission drop is in the current expansion and/or augment ores
You know your content is trivial when people realize gearing up all year isn't really important. A raid force can pretty much get a smattering of raid gear from this expansion, or none, and probably be able to day 1 clear every raid release in the next expansion.
The group situation is similar. I take less damage from tanking an entire camp pulled at once in LI than I do from pulling one stupid blob trash mob in Shadow Valley. I'm in, essentially, ToV raid armor.
I like the line of thought behind, create hard content and use gear as a method to ‘nerf’ that content.
The real question is why have 2 levels of raid loot knowing how people are. Why "waste" dkp or priority or what ever for a lesser piece of gear even if its probably not going to make a difference. If your goal is to get to best gear possible then you're going to want the best gear.
Why are you assuming that people are complaining about the Valiant drops in raid chests because they "only want the BIS gear"? I raid with an open raid force on Xegony. Every chest without a Valiant piece is one less item PERIOD to roll on. That's why I'm pissed about the drop rate. We had a chest last night that had as many ornaments as it did spells and wearables. For a raid force that has a roster of about 100ish toons, that's no fun. If they had a mechanism where either you got a T1 piece OR a Valiant piece in a chest, I'd shut up. Because at least our raid force is getting something to roll on. Perhaps you need to be educated on actually paying attention to what people are saying. Less loot in chests is bad because there are literally fewer items to distribute. Stop laying your misguided assumptions on folks.
This thread has absolutely nothing to do with drop rates in chests. It is about why people feel the need to get a Valiant xyz instead of a T1 xyz, weapons notwithstanding. Perhaps you need to be educated on actually paying attention to what the thread is about.
Every chest drops 2 T1 visible pieces, 2+ T1 non visible pieces, and 0-2 Valiant. Seems to me that there is a mechanism in place where there is a T1 piece OR a Valiant piece in a chest (at least 4 T1 pieces in each chest). Now you can follow your own advice, hopefully.
Because we needed another thread about the overall lack of Valiant drops? Maybe if they proposed something along the line of if the roll is for 0 valiant drops than an additional T1 wrist is added to the chest would be better.
This thread is not about lack of Valiant drops. This thread is about why players think they must have Valiant in every slot. Because players could have looted some T1 over the course of the past months and not worry about Valiants and still be able to play EQ perfectly fine.
Why would I not want Valiant? I ask myself a different question. Summer season is coming. Do I (and other players) spend Sundays raiding and maybe getting some Valiants ... Or do we just not bother to log in because we get so few drops and we go and spend time doing something else ... I watch streams from your guild raids. Your guild leader often comments on low raid attendance. I wonder if that low RA has something to do with a lack of Valiant drops.
If that is what you have to do in order to focus on the thread, yes you can. Others have answered the question just fine with the first paragraph as is.
