I love the change! reminds me of the old days when you had to fight long and hard for the piece of gear you wanted. I felt it was too easy these last couple expansions with multiple ores dropping. Well done
Range items include weapons other than bows. Regardless even if they are not weapons, they are all visible. Putting Range of any kind in the same category as non-vis is counter intuitive. Splitting the bow range items with the non-bow range items makes the whole thing a headache for everyone involved. The best thing is to do Visible Armor, Non-Visible Armor, Pri/Sec/Range/Charm, and Aug.
Simple to me: "weapons", "visible", other "stuff" Bows and shields are both weapons. General purpose range and charm are not. Why do you want them lumped together?
Scrap tiered (other than the group/raid divide) gear in every slot completely. It's unnecessary and serves no purpose other than to invalidate the rest of the tiers of equipment. I see ores (or diamonds, originally) being used to solve a couple of problems: Item rarity or unavailability: either specific items (e.g. Warrior swords) were not dropping frequently enough (also partially solved by the addition of raid currency) or they were dropped/unlocked from final expansion or tier raids (e.g. Ranger bows) which left players unable to acquire upgrades in their most vital spots until the very end of an expansion, if at all. Smoothing the transition from group to raid gear: particularly for newer raiders, the original diamond design allowed them to fill their equipment slots with raid-quality equipment (damage ratios, foci, etc) much quicker than if they needed to wait for specific drops from specific events, or enough currency for those items. These same problems can be solved in a similar manner with what I have previously suggested: remove the tradeskill equipment tier entirely and instead have the "ore" used to create (either by a claim, click, or craft) any normal dropped item. We don't need equipment tiers within the group/raid categories anymore. It's an outdated design.
I think this is a good idea and if there was no tier difference in stats and it will come down to the stat variance on each induvial item and give players a reason to choose from both types of drops.
You dont like playing the "is this rare drop one of the specific shared-table rare drops I care about" game every time you kill a named and get an ore-adjacent item?! You dont like multiple missions being irrelevant after you have the 1 non-ore item from them you might want because they dont have the ore-adjacent item everyone in your group still needs multiples of on the chest loot table? That was originally handled by raid currency, which was great, it just needed a little tweaking. Then we apparently needed to make tradeskills relevant in a completely counterintuitive way (instead of making them t1 group armor and making t2 group armor the drop), and we managed to undo all of the 'heres how we fixed awful drop rates' by causing the exact same problem we fixed, but in a different color, and also existing simultaneously with the old problem. At the very most, raid ore + mold should make the equivalent raid drop, and group ore + mold should make the equivalent group drop. Thats it. Just that. Then your ore drops, which you need fewer of, just become a safety net against that time where you go an entire year without seeing certain items drop. (Or, in my case, way back in the day, you see 0 plate legs drop from Time until Tacvi, because rng just said your tanks didnt need nice things)
Everything but the BP are cheaper currency-wise. BP is the same cost as the TOL ore. BP is 552, while most items are 469. So it's actually a bit easier to get t2 raid stuff via the vendor. Since drop rates are 0-3, and it seems most commonly 2 items, it should be a bit quicker this year for most people
Shields are no more weapons than the general purpose Primary, Secondary, or Range items are. Range slot has always been primarily a weapon slot. There are non-weapon Primary and Secondary items as well. It is the slot that matters not whether or not it is a weapon or not. We've got 23 equipment slots: 8 Visible armor slots, 9 Non-Visible armor slots, and 6 non-Armor slots (Ammo, Charm, Primary, Secondary, Range, and Power Source). The Ammo and Power Source slots don't apply to this discusion, as they do not get made using these drops. The majority of players group Range with Primary and Secondary. Adding in Augmentations that gives us 4 different types of no trade ores. That are reasonably easy to sort and prevent them to going to rot. I would say remove dropped gear entirely and leave TS'd gear. Make everyone get the TS'd stuff, then the multitude of ores doesn't matter. The reason was not because of item rarity, but the opposite. There were numerous items which were rotting, because they dropped at the same rate as the other items, but the number of classes which used it meant it would rot. People hate seeing stuff rot, and asked for and got the original version of this system, and that was years before Diamonds or ores were used. The reason why the ores for TS are being used is because people like yourself whined about TS gear could get made "so" fast at the start of an expansion and never needed the player to do anything that it wasn't fair. Making TS gear worse isn't viable because then it is never worth making or buying because you can more easily get the dropped stuff. Group gear is intended to be a little bit below the previous expansions T1 raid gear, so that you can do the older content and get geared up for the current or just do the current and not be a liability. If they remove tiering you will just wind up with the lowest quality of the gear. The Tiering is the stat variance of items. With weapons for instance, all of the same type weapons have the same dmg/dly and stats on them as long as they are useable by all the same people. It is only when you have different user groups or change tiers that it changes. The Dev's stating things are T1 or T2 or T3 is just there to tell the player hey this one is going to be better than that one.
Slot-specific ore is dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. One of the dumbest ideas since the HA scaling hack job back in ... RoS? Ugh. Make slot-specific ore go away. It's dumb.
This - and it was said during beta, too. It's clearly just an annoying artificial time sink; bring back the single ore process.
As it is possible to get more drops overall with the new system and you can sell the unneeded ones back it is hard to say what the overall impact will be.
Yep you don't get a lot from it but it does add up if you can loot and sell the ones that are going to rot because no one needs.
I doubt anyone is spending their DKP to buying raid level gear to sell to a vender for coins to buy something else.
Theoretically, it would be worth buying 3 items for minimum bid if they were rotting, instead of buying the one you needed for max bid. I havent actually seen anything rotting yet though.
The new loot system is extremely favorable to raid guilds that have beaten all events. Items are cheaper, apparitions drop in greater abundance for the first 6 months so far compared to other expansions. Apparitions also sell back at a fixed 30% the vendor cost. We have seen cloaks start to sell back to vendor as most people with alts have the evolve. For guilds that let apparitions items go to alts, that will happen sooner than ever based on slot specific drops (we are on the verge on weapon slot apparitions going to alts already). These have higher value than resell to mains since main gearing is already going to be faster as it is. The fact that once opened you have a pathway through vendor makes this system so biased to raiders. Couple that with lower cost overall and a 85% raid attendance player will be full TS gear by June/July. Thats the fastest I've seen in several expansions. Group people are the ones that fall on the sword as they only have low probability loot tables with RNG further complicating things. Overall, I don't have a problem with it other than the fact that group players should have a vendor/coin based outlet to get rare pieces they need as the raiders already do.
Who said anything about spending DKP to buy these items just to sell? I simply stated that these items can be sold back and that makes a good use for them when they are rotting because no one wants or needs the items. If a guild is forcing its members to buy these items to sell them back instead of them straight up rotting and being wasted that is a problem with the guilds DKP system. Any system that lets drops like this that can be sold back for currency rot because members don't want to spend DKP has some issues.