The stat inflation will specifically negatively affect Warlocks unless some fixes go in for our class. Going to give our class concerns thread a bump. :-/
It was very late SF when I got Master Yael's weapon and 4 Rune Theer's charm, but 3 weeks later I was using ToFSx2 gears instead of them. That is what I don't want to happen again. Well I have been just one of casual raiders for 2 years, and found that most casual raiders would want 'continual nerf and adjustments' on old HM contents rather than making all old HM contents obsolete and being forced to do NEW EM contents.
It will happen again. Everything but SGHM and DC loot will be obsolete compared to the new stuff, so all but the top end raiders will have every slot to upgrade to get your new higher HP, and all CoE raid zones will drop worthless loot except for those HM zones which only a handful of raid forces per server can kill currently. I can handle the desire to upgrade. No point having an xpac without it. What I don't like is making the past xpac completely worthless because the gear dropping is completely outdated. Anyone who couldn't do Drinal 3 or 4 SW now, may be able to do it after ToV release, but the drops will be worse than solo loot.
No one should take this personally but they probably will. Drinal 4sw has been killed by well over 50 guilds at this point. The loot remained relevant for long enough IMO. If you haven't killed it yet then your guild isn't a top or even middle end guild I don't believe that content should continue to be relevant forever. People complained that PoW was relevant too long so they started giving us a fresh start every expansion then people started complaining gear wasn't relevant long enough. I am happy to do a fresh start as quite frankly I get bored never bidding on gear. I get a rush when a piece of gear I been wanting drops and I start refreshing dkp sites and comparing my dkp to other members. Getting new gear is fun, for a lot of people and I am glad that I will have that again soon.
Scripts will still kill players no matter how big the gear upgrade is. So the challenge isn't really being removed, just the rewards. Anyway, given how flawed the current itemization is a fresh start is the right way to go, just my 2 cents, if the way SoE will do it in ToV is the right way remains to be seen, but I'm looking forward to it.
There is a difference between being relevant and being completely pointless. If gear stats were only going up in appropriate increments then the guilds that are behind on the content can do this stuff to gear up to allow them to tackle the harder stuff. By reitemizing gear for the new xpac to have 2-3 times the HP, it makes this older gear not even a stepping stone. The solo loot will have better stats in the new content. Therefore, there's no point in even having the content accessible anymore. That's what has happened in SF when DoV came out. No one bothered to do the raid zones anymore because solo loot was better. Of course the raid loot in the new xpac should be better than the raid loot in the old xpac. But if you totally blow out the stats of the new, it makes the older stuff, which is still only a year old, completely useless. And honestly, people in guilds like Equilibrium have a warped view of things because they've been at the top end for so long. 50 guilds is what, 1500 people when you have 10000 level 95s per server. This won't effect you regardless as you've beaten and farmed everything for ages and all you want is new content. What I want is incremental progression, rather than a 1 year old xpac having all its level 95 loot worthless because there's other level 95 loot with 3 times better stats.
My views are anything but warped. I have raided in Equilibrium for 3 months. Onyx for 7 months which was a lower end hardcore guild. I have raided in Ill Gotten Gain which was a casual guild for 7 months. I have experience with all forms of raiding. Casual guilds tend to have to recruit more people in worse gear. Which means having gear worthy of EM content widely accessible through heroic and solo content is actually a good thing for these guilds. They are doing a gear revamp. That is just what they decided was best. Going back to re-itemizing everything from the last expansion is just too much work for too little reward with the small team they have available. Nothing is wrong with old gear being bad, that is why it is old. The content is there for people to do if they so choose (there are several progression guilds in this game that kill content where they could get better gear not doing these raids).
Well I think it's wrong. DoV1 having irrelevant gear, sure, it's 2-3 xpacs old, but the last xpac being completely outdated and useless after a year seems wrong. The problem arises because of no level increase. 2 xpacs plus GUs at L90 and 2 xpacs at 95. They reset the gear when DoV1 came out (doubling stats because they made the mobs harder) and now they're doing it again. These resets make the original max level xpac completely useless from a loot perspective, rather than a gradual increase in risk vs reward. Seems shortsighted to me.
Personally I don't see a problem with it. At least to me it is no different from a 10 level increase they did in many other expansions. The content really did become pretty much obsolete. No one did level 70 raids at 80 or level 80 raids at 90 unless they wanted to do it for the experience which you can still do with CoE. You can argue that they will do the content for 70 or 80 gear but in reality no one ever did. The cloak quest in CoE also allows for people to explore that content with a reward you can use well in to the future due to it being a little buff without having to have the item equipped.
That looks great on paper, but there are reasons they don't do it that way. If ToV solo gear was only a slight upgrade over CoE solo gear, then it would be worthless to players with CoE group gear. The same would be true of ToV group gear for people with CoE raid gear, and with ez-mode raids and SLR, there are a lot of players with CoE raid gear. There are just too many tiers of gear now for incremental progression from expansion to expansion to work. Back in EoF (the last time we had incremental progression), you basically only had two or three tiers of gear for the entire end-game expansion. There wasn't a tier of solo gear (much less solo quest + advanced solo). There weren't ez-mode raids (or x2 raids). There was only one full set of raid armor for the entire expansion for each class. There were different special/junk pieces here and there, but not the full sets we're accustomed to now. EDIT: And all these new tiers of gear mean a wider gear gap, which segregates the player base. Resetting the gear with the expansion will bring people closer together in power, which facilitates grouping/raiding. The majority of us will be playing in ToV, not CoE, so we benefit from having more people at that power level. And unfortunately, people would have a hard time finding many CoE groups to work their way up to ToV group content under your system.
When you have one xpac for a certain level range, the Itemization is in line. So yes the L80 raid gear is obsolete at 90 but it serves a purpose at its intended level range. When you have 2 xpacs at the same level and one has gear that's twice as good, the poorer geared xpac has no value after the new one is released. That's what happened with SF and what's going to happen with CoE. All content at the same level should be in the same ball park (with progression obviously by risk vs reward) , otherwise there's no point in having the poorer one. Doesn't matter if it's heroic, solo or raid.
When they have new x2 content in CoE for example, I never kill it. The gear from it is never an upgrade for me so I don't see the point. I understand it is easier and therefore shouldn't have better loot by that is fine. The hardest mobs in the expansion have upgrades for me so I kill them while some more casual players may not. There is content for every style of players which is a really good thing. I understand where you are coming from but I just don't see it the same way as you do which is fine. In my eyes all content isn't for everyone. Casual players will not see the highest end content while high end raiders probably don't see much of the solo/heroic content.
It's only irrelevant if you're trying to use 3 expansion (and lets face it, DoV is basically 3 expansions at this point) on new content. If you are trying to use DoV gear on say Drunder content it will most definitely work. That's the whole idea behind item progression. But saying you should be able to use DoV gear on ToV content means that everything in-between sucked and there was no reason to play the game.
You keep mentioning risk/reward, but much of the CoE heroic content is now solo'able and much of the raid content is one-groupable. If ToV didn't provide much better gear, the path of least resistance to obtaining mid-level gear would probably be to do old content with fewer players than it was intended for, especially when you factor in the extra AAs we'll have.
I'm not saying use DoV gear in ToV. DoV was 90-92 (apart from PoW) so its gear is for that level. CoE on the other hand, is level 95 (for raids and heroic). If ToV loot is a steady improvement on CoE then that's fine, but it's not going to be, it's going to have triple the HP, making anything that drops in CoE pointless. The gap is widening so much that I bet solo loot from ToV will be better than CoE HM raids. Well I know my toons with a mix of top heroic, EM raid and a few pieces of HM/PoW cannot solo any heroics. Anyway, CoE is not something to consider as a good job on risk vs reward. DoV1 was ok, with basic heroics, then kael, then drunder from a heroic point of view.
What? Now I know that I've duoed heroic DC with a HM geared Healer but took forever. I can't see someone soloing it.
People use HM geared very loosely in todays terms =/ These heroics are definitely soloable, my bruiser who is what I would consider badly geared (though most would probably call his gear good) can easily do dreadcutter if I were to pull things 1 at a time for 3 minutes per trash mob. I've actually done both the Wurmbone HM zones in an awful group set up, pally, sk, ranger, necro, conj (yes 5 people no healer). The zones really are a cake walk, and shouldn't be argued how much of a cake walk This is also not on topic of the thread and if continued will only get the thread locked. Personally I believe the gear increasing this much is perfectly fine especially for a gear revamp. If they made gear another .2cb/pot upgrade system I know a LOT of people would no longer be interested in playing because the gear to chase isn't worth it, I know I would have.
My warden can solo the trash there and, probably the bosses too, granted she would probably wipe a bit doing so. We she completed the solo version, she gave a try to the heroic and she killed 2 trahs that were at that time red. According to your standards her gear is really bad (i m just returning). But like you it would takes "forever" . In DOV yo could solo instances (eg, Ascent even If i never tried solo the last boss at 90) but you needed more gear. I will try to do it with a mercenary, i did it with 2 level 92 and mercenary and it was sort of fun. I don't see the point in going there with a group unless it is with friends, way too trivial. And apparently almost all the instances are like that (but 1-2 not sure which ones, apparently dirinal requires real team play). Moreover the solo gear is enough to start raiding, so why would i bother with pick up groups ? Especially this late in the expansion, most of the people wanting to group are the worst of the servers. Note i m quite biased since i returned when the expansion was almost over, may be i would have been excited if i had been there on day one ;-)
Just did Chelsith solo on my moderately geared Inquisitor. /shrug Not that it's super easy or time efficient for me (except for the fact that I don't have to roll against anyone on the ethereal), but it's only going to get easier after ToV launches. Dropping gear relevant to ToV progression from these zones would be pretty silly. (And let's hope the ToV heroics aren't solo'd any time soon!) EDIT: And I guess it's a lot easier and more efficient with a mercenary...
It isn't meant to be like that. CoE EM > CoE HM > Dreadcutter > SG > SG HM Because you can sometimes skip steps so that the starting point isn't so far behind doesn't mean the gear is useless or that there is something wrong with progression. You also know this very well because obviously you'll be able to raid in ToV with CoE gear. Not to mention things like this stuff is only going to be easier than ToV by virtue of character power going up. 4SW Drinal got killed LAST year, in gear far less than what is attainable now. Should it still be that relevant going forward? It has value, if you kill it the gear is still of use, but if it wasn't for the curse on that fight it'd probably be 2 groupable with the expansion (if not now).
