Are these really raids? TBM has group faction requirements to buy gear based on killing mobs in these zones now we cant use mercs in faction groups for these zones? There was a reason plane of fear and plane of hate allowed mercs. it was a group zone with a few raid encoutners. There should be a group version of this zone with mercs allowed and no raid mobs. if this is what they want to do.
Does it actually matter, though? This is one of the false problems offered by the Broken Mirror expansion. For those who don't know, the Plane of Fear and Plane of Hate raids grant you faction used to access a vendor called Kamiowe Ordup, who offers group equipment, even though the faction to access him can only be gained while in a raid instance - the problem raised here. What makes it a false problem, however, is the fact that the group equipment offered by Kamiowe Ordup is in fact, much worse than the actual group drops from the Broken Mirror static zones and heroic adventures. This breaks down into a 3 tier progression for group players: Tier 1: Plane of Tranquility vendor bought equipment, only requires two no combat tasks and one simple kill mission to access, but is very bad in terms of base armor, etc. Tier 2: Plane of Health vendor bought equipment, requires Plane of Fear and Plane of Hate raid faction to access, is slightly better in terms of base armor, etc. Tier 3: The Broken Mirror heroic adventure and static zone drops from rare monsters, requires killing the rare monsters, and is much better in terms of base armor, etc. Thus, tier 1 is easy to access but very bad; tier 2 is hard to access, but also bad; tier 3 is easy to access, but takes longer to get, and is much better than both tier 1 and tier 2. As a consequence, while the expansion was current, group players basically just skipped tier 2 and went straight for tier 3, using tier 1 only to fill in for what they couldn't get tier 3 drops for.
While that TBM gear assessment is typically correct (a few deviations here and there), the change makes no sense. The last thing anyone will go back to raid in TBM is either Hate or Fear. The only remaining value is the progression raids for Dicho, the eyes and the aug. Hate and Fear were advertised as group content zones and have group drops off all the trash and non-raid named. Although those drops suck as mentioned. Not the least is the rare level 75 augs that drop as well. For those that actually intend to raid those zones, they'll most likely form a Raid. When you join a raid, mercs are dropped. You can't be in a multi-group raid and have a merc thus negating the need for this "fix". If they're afraid people will go farm these raids with single groups including mercs, I'm not quite sure what the supposed harm is because the drops will all be worthless for anyone capable of doing such. It will just be people having fun for the sake of having fun. Perhaps the real target is the Anniversary raid that has still useful augs. The thinking being they would be called out for changing one combo group/raid HA and not all three design abominations. If they really want to remove any illusion of the clearing the ship populace for commemorative coins as being group content, they should have just done the right thing and removed that complete waste of time facade and changed the entire event to just being the raid part.
Maybe they thought the drops(from group-mobs) in those zones, were meant to not suck for the hypothetical level 75 raidforce doing weekly clears. You know those raiders who would joyfully kill down-scaled level 75 raid-mobs for raidgear they will have to bank for 25 levels. Or the rebirth of shroud raids! TBM-planes was a weird experiment, as well as the group-gear scaling. Im not really sure what the intention was... were people meant to level 25 levels in TBM, or was it to give leveling players a free choice of when to complete TBM ? I think the TBM development was a time of internal chaos for daybreak where they had way too little manpower/time to make what they really wanted, and just tried to scramble all their ideas together and hope some of it worked out... (at least the type 5 aug-idea turned out great, raids were ok too )
Yeah, it's important to remember that something like half the dev team was fired in the interim between TDS and TBM. It's also fairly likely that they planned the immediate follow up to TDS to be a Kunark themed expansion, given Droga (including the raid and collections) was made during TDS (by Elegist, one of the devs who was laid off) and that much of the artwork for EoK/RoS was being worked on during that period. Hate/Fear were both made by Elidroth, who had previously been the AA dev, and itemization was done by Aristo, who was the spell dev. So a lot of the inconsistencies/oddities were likely a combination of a lack of time, a lack of dev resources, devs outside of their normal roles, and the relative suddenness of the change in direction mid-expansion cycle. Prathun very bluntly stated in beta that the group portions of Hate/Fear and the raid portions were in the same zone solely because of a lack of time. It's possible their hope was to design a system that could be scaled for higher levels, not just lower ones. Having 7 raids that continued to have some relevance at 110 isn't a bad idea in theory. I think the implementation, though, was rather lacking, and they seem to have abandoned the idea. It's pretty clear at this point that the errands system scaling up in level has some issues (given the recent HA debacle).
I personally love the idea of scaling I just wish there were two versions minimum for things that scale kind of like some of the older missions. Easy, medium and hard mode or just a true scaling and a scaling version minus 5 levels for the level cap for which the expansion was released or something like this. The rewards could be tied into the difficulty level. Having a system like this would still allow for challenging content for raiders in group missions while not making the same missions unbeatable by group geared players or players that don't have the perfect group makeup. If they tune missions around raiders it forces group geared players to often wait until an expansion is a couple years old to finish off all of the content and if they tune missions around group geared players the raid geared players will be done with it in a couple of weeks and have nothing to do. Obviously developer time is limited and I am sure making multiple versions of the same mission is time consuming so a system like this will probably never happen.
I'll agree that the scaling of heroic adventures is done in a relatively poor way. There are many problems, but the most obvious are: Scaling to maximum level, as opposed to average level. Assume this was done to prevent people from including low level characters to drop the instance's difficulty, but in practice it punishes people for having any sort of level variety in their groups, and discourages pick up grouping until maximum level. In fact, what should have been done was to make both the adventures and rewards scale to average level. Having a poor scaling equation for earlier levels, leading to very difficult monsters at levels when player characters are simply not equipped to deal with them, like the Convorteum style rare monsters at level 85, despite the fact that heroic adventures were made for, according to developers, 2 to 3 group players with their mercenaries. Not having automatic scaling for drops. Probably due to the way the game engine is designed, which seems to require every drop to be made by hand, as opposed to being generated dynamically. This limits the automatic production of content. All of these problems limit the value of heroic adventures and the time spent developing them.
In this video by Daybreak at 15:09, they say straight out that Plane of Hate: Revisited has content to do as a group. So any claim that Plane of Hate: Revisited is a "raid only" zone has just been debunked.
The Plane of Fear: Revisited, The Plane of Hate: Revisited, and Hate's Fury: Seventeen Pieces of Silver have always been explicitly stated as being GROUP zones first and form most that simply include raid mobs in them and allow a full raid to enter the instance for those specific raid mobs. There is absolutely no reason why these zones should have their merc useage status changed, much less this many years after they came into existence.
well it is live now. Ive done a lot of instanced content in TBM and the tuning of hate and fear for group content absolutely required a group imo . I am wondering if this is a segue for more merciless group content on the horizon.
