Bad luck in PVE = no loot, armor damage, debt, frustration and a lockout. Bad luck in PVP it just takes longer to get something and you can always just afk for free tokens.
It's more a battle of changing player perceptions. The Novelty Card looks amazing on paper and it is by iteslf. However think about Four Eye's of Essadara. It's 100% more Damage just like that Reckless Assault earring but instead of only 80% Potency the group now has gotten 160% Potency... same risk, double benefit.
I don't mine that heroic gear ect is good... but ya after upgrading a piece with a red gem last night... Glad I grew out of getting all Giddy from getting gear in 2004 EQ... because this stuff is nothing to get giddy about.
I don't mind it either, just with what everyone else is saying it seems to me that perhaps both weak and strong charms need to be reevaluated. I don't expect anything to change really about the Card.
In general I agree with you and I've always enjoyed contested mobs. Being able to kill contested has always given those guilds an advantage in clearing instance raids and it should. This round though they've made it into a much more significant advantage then anytime I can remember in the past. And I've been playing since the game went live. I know the instant response will be "your crazy they only drop three items" which is true. The items are on par with the advantage we're seen in the past. Nice things that will give the contested killing guild an edge in raid DPS over the non contested killing guild. The difference and significant advantage is from the additional 18 red gems the contested guild gets a eight days. Go with an average of 3 reds from the raid zones that's a 7 to 1 ratio on how fast contested killing guilds can upgrade their gear verses all the other guilds on the server. As it stands now contested guilds can use reds to upgrade the easy mode gear. Other guilds would be smart and better off to horde any reds they get and stay in gemmed potent gear until they can get the hard mode gear that's going to require one weeks worth of raids to upgrade one piece of armor for one person. You on the other hand will be able to upgrade one persons entire armor set per week. PS - I don't want or am I calling for contested changes. What they need to look at is changing the amount of red gems that can be obtained from the raid zones. Increase that and that 7 to 1 ratio goes down and affords the use of red gems on the easy mode gear.
We are in agreement there, I think contested guilds should be rewarded for their efforts but not on a x6 benefit ratio. That's not an edge it's a league. Yes, most servers have two or more guilds contesting so one guild is not getting all the extra red-gems but the current displacement of Reds puts non-avatar guilds so far behind that they can't even try let alone think about Prismatic Gemstones. Given the 18 Gems Available to Avatars versus the 3 Gems to non-avatars that is assuming Legionnaires are slain. That places an instanced guild extremely far behind. Perhaps Matri Marn could drop two Red Gem on a 20% chance and one Red Gem on a 50% chance. That introduces more for a somewhat challenging fight but not at a high rate.
Xelgad, The majority of posters in this thread agree that there is a problem with red gem distribution. For avatar killing guilds, of which there are very few, the gems are rare. For everyone else they are super ultra almost non existent rare. Avatar guilds have been given an incredible advantage over everyone else. suggestions for fixing the problem are gem redistribution, adding gem drops, changing avatar mechanics, and adding a green to red gem conversion. Is this issue being looked at by your dev team? Are any of these solutions being considered for a future update? Or are we spinning our wheels here?
To an extent Gems are an alternative to making Tiered items. Think about it, rather than like TSO or SF where you had T1 through T4 gear you have Energized 0/1 (T1) Energized 1/1 (T2) Mystical 0/1 (T3) and Mystical 1/1 (T4) it seems.
Except that the 0/1 raid gear....at least the ones have seen are worse than even 2/4 potent gear. We have yet to see a red gem drop.....course we are not contested avatar guild. At this rate and assuming a red gem drops off the final boss in Sanctum there is no reason to bid on energized drops. 1 ..maybe 2 red gems per week for the raid.
Just in case you didnt notice: having 10people agreeing upon a topic within a single thread on forums isn`t a representative majority in order to push through changes. Also: I favorize the current system, because it rewards me according to the skill/effort/playstyle I bring into the game.
Of course you do not support change on this issue. That would be like the ultra rich begging for a tax hike. You have a 7 to 1 advantage on gemming over evryone else not in your guild on your server. Imo even 2 to 1 would be too much. But 7 to 1..... come on. Even you must recognize that that is completely unbalanced. I didnt call for Xelgad to make changes. I asked if this is acnowledged as a problem. I restated some of the suggested fixes so they arent lost in the BGs discussion.
I think if they dropped 1 red gem from Shazaak, 1 Red Gem from Matri, and 2 Gems from last guy in AS, then. 1 Gem for Pirate Kings in DC, 1 Gem for Psyllon in SG. Then maybe 1 red gem for every other mob killed after sontolak in TOV, but no more than like 6 or 7 total per clear.
A 3-10 (somewhere in there) green gem + a lot of plat = red gem would be cool, some kind of plat sink. Other than that meh.
2/3 you mean Potent only has 3 gem slots. It's slightly off 2/3 Potent should be about equivalent to 0/1 Energized, with Energized being "slightly" better and this wouldn't be an issue. It is an issue because players are getting double tokens and thus thinking its easier to gear up Heroic than it is to raid. That's why Green Gems were so expensive, it was supposed to be about 1 week per green gem in terms of cost. Think about it, 5 Etyma per heroic counting the 5 for the daily and 5 for the champion (sig completed) you would have 55 Etyma for running all Heroic Zones, 70 if you had the Weekly Quest. It would take 3 days of running all nine heroics per day to get one Green Gemstone or you could just raid and get Energized. The final boss of Sanctum drops 2 Shining Red Gemstones by the way and the Legionnaires drop one so you can get three per instance. I highly think Matri Marn should have a low chance of dropping two gems and a decent chance of dropping one since Marn is probably the 3rd hardest fight in Accursed Sanctum. That or have Sontalak drop one (1st boss in ToV).
so, excluding the ending ToV raid zone mystical gear that people are just now getting. if you aren't an avatar killing guild. atm 3/3 potent gear is your best in slot right? since 3/3 potent > 0/1 red gem gear
you can get red gems from bristlebane, emperor, and legionnaires. Probably somewhere else in Temple too.
Which boggles my mind when people try to defend the current system of Heroic better than raid for most of the population, and the jewelry has equal stats with most of the raid stuff being terrible effects.
