New Expansion - Itemization and Rewards

Discussion in 'General Gameplay Discussion' started by Mint, Aug 30, 2021.

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  1. DENSER Well-Known Member

    4*) A list based on players advices, about that subject if course
  2. DENSER Well-Known Member

    We Can work for you for free, In your development if it keeps this game in good condition. Why not.
    This forum, is populated with ideas, which would allow you to overcome various problems affecting the classes, gameplay etc etc.
    But let's not go too fast, let's see already on this subject if you listen to our suggestions.
  3. Mischefsmistres New Member


    1) Sort of. I have been in solos and heroics where there were two cloths in the zone and no cloth drops. Multiple times. It is not a rare occurrence.
    2) I like it to come from ts questline rewards or tradeskilling. I wish the recipe books in some cases were a lot easier to come by.
    3) I think that the currency earned should be for multiple items in that expansion. Not bazaar coins only useful at the bazaar etc. Something more universal.
    4) I like the idea of recipe books for house items that you can buy. I also like to get more drops that are evened out. There should never be an instance where two necros run a solo zone and not one piece of cloth or a group with tank, healer, bard, necro and not one piece of cloth drop. Exquisite chests used to be packed with goodies to the point at times you wondered if there was an end. They do not seem to have as much anymore. Don’t take our ability to fly away that is so annoying and frustrating at the very least don’t make it take so long to get it back.
    Hartsmith likes this.
  4. DENSER Well-Known Member

    Drop rate of spells is directly related to a source of Income, like familiars.
    Nothing will change on this side.
    Such an old mmo can't only survive with the few subscribers per month. The integrated purchase, I believe, allows eq2 to remain present anyway. And allows the company to draw a minimum of profit.
    So much the better for us fans, it's up to us to choose whether to pay or not.

    I come back to these questions that are put to us. For many, some will see this as a positive point, the interest that the Company has in its customers.
    For me, I see it as a joke, after so many ideas, rants, Hopes to be listened to, posted on this forum for 1 years, we are asked our opinion when it was enough to read the lines of this forum to have an idea.
    It feels like a re-election, 4 years of silence and all of a sudden to keep his voters, the mute turns into a good Samaritan, listening.

    There would be so many tricks to avoid this. A discussion group made up of players, directly linked to the team ,GM per servers.
    Yes, Developers playing their games, nothing more efficient
    EmJay likes this.
  5. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    If you read back up the thread...

    None of this is going to happen. They will have a team sort through the suggestions and throw out impossibilities, then they'll look at what's left. Whatever suggestions fit in with the overall conceptualized direction of the game, and for which they think they have enough man-hours to accomplish, they'll schedule.

    They WON'T tell us what's going to change ahead of time, because right up until release day everything is changing. They can't tell from here what they will have ready in time, if management will force an earlier release date than planned, etc. It's the Scotty Principle... don't raise expectations, promise nothing then you don't have to apologize when goals are not met.
    Komatus likes this.
  6. Lateana Older than Dirt, Playing EQII since 2004

    Solo zones are too heavily scripted and the rewards are lackluster compared to the effort needed to complete them. Make them quick and simple or give much better rewards.

    The use of sig lines to gain access to zones should be eliminated. They were once the way to get a BIS gear item or weapon and that made them a nice sideline for raiders and dedicated groups. Let people range free and do whatever they like to move up.

    We need more shared tank and spank dungeons that give good random loot so that casual players can group with some hope of progressing their characters.

    Master crafted gear used to be desirable and a great way to get ready for group zones. I can still remember eagerly looking forward to getting my new gear made. Now its not even good for appearances.
  7. Celestia Well-Known Member



    I actually agree with this too. Flying is great - but having to fly, and fly up a small hole in the wall just to get to the next zone, and then have to do more to fly after that? No. Possibly even more dumb (or at least AS DUMB) as tradeskilled gear not being good enough to start with. BoL I didn't love, but I also didn't mind as much because no matter what, I got to see the zones without having to fly to them. RoS is ridiculous in that you can't even get to the other places beyond EC unless you have made it past the first dungeon...and as I said before, gear was so dumb with this expansion, I still have many characters that have yet to complete it or see the light of day in the next zones do to all this.
    Lateana and Breanna like this.
  8. RubyHOF Member

    Comments:

    1) No Trade Shiny bag for VD zones is a top tier decision. I hope this stays.

    2) All items being infusible, or no items being infusible. The "only some" thing from last expansion caused people to need to wear low resolve gear or old ethereals. Would not have been an issue if all items were still infusible.

    3) I miss being able to level weapons with disintegrated weapons. This gave something tradeskillers could actually make and sell that effectively remained releveant with the progression. Tradeskilling hasn't been the same since we lost you-know-who.

    4) Good loots from the PQs was nice... although while I liked this, this also caused some of the issues in #2. Consider bringing back the old Celestial monthly quest for current level items. Or consider making masters drop off PQs.

    5) Remove "Melee" themed armor/flurry etc. Or unnerf it. It went from 100 to 1 with the nerfs that occurred near the end of the expansion, pretty much rendering a plethora of gear and AAs useless in one fell swoop. It's so bad that even a melee equipment geared inquisitor with all the bells and whistles can't do anything with it.... so if it's going to be like that then get rid of the items.
  9. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    AMEN!
    Bhayar, Virtuosity and Breanna like this.
  10. Standard Member

    No. Just no. Actually not just no, absolutely ******* not, never ever again, no way, kill it with fire!
    Sykle, Hartsmith, Bludd and 4 others like this.
  11. Virtuosity Active Member

    Since hate moderation is so hard to come by, I would dearly love to be able to reforge into hate mod. If that isn't feasible, then put hate mod on shields (yes I know the problems around shields being almost useless) or something else tanky.
  12. Virtuosity Active Member

    I am really liking the way shinies have been done in the VD zones; more of this going forwards please. And find whoever came up with the idea, and give them a pat on the back for a job well done.
    Sigrdrifa and Arclite like this.
  13. Ingerimm Well-Known Member

    Hello Mint,
    these questions are not that easy to answer as long as the relevance of a whole set of stats no longer seems to play a role.

    How can it be, for example, that the tanks, more or less no tank stats, seem to need any more, at least not certain classes, like the Guardian?

    Other tank classes, on the other hand, have problems surviving because the gear does not provide the stats in the required amount. In this case, we're talking about physical mitigation.

    Guardians usually have well over 100,000 physical mitigation due to their buffs in combat, where other tank classes range between 25,000 and 40,000, which leads to massive problems for these classes with harder encounters. How can it be that buffs, e.g. from the elementalists, give 3 times more physical mitigation than the entire tank / mitigation gear combined? So peoble which wearing fabic have in the most cases more physical mitigation as the crusaders as plate tanks. Tanks are also excluded in all healer mitigation buffs.

    Furthermore, you can't re-forge everything, so the tanks, stats like reuse and castspeed are missing if they wanted to put on a fully defensive gear.

    Things like hate gain can only be reached via adornments, for the necessary height you even have to equip year-old adornments, otherwise you won't get the necessary stats. And not every group has a coercer and a dirge to buff this externally.

    Block seems to have next to no effect whether the tanks have a shield or not doesn't seem to matter anymore because it makes no difference. >>> this is since the Blood of Luclin addon defective ...

    The same thing that applies to the tank stats applies to the melee stats. If the pure auto attack damage only accounts for 0.001% to 0.5% of the total DPS, what does gear with melee stats bring?

    People forge everything away to get more critical bonuses, there is no other sense for these stats anymore.

    Autoattack should never be the main dps component, but it should have a relevant impact. Thus, up to 30% dps through autoattack would be a point that would make the stats relevant again.

    That should first corrected before, then we can speak over gear and rewards ...

    Now for 1, 2, 3 and 4.

    Here you can only say no. There is no clear line in gear progression. Largely due to the fact that not all gear parts were infusible. The easiest to get parts from the public events, however, were infusible and are therefore still above the best raid gear and challenge mode gear parts.

    The progression should be clear according to difficulty and effort.

    public> solo> heroic> heroic expert> heroic challenge> raid> challenge raid

    There is also no point in giving people the ability to bypass the game's reward or mission restrictions. Because then you could lift these restrictions directly. I mean mission loot.

    The biggest flaw in the game is that mission loot is heirloom. Because people no longer play with their twinks to play them, they only use them to speed up the equipment of their main character by doing the weeklie, which should actually only work with one character only once a week with many characters and then trade the reward on the main character, which means that people with many twinks have massive advantages over players without twinks. => this means powergaming through twink farming ... i know some peoble them do this with more than 10 twinks and the main so them do in 1 week that what a player with only one char can archive 11 weeks later. After this 11 weeks for the player with only one character, the player with the 10 twinks is by 121 weekly missions and the arcording mission loot what them could be traded to the main. Thats not ok.

    A character should always be considered for himself. There must be no ways to speed things up by bypassing restrictions for them.

    So mission and quest loots should always be notrade. Thus, currency should always be notrade.

    An activation system like the one at the moment with the Ethereals would be the solution here.

    With "drops" this is something different, here things can be heirloom or even tradable, because there are only minor advantages for multi-character players if you can trade the things. Although it promotes loot fraud between players, it does not distort the entire player performance system and also does not support the powergaming of almost 24/7 players.

    Merchants are good, where you can buy the gear for earned coins even if you are not lucky with the drops and mission / quest rewards.

    Even the really rare things should be available for purchase here, of course at a correspondingly high price (coins, platin and status), so that you have to make a certain amount of effort to get them. But you shouldn't exclude anyone from earning rare gear.

    Furthermore, it is not good to build instances like the challenge modes, so that these can only be done with "optimal setup groups" and then also hide the best gear items in there.

    On the one hand, such instances exclude at least 90% of the players from the possibility of achieving this, furthermore it makes no sense to further strengthen groups and players that are already maximally perfectly developed and to tear the performance curve between the players even further apart.

    thanks for listening
    best regards Ingerimm
    Priority likes this.
  14. Arclite Well-Known Member

    The VD no-trade heirloom box upon completing the weekly for the zone is probably the best part of this expansion. This must give you an indication how bad the rest of the loot giving mechanism has been in this expansion (and for the last couple of years). I sincerely hope that going forward, you have exactly the same way of doing all meta collections.
    Virtuosity and Sigrdrifa like this.
  15. Hazimel New Member

    Hi,

    Thanks for asking for feedback.

    Many things were already said, and I admit there was too much for me to read it all. I wanted to give me few cents. This is going to be mostly about things that need improving. There are things that work OK, but I will not get into those.

    I came back to EQ2 in March after a break from 2012. I have played the game for about 6 years back then, so I consider myself a very experienced player. Yet coming back was a nightmare...

    I decided to return with my warlock, because some people convinced me that it is not so bad as others say... Unfortunately, I have learned that returning as a DPS is for masochists who enjoy daily punishment and people who hate life. It was the worst gaming experience I have had in my whole life, and I am a gamer basically for 30 years now.

    Regarding the advice I received above - I have learned that people who have been playing for the last few years have lost touch with what is sensible in the game and what is not. Many are not able to understand the outside perspective (even of an experienced EQ2 player). Watch out for their opinions and advice - if it is sugar coated, something is probably wrong, and will satisfy a small fraction of people.

    So what made returning as DPS a nightmare?

    1. Old content loot that is inaccessible or barely accessible without lots of help. Ethereal rewards, fervor runes (Insight, Embers, Mystery). If you want to keep them, please provide the last expack version to returning players. The RoS Tishan's box didn't contain key runes.
    2. Masters not dropping, almost never. Masters on the broker cost millions - a value not obtainable via questing or crafting, most certainly not at a rate that makes any sense. Farming for masters was one of most fun things for me in EQ2 - now obsolete. And there are still 3 (!) levels of spell tiers above...
    3. Solo content loot is barely enough to survive heroics, let alone DPS. Everybody who played before expects you to perform as those with ethereal rewards, fervor runes, celestial ascensions etc... all things out of reach. Basically this translates into nobody wanting to group with you, regardless of your experience and skill. If you don't have previous expack gear and raid loot, you are a burden.
    4. Red runes not dropping, and they are key - like Destruction. Super rare, and super high on the parses.
    5. Tradeskill recipes with limited uses AND rare drop rate (Ancient spells). Horrible idea...
    6. Itemization (stats) are random and lazy. Working hard to get mage loot with block and flurry? This was already mentioned a lot, so I won't get into it.
    7. Heroics: the only named with a chest that has a CHANCE for something remotely useful is the last named. The previous ones drop NOTHING... the armor is useless very quick, no masters, no runes etc. It makes running zones no fun, not rewarding and frustrating frankly. You have only one chance to get anything decent, and usually it is a let down.
    8. Raids: most loot is kinda meh. Slightly higher stats than the previous tier. Almost no items with interesting procs, unique effects etc. Nothing to be excited about for most part...
    9. All loot is legendary or fabled... really? What do these names mean anymore? Most of it is worse than treasured trash of old. Please use the tiers the game offers with meaning.
    10. Infusing. Unnecessary mechanic that requires lots of plat and set up characters to fully buff up. Returning players struggle to use this. Also - the few infusible items are almost non-replaceable. Why then add so many cloaks, offhands etc to later loot? All salvage trash... Please remove this mechanic in the future.
    11. Reforging: if you want to keep it, please give more freedom with assigning different stats. Especially if the RoS trend will continue (dps flurry for mages...)
    12. Achievement runes, especially raid runes: please make them account-wide unlocks. The same way it works for the All-Collections necklase in RoS, or how Ragebourne Insight worked in Fabled Kael. It can cost an alt something to get it, but doing it again is next to impossible. Switching mains doesn't happen everyday in raids, and people want to enjoy their alts (as mentioned, without some of these items they will have little worth now, and fewer in the following expansion).
    13. Lack of working melee stats makes the game more flat, less interesting and make class design simply not work. Please fix auto-attack so the gear makes a difference.
    14. Familiar, mount and merc levels are necessary for success. They drop nowhere outside events - why? Please add these consumables to loot tables in solo and heroic zones. This leads us to the next point:
    15. Overseer as the main source of key consumables: familiar, merc, spell research, mount trainings and bardings. These should drop in heroic instances or come from quest rewards (not only during events). Overseer is boring, brings nothing into the game apart from meaningless busy work. As a returning player with lev 1 Overseer, I had to wait MONTHS before I had enough agents and leveled up enough to start getting these consumables relatively frequently. How can you expect any new or returning player to wait this long before their toon is useful at all?
    16. Speaking of Overseer, most loot there is complete garbage. Most consumables are no-value, so we cannot get rid of them fast. Again meaningless busy work. Please remove this kind of loot from the tables. Give us coins or something else that has some use and does not clutter bags if the more rare items do not drop. Or better still... remove Overseer completely, and move the consumables for training to solo and heroic instance and daily/weekly reward loot tables.

    All these parts of itemization and drops almost made me quit EQ2 in a lot of frustration. I decided to give a healer a go, and it turned out to be a lot easier to get into RoS with one - especially that unlike DPS or tanks, you are not expected to be fully geared with everything to take you to groups and raids, where you can get upgrades. So I stayed as healer, thought would have preferred to have a free choice what to play. People say "play what you like" - in EQ2 RoS returning as DPS this was a horrible joke - returning to my comment about the worst gaming experience of my life.

    I have seen several people try to come back as DPS, and they quit the game very fast. Losing new and especially returning players should be a considered a big fail.

    I get that P2W and effort should make a difference between an average DPS and a great one, but currently it is a difference between being useless and considered a noob (regardless of actual skills) and being considered a dps god. It is silly. Do something about it. Some hints above.

    End rant :)
    Lateana, Carynn and Priority like this.
  16. Mint Loot Meddler

    1) Are you going to read what the players have to offer, suggest?

    Yep

    2) What are the points you will be working on for the next expansion that caught your attention?

    Tradeskill rewards need attention, there is a strong desire for gear that can be worked toward alongside regular drops, quest and mission rewards need attention for balance and consistency, among lots of other things

    3) What are the most complicated points for you to implement, and the most feasible?

    Finding the right balance of static, guaranteed rewards vs traditional loot drops is a constant focus. Chance is a core element of roleplaying games and fundamental to the longevity of an online community, but can become frustrating if tuned incorrectly. Earned rewards can impart a sense of meaningful progression, but if they are leaned into too hard the experience can devolve into a series of checklists that nobody wants to have to do everyday. Hopefully with continued communication (like this thread, thanks everyone for contributing!) we can better meet a fun and rewarding balance.

    As for feasible, infusing is confirmed being removed so that means concerns about balancing around the system are all fully solved outright

    4) Could we have a preliminary list of the changes that will be made before the launch of a new extension?

    Nope

    This is due to the nature of development more than anything, as nothing is guaranteed to make it to release. We will definitely share what we have when we are ready for testing in Beta prior to launch!
  17. Ingerimm Well-Known Member

    Also here, is the base idea a realy good thing, but this boxes should also be notrade, i know enough players who have a lot of twinks who have this collections still completed, have therefore the good ring reward.

    Others who have only one char, need thefore the full 7 or 8 weeks to collect all no trade shinies with the only one character. So this players who have completed this through bypassing the restrictions have a big advantage over the players with only one character. In a lot of cases from 5 to 6 weeks.
  18. Bhayar Well-Known Member

    There's lot of good questions asked and a lot of good responses. I tend to look at global landscapes before I start drilling down. First, in order for itemization to work effectively, the classes need to be retooled and bugs/miscues on current spells/CAs need to make sense. There's some really broken class mechanics that need to be fixed in order for any gear itemization to make sense. In addition to that, DBG simply has to sit down at the table and either make some of the stats/CAs/Skills relevant or get rid of them. Decide what you want to do with autoattack and be done with it.
    1. Gear provided as a reward should make sense for the class it's being rewarded to. Plate gear dropping for druids doesn't get it. Having a lot of gear dropping with mitigation makes zero sense. When you finish the sig line, the gear you're rewarded should be at least minimally competent for heroics.
    2. The drop rate on red adorns frankly, was ludicrous this xpac. Either have them dropping in sig lines or heroics. I've run a lot of heroics, etc. and have yet to see a single effing (for emphasis) red rune drop. Damned few in raid. Can't craft them. This kind of incoherent approach to the game speaks loudly that there's simply no master plan involving oversight on connecting the dots for players, but less connecting the dots between devs with varying areas of responsibilities.
    3. TSing was effectively a bust. Very few TSing classes actually were able to make contributions.
    4. The lack of masters to level up toons was also an issue. Again, this speaks to a lack of coordination at the highest levels. You don't design a spaceship to launch with everyone working independently. Also true of ascensions. Frankly, having two different leveling systems for ascensions and CAs/Spells wasn't well thought out either. A lot of the facets of this xpac felt like it was slapped against the ceiling, and if it stuck, it worked. Unfortunately, gravity took over on a lot of things, and there was a lot of fails.
    5. Did enjoy the VD GU and the loot/green adorn/cyan award system worked fairly well. That said, things like green adorns should be heirloom as well as many of the coins. Loot dropping that's no trade/no value = poor thinking. Let's make green adorns no trade and lore as well as cabal coins, but raid coins aren't. Seriously, how does anyone even justify that kind of decision?
    6. Look, I don't want to point out the obvious, but since you've adopted a PTW gaming mechanism, people tend to spend money when they can level up an alt. If you look at the current in game mechanics, no player is going to have the time/money/inclination to play more than 2-3 toons. Used to be you could level up and effectively play a number of them. If I've said this once, I've said it 100 times--when you have a PTW system, you make a helluva lot more money with many microtransactions, not a few very expensive ones. Wake up and smell the coffee on this issue.
    7. Have some consistency in the RNG in this game. It's completely borked. When loot drops are dependent on it and it's ineffective, you want to poke your eye out with a dull pencil. We're trying to level up familiars, mercs and horses....oh my. I can go weeks on 10 different toons and get OSers I don't need. Merc/horse pots drop more frequently and research/familiar pots drop as frequently as chicken grow teeth. Oh joy, let me spend $100 bucks to get a celestial familiar and take the next 10 years leveling it if I relied on the drop rate going on in familiars wild. We're talking 100 points for a treasured familiar dropping 98% of the time when the celestial familiar takes MILLIONS of xp points. What mathematical genius thought that reward system up?

    Bottom line here: one of the biggest problems in the game today is a complete lack of oversight coordination over the fundamental gaming elements in EQ2. An xpac lasts one year--tops. Your rewards and leveling mechanisms should reflect that timing. Unfortunately they don't. Not by a long shot. Not for spells/CAs, nor for high level familiars. A game is supposed to be fun--not a poorly crafted environment that's effectively worse than a working environment. Get problems fixed...guild chat has been fubared since March when they did a "fix." 6 months later, it's still broken. Which brings me to the last and final point--the complete breakdown on communication between players and DPG. Recognize when there are issues and openly discuss them. Ignoring them by pretending to be the "three monkeys" is insulting to your player base. We're the ones on the receiving end. Involve some of the player base as advisors. And don't rely solely on your raider teams. They have solid feedback, but they're not the only players. Find some knowledgeable ones and listen to them.

    Any rate, thanks for the opportunity to throw some ideas out there. Maybe if we can get some collaboration going forward, this game will return to "mint condition," haha. Sorry, I couldn't resist that one.
  19. Antizark Gaming New Member

  20. Miauler Active Member

    1. Yes, there was an element of working towards the next milestone. However, there was also an awful lot of frustration as well. Read on for ye not faint of heart.
    1.1 The first frustration was seeing hard earned Raid gear become below par, simply due to Resolve. EQ1 (which I've played for years) had the superior system out of EQ1 and EQ2, whereby equipment from the previous xpac was still viable in a new one. If you had Raid armour, you were solidly set for all the group content, ready to traipse through it, and back to the raiding (which Raiders tend to like). The solo/group contingent had a steady climb to reach ever better gear (though nothing outright overpowering most of the time). EQ2 lacks that base continuity, and the feeling that you're going somewhere new to improve, not completely start from a blank slate.
    This is, of course, very subjective, and isn't something I'll tear my hair out over. I just see it as a design win for EQ1 over EQ2 by a significant margin.
    1.2 The absolute randomness of the Random Number Generator (well, I have my suspicion it's not a pure random number generator, as a significant number of runs through with multiple characters with looting samples of circa 100-200 show a serious deviation from an expected statistical distribution on rolls to win). This results in gear that is completely unusable for a player, despite that player only having one character on the account. This can affect entire parties at times.
    1.2.1 A possible mitigator to this is to have Heirloom gear tradeable for up to 60 seconds (for example, and subject to level constraints) in all circumstances, not just certain types of instance (i.e. Raids). This could also lead to parties staying together to receive rewards, as these would also obey the same rulings.
    1.2.2 The randomness of the loot awards is notorious for some very active players not receiving the rarer loot (which is heirloom/no-drop) over the course of an xpac, where some 'lucky' players seem to have endless streams of them. This is actually psychologically a pretty bad model for a game to have, as it visibly rewards lack of effort. I did do a forum post a while back about fixing the RNG flaws by the introduction of a system such as "Lorenz's Hydraulic model of Motivation" (with the expression being equivalent to the character being active, and actively searching out this higher tier of loot, so persistence will, inside a finite time, be guaranteed to achieve an end). That brings back the factor of "Put in the effort, and it will, overall, pay off". Time could well be a factor, based on the probability that an 'offline character' would be asking around for good deals, or where the good loot was. This would be far lower impact than effort, but with a good chance of having at least one good item over the course of the xpac.
    1.2.3 A proposed model of loot that would make me fairly happy and keep me fairly engaged would be a 3 factor one (with factors represented as a circle). The first factor would represent the type of gear (chain, leather, plate, cloth). The second would represent the statistic spread (tank, casting DPS, heal, melee DPS). The third would represent the tier (treasured, legendary, fabled etc.).
    1.2.3.1 Each of these factors can be influenced by a model such as the Lorenz Hydraulic to tend over time/iteration towards a "desired" piece of loot. This should even out the 'hiccups' with the RNG such that over a very limited amount of time, they are pretty much guaranteed usable loot. With time/effort, they are far more likely to receive superior rewards (essentially guaranteed for some categories).
    1.2.3.2 This does open up possibilities for creation of user based "scavenging" skills, where they can target particular slots, stat spreads etc. The more complex the scavenge, the higher 'skill' needed, or the less the effect or some other factor (possibly even the chance of fumbling and something unhappy occurring for a short time, such as a detriment etc, which is woven in as a story result for asking the wrong person the wrong question and so on").
    1.3 I don't think there was a "Best source of loot". The coin allowed a purchase from a limited pool, which is popular, as it lets people craft what they're trying to achieve. This (to a limited extent) fills in gaps that the RNG leaves (but doesn't take away the sour taste of random).
    1.4 The EQ1 ability for some of the best items to drop randomly from anything helps take the load away from a forced funnel of activity into an extremely limited resource (i.e. several overland names that only spawn once every 30 minutes, and certain ones are farmed most as the reward is superior, leading to resource starvation and a potential for griefing denial). This would of course be highly random and very, very rare. And not significantly above other 'name drop' gear, so it's more a 'balance evener' than a game changer to discover.
    1.5 Reward gear should carry more of a "useful/sought" vector than dropped, as it's supposed to be a reward. Nothing would ruin your day more than being paid your monthly pay check in a currency that's not valid in your home country, not valid outside its country of origin, and not allowed to be exchanged on markets for useful currency of a similar value. That's essentially what a lot of random rewards end up as in the game.
    1.6 Overall, I like the model of having rewards, drops and a non-hyperinflationary currency (*cough* Plat *Cough*) with which to make some trades to obtain items of value within a limited environment (i.e. the current xpac). It just needs tweaks to remove the tail ends of the normal curve and ensure that a more fair payback on effort is achieved (rather than just being lucky).

    2 The most rewarding loot drops (and the most exciting) are the boss drops. These have a 'special' feel to them, especially when you overcome a tougher boss. There is genuine excitement at taking down a Raid, or Heroic boss the first time. As a suggestion, I'd be interested in seeing the 'first kill' for a character of a boss to receive something good, and tailored to their likely requirements. Something that when they still wear it much later in the game, it still reminds them of the 'good feeling' of the challenge and the commensurate reward.
    2.1 The corollary to this is that the Currency purchases don't have that attachment. They are simply a transaction, and occupy that psychological niche for everyday (even nice, or special) purchases. They are, however, functionally very useful.

    3 I think my favourite currency was the Ethereals this time round. Account wide.
    3.1 The downside to this is that it favours having alts that do nothing but run for currency in a 'grind' that is denied people who choose (for whatever reason) to only ever have one character. Completion of a challenge/set of challenges should be the account wide completion if the currency is also account wide. This brings back the "fairness" element, as well as statistically affecting all characters equally, regardless of the number of characters on an account, which I believe to have been the intent of having an account wide currency.

    3.2 What I'd like to see in the future is more experimentation with reward types/currencies. Keep the bits that really go down well, and experiment with additional features/modifiers to it.


    4 As you've probably picked up from my quick overview in 1, above, I'd like to see the statistical distribution of the RNG flattened a fair deal and the tails removed. Allowing players to have methods of interacting with this over time to influence matters in a scavenge fashion, I believe would pay dividends. Due to the low rate of rewards etc. compared to combat hits, and the (probable) existing simplicity, I believe the mods to loot proposed above wouldn't create a significant impact on performance. But even if it's not a more complex system, just something to remove that "I've been insulted for the 30th time by this quest giver, while this lucky so and so next to me is laughing all the way to the bank after just 3 tries. "
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