So, I hear a lot about the gear system needing to change, but all I hear are the same ideas. It's boring and getting repetitive now, so I'd like to suggest something slightly different. I'm just putting forth the idea to see what everyone else thinks, I'm personally still not sure if I'd enjoy something like I'm proposing in the game, but here it is: -Raid bosses drop only purple gear. This means when a boss is defeated, you have two choices between purple gear only. -Vendor gear also offers the same pieces of purple gear. -The twist is, when you turn your unattuned gear into a wearable piece of gear, it'll roll a random amount of stats between a certain boundary. For example (and this is just for the purpose of an example), I have two unattuned hands in my inventory. These hands can roll anything from 1-10 might for example. My first hands decides to roll 7 might and the second rolls 4 might. -I could also buy the same unattuned hands from the vendor, but the roll will once again be random between the set boundaries. For the sake of the example, I buy hands from the vendor and roll another 7 might. -This will work because it will offer everyone a way to get gear from their most desirable method - as a raid drop, from the vendor or with scraps. -This will cater to the casuals as they'll be able to get all their gear easily without the need to complain. Most casuals wouldn't worry about the stats too much but won't be left behind as they'll still have the same gear with just a slight difference in stats if they're not pushing to constantly try roll higher unless they're incredibly lucky. -This will cater to the hardcore players as they look to keep finding and buying the same pieces in the hope of rolling the best stats possible. -This will not impact the amount of replays being spent despite purple gear only dropping, as people will want to keep playing to find the best stats possible. -There is a continuous reason to keep farming MoV and to keep spending it, as there's most likely always a piece of gear that can have potentially better stats, and as stated above, the vendor gear is the same as the raid drops. -A possible problem in the eyes of people is that stats are locked behind a random number generator. I still think it's a better and more fun gamble than hoping for purple drops. You know that you'll always be getting 3 purple drops from your raid, and that's much more fun that seeing 1 purple piece every few runs. -One could argue that the devs might make the roll of stats awful, so despite purple gear dropping constantly you're still basically getting useless gear like blues/greens. However, I think if the roll of stats was decent so you're usually getting a high roll, it would work. -This system most likely wouldn't have worked with monthly content due to there not being enough time to properly farm for gear and pushing your stats. However, with us moving back into bigger episodes, I think this system could keep people playing for a much longer amount of time. -What about omnipotent items? I think they could work with the system by guaranteeing the max roll of stats across the board for every single stat on the item. (I also think it should be able to be crafted, but I think that's an entirely different subject so I won't dip into too much in this post). Before anyone decides to mention it, this sort of method is used in other games, such as Diablo, which is what actually popped the idea in my head. However, I haven't seen the idea suggested for this game and I think it could potentially work if done correctly. So, that's the idea. I'd love to hear what you guys think so leave your opinions and feedback in a post below.
There's a similar setup with RNG stat spreads on gear in The Division, and it drives people nuts. They too implemented set gear, and several of them have unique bonuses. The ones that are DPS oriented, for example, will have random perks for certain weapons and randomized stat bonuses. You are able to reroll one of those bonuses, and only one, so you essentially have to get really lucky to find a piece with the preset stats you want and with only one field you want to reroll. The rerolls are similarly rigged. It turns a lot of people off because it puts much more pressure on the game's content requiring replay value and persisting fun factor. That's is a particular challenge to maintain for many studios, and I think it'd be a problem area for sure with DCUO - UNLESS we could have something similar where we could re-roll everything, and the RNG wasn't superbly rigged against you. That way each piece of gear could syphon a small chunk of marks to attune how you want it. It could be one way of bringing back things like prec or might oriented gear, especially if your AM is precision based or might based, or requires the use of weapons. Think that could be a fair alternate applied to the idea you've got.
Never really played The Division so wouldn't know too much about how they handled it over there, But yes, if the rolling odds were awful it would only ruin the game and definitely shouldn't be implemented. However, it people were constantly rolling decently high most of the time (let's say 7/10 for example), you're still getting a nice amount of stats and if someone did get a nicer roll than you, it wouldn't be such a big difference. But the gap is still there for those that want to push for more but not big enough that casuals are left behind. Or the boundaries could be incredibly small so there isn't a big difference from the worst possible roll and the best possible roll.
Nice of everyone to put thought in this, but in the end, permanent gear progression will kill the game from within via powercreep and other effexts coming with it by design. If DCUO wants to live for another 5 years and get out of the "we need to keep stats in check/reset stats before we allow players to get bigger stats again"-idiocy, they should start working on a senseful, different progression that keeps players interested and involved. Also, the current system is bad for sales as it appeals only to the "top lot" for episode content. There are more players than those 20-40k who have no reason to even bother buying the new episodes for their premium accounts. Yes, the current summer of wonders tries to address this very problem, but: this effect will wear off after a couple of episodes. A systems that needs constant events to work is no system but a collection of improvised methods.
I dislike this suggestion. All this concept does is redefine the problem from "I can't get the gear I need" to "I can't get the stats I need".
Fair enough. I sort of agree, just wanted to see what everyone else thought of the idea. I do however see some positives with it.
Diablo 3 has this setup at least on the console version. The difference there is you don't have skill points mudding up the equation which you will have here. There your skill points are added automatically, you don't get to decide where they go. If you want a certain build, you have to farm for gear to turn into crafting material then roll until you get the build you are looking for and you do this for every piece including weapons. It is a tediously long process. Bright side they do drop gear with pre-set stats so you can go that route if you want.
I think if it were more than just stats then it would work. For instance, add elite mods as possible rolls for each piece of gear, then you might have something worth farming/re-rolling for.
ESO has a crafting system where you research traits (which takes weeks in the later stages) and the more traits you research the better gear you have. This way it eliminates the luck factor... that being said replay sales will go down. T4 had a pretty decent system to be fair, Buyable gear was top notch, Runes of the Norsemen for those that wanted to marginally improve their stats (and feat chase) and the omnipotent PBG head for those who love the Casino life haha.. bear in mind back then it was Need Before Greed too haha I think the game was quite balanced back then (PVE and PVP wise)
Ok so the main issue is that RNG will still weigh heavily on drops, there is a chance you might get the same drop 9 times, that's 3 runs (assuming only every boss drops purples, if you meant the last then just apply it to that) which for some it could be 1 hour, no biggie, but for others it's 3 weeks of the same thing and we've seen it too often this past year with how bad drops have been on raids. I'm all for vendor gear being better, always have been however I think we need to go back to the dual mark system as it gave people the freedom to run everything and not be constricted to certain content just because it gives more marks. Also it controls overgearing in hours instead of days as it's meant to be, players would need to play everything and not just jump into the hardest content just because it has the best gear. Now I believe vendor gear should still be high enough to be comparable to raid gear, but understand it's a raid so if raid drops had better stats but the same CR then I wouldn't mind, they did it for WoL 1, HoP 1 and WoL 2 and everyone was happy, players still ran raids just as much, we still had OP drops and most times players would gear up on the vendor then went for the raid drops, this mistake of having raid drops at a higher CR caused too many issues because of the relevancy window and it should stop. Another issue is RNG, you could have players (I'm can personally vouch for this) get 1 drop on each run, that means in 4 runs they had all the raid gear, meaning they have no need to get vendor gear except as a style, because again you had the highest drops from past raids so you had a CR level high enough to finish the new content without any of it's actual gear on. Now The Division and Diablo where mentioned, but there are a lot of differences between both games and this one, for starters Diablo has a very different loot system than we do, so that would work on it, in fact I could get up to 10 drops on a single dungeon and at times would change pieces 2 to 3 times on the same dungeon, that isn't really good for this game as not only will it render the piece you just got useless but also force players even more into buying replay badges. Also Diablo doesn't have the roles issue that this game is the only MMO in the world that has, see all others found a way to balance the support and dps side of their toons into one, here you are either support or DPS, which means having to get double gear for the same character, now with your system it would mean even more replay badges, more gear changing and you didn't mention this, more mods which will come back into play when stats change. As far as The Division goes it shares the same issue Destiny has, every piece of gear has different stats but the main issue is that they actually take away a stat to add another, I used to have almost 20 pieces of gear on my character at all times because I would have to change it up constantly depending on the situation, and I'm not talking about guns, I mean gear like hands, helms and boots. It was horrible because one piece gave me more Light, but took away my melee, then another gave me more melee but took away my Light, and so on (if you don't know, Destiny has a level and Light level like our XP and CR, however gear has 3 main stats, one for grenades, one for melee and one for supers, all 3 stats dictate the cooldown timer on each piece of gear, so a higher light level gear didn't always mean more power to you). You have a good starting point, but the whole random stat thing is just more RNG that might even be worst as players will get even more frustrated because they can get what looks like higher gear, but it's really lower than what they already have. Now using your idea I believe that yes raid bosses should only drop purples (again not sure if you mean LB or any), so what do you think if we have vendor gear being best, but have bosses drop crafting plans or a piece of gear, then have that plan be RNG until opened and whatever the piece it is it will be the same style as the drop gear but with higher stats and so you would need to get scraps to make the gear. Now crafting costs wouldn't need to be adjusted, instead it's what we get from each piece that will, a Ring can give 5 to 10 scraps, but a head could give 30, of course it will vary between green, blue and purple, but pieces will always give scraps depending on what they are.
Let's not forget the alt problem, too. If the gear was also account bound from the get go, maybe not so much a problem. That said, it's clear they want to monetize the gear swapping feature, which will limit its appeal compared to what rival studios are doing, but hey. That's the corner the game's been backed into.
Yeah, that too. You'd end up having to store at least 2 variants of everything depending on how many characters you play and want to spec specifically to boost power type specific strengths.
I was partway through writing a longwinded herpaderp parody post about how AF3 will introduce a NEW! reward chest called a "Prime Capsule" that would be opened with "Antagonizers" that are available from the marketplace, but I ran out of interest and steam. TLDW: New top tier gear will be behind a limited time paywall with nesting doll RNG. I want to say that there should be /s tags in there, but I'm actually sort of scared that there really shouldn't be.
Return to the days when we had to roll against everyone in the instance for a piece. Maybe that will make people appreciate the current system.
With the current direction of the game, they would then introduce a consumable single-use MP item to autoroll a 100. Of course, the tiebreaker for 100 is alpha/numeric order, so then you'd incentivize more namechange tokens.
