Been away few months and I was wondering if a new mark system has been in the talks by the devs to replace the horrible one currently in place? For end content, it's more or less ok, somewhat, but for lower content it is atrocious This is the 6th alt I'm leveling and the first one under the new mark system and boy is it frustrating and it is the less fun I ever had upping a char. You end up being expelled propelled with a kick in the butt to higher tiers while having your character halfassed geared all the way through. There is no incentive of even bothering getting the full tier gear like before since you'll be able to buy its style cheaper when you won't be pursuing leveling up later on. Moreover, why would you want to complete your T1 gear when you're already in T3 and should be more focused on getting gear to survive there since you now no longer get rewards from #nonrelevant content that was still relevant seconds ago until you had to equip that stupid piece of equipment because you were missing that style and that you're not EVEN wearing (so basically you're exactly the same as minutes ago but for some random reason you're labelled as now being too uber for this content). It is the first time in my gamer life that I find myself saying "F*ck that! I increased my cr! Noooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!", this is the first game I've seen penalizing players for progressing. "Oh you had 8 alerts at your disposal to get marks from, well screw you! Now you got 4! Shouldn't have equipped that piece that is not even your role! Muhahaha! " Add to that the fact that higher CRs come in the instance and you just follow them (there should be an auto follow mode somewhere, would make it more convenient for those cases so you can do something else waiting for your marks to come), and with that current mark and progression system you hardly do more than once a lower tier content before it losing its relevancy, so I can imagine new players actually never had really played some of the content and for some would hardly even look back (or remember that it actually existed in the game). So is there any plan of a new system of marks in progress? Or even maybe being able to directly buy Marks of Victory from markets like Replay badges to make the process quicker and funnier (how ironic) than leveling a new 30 the way it currently is? That would make people reach end content even quicker, which seems to be the goal of DCUO, and bring more money in the pockets of the team. Ah, long are the days in which you needed to have 6 out of 8, or full gear to be able to advance to the next tier and in which you'd feel your character getting stronger, now breezing through the Tier s/he was once having a difficult time upon entering it. It was also nice to be able to complete the last two missing pieces after basically doing a run of the full new Tier alerts, slightly delaying your progress but oh so fulfilling for completionist, yet not to the extent of the way it is now in which trying to do the same would be complete nonsense due to their cost compared to your earned rewards.
Just depend on drops. Save Marks. The drops in lower tier content propel you through the entire progression system. You don't even need to spend replay badges or do the raids, if you don't want to. Power levelling has never been more user friendly.
Marks are fine, content relevancy is kinda fine. Biggest problem for me is replacing and re-modding my gear every single month. On multiple toons. I love to mod all my toons and keep a library of the highest tier plans. But under the 15-17 gear split, I've given up on all but my 2 main toons. It's just too expensive in materials and Total kits to keep up with gear changing on 15 toons in 1 month. All my alts now either go Beta or nakies. Most just go nakies. I like ideas proposed by the new gear toss system for next round of Episodes, but it remains to be seen how it well it works. Seems to me that if my luck goes really annoying (which is often) I might be replacing my shirt 4 times next month. At least (theoretically) it won't be replaced for another 3 months after that though.
My main issue with the new Mark system is that it takes so many marks to unlock the generator base items. Just to unlock the Supply Drop, Orbital Strike, and Equipment Mods is 150 marks. Although those items are 100% necessary they are very helpful, but do not increase your CR or progress in the game. However like a previous post pointed out that most of the progress in early leveling is through drops and not vendor items. Now I don't usually purchase any vendor gear until I get to the end game content, unless I need 1 piece of gear to get to the next level and I become impatient waiting for a drop!
