Cultural type 16/17 can't be moved across armor????

So starting in VoA the type 16 and 17 cultural augs only work in that expansions cultural.

The UF and HoT type 16/17 augs were interchangeable between armor, but no longer once VoA launches.

I guess with a year between expansions it wasn't that bad when this was live, although it's different than every other aug type out there. But for TLPs this kills a viable upgrade option with the limited time we have in each expansion.

Can we please get the restrictions lifted and have all type 16/17 augs work in any cultural armor from any expansion?

Why you say so?
Because VoA crafted augs are limited to "August"? http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=112428;source=lucy

I am more worried about the fact that August armor is like lvl 105 and Flagged as Darkened Sea expansion.
So if Alla is right, and Numious symbols from VoA and the lvl 95 range are restricted to "August" armor... we won't have 17/16 symbols to use on "Glorious" armor (the lvl 95 VoA cultural).

Shockingly allas is wrong, VoA augs are limited to Glorious armor only, which is the VoA armor.

UF and HoT augs are limited to Extravagant and weaker, so you can't move your current augs into the new VoA Glorious armor.

It makes no sense, especially since the past 11/12 cultural didn't have this limitation, and since we are only in each expansion 12 weeks.

I've entered a jira ticket to get it changed, everyone please go vote for it.
https://dgcissuetracker.com/browse/EQ-2375

I mean they did do this on purpose. It does make sense why they did it also.

The jump from HoT Lucid Type 17s to VoA Veiled Type 17s is about 5 AC and 20 HP increase.

The jump from HoT Illustrious Type 16s to VoA Numinous Type 16s is about 5 AC and 250 HP.
The jump from HoT Extravagant BP to VoA Glorious BP is 25 AC and 250 HP.

Essentially they put the power jump in the cultural armor and Augment, not in the raid Augment. When they made this choice they wanted to guarantee that you had to raid the current content and obtain new current raid Augments to have armor that was on par with other raid obtainable armor.

So without stepping foot in a single VoA raid, just by grinding some Tradeskill materials which takes a day or two, you can increase your Armor by about 30 AC and 500 HP in each slot.

This is basically like you jumped from having armor which is around HoT Tier 3 raid armor (lower than VoA Tier 1 raid armor) to having raid armor inbetween VoA T2 and VoA T3, without doing any raids. That is why they made this back when VoA was new. They were noticing tanks didn’t care much about the focuses being old on their raid Augments, and they were just jumping their old raid Augments into new cultural gear with new cultural Augs and effectively getting visible gear equivalent to T2/3 raid gear without being able to defeat those raids.

Yea we are dealing with 12 week expansions, but the Raid Augments are extremely common in upper tier raids, and because they lack BP focuses and involve tradeskills they aren’t that desirablefor many people so they do end up rotting before the expansion cycle ends usually anyways.

The amount of farming it takes and the platinum to make 8 boxes every 12 weeks is the main reason they end up rotting. Not to mention all the tradeskills you have to have around 300. And that the armor isn't as good as end tier armor. Some expansions it's not even as good as T3 armor.

I'm surprised the cultural was even used on live during these expansions when you raided it for a year. You could get your entire raid force in the end tier visibles. On a TLP we don't have that luxury. We're lucky if we get 1/3 of our raid force in full end tier visibles before the next expansion launches.

The one thing that makes the cultural desirable on a TLP is the fact that you can upgrade without spending any dkp and focus on your non-visibles. It's especially great for tanks because they feel like they have to upgrade every piece every expansion to stay relevant, which is almost impossible on a 12 week unlock.

No other augs have this type of restriction, at least not yet; I've only played up to HoT so far. The old type 11/12 cultural never had this restriction and you could do the exact same thing, jump into the next expansions armor immediately. If it's a type 17 aug and the armor has a type 17 slot, it should fit.

When I raided HoT/VoA usually we would have 1-2 main plate tanks get the Augments early on so that they’d have a T2/3 visible set before that armor was commonly dropping, and then the rest of the Augs would end up going to plate tank alts or Melee alts, not a lot of Casters used cultural.

I already explained why they have the limitation. It doesn’t make sense to allow old raid Augs to fit into new cultural armor when that allows people on day 1 or 2 of the expansion to immediately jump into a full set of gear equivalent to T2/3 raid gear. I don’t think they’re ever going to change this. Hell they even did this from SoF to UF. When they introduced Stalwart armor they changed the raid Augment slot from Type 12 to Type 17 so that people couldn’t immediately make the new Augs and armor and throw in their old Last Bloods, Serpent, Sunshard or Faycite Seals into new armor and have better gear than all group and lower Raid content offered without doing any raids.

Making AOAAs does require you skill up Tinkering and Smithing a fair bit, but they are 20x easier to make now compared to VoA because we now have autocombine. You can spam through so many more steel combines while barely paying attention. The raw cost to making them isn’t that high, they are only expensive if you’re buying them in the Bazaar.

Of all the things I feel they should adjust on TLPs because they are working on 12 week unlock schedules, this doesn’t even get close to registering on a list. Some of the things at the top of that list should be accelerated EXP, increasing key drops more than they have, increasing raid drops from chests, increasing coin awarded from raid wins, allowing Type 3 Augs be removable with normal distillers. However allowing Type 17 Augs fit in any slot, I don’t think really is worth considering until the other issues are addressed.

I’m far more concerned with people’s ability to keep current on AAs and be able to clear and farm expansions within the 12 week expansion than I am a few people in each guild having to make some more AOAAs and having to wait a few weeks to get a T2/3 equivalent gear set.

I'll never understand the whole don't do this because I want you to do what I deem important argument. Just because it's not important to you doesn't mean it isn't important to other people. And they also have multiple devs and can multi-task. I also would bet to take off the restrictions would be super easy for them, wouldn't take long at all.

They don't even do cultural for expansions any more, TDS was the last expansion, so I'm not sure why you're so concerned. The only thing this affects is TLPs from VoA-TDS. Which is when TLPs struggle with keeping population, there's no reason they can't make this change to make gearing raid forces easier.

And if they wanted to stop you from upgrading cultural immediately they need to go back and restrict all the type 11/12 cultural and the UF cultural, because up until VoA, that's exactly what we've been doing. I've been in cultural since DoDh on phinny except for SoD when they didn't have it.

I love tradeskills, and in some regards wish this game would put more priority on tradeskills in order to make armor as the main armor of the game. Raid drops could just be components needed to make said armor/jewelry etc.

I'm Max xp on all my toons, and have already made over EE so far this expac. With another month to go, your worries about xp and AA are completely unfounded.

Just a friendly reminder to vote for this issue so we can get it changed, thanks!

https://dgcissuetracker.com/browse/EQ-2375

This is intentional because free placement of these augments causes huge balance issues.
This restriction is neither "Silly" nor "Arbitrary"
The restrictions were actually a code change to the game in order to address the balance issues.

I don't know that I'd describe being able to upgrade the armor early on in an expansion as a "huge" balance issue.

I get why it was done when this stuff was live, but we are talking about TLPs now, where we only spend 12 weeks in the expansion.

Cultural doesn't exist on live any more, so this only affects TLPs from VoA-TDS. We're only asking for it to be lifted now for TLPs, so it's a more viable option. As it stands now most everyone that went the cultural route on Phinny will be dumping it for regular visibles, but with only 12 weeks in the expansion that means a less geared raid force when the next expansion launches.

Because why would I pay 30k+ platinum per piece with massive farming to only have T2 or T3 comparable raid gear when I can just get the non-cultural visibles if I'm forced to upgrade every expansion. This restriction takes away cultural as a viable option on TLPs.

For Standard servers where you're talking about a 13-14 (12 months literal + 1-2 months for new drops) month cycle where they're good I can see that argument making sense, Ngreth. Where a massive plat investment into the AOAA's carries for a long time. (Sort of like how it has for previous versions here - they lasted in the ballpark of a year for the originals, UF ones will last 5 months - which was quick but didn't feel god awful)

I cannot imagine many (if any) will be anxious to pony up ~750k in order to put together a set of armor augs + mechanoinstructions during VoA knowing that they'll have to do it again in 3 months.

I'm usually pretty free with my cash (part of why I've preferred cultural in past expacs) and that amount makes me balk.

Perhaps if the "must upgrade it per expansion" rule is set in stone, something to reduce the cost to something more sensible for a hastened server then? (i.e. adjusting the recipe to be made in the 20k vendor box http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=118774? - as well as turning on the mechanoinstruction vendor items? Reducing it to a ~30k combine or so since I'd assume the playermade parts would drift around 10k/per aug or so - versus current today of ~100k depending on mechanoinstruction)

I understand the philosophy of "wanting cultural people to upgrade every expac like normal armor people" - but wanting them to, while also doing nothing to mitigate the insane cost is ludicrous for a TLP's timeframes.

Or for the TL;DR version - If a "duration" adjustment couldn't be considered, could a "parts cost" adjustment be considered?

(And side note actually - what the heck is the 20k box actually designed for anyhow? It's sold on Phinigel now and hasn't worked for anything when I played with it a bit - seems like it's for CotF or so? Seems like its on the vendor premature assuming it's not adjusted)

Plat sinks are healthy for a server, and you aren't forced to upgrade via cultural, there are other raid loot types.

Platitudes are useless in reality.

Look at original costs for "skippers" in SoF versus their adjusted values we know today because it was found to be out of scale as a plat sink.

In fact one of the arguments people made (besides the generic "these are too expensive!" one its the only "fact-based" one I recall) to push for their reduction back in the day was that SoF armor "skippers" were too costly compared to the value in the cultural augs. So why wouldn't the reflection of that argument make sense now?

That 750k number is totally bogus. AOAA are 30k? To make? Only maxed TS you need is tinkering iirc. With 5 or 6 raid guilds left I'm assuming every guild has someone that can at minimum do the combines at cost. That amount of plat is totally trivial considering drops by this point in progression. My regular 30 min solo lesson burn in SS nets me a good 3-5k, not considering TS mat drops. The armor and symbols have both sold like crap since UF opened too, so I know that's not boosting your cost estimate. My stock of stalwart and extravagant have turned into pet gear.

Go do some mech guardian runs, farm the mats and plat at the same time. Make friends with a gnome to combine the boxes.

I think the armor pieces to skip having prior tiers were fairly priced considering the massive amount of plat generation that was created in SoF, but that is not the topic here.

If there wasn't plat sinks, there would be no demand for Plat, and without demand for Plat the supply would be endless, and the currency would be pointless.

250k every 12 weeks is not totally trivial. The amount of farming it takes to do them at cost isn't trivial either.

And I'm not sure why plat sinks are being brought up, this has nothing to do with plat sinks.

Regardless, this restriction that hasn't existing on cultural from DoDh-HoT will cause less people to go the cultural route on TLPs from VoA-TDS.

I don't think it will change much, people are going cultural to substitute platinum for their dkp on gear.

You can get a decent chunk of that 250k in 12 weeks just be buying plat with loyalty.