Most people I raid with don’t enjoy doing Hunters, Collections, or Tradeskills. They’re menial tasks for people who have too much time. A good number of us just enjoy raiding a few nights a week for the social aspect. It’s been vital for those that feel isolated.
If droppable gear was best in slot I would be wearing that. It is not nor are my alts. If they were the same no one would bother with the hassle that is TS. Your gonna to grind out AA anyway might as well grab the loot while doing that and fire in them alts.
People did TSs even when the TS gear was not as good as raid items. If it was equal they would still do TSs. Anyhow, people dont even need to do TSs to make raid TS gear. They just need to know someone that does, or have the plat to buy the faded off bazaar. So the idea that people would stop doing TSs as a result is not logical. Anyway, since the discussion seems to involve whether TS should be better than or worse than the drops, I think its also fair to consider if it should be equal.
On Phinigel, I have a friend that was making various conflagrant items. He was selling Conflagrant (RoS TS gear) at a good clip but has yet to sell once piece of TBL. You need the container, plus the muhbis and then you still have to spend more than 26K per piece on the subsumption and emblem. That really killed the market for them. My boxes were walking around with a full set of conflagrant and have just one or two tradeskilled augs and that's it. A couple pieces of the T2 group gear, but not going to spend that much money for 2 months of an expansion.
In RoS for group gear there wasn't any no drop ore, you made a piece of Conflagrant and you could give it to someone or sell it to help them catch up. Had someone ding 106 in the guild recently and it was really easy to send them a full set of crafted conflagrant. You can't do that with 110 and 115 gear, every piece of visable gear needs something else done to it and PP is something a lot of returning players don't have. Currently you have to go and purchase an ore and a class emblem to be able to use T1 dropped visable gear. T3 gear needs a no drop ore and a player made item and also a purchased ore and Emblem as well. IMHO RoS was the better formular where you purchase a completed item, though I did like EoK gear where you just clicked a visable and it created the correct item for your class. Was frustrating today in group when someone dinged 110, they couldn't use any of the visables we gave them as they had to go else where to purchase items to be able to use them. I've also noticed while I have snowbound stuff coming out my ears, I have very few non visables.
And many of us think they are nearly the best aspect. When Ngreth was hired, it was to be the tradeskill guy, and many of us CHEERED that it would finally get the love it deserved.
I was really dismayed that for COV even the tier 1 drop gear is no-drop, so you can't bank it for returning players in a guild. I can see tier 1 being drop-able from group content and wearable from the start tier 2 being no-drop /named drop needing at least something from the merchants tier 3 tradeskill + drop from chests from missions, no-drop Raid chest items no-drop wearable from the start Tradeskill raid items no-drop, needing raid drop/merchant purchase
Non-level increase expansions ... Tier 1 has been no drop 3 of the last bumps. The last time you had armor pieces you could trade in a non-level increase was CotF. Well, and TBM currency ... I'm okay with that. You keep the first tier of level increase attunable and non-prestige but everything else is no-drop and prestige. Keeps the ftp bot armies in lesser gear at least.
Hmm.. I don't box, so didn't really pay attention to that, the raid Ely ignores 99% of dropped gear, and the non-raid Ely on Luclin is farming CoTF and ROF right now for collections she and a guildee need, and throwing any trade-able gear into the guild bank for other guildees, as Black Dragon Legion on Luclin has a HUGE span of people at all different levels, and returning players all of the time, so they go through that gear fairly well.
Another alternative to this is to do like CotF - everything that can drop is also on a mission currency vendor. If the drop you really, really want isn't showing up, or you can't get a group to go after that specific mob for the 30th time, you can still get what you want with the currency built up from going after other named in other missions. My point here is that it wasn't necessary to make TS + a drop be the path to alleviate the random factor in loot. (And face it, the randomness of loot is part of what keeps us addicted. If everything was perfectly predictable, it wouldn't be nearly as compelling.) To reiterate, what some of us are saying is that we much prefer that crafted gear be complete items. Once the dropped materials are gathered, and you combine them, and it succeeds, that is it. The item is done and tradeable. This is actually secondary, in my mind, to the question of where in the grand scheme of itemization the TS items actually are. Though what I really think they need to do is to stop doing tradeskilled gear on an expansion by expansion basis and actually plan out a system that works and then stick with it. The system they've used for the Velious expansions is the same as in TBL, so 3 expansions like this may seem like they have something consistent, so they could decide to stick with this. But I've already put in my opinion that I don't see it as a system for producing TS gear, but a drop system that requires something made with tradeskills.
A few crazy ideas all intended to reduce how much I get showered with gear and how much time poor Ngreth has to spend coming up with new gear. 1: Make three tiers of gear: Crafted or tradeable gear that's relatively cheap to make or easy to acquire. Intended to be a baseline for an up and coming player. Group gear that's really difficult to acquire. Some being rare drops from tough named, some being crafted gear that's expensive to make. Intended to be something for a group player to work toward over an expansion Raid gear that drops in less quantity than current raid gear 2: Reduce the variation between gear. I'm tired of 3 different types of cloaks where one has high AC and slightly worse stats. It feels cookie cutter. Just pick one https://cov.eqresource.com/raidgear.php?class=&type=back&stat=ac&tier=2&Submit=Submit 3: Only offer upgrades to half the available slots per expansion. Upgrade the other half next year. I've got so many damn slots of gear I'd rather keep some gear through an expansion.
I like maintaining the idea of ores for BiS augments, type 5's, weapon, 7/8's etc. Completely negating all the other loot and basically making all teir 1 and 2 loot useless kinda stinks. Perhaps T1 loot could be non gold useable, T1 and T2 loot usable by 5 levels less than max, while maintaing T3 ores for all the top teir items? I don't know. Some times a lot of rare mobs have a rare drop on their table, maybe it would be nice for all of those drops to be slightly better than T3 craft would be a good idea. Something about never killing any of the named for anything cause there's no point, needs to be changed. From both ToV and CoV you could get all the items and augs just from running the missions. I guess CoV is a bit better since all the missions are teir 2, so you have to do some of the teir 1 named for augments, but still, ever camping or doing any of the teir 2 named in CoV is virtually pointless. I think that's the biggest problem, there needs to be some reason to kill/camp them other than hunter.
The whole T2 being worse then TS became meaningless once TS stuff started requiring drops to make. The best group armor still requires drops whether it has a TS component or not. So this whole argument that the best group armor should be from drops is stupid because the best group armor IS from drops that just happen to have a TS component required. You see ore drop I see a new BP or Legs or a new Helmet. Some folks liked the excitement of corpse runs so lets bring those back. NO THANK YOU to that sort of thinking.
Pretty funny you got hardcore raiders that hate tradeskilling lol find it very funny. I got a few words for you SUCK IT UP! haha Andarriel
The idea of having to wait for every class to have their weapon drop doesn't sound fun to me at all. Current system makes it so that you can always make sure to spend your DKP on the item that will give you the largest boost and that every time your guild drops a boss you'll have 2 items that aren't just best in slot but are best in slot for most important slot dropping. Swapping the strength of TS and dropped gear would just mean that you're cutting the amount of weapons (or shields for tanks) coming into guilds down by a massive amount. That doesn't sound fun to me.
Raider here. I love tradeskilling. I HATE.....HATE tradeskilling in EverQuest. EQ2 is tradeskilling done well. EQ1 tradeskilling is the masochist's Valhalla.
Zurril, I do not like this idea at all you placeholder I think if you have to do all the work of the TS on top of the work of the raids, they should be best in slot. Maybe we should make the containers not tradable then you could have the "excitement" of seeing if your combine fails. That said, perhaps a good compromise would be to keep TS visibles still best in slot and swap the non-vis so that the dropped versions are best in slot.
Something that may have been missed, is that some of the farmers of TOV, killed so many Rare mobs, that they have gear that they equip their pets, with it. Conflagrant gear is tradable and it is possible to enhance pets, with it. I suspect that making new gear usable with emblem and ore is to control that.
