Firstly, the raid jewelery/charms are broken. The entire raiding community agrees. I'd like to start a thread with constructive item by item feedback on what makes the item useless, and possible solutions on how to fix them. I'm going to post some items, and my thoughts on how to fix the items. By fixing the items, I'm talking about making the items usable by a raid. Swiftclaw's Bracelet of Action - The reason this item doesn't work is because of the 'Can only trigger if no allies are within 7 meters of the caster'. That means that as a scout trying to DPS the named, you can't stand near the back where everyone else is. Technically, you could have ONE per raid and the entire raid could stack on the left, and this one 'special' scout could stack on the right and get a proc'd AE avoid. In reality, it makes the item useless. The constraint on no allies within 7 needs to be removed for the item to be useful. Swiftclaw's Bangle of Might - It procs raidwide 5.5 crit bonus. It's basically a healer item. You put it on a healer, they aren't going to pull aggro anyways, and they give your raid more cb. Works fine. Not that 750 threat is relevant any more considering t1's are doing 4m DPS. Sontalak's Unstable Horn - A clicky rezz with a 3 minute reuse, the catch is if the person you rezzed dies within that 3 minutes, you also die. A healer can't use this, nor can a tank. You can't afford for your healers/tanks to die at random if someone ELSE is out of position. That means that it's exclusively a scout/mage item, and there are too many options for DPS out there right now for them to even consider it. That makes the item utterly useless as no class in the game can equip it. Remove the life link to start. Perhaps give it a 'When rezzing someone adds 35% crit bonus/potency to the target of the rezz for 60/90 seconds after they are rezzed'. That would give people a reason to wear it and cast it over their normal rezzes. With 7 priests in a raid and 2 dirges, you already have a total of 25 potential rezzes, not including rebirth and immaculate revival and dirge mythical cloak. People need a reason to use THIS rezz over the others. Sontalak's Claws - Tank charm that reduces your current health by 75%, and in turn grants you 75% damage reduction for 5 seconds on a three minute reuse. This item would be useful if it lasted 10-15 seconds. I could see using it. With it only lasting 5 seconds though, it basically grants you damage reduction for the duration it takes healers to heal back the damage you just inflicted on yourself. Lol. Please extend duration to 15 seconds. Scale of Sontalak - Clicky DPS charm with 120% cb/potency, and grants an additional 3 cb for everyone else in the raid who clicked it. Hands down bar none the best charm in game. It was very 'meh' until the update this morning, and now it is godly. This is what the top tier of raid jewelery SHOULD look like, something that just blows you away. Great fix. Ring of Tactical Superiority - 15% potency decrease as a proc. It's the tactical superiority proc that has been dropping on war runes since the dawn of time. No one has ever used it, so they slapped it on a ring so you can't avoid wearing it. No one likes this proc. It's never been good. Replace it with 'reduces incoming damage to the raid by 5%' and people will want it. It has basically the same effect, reducing incoming damage, but it'll feel more powerful. Right now no one knows how much potency each raid mob has, so no one can properly judge how much 15% of that mobs potency being removed helps. Keplin's Hardened Earring - The problem with it is that after you've been tanking for 10-12 seconds you're sitting at -6k mitigation. In an expansion where mitigation is hugely important, losing 50% of your mitigation lowering you to cloth levels removes your ability to tank anything. Instead of reducing your mitigation the longer you're tanking, it should INCREASE your mitigation the longer you're tanking. There are already a ton of scripts that involve swapping tanks. Look at the very fight that this mob comes from. It's a luxury and a rarity to be able to consistently tank something, and this item being particularly useful on those fights would be brilliant. Just flip the 'decrease' to 'increase' concerning the migiation. The fact that it gives at max stacks 15% rw cb is cool, and I'd leave it. Then if you have all 3(4?) of your tanks properly maximizing the item by taking hits every 30 seconds your tanks could provide a raidwide 45(60?) cb enhancement. It also adds a level of depth to a tank getting hit to refresh stacks as well as giving you a reason to bring that 4th tank who is so often benched in favor of a dps class. Keplin's Earstud - The item I told my raid that if I find them wearing it, they are being removed. Right now if you maximize it perfectly you gain 625k RW dps at the expensive of having to pause for 3 seconds. That means to actually benefit from the item, the person wearing it has to be doing UNDER 207k DPS themselves just to break even. For this item to be practical the values on it would have to be absurd. I suggest changing it to a self only stun, and increasing the increments to 10-20 per rather than 5. At 5 increments per stack it's not usable, and the fact that it has the potential to stun the entire raid makes it too dangerous to ever use even if it were at 20 potency per increment right now! Item needs serious help. Jalkhir's Orb of Power - I like the idea. Unfortunately this expansion there's a lot of movement on fights so the snare is painful, and the additional fact that it has an AoE kill your raid nuke at 30 stacks makes it unusable. Allow it to stack up to 50, remove the snare, and remove the kill your allies AoE nuke. Then it'd be worth equipping in an already intensely contested charm slot. Jalkhir's Focus Wand - It grants the target 35% increased received healing. I like it, although I think the duration should be 15-20 seconds on a 90 second reuse. If it works like other 'healing received' bonuses, it also doesn't apply to wards meaning it only helps druids/clerics heal. Hoop of Casalen - It increases your movespeed and increases the damage the target takes, those are both cool. It shouldn't port you though. There are too many HIGHLY positional requirement fights that if you are moved even 2 meters the wrong direction it causes a raid fail condition. See Legionnaires/Raptor curses/Jalkhir red circle/any mobs frontal etc. It's just not viable in a raid to be ported at random, as any class, ever. Eye of Sontalak - Does 300k damage, + 300k for every 25%, with a 1 minute reuse. Considering DPS classes are doing as high as 10,000,000 damage per second, a 300k nuke with a 60 second recast isn't viable. In an ideal scenario under 25%, it will grant you 1.2m on a 60s recast, equating to a total of 20k dps. Considering that on average that value will be less than half, you're looking at 10k DPS from the charm if you click it every time it's up in a best case world. I'm not really sure how to fix this item. I'd say just scrap the effect all together and try again. For any item to have a clicky nuke usable once a minute the numbers would have to be absurd to be usable. Increasing it by a magnitude of 25 would make this usable, but I'm not sure if that's really a good route to go. Perhaps increase the casters base cb/potency by a factor of 12.5%, PER 25% the mob is missing for 20 seconds. It just seems like the Scale of Sontalak + Aerakyn Novelty Card are too hard to beat out right now in the charm slot for DPS classes. Casalen's Stud of Power - Last but not least, an ear that will give the wearer +80 potency. Looks great. More items should be desirable such as this one. Well, that wraps it up. There are quite a few other items that need to be changed, but these are the ones that I've encountered so far. If anyone else has thoughts on how to fix the items feel free to post. On most of them the negatives actually outweigh the benefits by so much that they're transmute fodder. I think throughout our entire first two half clears of ToV 3 items went for DKP, the rest went for plat. Two of those three items went to alts after they were equipped and tested. Please make these items desirable, because right now raiding the 'top tier' of content and being rewarded with gear inferior to advanced solo gear is just demoralizing.
Bell tolls is an amazing clicky, I don't know what you were thinking when you said it should be scrapped and/or is unusable, it is the best charm from the zone.
except Bell Tolls are most likely broken 'cause it doesn't work regardless which way you interpret the description
There is also the charm that offers 35 weapon damage mod to anyone in the raid, but you can get the stridor fangs instead which is a passive 20% potency and when clicked a 15weapon/spell damage mod for the group.
by some definition of works, perhaps. it's neither 1 trigger total (way underpowered, but probably intended design), nor 1 trigger per person who hits mob in 12s window (way overpowered). it's somewhere in-between, but closer to latter, thus "really nice". appears to grant the trigger to anyone who happens to hit within ~1s window of it being applied.
On a 3:43 fight with one person using the charm, Bell Tolls 2 had 88 triggers and parsed 470,623 dps. There was 24 people in raid. edit: the charm was clicked 3 times in the fight
Okay, so it applies to everyone in the raid. Not how I thought it worked, but glad for your input. If it really does apply a trigger to everyone it IS in effect multiplied by a magnitude of 24(I had suggested 25 originally) and it's almost on the tier of being broken. Definitely an amazing item then.
We’ll do a balance pass, but I suspect you still won’t like some of the items. If you don’t want to use the “hard to use” items or the “items that have downsides” then you can use the other options from different raid items or heroic items.
I don't even mind the 'hard to use' or 'items with downsides'. The problem is that the upside on every single one of them isn't large enough to compensate for the massive massive downside. Take the port ear or the tank ear that makes you lose 6000 mitigation. There's literally no scenario where either of those are viable in a raid setting. You just can't use them. If you could unequip gear mid-combat the ear that makes you lose mitigation could be viable, but because you can't take it off mid-fight, it's never going to be used because it's only viable on a tank who never has to tank anything, and if they are in a raid and not tanking, they're going to be replaced by a dps class regardless of the fact that they give +15% rw cb. Why are there 'downsides' on getting raid gear? Shouldn't the gear be good? I understand that you want to add complexity to raids but making your gear hurt/debuff/stun/slow/snare/root/kill yourself isn't the way to do it. I don't mind if the gear is the best IF you maximize the potential from it. I love min/maxing. The problem is that even if you ABSOLUTELY MAXIMIZE the gear, it's still terrible compared to trivial to obtain heroic drops.
The tank ear is a PRIME example of what you could do to enhance raid coordination without making your gear debilitate your character. It lasts 30 seconds, that means every tank wearing it wants to get hit at least once in a 30 second window to maintain the buff. That's going to require coordination to pull off regardless. There's no need to punish you by reducing your mitigation to that of a mage when the coordination to maximize the ear is already in effect. The desired effect is already there. The punishing factors on these items just makes them undesirable. The item should grant half the crit bonus values, yet grant bonus mitigation instead of reducing your mitigation. I love the new direction with all the incredibly unique effects. It was going great until we got to ToV and all the items had these ridiculous penalties that made them unusable, Even without ANY penalty or constraint the majority of the items would go unused simply because their solo/heroic counterparts are so much more powerful.
Swiftclaw's Bracelet of Action - Remove the "except when direct" and the item becomes interesting for tanks. OR, add "Prevents AOE (except when direct) and many AOE-like effects" <--- and make this block things that were made to be immunte to AOE blockers. Sontalak's Unstable Horn - Maybe add a way to turn this into a (optional) charm could make it more desirable while still having the risk factor. Sontalak's Claws - I agree the duration should be a little longer. 8-12 seconds is the rough amount I think. Ring of Tactical Superiority - The idea for raidwide damage reduction is nice... but I'm thinking 1.5% reduction that can be stacked up to 5 times. Sort of fits with the way you're setting up gear currently. Keplin's Hardened Earring - change the "decreases mitigation of caster vs physical damage" to "decreases mitigation of caster vs elemental, noxious, and arcane damage" - By doing this you are able to maintain your "risk vs reward" factor, without making the item virtually unusable by anyone who would actually be taking weapon damage. Keplin's Earstud - the reward and risk could both be improved, with the "fail condition" left the same. Currently the reward isn't enough to balance out what is lost when the player uses the item "correctly" unless you put it on a bad player that cannot cause damage. And if it is a bad player that cannot cause damage, their likelihood of using the item incorrectly is extremely high... Jalkhir's Orb of Power - This is an "on activate" item. I'd say double down on the attributes and slow effect. It is clickable, so the caster can always warn the raid force. Jalkhir's Focus Wand - Allow it to affect wards, maintain cooldowns and duration. Hoop of Caselen - I just... um... yeah. It is situationally clever. I'm thinking this hoop might be useful on future encounters where "walking" isn't allowed but "being ported" is ok. If so, then don't change it.
Just wanted to add my two cents to this conversation because of being the main tank atm for Fatality on Crushbone. I feel that in the current state of these items that this zones difficulty is not even close to being worthwhile to run after you get the check marks for the kills. Besides the forearms there is like 2 usable items and thats even stretching it considering how good some of the heroic gear is. I just find the loot to be extremely dissatisfying since the downside of each item makes them useless.
are "hard to use items" or "items that have downsides" really the way to go if literally no one ever uses them? This expansion is supposed to be about options and decisions on what to wear, but some of the downsides are just so bad it isn't an option. It feels like instead of having a set path of this is a direct upgrade to this like last expansion, it's this is what you should use but now stuff you shouldn't use that drops too so it's harder to farm what you want. I couldn't do itemization. It's not easy to make everything balanced especially with a brand new approach, but if something is globally noted as being awful, it should probably be looked in to deeper than just saying if you don't like it don't use it. I'm not assuming that this wont be fixed with your pass through, I just hope it does get fixed.
So far Dev's have been pretty responsive to all this. Overall, I really do like the concept of risk vs reward items, but I don't want them to completely dominate the loot pools. I want them to be there, balanced with "no risk and straight up gain but not as high as the ceiling of the risky item" items.
Exactly. I like the new direction of items rather than just bland +cb/potency/damage procs. The fact that it's the supposedly 'best' gear that has these literally CRIPPLING downsides which makes the entirety of your raiding community reject the items as even usable needs to be considered though when doing your balance pass.
I applaud the effort to introduce new proc and clicky effects but replies like this don't make me feel at all confident that things are going to change. If this many attempts were going to be made to introduce new mechanics with itemization a large portion of beta should have been devoted to testing these items and getting feedback before going live. You would have had plenty of posts like this one with even more detail on why half of this gear is garbage in its current state.
Swiftclaw's Bracelet of Action (aoe block one): 8s twice a min just isn't worth it (unless all aoes are blockable now?). There are several classes (swash, ranger, mages, healers maybe) that could potentially sit 7m away from the raid and still perform but it's just not worth it when you have so many other items that buff those around them. If it were a full time aoe block anytime you're 7m away from everyone it would be an interesting item. As of now, nobody is even taking it for their alts. Ring of Tactical Superiority (pot debuff proc): As the raid's debuffer I want and would wear this one, but hasn't dropped yet for us. I think it's valuable, but the problem is that you only need one, maybe two of these in the raid and there are far too few options for scout rings. Many people are still wearing CoE rings. Need to add more rings. Brings up the other issue of not knowing mob's buff packages. People would value debuff items/skills if we could actually see the buff package (more than crit avoid) on the mobs. Swiftclaw's Bangle of Might (non-fighter threat plus rw cb): It almost went to an alt last night (first time dropped), but I took it. It should be a decent amount more raid dps than a dmg proc from heroic wrists like Harrowing Tempest if it's modifiable and up more than half the time (didn't check to see if it was modifiable yet). The threat component is very minor...it parsed about the same threat as I was ditching from using evade (not enough to matter in either direction). Utility classes should be taking this one...though you know they're gonna use dmg procs instead cause parse. Doesn't say if can be stack-able from multiple users...would assume it's intended to. Eye of Sontalak (Bell Tolls proc): Already very powerful. Hoop of Caselen (1% increased damage to mob, ports player): Hilarious item, just too many fights where it's not usable with the port. It's fine to have super situational stuff like this, but you gotta have a whole lot of options dropping to make it worth being on the loot table. Sontalak's Unstable Horn: (rez clicky w/penalty) Yeah, too many better options to risk using this. Might be useful in duos. Would be a better advanced solo or heroic drop. Not very useful in raid as classes without rezzes can just use redemption signets without the risk. Overall items could probably use a pass on the item descriptions. We need more consistency on language (define what is meant by attacks, combat hit, etc) as a start. But I would look to see if descriptions could be made clearer in general.
