It's only about a 10% upgrade from VOA T4. In other words, it's not meaningful from a tuning or gameplay standpoint and only worth farming if you have OCD. What do they expect us to do, spend our time on the slaughter achievements? Or do they think everyone has OCD? Concomitant to that, the zones seem to be tuned to match. Killing stuff in T2 is very doable at level 96 with old gear. Raid gear got a more reasonable (though still modest by the standards of the last few expansions) bump. It's worth working for IMO.
Based on the difficulty the stats should be lower in tier 2 rof than in tier 4 alaris. *serious face*
To the OP: Basically what has happened is that group gear has closed the gap a little bit too much with raid gear. So instead of increasing raid gear a lot, they made the top tiered group gear a minor upgrade. For all all intents and purposes, a grouper in T4 VoA group gear could just skip gearing up in RoF and would still be in good shape for the next expansion. (btw, if you think a 10% increase in stats is bad, take a close look at the T2 weapons. I wish those had a 10% improvement.) To the others: Laugh all you want but ultimately the replacements for raid guilds come from the person currently in T4 VoA group gear, has spent the last 8 months playing a series of alts and getting them into T4 VoA group gear also, and is currently looking at the top group gear and thinking to him/herself, "What is the effing point?"
There are only two tiers in ROF. I'm comparing top to top between the two expansions. The problem is that the vast majority of characters don't raid. If you're a melee, you'd be way better off figuring out how to farm T2 VOA raids and ignoring ROF. Due to focus decay, that doesn't work for casters though. My family has seven gold accounts. Three of those raid and four don't. It seems like this year might be a good one to let the non-raiding accounts lapse until an upgrade for them comes along.
I couldn't agree with you more. The gear upgrades from someone in T4 gear are minimal. Once I've farmed a few augs - I think I'll be done with this expansion. I look forward to the raids and hope they keep my interest. For those that complained about the difficulty of VoA (and there were many) - I hope you enjoy this expansion. It's going to be cake.
Not really. They did the same thing with the missions as they did in VoA. Essentially, they took the raids and scaled them down. The ideal group to complete ALL missions seems to be: 2 Tanks, 2 healers, 1 Wizzy, 1 Enchanter and 1 Rogue (Yes, I know what that adds up to). No single group can do all the missions.
The more I see of this, the worse it seems. I'm looting piece after piece of L98-required gear that's not clearly any better than the T4 VOA stuff my characters are already wearing. It's definitely not worth paying for aug distillers to swap them in. The only clear upgrades are the levels of clicky and focus effects. Resists and general stat effects are actually reduced in the higher-level gear, with heroics at rough parity.
It is not a good upgrade if you just go from VoA to your archetype's gear. But if you are like the millions of men and women who do not like their archetype's gear, then this expansion has HUGE, MASSIVE upgrades for you.
It means that there will be more content (I.e. zones and AA) released in the upcoming months. The zones, specifically, will be the higher end content and(thus) T3+.
This appears to be a raid only expansion if you want good upgrades. Where did they say there would be a t3? Was it beta? I could not find an official announcement. I do know they plan to give us more aa but nothing about more zones. I think xnao is referring to heroics on gear and that many non visables are all/all so you get to pick and choose what stats you want to have. Archetype = classes on gear.
That is what we are expecting, but nothing official has been announced, whether we have to pay for these extra zones/AAs remains to be seen.
In every other expansion by now I would be a good way towards reaching max level again, in this expansion I have not even dinged level 96 in any of my toon, and the large part of the reason for that is the lack luster gear in this expansion. My T4 Voa group tank buffs out to 92k HP's, I can not really see him tanking that much better if I spend a ton of plat to increase his HP's by another 6K or so.
Thankfully, I did not buy it. Until something worth $40 an account comes out I will no longer be upgrading, and at this point I bet there are a few that wish they waited before preordering. ALL the marketplace fluff in the world wasn't going to get me to commit this go round till I seen the goods.
VOA t2 was hardly better than HOT t4. If that was all VOA had to offer I would certainly not spend the same $ I did on HOT to get it.
I haven't seen much of RoF yet, but looking at the gear and likewise some of the decisions they've made (specifically invalidating Alaran as an impediment to T3/T3 VoA armor), it seems like they've actually listened to the many players (me included) who have derided the mudflation of the last few expansions. RoF appears to be more like VoA T4.5 and 5, rather than a full four tiers of upgrades, and overall I think that's probably a good thing. 10% upgrades from expansion to expansion certainly is more in line with the history of the game than the absurd numbers HoT and VoA established. Endaar
The main thing for me is how easy this gear seems to be dropping. I didn't want another UF but I didn't think we were going to get stuck with what seems like vanilla SOD either.
