Stat Consolidation and You: May 2016 Patch Preview

Gotcha. I thought you were speaking of lumping mod2s with heroics as resulting in less choices because doing so is actually creating more choice.

I would tend to think STRIKETHOUGH would be a matter of hitting a shield or weapon so hard that it then hit the defender, and avoiding a ds would require moving in some way to not get hurt as u fight. (not that ds matters anymore how many 200 hp hits would be needed to see anything on a mob with a million plus hp?) hp str does seem in line with a ds (as a whimp in high school If I punched the strongest guy in school I would hurt myself).

this from a druids point of view

DS does matter a good bit. My mage + Bard gets a solid 1-2k DS on my pet (not including temp DS like the Surge line with hit counters). And in terms of DS defense, there's plenty of mobs with powerful DS abilities.

I love the idea of allowing large amounts of heroic stats to raise the mod2 caps.

However, I don't like the stat consolidation idea at all. It is a solution in search of a problem. The item display screen has a lot of information on it, but it is perfectly readable.

Changing the stats on all these items will require an enormous amount of work for third-party websites who keep track of them, but the rest of us won't notice much difference.

Finally, although I realize I am in the minority on this, I also look forward to progression servers in the GoD--TBS era. Let their items have their original stats, mod2s and all, not heroic stats, which were introduced much later.

So they should not make improvements to the game because of third party websites? Overall this should be an improvement to the game and one less thing for them to worry about when designing new items.

The only one that will have big changes is possibly Magelo since they will have to re-calculate mod2's based on Heroics instead of just the mod2 stat itself, but every interval in game is the same so they just have to find one per stat and it's gtg.

The rest just have to hide the mod2s from showing and they are done.

The spell file stuff they do are way bigger changes they've done and they do that stuff as a basically surprise to the 3rd party sites

I cannot agree with the sentiment that this is a solution in search of a problem. This is very much a solution to a problem that has negatively affected the game for many years (that problem being, tons of practically superfluous numbers cluttering up the stats page of every item).

If you think the item display screen is perfectly readable, I highly suggest attempting to teach the game to another player who has never played it before and helping them work through their initial shocked, stunned, or cow-staring-at-an-oncoming-train reaction to the item displays. Be there with them for those first, precious times that they click on a link to a high level item, see one on your screen, or actually get to the 75-80 range themselves and start encountering it as a matter that relates to their own character.

I have actually done this, for several people with various different types of personalities, and I will very confidently say that the item display screen has caused confusion, anger, or frustration in 100% of those people.

In brief review of what I've seen:

• Casual gamer types just drop their jaws at the sheer number of numbers. They don't really get beyond this point. I can't explain all of the numbers in one go, so I gently nudge them to move on and then try to explain slowly from there. Eventually I get the inevitable, "This sounds like a dumb system," type of response. I have no justifiable rebuttal to their assertion.
• Min-maxers get excited at first and then get angry about two minutes later, when I end up having to explain to them that over half of those numbers mean nothing for min-maxing purposes because they're ramming hard caps set by the game and might as well just be baked into our characters at this point.
• People who work in programming or database administration (a few of my friends) get a chuckle out of what a kludge the page looks like and then eventually get frustrated because doing even minor min-maxing just feels like they're back at work.
• Returning EQ veterans just take the item with the most HP/AC/etc and then use mental force of will not to think about all of the other (probably useless) stats. If they're a more recent returnee, they might look at their favorite heroic stat at least and then do that. Basically, using more brainpower on avoiding thinking about the other numbers than they are on thinking about the ones they're actually looking for.

Personally, I stopped liking the current state of the item display window the moment Secrets of Faydwer arrived, because that was my first exposure to what my old ranger friend called "shotgun mod 2" design (in which like seven or more mod2s are sprinkled onto every item in small, nonsensical amounts and they all just sort of add up to you hitting all of your caps across a gear set -- before that the mod2 distributions were chunkier and more of a decision, and I liked them much better back then).

I have wished for some kind of reduction in mod2 bloat ever since SoF, and I'm positively ecstatic that this roll-together with heroic stats is happening. It's the first (of what will hopefully be several) steps toward making item stats both interesting (as in, choosing which ones to focus on is an interesting choice) and comprehensible without a great deal of personal mental filtering and rule-building.

Meh, They are fixing TBM gear by nerfing all the older gear. The gap between group gear and raid gear just got wider. Not that it matters.

Absolutely nothing that I've seen from the devs suggests this is a nerf to older gear. If anything it's going to be a buff in various cases.

Well, maybe you're not a jaded as me. If you think this is an upgrade to older gear I've got some beach front property to sell you in Arizona. If you knew anything about the TDS gear you'd know this is obviously a nerf.

Oh? Care to enlighten me as to how?

Sure, Full T2 TDS gear doesn't maxs the stats they are "changing" nor does TDS T3.

Are you trolling?

You're saying that players in TDS T3 gear don't have more then 35 heroic strength, stamina, dex, agility, wis, and int.

That is factually false.

https://i.sli.mg/r7T01H.png

I think you are misunderstanding. You only need 35 in each hstat to get the current max for mod 2's. Then after you break 400 you can start gaining to the new mod 2 caps. With your pic you will have max current mod 2's after the patch, but you wont have any towards the new caps.

You're getting it. And I'm even further away than I am now.

You obviously don't get it Heather, how can you be further away when your capped as you sit now. And really how you got your stats to look like that had to be some odd aug removal/choices.

My free 85 sk heroic ( hey it was free so I picked something I hadn't played, and still haven't LOL ) sits at on average + 90 on all heroics without a single aug and just wearing the claimed heroic gear. Some higher some lower, and that Capped the mod'2s or gets him within 1 on every one.

You're the one who doesn't understand. If you don't know why my stats would look like that, it's obvious you don't know what you're talking about.

I think what he is trying to say is they will be capped with the new system. Higher heroic stats will allow you to go over the cap.

But Ya as it stands now my accuracy or combat effects are not capped in full TBM T3 group gear and like 600+ Hdex. So I'm all for this new system if it caps me.