What increase in the drop rates lol like what's been happening...scout shield drop rates definitely need to hit maybe slightly higher than the war drape drop ratios...but no where near what they are now...tank and healer shields should be the ones dropping about 90% of the time if not more....but that's not what we have seen across the board from avatars to raid zones.
Considering just over 25% of the classes can use bows now (all scouts) anything lower than an observable 20-25% drop rate is unacceptable. Meanwhile we have gotten the 'Crippler' so many times its going to alts, apps and we have nice little nickname for it which can't be repeated here. I love that SoE makes a lot of data available to feeds but if they don't update them with every content push and item change its rather useless.
I don't mind the random personally. I mean, smart loot wasn't bad until you got it down to where you were guaranteed a specific item would drop....then it was pretty lame. Yeah, gearing an app in a single raid was convenient, but there is such a thing as too much convenience in a game like this, imo. Regardless, I think smart loot uses class restrictions, so I doubt it would work very well for bows.
I would love random. Random would be great. Random would be an upgrade. What ever we have now most definitely does not seem random. Seriously all this, the '50% smart loot' the 'loot logs' are all in effort to make it seem more 'regular' and genuinely random. Right now loot is quite predictable. For whatever reason guilds, groups and players can run content literally dozens of times and NEVER see items that aren't even supposed to be rare. The smart loot I encountered was based on if people had it in their possession or not and if they could use it. So if all the scouts had a certain scout only item, that item wouldn't drop anymore (or much less likely) if there was another item people didn't have. Now I don't want loot to be 100% smart loot either. I agree that would make the whole process go by too fast and leave people bored much too quick. At this rate my guild has better luck with MYTHICAL cloaks than they do with FABLED bows and shaman armor. We've yet to see a single ethereal mage earring and we haven't lost a single avatar, meanwhile we got ethereal tank items going to alts. Loot drop rates need to be made more regular. We shouldn't see two items with a 25% chance to drop while one drops 90% of the time and another drops ZERO times. The only explanation I can think of is the devs are basing these drop rates on a global scale rather than on individual players or even servers. 1 guild getting swords galore while 3 others have yet to see it does not a 25% drop rate make.
A significant worry though: Stat consolidation has the potential to hurt Sorcerer a lot. Of all the classes... Sorcerers rely on reforging a ton to be able to get ability mod. If consolidated stats hurt our options to get ability mod, then our power will go down drastically. This needs to be taken into account. I support the idea... just expressing a concern about how it might affect t1 mage dps.
It would be fine because all the spell weapon stats would still be on those weapons but the 'original' versions. So instead of spell weapon DPS it would just be DPS for example. Ideally anyway.
As stats are essentially distributed onto items from a pool of 'normalized stat points', spell weapon mechanic stats would not be 'discarded' but just distributed to different areas more heavily than you probably saw in the past.
This isn't really true. Unless they ALSO significantly boost the quality of damage from spell weapons, we will have "more" spell weapon stats giving us significantly less value than the ability mod we were getting from our reforging. Concept: We'll lose the reforged 3k ability mod, costing us 60k on the parse. We'll get 50% improvement to our auto attacks, gaining 15k on the parse. Overall, we'd be 45k worse off. So there has to be caution used with how this stat would be combined. Sorcerers love spell weapon stats being on items as long as we can reforge them into mod. If that stops, we'll actually lose dps. 50 Spell Weapon MA turning into just 50 MA will cost us a decent amount of mod, because we'll still be reforging it.
The fact that this is what the concern is shows that there is a real problem that needs to be fixed, that problem is only going to be fixed by getting rid of those stats completely. It sucks, but it has to be done, and that reforging loophole needs to be closed. I think reforging in general was a bad idea. It was a lazy half implemented solution to try to let people make gear better on their own so you don't have to fix the automated system. It's half implemented with a really odd cost system (being frontloaded is completely backwards). It also makes it harder to to balance gear, especially when you have a reforge value so weighted as the spell auto stats. Then you have stats you can't reforge into, and even worse that you can't reforge to a stat you already have which completely removes the purpose (in my opinion) of being able to choose what you want to focus on. I mean, if you actually fixed the problems with reforging (like letting you reforge into something you already have, and fixing the really screwy overcap conversions) you could even occasionally just put a stat on gear that reforges at no penalty as a "Reforge stat 12.3"
Here is the main issue though. Class balance also matters in these changes. If stat consolidation is done, it affects casters and priests. It hurts socrs the most, because we currently are only able to compete with t1 due to this reforging "loophole". Take away the loophole, and you've got to balance it with some love to ALL mages and priests, but you'll need to give MORE love to sorcs. In the left hand, you're frustrated that Warlocks are underpowered. In the right hand, you're proposing a stat consolidation that would hurt them further. I am FOR the stat consolidation if and ONLY if Sorcs get enough love to offset it. However, Sorcs really need more than just offsetting it, we need the entire scope of changes that come WITH stat consolidation to leave us in a better position than we are right now. It would be negative to the dps and healing of all mages and priests, and therefore, there should be some give/take with class balance at the same time if the stats are combined. I'm not trying to rain on your idea. It is a good idea. I am trying to bring this issue to light so it is dealt with at the SAME time, because waiting until 3 months after stat consolidation to deal with the negative impact this will have on Sorcerers is too long to wait.
Because I disagree in how much this would impact mage dps. Yes, classes are going to lose that reforge, but they need to lose that reforge because that shouldn't be the sole purpose of those stats to begin with. It's also a very minor part of the whole, the whole in which there is plenty of other stuff to gain from, like the fact that Mages are getting less from gear then every other class. Or from a fix in reforging allowing you to reforge into a stat you already have. Or from uncapped doublecast. Or from a myriad of the other things
Right - I'm just saying if stat consolidation is "project 1", and everything else takes a while longer to do... that would be very unpleasant. If stats are going to be consolidated, there need to be the other changes that'll help mages.
I had an idea and it might be insane but we shall see. My thought is this have a button on the chest that is only available in raid and only on Leader only setting which allows the looter to re-roll all fabled+ loot. For example my raid force has been farming Oligar HM for months and everyone has their shoulders except our Monk and one new Mage. Our Monk has been in these fights since the beginning and we've never seen his shoulders. With my idea we defeat Oligar HM and he drops a chest containing 1 Scout Cloak, Scout Shoulders and Plate Tank Shoulders. We don't need any of those so I as the Looter click reroll and the items change to some other combination on that nameds loot table. Ideally the loot after the re-roll should be completely different than the first time but if that is too complicated then re-randomizing the loot would work fine. Some restrictions to this aside from raid and leader only are this could only be done once per chest, it must be all or nothing. If one fabled item is looted from the chest the re-roll option is grayed out. Also Obols, Spirits and Plat are not given out a second time
Like the idea just unsure of how well the coding would be considering past history....would remove some of the luck factor.
The re-roll does sound like a promising idea for mobs that just don't seem to drop what you need, at least you'd have two chances at it. Really, it's just frustrating on the armor drops much more than the jewelry drops. Those are 1 in 4 chances at least (supposedly), the armor you're going for a 1 in 7 chance. I never understood why they got away from the crated, because if two patterns drop I would rather see Tank and Healer drop rather than Leather Tank and Plate Healer. When our brawler has his helm from HM ape I would rather see our OT get a helm versus my monk alt. Same with the chain and leather healers, why do we want plate alt healers to get their gear before main raiders, the logic eludes me. At least the HM mobs drop two patterns, that is nice, but when we kill 3 SW Drinal and get a healer bp, it seems like it would be more "fun" for all the healers to roll on it rather than just the one or two Druids we have in the raid, but that's just my thinking. It still would be nice to see them implement smart loot to a degree, based on the amount of a particular class in your raid dynamically altering the drop rate from a mob. If we have three tanks in the raid and kill Oligar HM, have the chance the fighter neck drops from that chest as 3/24, or about a 13% chance (12.5 if we're being picky). There is no need for it to be 25% drop rate when there are not 6 tanks (yuck) in the raid. This is likely why we've had 7 or 8 tank necks go to alts while we still have scouts, healers and mages that need them (I know my Monk alt has had his for awhile, but hardly see one to bid on for my scout main). This should be relatively easy to program because the game could flag what classes are in the raid when the mob dies and tie that chest to those classes (percentage-wise). This would at least give all the participants in the raid a better chance at getting loot they could use. Just my two cents on these ideas, please feel free to disagree if you think I'm way off base .
Kwikdeath - your idea of a Weighted Loot Table is not a bad idea, but i think it would be very hard to code. I think crating Healer and Tank armor is the best solution for the long term but it involves redoing loot tables. the think i like about the Re-Roll loot is that all it "Should" require is a code that re-randomly selects the loot from the existing loot table. i think Re-Roll should be easy to Code. but i am not a coder and i dont know the code for loot tables.
Sorry should have said code, since they are incorporating in into the game's code rather than writing a stand-alone program, you're right. I was thinking of the programmers we have at the college that write programs for various tasks (such as spreadsheet queries, etc.). I was more imagining them (SoE) writing a script to do something to that effect. If x amount of fighters are in the raid when a mob is killed, then it will =x% chance of y loot dropping in the chest from that mob. All they are doing is dynamically tweaking the rates based on the makeup of a raid, and they already have the mechanisms in place to determine who is there (how many of what archetypes), but maybe I am missing something. Maybe it would be challenging based upon the game code, but if they have time to take on projects like the failed dungeon finder, dungeon decorator, city revamps that hardly anyone use etc., I would think that making loot drop more reliably for the classes that actually are playing the game would be a worthwhile use of time. Weighting it based on who's there would help all guilds, since some are more mags heavy, some are scout heavy, run different amount of tanks etc. Really though I would think the crating could be a first step done quickly. The other would be a longer term project, but crating the loot so we don't have to deal with three different healer drops and two fighter drops would be nice. It's sad when someone in guild is splitting 50p for the HM plate healer helm (because all the mains and alts have it) and we still have Shaman that are in EM helms because the RNG doesn't seem to like them when we kill Baelon. That is for sure a quick fix and would help the armor drops at least. Still wouldn't fix the neck drops from HM Oligar though, the fighter one is going for plat next time for us because even all the alts have it after killing it so many times...lol.
Crated armor is ok, but we'll still end up right where we are today, with a bunch of fighter crates going to alts.. The goal of a raiding guild with new content is often to gear up the main fighters as quickly as possible, as it makes handling that more challenging content a bit less painful. It also encourages the fighters to continue coming back early on, as they have a pretty good opportunity to get geared up rather quickly. For a guild, that is a often a good situation to be in, early on. However, as time goes on, there is a lot less need or desire for those fighter loots in particular, but the weighting doesn't evolve. There is also a lot less for those fighters to look forward to. I am not opposed to the idea of sacrificing a chest for a second chance at more desired loot, but it is really only looking at the surface of the problem. The problem is that loot distribution weighting should evolve. We all want some randomness in what we see, we just want that possibility curve to shift as time goes on (or more specifically, collective experience grows/accumulates with a particular set of encounters). Early on, fighters should have a really good rate, priests should have a moderate rate, and scouts and mages should have somewhere between moderate and small chance. As it goes on, the curve should pivot or shift around the axis of the priests, where everyone has a near equal weighting in the distribution curve. Later, it should shift heavily to favor scouts and mages, leaving still a moderate chance for priests, and a light but present opportunity for fighters. Perhaps this could be accomplished, along with the concept of 'memory' by adding a field to each individual's achievement for number of times killed by the individual. Average out a raid memberships accumulated kills on a particular mob, and then use that to adjust the weighted distribution curve in use. This way, it wouldn't matter when anything was killed, just the total kills experienced by a character. I also think there needs to be some benefit for persistence and endurance, for those that give the commitment of returning even when they have nothing to gain from it personally. Sure, they are probably still earning the equivalent of points with their respective organization, gaining favor for future purchases. But there should be something modestly tangible, too. I am guessing that was the intent with the raid quality green adorns -- the 45+ stat ones. They should have had the growth rules adjusted in order to fit what I imagine was the intent. Instead of leveling off any mobs, they should have leveled only from higher tier and higher level mobs -- eg, hard heroics and raid mobs. The rate they leveled from those mobs should have been fairly noticeable, but not such that two weeks of raiding would have capped them out like their lesser green adorn counterparts. Perhaps the rate they scaled up needed to be adjusted, so that they achieved near heroic quality at the same rate as the heroic quality adorns, and then slowed down after that...
If you want to start itemization and risk vs reward all over there is only one way to do it proper: - risk vs reward is balanced - the faster/better you kill something, the more/better loot you get (flawless? gratz! there is your garantueed ethereal item!) - new setboni offering something really good when you gathered all pieces And in order to settle things right regarding risk vs reward: no more easy avatars, no more "we make content accessible to everyone while you can get best in slot from those by just looking at them" - I am missing the thrill to actually compete with other guilds to attempt something very hard, trading pulls and such for maybe hours. EoF did it right, RoK did it right - TSO was easier avatar-wise but it didnt offer a loot-pinata like nowadays. Same rules for heroic + solo-content, remember back the day there were only a few guilds per server who could clear Nizara - the loot was good, the challenge nice to have but the most important was: everyone attempted it.
