Just creating a space for everyone to start posting issues with itemization with the KoS testing over the next 5 days. Varsoon just finished quite a rough stretch off badly itemized content so I think we're all hoping KoS will be a nice refresher for the server with big improvements for raid gear. To kick things off with my comments after doing some research (post itemization patch 12/1/22): Level 70 heroic gear looks too close to raid gear in terms of quality. Most items only have a difference of 0.1 potency with heroic gear at 1.7 per piece and some raid gear at 1.8 per piece. Suggest bumping all raid gear to 1.9 minimum and/or reducing heroic down to 1.5/1.6. Many KoS raid drops still only have 3 blue stats. This was a MAJOR issue with the DoF content and we've stressed over and over again how bad this is in terms of game design. Please ensure all raid gear has 4 blue stats or you're going to lose a lot of subscribers until EoF. This content was originally designed for many months but we are condensing it down to 4 months. If we want to gear out entire raid forces and make sure everyone gets the gear they want within the relevant ~3 months for this content, the encounters need to drop more than 1 item per lockout timer. Each raid boss should drop at least 2 items per kill. Clearing a 2-hour raid zone for only 2-3 good pieces of gear for a raid force of 24 people is not fun game design. A lot of the gear is just plain bad. The algorithm has really butchered a number of key items that are meant to be strong pieces of gear for certain classes. Still A LOT of gear with only haste, only DPS, or both. These stats are trash compared to the other blue stats and they don't belong on items meant for mages, healers, and main tanks. Some time spent manually designing some good items from these KoS raid zones would go a long way towards making the whole server happier until March. Specialty items like tower shields, charms, and cloaks especially need some love. Relic gear should something exciting and fun to collect. Set gear like this seems to always be overlooked on these TLEs but it really shouldn't be. We as players want to work towards these sets and see them as powerful. Please prioritize making Relic gear exciting and strong, at least on par with other raid gear with 1.9pot & 4 blue stats. #GoodItemizationOrServerEvacuation
Examples of badly statted gear that should be fixed into something fun/useful instead of literal vendor trash:
Just to add to this, we made a relic gear guide that pretty much breaks down how relic gear might look in a better environment. Relic Itemization - Google Sheets Also the Mark of the awakened quest rewards need to have 4 stats. Also the Claymore rewards could also all use a facelift considering the hunters items in game are better in some situations...
We put a decent amount of time into that google sheet it would be nice if you would at least look at it and take it into consideration. If you end up not taking our advice a reply as to why would be nice as well.
This is why every one of these threads is trash. Do you all even remotely remember how bad Relic gear was? It was not great. Literally every item was a copy and paste across each class, the only thing that was unique was the Focus effect on the chest piece and legs. That's it. Go look it up on Xanadu. You all have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when it comes to stats, you're all just obsessed with numbers and blue stats as the only means of progression. Is there a reason now that all the stats have been messed up by changing to +Combat Skills among the other dozens of bad changes to have unique scout pieces? Sure, I guess. Personally I think aiming for Handcrafted < Treasured < Mastercrafted < Group and Legendary < Fabled and Raid for a progression in each expansion would probably be best, but nah let's keep on beating this dead horse. 70 Handcrafted gets a bit tricky with EoF, but yeah. It's not hard to keep previous tier Fabled > Next Tier Treasured, let alone Handcrafted. What is the point of spending weeks raiding EoF on end if on day 1 there's going to be better crafted gear for every slot? Why even wait for the crafted gear when every quest gives you an armor and jewelry set until the next questline that gives you all that again does? Gear isn't what it used to be, if you're doing it for the attuned pixels, that's sad. Clearly you all haven't looked at the EoF itemization yet. Everything you're asking for is already done on the EoF gear. So here's how DB sees it: Okay so if we spend our time and reitemize KoS, once they get to EoF they're going to complain that the blue stat increases weren't enough and we need to reitemize EoF. And then they're going to realize that it's just going to keep happening, because the power creep is never enough for this crowd.
This dude has to be one of the equilibriums guys that think the game needs to be the same as 15 years ago.
Feedback threads for an open beta are trash? No idea what you're on about. Was that fun? Nope. Could it be more fun and still balanced around current raid gear? I think so. 15+ year old data is irrelevant. Those stats are long gone and the game has been completely rebalanced around the current meta. I don't get your point here. Have you ever played/raided on a TLE before? It doesn't sound like you have any clue what you're talking about. Nothing stated in this thread goes against this idea. I even mentioned that heroic and fabled are too similar at the moment and should be adjusted so heroic is less powerful. Personally I don't care about crafted/treasured gear at all as long as it's not better than raid gear. Right now, it's not. If you know of a quest/crafted item that's badly itemized, this is the thread to post in for it to hopefully get fixed. Who cares about EoF? This is KoS. Should we just not play for 4 months and wait for decent itemization? EoF gear should be about 10-15% stronger than any KoS gear. No one is arguing against that. Most fabled items are currently set to 4 blue stat with 1.9 potency. If 2 raid zones don't have stats that match that norm, then no one will run those zones or wear that gear at all. It kills the content and shortens the amount of raid options/fun players have over the next 4 months. This whole thread is just asking for raid-dropped items to be balanced against each other and for stats to make more sense based on their intended class. Having a tower shield with haste and cast speed on it is pointless. You should just have the mobs drop fabled turds that sell for 60g instead of 3-blue stat gear. Same thing.
God, how boring. This gear is so un-exciting. No reason to want to even try for any of this, none of it has abilities on it.
The TLEs would be infinitely more interesting if mobs and zones where it could work, all had randomized fight scripts every time you start the instance. If you never knew if Lockjaw was going to be regular Lockjaw or if it was going to be spawning adds that run in and explode on you, adds that spawn every 20%, etc. etc. That doesn't change how I feel about stat inflation. I actually enjoy playing EQ2 because EQ2 used to have same great fights that involved team work. That's the entire idea behind raiding, taking group content and putting it on a larger scale, in theory and in used-to-be-practice, requiring the larger group of players now to have better teamwork and better coordination than the single group content... "no one will run those zones or wear that gear at all", wow so you mean, like.. Labs and Lyceum won't be end all gear because Deathtoll and the contested x4s should have better gear like they always did because they're intended to be more difficult and, wouldn't you know it, more rewarding??? Yes. That is actually exactly what they expect. They expect every single piece of gear to be so amazing that they have to choose between awesome, awesome, slightly less awesome, slightly more awesome, and oh wow that's really awesome. That's how this crowd wants itemization done. The entire TLE up.
I've played a lot of different MMOs and it's pretty consistent that yes, the first bug you kill on the first island in the new expansion is going to drop something better than what you raided six months for in the old one. It's 'a thing' and always has been. Pretty sure they aren't going to change that now.
I really wish people would actually remember things even remotely close to how they actually were. That didn't happen until RoK. Until people had been at a level 70 cap for 21 months. It's almost like the devs were hoping for a lot of return players that maybe left the game in that nearly 2 year span and wanted them to have an easier time playing catchup and getting to the current content. We're talking about 4 month expansions. You are one of the ones who is always posting about smelling the roses, now it's okay to obsolete raid gear day 1 because you don't actually remember how the game used to work? Tanks in full fabled plate at level 50 weren't replacing it with treasured items in DoF, that never happened. Full raid geared DoF plate tanks weren't swapping out to Scaleborn treasured gear, you serious? The only group/legendary items that were worth it to a raid geared DoF tank in KoS were the 65+ Legendary drops that just started to match the mitigation, but now had better resists and better stats. It's your ride, whether you care about whether or not it's any good or not is entirely up to you.
It's been a day and I'm already bored of the heroic content. Nothing worth trying to farm for whatsoever. Run it once or twice for signature quests and never zone in again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ No 1% chance to get a unique item off a final boss No encounters that take any effort whatsoever Just linear hallways full of trash, which drop nothing but trash.
Followed by names, which also drop nothing but trash. This is a huge difference from DoF, where there were plenty of upgrades in heroics.
Humorously, it's the opposite problem we had in DoF, where level 50 common drops were raid-level lol. It made running DoF instances lucrative (albeit silly). KoS instances, however, offer almost nothing. Couple that with the fact that nothing is challenging... Even a level 62 Monk is swarm pulling in Halls of Fate for crying out loud. I did not play on previous TLE's, but is this how it always is? Just no challenge, whatsoever? I was stoked to revisit Halls of Fate, one of my favorite old zones; but I don't even have to cure debilitate anymore... 20 even con-yellow mobs just tickling the tank.
At 62 in HoF? No, that's definitely not how things have gone in TLEs in the past. Sounds like this TLE is about par for the course though! Only 4 months until EoF!!
2 months of players dissatisfaction, sloppy work without finesse, 1 month of players excited by the hunters, 3 weeks of complaints from players shouting they re now boring 1 week of excitement for the next xpac... And go on
I said this in Discord: the difficulty of these dungeons are commensurate with the rewards. HoF was never actually difficult; there are no challenging mechanics and most people know how their way around and what mobs do what. So you're left with "how much of a time sink is it?" You are never going to get that old time 2006 feeling of running the dungeon for the first time. Can't go home again and all that.
I remember kos, when it was started, and the difficulty in completing some instances, at least in the 1st few weeks. There yes, we have nostalgia but we are completely doped with taurine
