The T1 visible armor pieces (feet, helm, wrist, etc.) are all No Trade this expansion it seems. Is this an error or intended? Having T1 armor on a level increase expansion be tradeable allows groupers to buy select pieces in the bazaar to increase their power to camp rares for the gear they may otherwise not be able to. Also, while the AC, heroics, and modifiers are all slight increases to CoV T2 TS armor, the HEM are all lower. Is this intended or an oversight?
While you're waiting for a dev response, some of the changes makes sense for the following: 1. They set the gear no trade because they want people to buy the expansion. 2. They may want the previous expansion's T2 TS gear to not suffer from obsolescence due to the newest expansion's T1 gear. There ought to be some durability - players spent a ton of time collecting the necessary ores over the last year.
They can’t have it both ways. Either they want us to go back and do old content or they don’t. They should make T2 the new T1 and reduce the level requirement to 115. The way it is now, there’s no point to getting anything besides T3. And when we complain about this, the devs will blame us for their own contradictions.
You're sort of right. The ideal gear situation is: FTP - T1 group gear, always non-prestige Subbed non-raider - T3 TS gear with the named/chest dropped ores; T1-T2 is a temporary stopgap for you Subbed raider - mix of T1 and T2 raid gear, depending on heroics shifting and class archetype.
If you have the raid level TS gear from the last expansion there is no point even looking at the group level TS gear from ToL (or pretty much anything apart from a handful of augs). Fingers crossed that the raid TS gear is going to be an upgrade.
Even so… it’s still a contradiction. No one gold is going to waste time on T2 (just a waste of time and effort). Makes no sense to have the level requirement of 120.
I'm not sure I'd be cool with that. I do think the reagents you buy from the vendor to make the armor should be "no trade". That way, if you want the upgrade to armor, you gotta buy the expansion so you can buy from the merchant. But the non-visibles would be the bait to entice people to go ahead and buy it to get the armor.
T2 items are basically "nice if it drops, but I'm not wasting time on it" gear. People are going to spend their time farming the ores (or whatever the ToL reagent is) and the tradeskill mats to make the containers.