Cultural Raid Armor vs Raid Armor

In other words Cultural is finally being made worthless to the only people who really bought it with any regularity, lol.
Not surprised, Cultural has been being nerfed by a thousand cuts for several years now. Most people really just didn't realize it.

Hope this can be rediscussed.

Howeever, why not make T3 drop something similiar to "enchancer" or energy source as well.

Put the essence amagalator + transformed cultural aug (say warchief) into the ROF Box
and get a new higher Warchief Aug?

You do realize that in previous expansions you had to drop cultural if you wanted the very best too? The advantage of cultural is that it is far earlier at hand and that while you have to pay for the TS on the other hand the "raid currency" (be it DKP or merit) is far lower (all raid augs go to twinks these days, while T2 armor still sells for us).
Cultural is a step on the way to the end, not an alternative to the very best.

Seems like monks/rogues/zerkers and some other classes will have to stick with it though for absoultely max dps potential (a minor boost but still needed for max potential) Rangers can use cultural too but realistically the only slow that rangers can 'get away with' stacking cleave hit mods (the +32 or so damage mod) are their wrists, classes like rogues / monks / zerkers"have to" use cultural in every slot I believe.

That "max potential" via stacking cleave is probably less DPS than the RNG giving you your max hit -1- more time than normal - in short, it's not even close to as good as people claim or think it is.

Not updating cultural is probably the best answer to this question, otherwise you get "tier 2.5" gear dropping in tier 1 zones and NTOV - which is not only laughable, but extremely wrong.

That, and when have you ever seen them just change an entire set of gear mid-expansion because people want hand outs?

Well melee dps isnt my expertise in EQ, I was always under the impression that the cultural stacking was ideal for "min/maxing" but never thought it was a massive boost either. The difference is small enough that it won't really alter dps parse rankings within a a guild.

Stacking cleave cultural augs is almost as useless as maximizing your hstr. It's not as useless because, unlike hstr, it doesn't detract from your other more important (useful) stats.

Simplest Solution is to make a 2.0 Cultural Aug that Drops in t3 that adds a minor HPMAC boost and maybe 1 level of focus.

Called them Perfected Veiled Augs

Then make a second set of recipes that a Transformed Veiled Aug (say Warchief) + New Untransformed Perfected Veiled Aug = Transformed Perfected Veiled Augs.

Cut and Paste the current Veiled Aug Recipes to Transformed
Add about 23 (types of Cultural) * 4 (Plate/Chain/Leather/Silk) = 92 New Recipes in Fear Box

lol I hope you're not a pure melee toon if you're saying that.

I'm not. I realize pure melee have no other cultural aug choices worth getting besides ferocity. Even still, I'm sure the extra 750 dps will make a huge impact on your 100,000+ burns and 20,000+ dps sustained. Focusing on hstr in augs/gear is useless for everyone regardless of class. It's even less of an impact. I'd say less than 75 dps gain over choosing other heroic stat focused gear/aug.

There is a huge difference between being 1/2 a tier from the best and being 1 1/2 tiers from the best.

The best melee players do anything that results in a gain... the trick to being better than others is doing all the little things... like the marginal gains from cleave, heroics, blocking certain buffs, stacking buffs in a certain order, knowing when to swap weps based on HHS, etc etc etc... that all adds up to something much more than marginal. A gain is a gain... anything less is lazy.

anyhow, /derail off

You are actually half a tier from the best if you are in cultural.

You're basically asking the equivalent of everyone currently wearing T2 armor to getting a free upgrade too because being the top tier to being 1 tier behind the top is a huge difference.

Neither difference is big. Just upgrade if new gear comes out.

I'll agree with you, lazy is bad. Also, I was wrong to have said anything about stacking cleave cultural augs. There are no better choices for pure melee so it being a trivial amount of gain is moot. However, focusing on hstr will never give you a parseable difference in dps. Unless you're doing autoattack and nothing else. Even then you'll be losing more than you gain by having other lower heroic stats.

No, it is minutely better than T1. By about 11 hit points and 50 AC. Probably more accurate to say equivalent. But it isn't below it.

um you mean like in UF, HoT, and VoA? where t3.5 (2.5 in UF) dropped but as mentioned, not as frequently as the rate of cultural drops is <1 per event vs multiple of the other. btw, cultural augs dont drop in ToV that you might call "laughable" to drop in, they only havea chance on Vulak (do they even there for sure?)

cultural has always had its tradeoffs and it depends on your guild and your class on what all those tradeoffs entail. If you dont foresee farming endgame raids in a month or 2, then it's better for certain classes to go for it, or at least has been. however, you lose your bp focus and clickie (one change in RoF that is nice is that yo ucan wear regular dropped BP along with cultural in other slots) In those said guilds where theyre not expecting to farm better before one could get a set of cultural, the competition can be pretty high for these cultural augs. yes later on in the expansion they go to rot or close to it (or alts if your guild allows that sort of thing) but the demand can be higher for these augs, not lower, the supply much lower than dropped armor, and depending on your guild's raid currency, actually cost more in addition to the plat and work to craft them. Also they're lore, if you dont bring all your goodies with you to craft an aug as you get it, you wont be looting a second one on same night like you can with dropped gear.

there are tradeoffs, theyve always been there, why make it so much less useful now? they nerfed swapping augs after they realized putting out worse augs in HoT than in UF made people keep old augs in new armor for most slots and now not only do you ahve to get new drops each yeah but make new armor, do another quest to do the symbols, and spend another 40-100k per aug to finish it. Cultural has never been the easy way out, but it's always been a better option for some classes IF the player was willing to put in the time/money to finish it. The spell focii arent even as good as the dropped stuff is for the most part so idk why people constnatly call it this big joke OMG you got this there blah blah...well guess what, sounds pretty similar to those negative stat items taht drop in much lower zones than the resulting finished product.

you're completely mistaken about hstr and its benefits. after you can hit 300hdex with tribute/trophies you're much better off stacking hstr as much as possible. if you ignore hstr as a pure melee your dps will suffer.

wasnt looking at real stats or real tiers just respondingto what was posted here as stats etc in response to a request to a comparison between cultural vs t1 gear. if what was posted is indeed t1 vs cultural then at least on the bp the cultural is worse, by 20ac as noted. the full sets dont matter because no ones forced to keep their sets matching anymore. item by item if the stats listed (ill look at the real stats myself later) were correct and t1 v cultural not t2 v cultural, then yes, its below t1 as far as my concern: tanking

Certain classes will benefit more than others using cultural but also you can no longer specifically look at 1 piece of armor vrs the other it is a Full sets value you have to work with.

Take the Full set of t1 or t2 raid arm and adjust that to the full set of Cultural with all but the type 7/8 augs inserted and in general leaving the 1 cultural aug at full on adjusted.

Now I realize that the cultural set has been noted is lower than recent years. Some people prefer the cultural in their guild because they can get a full set faster/cheaper than the raid "tier" version even if it costs them more plat.

actually you no longer need to look at them as sets because emblems went byebye. now it is all about best in slot available not best overall set.