Raiders are already smashing through heroics just fine (as well as raids), better raid gear would do very little to make the problem 'worse' because its more or less topped out. Since we are largely talking about offense and not defense its not like better raid gear would result in all raiders soloing heroic zones or something crazy. Even with the sad state of gear now you got people duoing and trioing heroic zones. Solution: Boost hard raid content and loot by A LOT Boost easy raid loot by a lot and easy raid content by a little, if any Leave heroic/solo loot and content the same. Result: Solo and heroic content and loot remain fluid between each other making crossing over easy EM raid content also remains easy and fluid between solo and heroic content for easy transition EM raid content drops loot that prepares players for harder raid content Solo and Heroic get ZERO NERFS and even access to a boost via EM raid content if they so wished Notes: Raiders are already steamrolling heroic content so this 'fear' of it suddenly happening is irrational Why do you insist on making this some sort of casual vs hardcore/raider issue? It absolutely isn't. I can;t recall one suggestion here that would even come close to stepping on 'casual' toes yet you think if raiding gets boosted some how this will 'slight' casuals while simultaneous being incapable of even providing anecdotal evidence as to why this would happen. Raider boost != casual nerf Although I wouldn't be surprised if casuals derived some pleasure from seeing raiders get minimal rewards compared to their own which would not only be bad design to support but demonstrably immoral. "Im not happy unless other people are sad" really isn't a good basis for a design philosophy. Because its useful in all styles. Why do we suddenly need to make raid loot terrible for group and solo content or heroic gear terrible for solos/raids when items working the same all the time seems to have been working fine for OVER A DECADE in MMO's. Has some new law of physics or math popped up that MMO designers now have to deal with? No. Not to mention having gear that only works well on raids or heroic gear that only works well in heroics is not only heavy handed and brash but a exacerbation of the problems we are currently having, not a solution. "Hey I got 24 people together and killed this mob for loot thats complete garbage in heroics, yay" Trading usefulness for power is just a shift, not a fix or increase. Raiders are doing inherently harder content so they should get rewards that reflect that and that reward should be CONSTANT, not in 'special circumstances.' And because its the 'top end' it has no effect on the itemization/content synergy of solo and heroic content for those players who prefer those styles. Unlike the problem we have here which is solo content being boosted severely rippling upward destructively.
You misunderstood what I wrote. It's not a matter of why we have to make raid loot terrible because it already is terrible. I'm simply trying to come up with a compromise that will keep raiding somewhat relevant and fun for raiders. If I had my choice I would go back to the way it was before but it seems the dev's are pretty intent on not making raid gear any better than heroic gear. In order to try to keep people raiding I tried to come up with a simple solution instead of mindlessly arguing back and forth.
Most people wouldn't see that as a solution. Raid gear being better than heroic gear and SHOWING while doing heroic/solo content is a intrigral part of the reward and experience. If that's taken they may as well not have raiding at all. Making raiding a 'closed system' would be a disaster, possibly even worse than what we see now. All they had to do is take AoM, crunch (Solo+heroic+easy raiding) and make easy raiding drop loot with bigger boosts to get them ready for hard raiding. Not only is it a compromise it keeps most of the current system 100% intact, by percentage of content and even more by how much the content gets played by the overall population.
well this is most likely going to be the death of raiding so I'm not entirely sure how you can say it can be worse but whatever.
Quicker death with no hope of improvement. At least now people don't have to start from scratch in every aspect.
I'm with you on this one but maybe it might help put my pre-existing experiences in EQ2 itemization in context rather than appearing to be anti-raider. As someone with one main character, an Inquisitor, I'm not one of the people with 10 half baked 100's either. The tank I have is for when PUGs won't form otherwise. My misreading of the Prepared Defenses tooltip on the stock UI over on the class forums awhile back not-withstanding I've been on the class a long long time and have personally been responsible for multiple nerfs to the class because I was doing things using AA and abilities that negated the need for "itemization" progression. Raid itemization policy was the driver for these "adjustments" on the Dev side so these contextual flashbacks are appropriate to the thread. 1/4 _ _ _
Some memorable highlights include: a. A Dev on an x4 warlock in TOFSx2 with me in my PQ gear and Wis line back in DoV wasn't a happy camper I was parsing like they were.... We got "exorcise" instead of groupwide immunities and cleanse on that one... You can blame me although the x4 crowd asking for more useful "all the time" version probably made it easier to push that change through. b. Some monk was having a hard time in Stasis ToV on the 2nd name and I was on my junk wizzy when another player switched to their raid defiler and couldn't keep them up. I popped on the heroic Inq and did what they couldn't due to left side prestige, Sacrifice, DG, 2-trigger Redemption, etc. much to the surprise of everyone there. I didn't know at the time at least 1 Dev was present... Evidently the monk was accidentally in BG spec. So boosts to Shamans in AoM and not as much "inflation" of Clerics was in part because of that little fiasco right there. I'm certain Templars could/did it too but few Templars were heroic ones so it was harder to "catch" it. Carrying bad PUGs without raid gear must mean that some classes were too overpowered since itemization must be the "carrot" according to policy. Both of these changes highlighted that class abilities for some classes > itemization. 2/4 _ _ _
On a Wizard pre-SF you needed key items to compete i.e. Ring of Readiness but were often in the catch 22 that the hardest zones with the best gear were hard to get a spot to PUG in. MMC was Tank, Heals, Heals, Bard, Chanter, open spot. What were the odds that an up and coming mage DPS wannabe could occupy said spot to get the pants? Zero. Scouts were easier DPS and didn't eat the wards the tank needed. Raid geared scouts and tanks in Heroics were some of the most vicious people I ever crossed paths with in PUGs back then... The more vicious they were the more fabled and masters that dropped for them and this was before the days of smart loot. I remember forum posts by others about Wizards loosing raid slots due to low DPS but they couldn't raid to get gear to get the raid spots. You know what the response was? A forum poster offering a spot in a PST raid guild... Itemization evolved to where it is today because of these catch 22's that existed pre-SF on many classes not just Wizards. Inquisitors were relatively insensitive to gear thanks to plate armor, AA's, and a good 2H thus they were easy to live with all these years. Now most classes are as insensitive to "key" items to perform reasonably in the hands of more players due to these post-SF itemization changes. 3/4 _ _ _
Maybe ToT went too far with crunching raid gear but still I think the heart of the issue is that everyone can do almost everything else (already) so what's left to put on raid gear that would be unique other than cross-class skills? _ _ _ Look at what happened with ToT Class cloaks... People are over on the class forums saying they're not uber enough but when I look at them they seem about right unless we compare them to the Ring of Readiness. Unless you all want critical avoidance and critical mitigation back in the game there's just nothing special that I (or the Devs evidently) can come up with that really matters for you. 30% boosts tomorrow won't make people stay (since some here are saying almost all mobs are beaten and that's unacceptable evidently) and might affect the experiment that is ToT. _ _ _ The experiment as I see it defined is: How many existing x4 raiders love to raid for the sake of the experience (playing in the Philharmonic) and how many x4 raiders are addicted to vertical power and ACT whether used for good or bad? _ _ _ As I mentioned in another response, I was running Taskmaster's Echo for fun not for gear but I think they want to find out how many of their current raiders are like me (or could be) as it might affect how they handle > 6 person encounter design in EQN. Maybe this experiment goes splat. The more I think about it the more I think they just need to make different types of games rather than trying to make ONE game do everything. I'll probably find somewhere else on this forum (not this thread) to expand upon that for their benefit. 4/4 _ _ _
That's the core issue right there in this thread and there's no reconciling it. Jedi or Sith. One can't be both. There is no way to appease both sides. _ _ _ Take a look at #287 to see that I've always "shined the brightest" without raid gear before getting nerfed because it goes against Raid Itemization > Class & Player Skill policy that your side has gotten used to for the past decade. I still stand by my statement that AoM Taskmaster's Echo was is one of the most involved (hard-focus) encounters in the game and it is only a 6-person encounter. So 24-person coordination is not inherently harder. The hardest part is getting more than 18 people to regularly show up. _ _ _ I guess they can cave to your side and give you what you want by forcing Kander and Gninja to spend the next 2 weeks upward adjusting all raids and drops to match your suggestions but it won't change your sub-group's attitude which is the real reason these changes were implemented. Yards clearly isn't a member of that sub-group even though they happen to be an avid raider so this isn't about raiders vs non-raiders. _ _ _ An emergency Producer's Letter about the state of raiding ought to do the trick should they choose to cave. At this point it really doesn't matter given #278 and their "maybe" $3 million of guaranteed revenue from ToT. Cave... don't cave... it really won't change the hard decisions that are coming to EQ / DBG in 2017 unless decorators really splurge this in the Holidays but given the SC-item saturation it might be hard to do that.
It'll be too little too late. Raiders are already packing up their toys and going home. It's really bad for being this early in a new expansion. I personally don't think there's anything they can do or say to bounce back from this mess. I hate to be the dooms day guy but raid guilds are seeing this first hand. People just stopped logging in. I'm enjoying the alt gear. But my raid main is very unhappy. I'm spending DKP on the best of the worst.
I havent been online the last two days because I chose to do so, and I don`t have the feeling I have missed something gearwise which could be vital / a proper upgrade that makes me feel I need it. There is no tension when I open a relic-chest, because since I already use that signature ring which is best choice for me I can`t equip anything else - I rather have that "ugh.....relic...." feeling when I see the chest. I am used to give effort for minor upgrades (like Drunder-gear +2pot! *yay*) - but if I realize I should raid for what I can get now, combined with the lack of players who have already quit, including awful relic-tag while still having server-lags that spoil scripts which require narrow timing or you fail - I just don`t get a decent calculation that justifies a subscription. Fix it please.
This one time I beat an assassin on dps, all the tot class cloaks are incredible, and itemization is fine. I also enjoy ice cream. All of this is relevant to the thread
Smite, I am curious now. If AoM Taskmaster's Echo is the "most involved (hard-focus) encounters," then how far did you go in raiding during AoM?
Disclaimer: Stopped raiding years ago (<- hates lag). Still, I am inclined to be in agreement with the nuts and bolts of Koko's argument: at the end of the day (and in my personal view of course), raiding is about clearing challenges that are greatly more difficult than heroic encounters. This is done can be done with skills or gear, or both. Shortly before every new expac, we generally get grumblings about power/stat inflation. Yet it seems to me, a primary culprit for this is the presence of end-game gear that usually ends up trivializing current content; even the most difficult of it. The developers have the difficult job of finding ways to keep us challenged, so I don't envy them in the least. This is a tall order. And yet, i find myself a bit confused by the itemization schemes currently. We have fairly easy to obtain super powerful proc items that has, within a few weeks, made heroic content utterly trivial. And I suppose the raiders could care less about this, if, the raid content was at all challenging, which it sounds like, is mostly not. On the other hand, I also keep seeing arguments framed around "risks/rewards", but being honest with ourselves, what are these "risks" everyone is speaking of?? We have what, a week or so to keep the same instance? Raid wipes.. rez? Raid wipes a lot....pop a bot? Seems to me, what we really have is a system that provides a reward for clearing the encounter, there are virtually no costs for failure other than starting the encounter over again. The stakes are meh. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that raiders shouldn't be rewarded with better stuff, they should. But I'm also saying rewards are not the real issue here, because the stuff I'm reading and hearing gives me every reason to believe the encounters are already pretty darn easy with the gear obtained from over land, adv solo, and heroic content.
The t3 raid content is significantly more difficult and more time consuming than any solo or heroic content with essentially the same rewards. So yes rewards are very much the issue.
