A few (separate) things: 1. "jewelry matters more than other" - yes. this was a conscious design choice a couple of years back (i think ahead of ToV). See Kander's "itemization magna karta". The developers PURPOSELY took effects off other slots. For this reason, jewelry matters more than others. Things were not vastly different before the change. The major difference was that instead of "jewelry matters more than other gear!" it was "hat slot matters more!" or "breastplate matters more!". Personally i liked ALL gear having effects, but i understand the idea to standardize things, so i'm rather indifferent to it. 2. "9 slots matter more than AAs, reforging and player skill" - i'm sorry but this is pure BS. you put a character into 9 good jewelry items without the right AAs and without their gear tuned via reforging and they will fail against a player with the right AAs and properly reforged gear. I'll give you that it has become increasingly the case that the reforging and AAs are a given fact, which leaves only itemization and skill. 3. "oh noes some jewerly is powerful!". I agree, it is. I am experiencing it first hand right now as I am apping my totally ungeared warlock into a guild that has 2 warlocks WITH some of those items. I get destroyed. And this is given that last expac, I was easily able to compete even though my gear was 10 months outdated. But... is this a bad thing? Even though that i was fairly happy to be able to compete without having amazing gear, i also frequently thought "it kinda sucks that gear doesn't really matter". So now it matters more again. And hey, all the "uber rare" gear from last expac - uplifting, practiced, amplyfied - it all drops for the easier content (at least basic versions do). So it's easier than ever to get. tl;dr: sure, i hate that i'm losing parses purely on gear. but at the same time, I like it when i get a piece of gear and i can actually see it making a difference. i was so frackin' sick of continuously getting these 0.23 potency upgrades that only amount to anything after you get 30. p.s. and don't even get me started on healer gear, because there are like 2 total items in the game that make a serious difference in ability to heal. so if you want to go back to where "skill is all and gear doesn't matter", roll a healer. I can show up to raid, unequip 3-4 pieces of gear at random and still totally excel at my class. Trust me you DO NOT want this.
@Errror I'm beginning to see that yeah. Awesome we agree! I can confidently say that the original epics made less of an impact (EncDPS wise) than raid jewelry now. If you mean "at random" then yeah (maybe). If you mean competitively, then no and get the eff out of my thread. It indicates that gear matters more than skill, which is horrible. Those upgrades do matter, or they would, if jewelry didn't (passive +30 CB/P from a full set is no joke). That said, you can get 30 CB/P from reforging/adorning well. 30 CB/P is within that 2~3% EncDPS margin if you are exceptional. That is how much I think gear should matter, however as it stands now it is a lot more than that.
I cut a few things out for clarity (not to take them out of context). We'll just have to disagree on this. If i knew that spending 6 months raiding to get a full set of gear would improve my dps by "2-3%", frankly, i would consider this game to have the worst ever itemization and would have quit long ago. p.s. also this is not "your thread". the second you decided to post it on these forums, it became SOE's (or whatever they're called, so don't tell me to ****).
We'll have to agree to disagree that you want gear to matter more, whereas I want it to matter less. Historically, gear has meant very little. It is a recent advent that it is as significant as it is now. (powercreep 2015)
This is not correct. I've been playing EQ2 since launch and there have been - almost at any given point - massively powerful items. There've been items as far as 6-7 years back that individually account for like 30% performance improvements. The only major change that's happened is due to the removal of effects from half the slots, we've gone form the "major power increase" being spread against 20 slots to it being spread across 9 slots, which has obviously made those 9 slots individually more important. But there have consistently been really good items that DRASTICALLY improve player performance. It's not new in 2015 or 2014 (which is actually when most of current effects were introduced) or even this decade. Before amplifying and practiced effects made my wards super powerful, it was 80% uptime charms, before that it was ward procs, before that it was overloaded heals, before that is was the hat from Munzok, before that it was items from SoH, before that it was claymore, befoer that it was flowing through for mana regen, etc. I'm sure DPS peeps can give you DPS-specific examples of the same thing. Sure, some expacs had minor increases in power compared to prior ones - stuff always fluctuates - but overall, a well geared player has always had a significant advantage. As it should be. If anything, what this expac has done is made the more elite items much easier to obtain, which will result in competition evening out and skill becoming the deciding factor. Last expac, i had to content myself with the fact that my lock would never get an Uplifting item or a Finisher neck, this expac, i look at top locks and see effects that i can easily obtain in next month or two. And i'm not even in a top 30 guild.
I'll challenge this. The largest "power spike" historically were the original epics. Together, with the first "potency" item in the game, B.Choker, presented the highest to date EncDPS boost. Depending on where your epic stacked up, it totaled a 10~20% potency increase or a 5~15% EncDPS bump depending on your class. 5~15% was huge given the relative history (i.e. prismatic, prismatic 2.0, claymore, soulfire) which offered much lower gains predominantly voiced by their ratings. What we are seeing now (2~300%) is a completely different ballpark.
Just so i know, which item that i can get for my warlock or defiler will triple my DPS or HPS? (that's what 300% means, right? triple?)
I know you're nitpicking (trolling?), but for the people who haven't been following so far. I was comparing end game vs. heroic gear sets. A single item has been shown to be a 25% increase (page 1), several together have been shown to be 2~300% (page 2) This is a departure from previous expansions where a few outlier items together can provide approximately 10% (page 3) So yes, 300% is larger than 10%, significantly so. Also 300% is triple.
' uhm.. no it's not. there have often been items that increased output by 25-30%. And sets of items (like the ones i mentioned in prev post) that increased by tons more. you're also making dumb assumptions such as that a person that doesn't have the (Super-rare) collection ring is instead naked or wearing an ill-suited item for their class that provides NO BENEFIT. When in reality those of us who don't have the collection are probably wearing one of the countless other GOOD OPTIONS for that slot. For example my defiler doesn't have the collection ring, so instead i'm wearing a common T1 amplifying ring that gives 77-150 potency. So the person that DOES have the super rare, while deservedly ahead of me is not THAT far ahead that they will do 3x my heals or dps. My t1 amp ring in itself is average 110 potency for a single person. Last expansion i had a super-common charm that gave not just me but every healer in the group +110% potency with ~70% uptime. With 2 healers, that's already more powerful than this ring for the given purpose. Another comparison.. 110 pot is slightly more than 3x the amount that a purple war rune gives. Last expac any item that gave +40 or so pot was considered great, which also equated to approx 3x the amount that a purple war rune gave. Holy crap! But hey, if you want to make broad stupid comparisons, let's do that for armor, my BP gives me 100 total cb/pot. That's 100 more CB/pot over a person that's not wearing a bp! OMG, BPs overpowered too! Just like you can't compare a BP to being naked, you can't compare an item with an amazing effect to an item with no beneficial effect at all.
All of the items you listed were weaker than the original epics. The epics themselves pushed 10% on a good day. Are you just trolling me now? It feels like it.
No they weren't. A full set of overloaded heal gear would like double (if not more) healing output. Much more than was given by my epic. Munzok hat commonly acccounted for 30% or more of parses. Set of ward procs amount to like 60% of my heals at one point. I'm sorry i don't have DPS item examples, but i've not played a DPS class until last expac, so i don't really know. I'm sure other people can provide those.
Koko, you've mentioned several times that cast order does not matter much anymore, but I'm not sure if you've given a % to compare. You've compared two skilled players and say they should be within 2-3%, which is pretty ridiculous. If you're doing around 20 million DPS, that's 400-600k. I can't even get that consistency with the same character/group/raid on the same encounter and relatively same cast order. Anyway, let's say you have 2 players with the exact same gear, AA, reforges, group, and raid. One player has never played the class before, while the other is an expert. Thus we are isolating the variable of skill and holding everything else constant, which you seem to think is irrelevant now. What kind of differences in DPS (or effectiveness) do you think there would be between the two? I'm not saying there isn't a lot to gain from items, but as Arieste has been saying, you seem to imply that one character is wearing the most worthless piece of jewelry while the other has the best in slot item. Of course there would be a huge difference there. Although I would definitely say that I like how gear matters. If it didn't there would be no/little progression. Each expansion you would gain a few abilities, which you could determine the most efficient way to use them in like 10 minutes, and then you would see no more progression for the rest of the expansion because gear would add like 2% to your effectiveness as you seem to want. That would be so boring. It is exciting getting upgrades that actually make a difference you can see. Not only that, but any good raid chooses a player based on their ability to play, not their gear. If they have bad gear, that is taken into account for their performance. Although this is not really the case in heroics.
Current gear I'm using I get 514.6 CB and Pot off the base stats. Say Errror and Neiloch got put in the same gear and then you gave Errrror a few items. On there own they'd give another 77 CB and Pot. Please explain how doing this now makes Errror three times as good as Neiloch. I think you're the one trolling all of us.
Being a Ratonga instantly gives a 500% increase of DPS. Everyone knows this. But anyway, I think Koko still underestimates just how much player skill matters. While he is very math orientated, 98% of the EQ2 population are not. I know of maybe 2 guidies in the past 4 years who have spent the time to work out the actual efficiency of their cast order for example. And thats having been in the top 3 guilds on Splitpaw for past 4 years or so. I also don't think people realise just how little information is left out there any more. 3 or 4 years ago, a certain website contained class sections which were usually full of extremely good information to help players. Since that site has died, this information doesn't exist, and players rely on 'guides' on these forums, which 90% of the time are awful and wrong in many ways. The skill level of 99% of EQ2's population is lowering on a daily basis, this just means that the top 1% are extending the gap. Itemisation counts towards this, but not to the levels suggested.
Bards don't have this problem. If we push every button when they light up on hotbars, we are parsing at the top of our class. So sad.
I believe this is the main disconnect. I had much higher expectations of the average EQII player before making this thread. I expected everyone to play with EncDMG/time in mind, which is clearly not the case. Of the suspected 2% that are, even fewer grasp the importance of encounter duration with respect to skill order*. I expected all end game players to be at this level, which now I severely doubt. With lower expectations, yeah, "skill" matters again. Now I wish that word meant more. I expected this thread to be relevant to every raiding player, not <<2% of them. With that said, my bad, ignore this thread and have fun raiding. *when anyone mentioned a cast order before, I assumed they were referring to this, not a sorted list.
Ok so this post is quite honestly rediculous... You play a game where items do matter (always have always will). You play a game that has limited content that scales and you have to hit lvl 1 before you can hit lvl 2 so on and so forth.. So WTF is the problem... the items currently in game dont make bad players good and they dont make mediocre players so uber others cant compete. its all about farming the gear to be able to step up to the next difficulty. Sure the guy wearing raid gear from t2 mobs is probably gonna out parse a pug who doesnt raid but chances are the raider "may" have been slightly better to begin with. My brig currently only has 1 piece of non heroic gear (shiny reward) and it can compete with scouts in my raid that have some of the raid drop gear... TBH my brig out parses a much better geared brig in the guild where i raid my dirge. scout rotations make a big difference in the amount of dps regardless of gear being warn and so do AA's.. 1 rotation change and AA tweak 5 minutes before raid was a 3 mil difference not a piece of jewelry. As far as scouts who are building WDB and the "huge" affect people seem to think is currently there, its really not. i have looked at many scouts and most of the ones putting up the higher numbers arent even running wdb (aside from food cyans and greens). Jewelry isnt gonna make the WDB scouts better than the others it dont work that way. The jewelry just like the currently FUBAR'd raid armor is set up to teir so you can progressively move up through the raids.. if player A is beating you b/c of uber jewerly that you dont have or cant access in your guilds raids then farm more to progress or prove yourself in a better raidforce and go that route? the raid drop jewelry from this xpac actually took some of the stuff high end raid guild spent 12 months working for and put it in the easiest raid zones... if that isnt leveling the playing field idk what is.
This thread is bananas, not even one mention of the game breaking +1.25% magical debuff ears (all these bads think uplifting is still good lol.)
I think your thread would have carried more merit last expansion when all these items were on mobs much deeper into the expansion. Only the top guilds had access to these items including the debuff ear which is extremely powerful. This expansion all these items can be seen even in the super casual guilds. That moves the difference in DPS more into being skill related. Which is why I originally commented I thought you were underestimated the effect of being good at pushing buttons.
