All Raid Weapons Need Extra White Slot to be a Decent Upgrade to T2 Steward Stuff

Title says it all.

With the new steward gear, you're sacrificing 2.5 cb/pot for a red adorn, and there are some yellow adorns just as useful.

Some raid weapons /ranged have two white slots, but most don't. This makes them such a minor upgrade and only if you can get a decent war rune.

All single slot raid weapons need 2 white slots and two handers need 4 to be a true upgrade, imo.

Not to mention, the upgraded HEROIC weapons, have higher damage than RAID drop weapons.

All raid content that drops weapons that are equal to the upgraded stuff is easily do-able by PuG's i think its fine as it is, especially seeing as how it is possible to one group all of AoA and part of HE.

Actually greater spirits spirits ( for steward gear ) can be obtained solo , or worse case duoing. I do not see anyone duoing named in either AoA or HE raid zones , so that sort of makes your anology irrelevant.

For there to be a logical progression of loot, raid loot ( especially weapons ) should be better than group.

Pretty terrible design if this is the case. What are you thinking SOE?

Which RAID drop weapons? I've seen a few that might not fit and need some fiddling, but..

I really don't see a problem with SG heroic, 'faction' currency era weapons being slightly better if not entirely competitive in general with COE EMx4 weapons in their naked forms. There's still the issue of war runes that can only be used on the raid version, so there is still some advantage in that regard AND how do they compare to the equivalent SG EMx4 raid weapons? Trick question, that..

Solo apparently is the new Raid.

Altar of Abhorrence, basically EM-CoE-Raid. The issue here is that you can now obtain Heroic (Stewards) by Soloing Siren's Grotto since it now gives Greater Spirits on occasion.

Many Mages have been using T1 Steward's weapons rather than CoE EM x4 weapons
Because Deathcall 2 and Overkill 2 are powerful enough and an extra white slot is more than compensation for stats gap.
Not to mention T2 Steward's weapons.

And there will be many scouts who prefer T2 Steward's weapons to CoE EM x4 weapons.
Because of No Quarter 2 or Deathcall 2 or Overkill 2 and of course an extra white slot.

Not sure what should be done to this situation.
well how about add +7 crit chance to all Steward's weapons and delete those extra white slot ?
And maybe reduce the price at the same time.
This change will help who want gears to gain more Crit Chance.

Also I found that both T2 Scout bow and T2 Fighter bow being sold by Steward have much higher damage ratings than other bows including ethereal one.

I don't see your argument. I guess you're on of the people who favour getting raid gear in solo zones.

Regardless of whether AoA can be one grouped, that means heroic stuff can be done by less than 6. Although you'll find the one group that does AoA does not need the stuff, and the couple that can duo heroics do not need what drops.

There should be progression based on DESIGNED difficulty. Raids need more people, so should drop better loot. Not different loot that sacrifices a key stat for a slightly better proc IF you have the red adorn too, it should be better than heroic, just like heroic should be better than solo.

It's also especially weird how many avatar and Drinal weapons, secondary's and ranged items are lacking a white slot while Amalgamon loot has 2 whites and a red.

I don't know. I am unconvinced that it is a problem.

The situation is we are 6 months or so into current content, and about 6 months before the next content probably lands.

There might be some plan to have more people closer to a certain basis before that lands, and perhaps we weren't on pace to get there. I don't know that, but that is just a guess. I am going to continue to guess that part of the reason we see the kind of upgrades and availability we are today is to move people through some of the EM stuff a bit quicker, and get them a bit further along so that they can possibly be comfortably into HM stuff before the next wad of content lands. As I look at where we are, and what lies in front of us, progression might be a mess when the next update comes if the next update is a continuation from Pirates/SG as a basis. By mess, I mean we will have a long, long, long time in PoW, Harrows End, and Sleepers Tomb beyond the months we have already spent there.

Yes, the stuff you may have spent the last five months chasing and perhaps only recently got or are still waiting to get might be a bit diminished in value or possibly even binned, but hey, now you can move on to bigger and better things with a little less pain. That is a good thing as far as I am concerned. An upgrade is an upgrade, no matter where it lands from, and for now, I'll still keep chasing it. Getting it from EM raid is a bit more prestigious and more effort than from a heroic counterpart, but lets get real about this. There is no winning here, just the next thing. Ideally, it wouldn't work that way.. but that's what we have.

An 'occasional' drop from SG solo of a spirit really doesn't bother me in any way. Congrats on the non-tradable heirloom currency. I would rather it was that way than a fabled raid trash drop that so many have gotten so excited over during the past few months. That one occasional spirit may represent something, but it still has some caveats attached that doesn't correlate in quite the same way.

Perhaps it was overlooked, or purposefully glossed over, but how do these COE heroic++/SG solo+ weapons stack up against COE HMx4 or SGx4 weapons? I mean seriously.. some fairly reasonable options present themselves, and they are 'too' good?

Bump

Just got two EM x 4 one handers and I'm thinking about not using them in favour of spirit infused simply because I'd be taking a 5% cb hit for some so so red adorn effects.

Just throwing out arbitrary numbers, but I don't think there's necessary anything wrong with:

Greater Spirit = One per 40 hours solo'ing OR One per hour grouping.

Just because something can be obtained through solo'ing doesn't mean that it's practical or that it makes grouping irrelevant.

I was noticing that, too. SG normal mode stuff is 2 whites and a red, so I think they're actually better than Drinal's.

However players being more readily willing to commit to that Solo on the chance of RNG is an issue. Though it takes quite some time to get the Obol and coin to purchase Stewards. I made the statement you quoted without actually examining the in-game rates.

Upon doing some data collection I can accurately say for myself at least, the rate at which a Solo-Player could obtain Stewards T2 is accurately rewarding the time that must be invested to obtain it.

Back to topic.

B to the U to the M to the P

Add extra white adorns to red slot primary/secondary/ranged in 2013!

I did a comparison and at least for mage 2h's the T2 Stewards is worse than the Staff of Otherwordly Command (Raid-2 hander). So it seems to be more about procs, EM-CoE is supposed to be about equal to T2 Stewards if not slightly under because you need a fair number of Spirits for the armor/weapons.

I hope the T2 steward gear isn't supposed to be 'better' then EM-CoE raid gear. The idea that something you can get in a handful of group runs should be better then raid gear would mean they've borked progression even worse then I'd imagined.

I don't think it is supposed to be, EM-CoE is supposed to be on top when compared. Though CoE is quite borked.

That's the whole point of this thread. They (EMx4) are not better.

IF, and it's a big IF, you get a good red adorn your EMx4 weapons/ranged are nice, but you still lose 2.5% CB/Pot for a proc that generally is up for 20 seconds every 2.2 minutes. Generally those good red adorns don't come on the weapon you want, so you've had twice the work to get the item.

Now for some classes you can even get yellow adorns that are just as useful as a red adorn, and have better stats because you have the extra white adorn slot. All this without raiding.

Raid gear should be an improvement over heroic gear, not equal but different. Very rare heroic stuff can be on a par with raid gear, but not multiple slots, and that's what ethereal items are anyway, which btw, should also have an extra white slot on the weapons.

It's definitely not game breaking having an extra 7.5% CB/pot over primary/secondary/ranged and gives clear progression from heroic T1 < heroic T2 < raid stuff

The items are fine, give raiders an incentive to group with the community, something that has been needed for awhile.