Maybe it's going to be balanced somewhat by jewelry. Blooded Blade has a huge piercing damage proc twice a min with 25% of max health damage to a caster. Such proc would need as much hp increase as the one can get. Though call me ignorant if what I said is wrong. I haven't really seen all gear or jewelry to judge correctly. It was just an idea.
Taking 25% of your HP per proc scales, so if you have 50khp you still only have 4 procs with no heals until you die. Same as someone with 200khp. I must admit this inflation is rather tiring. It seems like a total revolution rather than evolution, yet if it's not a total revamp of ALL items in the game it just makes lots of stuff obsolete. What's the point of doing any CoE stuff outside of the revamped HM raids if ToV gear doubles or triples key stats? There's none. It's not like there's a level increase so you need some gear in that 93-95 level range. All current L95 gear will be worthless so therefore that content will also be worthless. If you make such drastic changes to gear, then make it to all gear. Otherwise you need to make small increments to gear power and mob power or you'll make content completely worthless. Ok, so with new ToV gear we'll have twice the hp, so CoE raids will become easier if you're stuck on progression... But, what's the point of doing those raids when the loot dropping is 220 sta and the new stuff is 700 sta. You're better off doing heroics for the 650 sta stuff then going straight into ToV raids.
Find a decent healer that can look at more than a single player's health for the question of the proc. A group heal every 20-30 seconds isn't unreasonable. Aside from the PoW mistake, when was the last time it was worthwhile to do a previous content's raids aside from trying to get a specific item like a Trak belt or a Miragul's charm? EoF maybe? Good or bad, that ship sailed a loooooooong time ago
I've been raiding less than a year, so I can't really comment on the past. But even from a heroic point of view, when there's no level increase it just seems pointless having gear that can only be worn at 95 being completely and utterly useless that there's no point running the zones. It's SF to DoV1 all over again. No progression for people leveling up through that level range. No one runs SF heroics for anything other than ER quest because you get twice as good gear from DoV1 overland zones and you can wear it at a lower level, because they made the gear too powerful. If it wasn't for ER you might as well delete that content, and I find that sad.
This makes a lot of sense, another MMO had a gear change between expacs where they massively increased the health too. The reason there was to make the fights more about healers making good decisions with choice of heal and also power use, rather then having tanks being hit for say 80% of their health with every hard hitting boss - and therefore the healers had to keep them at 100% health at all times or the group could wipe. (It gets worse when you factor in avoidance, sometimes you would be fine, but then the tank gets unlucky and does not avoid for 2 hits in a row and goes down... it makes for very panicky fights all the time which often rely on a bit of luck regarding avoidance). By having a large health pools we could see the heals being more important (although I would have though that we would also need the power consumption to be made more significant too). Or... we could just be seeing the mobs hit a lot harder and instead we are aiming for a way to reitemise the game without significantly increase the dps. I guess we'll find everything out when the beta is over.
There aren't many stats left except for hitpoints they can increase... Attack speed / Dps? there is barely any benefit from the amounts we already have due it being on a extremely harsh diminishing curve. Cast speed / reuse? sure right now its mostly priests and mages who have so much of it they don't know what to do with it any more, but with gear loosing a lot of class restrictions tanks and scouts will have that capped as well. Multi attack? We already have priests who have never set foot in a raid at 600 and scouts at 1000.... AE Auto? Easy enough already to get 100% CC? Hand crafted gear already gives you enough to meet the requirements for CoE EM raids. CB, Pot and Ab mod? If they gave us a significant boost of them we would just end up one shotting everything. and so on... By giving us more hitpoints and making mobs hit harder they are essentially using their get out of jail card so they don't have to redo the entire stats system and itemization from scratch. Of course the unfortunate downside is that all old content will be even more ignored and only used for grinding exp.
Back in Kunark I m very sure that level 70 raid gear got used till very late in ROK. T7 raid items were i think quite better than almost all quested gear, and may be ven faction gear. I still wonder why Develloper lost their braind and mind and got crazy, probably to please masses that do love big numbers. They took a direction that more or less broke most of the class intereaction and balance. Now we are in a situation where : a) We all are capped in casting speed and reuse speed. This makes lot of buf half-obsolete. So they had to improve those bufs and give them side effect. This also make many aas useless. On the top it quite hurt classes using over the time effects, as example my druid heals over the time don't really get affected by reuse, time is not compressed between the ticks. b) Auto attack has become monstruous, i don't get why the 100% cap had been removed. In general pourcentage based bonuses should never had been increased. c) The other very bad move was to allow factors to be multiplicative. Damage or heals get sort of "multiplied" by potency (MA for auto attack), crit bonus, ability modifier and this lead to a monstruous gear impact. d) HP had not been following the HPS potential at all, all healers can probably fully heal any group within 1-2 seconds, player should probably have 5-10 times the hp they currently have and mob should do real less spiky damage. e) The relative cost of abilities at the reforger is more than broken. ZE auto attack cost much much more than anything else, but knigths can get like 5% ZE for 1 AA. And for 1 AA you may get like 2,5 critical chance. So the ZE cost at the reforger is probably 5 times what it should be.
Amen! The STA on the mage gear I've seen is nuts. Do they really think my gnome conjy will be raid tanking?
It is all relative lest say the average Mage will have 100k hps that is fine if the average Heroic mob melees for 15k a hit non crit. I expect something like this to happen in the new expansion. Basicly you increase the stats on gear *5 and a Mob Power *5 and it all balances out. Sure you will be able to steam roller threw 2 expansions back content, but you can do that mainly now
Basically it looks like gear will only give 2 or 3 blue stats which will make refining not that useful. Between that and the elimination of yellow Augments. They seem to basic want to make all equipment generic or non modifiable in any meaningful way to make it easyer for them to balance stuff. The same as when the maid only Main stats + stamina needed Thus we get Generic raid Jewlery number 3 Entire raid roll up
Also for example i do not see tanks using full set of the defensive armors. For example if the best defensive armors have No dp stats like no crit chance no multi no potency etc. It will make it extremely hard to keep agro on a tank with no Dps. so while it may be possible to have a tank with 500k hps max avoidance etc,they could be useless as a tank in a raid because all they have for agro is there snaps and now wimpy ca's
This isn't true. When RoK came out the vast majority of gear was replaced with quest/heroic stuff because that's when we really started to get proc's.
There is a very good reason to go down this path. Don't expect ward healers to own parses anymore, don't expect fights whose start includes 'bring 4 warders'. And yes, expect tanks with 300k health and mobs swinging at high numbers.
I vaguely remember caring about KoS contested raid mobs at the start of EoF. Aside from that and the unpopular PoW situation, I don't remember ever caring about old content once a new expansion was released (excluding a few very special items here and there like contested mayong orb, bloodthirsty choker, trak shield, share pain ear, ect).
EoF was one of the better expansions for keeping old content relevant. It wasn't even just contested, but some of the instance pieces still held weight too. DoF and KoS previous xpac content got run all the time for a combination of masters and a few rare pieces of useful gear, but mostly masters.
Look, I can totally understand for people that have been playing in just the the last xpacs content for a year will want new stuff to do, and will not look back at the old stuff they've done for the past year. But, when it comes to the overall game flow and progression, when you have multiple xpacs all at the same level range, history tells us that if you make one xpac drop loot twice as good as the old one, the old one will never get used. We had it with SF and DoV1. DoV1 was a L90 xpac. SF heroics were a L90 xpac. DoV1 stat inflation got large because they increased the mob difficulty and so all SF gear became useless (except to mute). Any player going through the leveling process can bypass the SF xpac completely and just go from Kunark to DoV1. When ToV is released, they will bypass CoE completely because the gear will be crud compared to ToV. At least DoV turned out to be 4 overland zones and 10s of dungeons with WL and CS tagged on. ToV is one overland zone. SOE really shouldn't make the past content pointless if they're only releasing smaller content xpacs.
Looking back on things... Past Xpac zone, group or raid have never been relevant. even through DoV, the DoV1 stuff was not run after DoV2 (SS) came out. even the HM Stuff was not worth running. some of the DoV1.5 (Drunder) HM after it worth running but that was fully itemised. then after CoE came out SS and Drunder was worthless. this has been going on for a long time. this is done to prevent things like the Mirigal's Charn from being used 20lvl's and 3-4Xpacs later... there was also some other gear that was farmed from 10-20 levels lower that is still useful in SF/DoV. it is very problematic to require ppl to get "best in Slot" From a zone 10 or 20 lvls back and 3 or more Years old.
SS update again blew stat inflation out the window, but at least there was a level increase, even if it was minor. SS stuff is L92, WL is 91. That one overland zone and 4 dungeons funnelled everyone into it and away from the larger DoV1 content, but again at least it had a level increase. SF to DoV1 had no level increase. CoE to ToV will have no level increase, and both have/will have massive stat differences making the older xpac only good for mute fodder. Who bothers with skyshrine loot for L92-94 when CoE basic gear is 24 base stat higher as a minimum? Skyshrine luckily is good xp so still is being used. Who bothers with SF zones when GD and handcrafted gear at 90 is better stats? No one.
A situation in which people hps will move instead of blinking shall be interesting, this would allow druids to show their healing potential. A friend want me to level my mystic to 95 and to get her raid ready, simply because they need 4 warders, but i m not that interested. My mystic totally lack autonomy to deal with repeated stun/stiffles, she is also weak in the cures. Note that i m not complaining much since a) we got battlepriest itemized -- almost too much -- b) shattered infection is awesome now that it got fixed. c) we got groupwide instinct, d) turtoise shell is still wonderfull and we are curing machines. I foresaw (probably it started with DOV or SF) that 100% reuse and cast would sort of break the balance between warders and reactives healer on one side and over the time healers on the others. It has not been as bad as i expected, mainly due the cure feast. Yeap each expansion should have come with a level increase.
