Why is heroic gear now better than raid gear!

Pieces of rare heroic gear surpassing pieces of common easy mode raid gear means there is no longer a reason to raid?

If you're going to make the argument that its too easy that's fine. I have no problem with that. My beef is with the people that think that it's unacceptable that easy mode raid quality things drop in heroics on occasion.

Overcharged gems ARE raid gear. So basically "Heroic Gear + Raid Gear" is now better than "Just Raid Gear". Which makes sense. And T2 raid is better than either.

The fact that the newest released raid content is providing upgrades over previously released entry-level raid zone also makes perfect sense.

The REAL problem is the fact that Labs is entirely too easy. If Labs were at least on the same (or slightly higher) difficulty level as AS, then this would make sense in progression...but then...

If Labs were slightly harder than Sanctum, would any of your guilds that currently clear AS actually bother to spend time running labs for those tiny upgrades? Even though labs is piss easy and provides this slightly better armor would you waste your raid time clearing it for the extra 0.2 CB/PoT? Or would you just keep doing AS, getting energized, fractured and shiny reds?

tbh every piece in heroic you could wear over raid (until you get to the endgame raid zone). I would call that almost not a reason to raid yes.

Oy... appreciate the blindsiding of my posts first of all that showed non-raiders matter.. LMFAO. This change is the only one SOE has recently did that mattered for it's customer base. Sorry you all feel left out. *grin*

Apparently, you "raiders" matter more...............

Seriously? This expac was tailor made for people to do heroic and solo stuff so please enough with the raiders are more important crap. The reason some raiders including myself are pissed is because we took the Energized route spending our dkp to get it over a matter of 2 months. As a raid we get maybe one piece a night IF and that's a big IF we get lucky. I was full potent in a matter of 8 days. So yea it kind of sucks after 2 months they decide to change things up and make potent better than raid items. Please don't compare spending 10-15 minutes doing halls or labs with spending a hours and days learning zones and strats. And before people say that you can do it in a couple of hours...sure you can now. But when we were first doing the zones it took days.

Don't try to explain it to Vailene. Vailene didn't have any energized pieces to begin with. He/She doesn't understand the pain that comes with crunching six potents for gems... to find out that potents would be more valuable just a few hours later. Vailene just thinks its great that the "normals" have access to better than T1 gear... He/She has issues with raiders and that is his/her whole agenda.

You cannot compare raiding to heroic. First time in Lab in AS/quested gear we wiped may 2-3 times
and we got it right. Now it takes 15mn to clear that instance.

First tries on the Naga Lady in accursed sanctum, we spend 2-3 hours wiping
(mostly due to incorrect debuffing). Now with correct debut we do it easily.

You get 2 loot for 24 people ...

Lab 15-20 : 4 fabled + each one get a chest and etymon, difficulty none (we already did it with 4 people the two last missing more than 100% crit chance)

Matri marn : 10 mn fight if we got it rightm usually we will wipe 1-2 so it takes already 30mn.
Add trash, time to gather people and so on ...

And think about the task of the raid leader, he needs 24 people connected at the same time
he also need to meet some composition requirement.

Not only at least 2 solid tanks (sometime 3 or even 4) , but also decent healers, mana regen, hate transfert,
buffers, debuffers and some dps cap.

And this is an easy raid.

In hard mode people can spend days trying to kill a mob and then after several evenings
two loot drop.

The difference between raid and heroic should be the same than between arcane and advanced solo.

On top, for raids, one needs to keep track of loots, assiduity, to have some loot rule organised (not necessarly dkp it can any formal system). You almost need a forum/web site. Moreover if you miss the requirements someone has to level an alt and get it equiped ....

Add on top human aspects, what do you do if someone is really bad at palying his toon ?
get someone to give him advices ? ask him to play another toon ? Kick him (that's waht hard core guid do but familly teams won't do that) ...

And if hard core guild simply solve performance issue by recruiting good players and kicking others, they face other difficulties : people may leave if they feel that they don't get rewarded (loot loot rules hell)
or simply go to any guild that progress faster.


For heroic content I can just pick almost any tank (with low requirement such as 550 CC and 400 hp slef buffed)
and 4 random people (granted that some do at least a small 800k dps) and we are set.

Okay, PvP and PvE are entirely different games so that doesn't really apply man. Also YOUR skill isn't really what's in question here. The argument being made (well, one of the multiple arguments here which keeps coming back to skill level) is that it takes more skill to complete raid content than it does to complete heroic content. It requires coordination and the time of MANY people. I get that you don't raid these days, which more power to you if that is how you enjoy playing, but raids are significantly more difficult now than they were in previous expansions; especially at the higher end. There are a few exceptions to this here and there, but to raid successfully requires dedication as a TEAM and is requires a lot of people to commit time together.

The real problem is that unless raid gear is better enough than heroic gear to make it desirable then there becomes no reason to raid. Also, if you don't raid then you never have need of raid quality gear. All that accomplishes is that is completely trivializes the heroic level content.

Raid content requires a higher level of gear (or has in the past) to be completed and it's suppose to work that way. You gear up, fight harder mobs that in turn give better gear so you can fight even harder mobs. It's a cycle that has existed for a long time and it is a major part of the progression that drives raiding. If raiding isn't your thing, and clearly it isn't, cool. But you don't need raid gear in order to enjoy the heroic level content. There must be a reason to raid or else the entire raid community will die. If you don't get better gear from raiding then there isn't much reason to raid at all. The new zone that the put in is MUCH easier than AS and honestly is easier than some heroic zones. This means that anyone can now have access to gear that is BETTER than raid gear but only really put forth a heroic amount of work. This breaks progression.

Rofl. Bot guilds on Freeport are already selling loot from Lord Vyemm due to the lack of any decent scripts.......THANKS DEVS

Also, to the guy arguing about it being the best thing that has ever happened to casuals.... ToV has been all equal in stats for awhile, not sure you understand what is happening here. Seems like some of you guys are posting about "CASUAL POWER" without any idea on what is going on. The gear that is dropping in contested shouldn't be that common in a zone that you don't need to have X-pac for (Other than +sta, its the best gear you can get ATM pretty much on some pieces). The raid difficulty is a JOKE. Not just "decent", no, it is TERRIBLY easy.

Nobody cares about solos and how you feel BETTER than raid quality pieces should drop in a zone I can duo. This isin't a emulated server where you "LOLSUMMONGEAR" and have fun. Some of the zones in this update are screwed. I don't think many of you understand that it isin't about this expac, or this month, or this week. This is screwing up stuff in the long run.

The "change" you speak of has happened when ToV launched. You are 100% correct, non-raiders do NOT matter because it is not the non-raiders that get screwed in the long run. Stop with the casual vs raider stuff. This is one of the few topics that does not concern Non-raiders. Seriously, just stop. You don't see me posting in the decorator forum about how I can't have a pre-made layout do you?. For the last 2 months, the gear you get from heroics is VERY close to what you can get in raids. Some of the procs are actually better in heroic zones. With the KoS zones, everything is completely out of wack, that is why people are posting, no one is on a mission to take anything away from anyone.

Because of how easy Fabled Halls is, our guild is not even considering pulling Accursed Sanctum anymore. The only reason to go in is Legionnaires and Emperor, and Legionnaires takes 1 person being out of position to completely wipe instantly and you never get a 2nd pull.

The fact that our guild leaders are debating if the time spent in AS is even worth it for 2 Red Gems shows leagues about how little incentive there is in AS because of how easy FHoLV is.

As mainly a raider I hate this expac. I dont get how progression is supposed to be anymore. Go do the first raid zone Accursed Sanctum to progress to the next tier raid zone by getting gear that has lower stats than heroic gear? Oh wait no, go do heroic zones to progress to the tier 2 TOV raid zone? Oh wait no maybe go do Labs and get better raid gear there than the tier 2 TOV raid zone? or wait or would that be Halls of Fate?

Why raid anymore? We dont kill avatars so guilds that just want to progress noirmally like before through the raid zones are out of luck. I can just go do heroics to get best gear in game now why bother raiding?

It's pretty easy tbh. There are now multiple paths. You can do:

AS ---> ToV
AS + heroics ---> ToV
Labs + heroics ---> ToV
AS + Labs + heroics ---> ToV

Choose whatever path best suits your guild's playstyle (lots of non-raid play / little non-raid play, etc.) and go forward. The progression is pretty basic. Throw in some DMP, DC and SG for some special items too if you got time and inclination. Either one of these progression paths will equip your raid just fine for doing ToV, which is the main progression zone for the expac.

If your guild is all "raiders only" and doesn't do heroics at all, you can get all your red gems out of just doing AS and progress. If your guild doesn't have enough time to fully farm AS every week but does a lot of heroics, you can skip getting AS armor and just upgrade the heroic by doing the faster labs zone. If your guild can do both, you'll just get geared up faster. It's not rocket science.

The only way the new overcharged gems make any sense whatsoever is if they upgraded Energized + red gem. That way, the upgrade path would be heroics --> AS --> Labs --> ToV.

Right now, having already crunched my Potent gear in order to upgrade my Energized gear under the assumption that Energized gear still served some sort of purpose progressionwise, I feel completely cheated.

I agree and clarified through proceeding posts in this thread the issues that need to be addressed was the ease to obtain the gear and that we were blindsided by this change. Also another fix would be to beef up energized if they chose not to increase the labs difficulty. either restores a sensible progression path. There are multiple ways to fix this issue.My opening post was about starting a conversation. My follow up clearly aligns with what I quoted above.

Now tell me how does your post fix the fact so many people got burned by crunching their potent for fractured gems? This was after-all the progression path. For a min/max raider this unannounced progression change could and did cost 7x3x90=1890 etymas from crunched 3 gem potent gear.

That is almost 19 days of doing every etyma instance, each of those days, over again. I call that a serious waste of effort. All because of a significant yet unannounced change. That isn't fun. This is the same kind of stuff that has killed other games that turn progression into mind-numbing hamster wheel grinding.

Please SOE do something about this. We are back to COE days. Now we are going to have botters selling second best in slot armor. You were supposed to be moving away from this. The loot in these fabled zones is a disaster for the level of difficulty!

All you have done with these new fabled loots is turn eq2 into pay-to-win with the botters help.

I do agree that SOE kinda blindsided people with the Overcharged armor, ending up in people making bad decisions.

But. When in the history of EQ2 did developers EVER tell people "this is the loot you'll get in the new raid zone, here is a list"? Not ever. People knew that was a full new raid zone - with like 10 encounters, that had SOME kind of ToV loot. People chose to make decisions before waiting a day to find out what kind of loot is in there. Which was stupid.

Now, because of the specific situation in that the loot in Labs specifically impacted the ANNOUNCED and discussed gem changes, it really should have been somehow communicated or at least hinted at that "new overcharched gems are now available to help increase the power of your potent armor further" or something like that. .

I'm still on the fence about how I feel about the overcharged stuff, but I have a questions to pose.

1. If they released these zones and the loot wasn't at least as good as AS, wouldn't there have been a huge stink about how worthless the zone is?

2. While overcharged can be though to be "better" than AS loot, we are talking about .1 % better blue stats and, 1 point better on primary stat, 32 points more STA, but less Mitigation. It's not really an upgrade For all intents and purposes, it's pretty much the same gear. So, the progression hasn't really changed at all.

3. Isn't calling overcharged "heroic gear" a bit disingenuous? While Potent is heroic, the gem that makes it Overcharged is not.

4. Is it really less work to get? You can get a fractured red gem by converting your 3 gem potent armor for 50 etyma, or now from random bosses, or use the full red crystal off the final bosses, or have someone craft you one for a large number of etyma. On the other hand, I can replace a cryptic, arcane, or worse slot with Energized easily in a raid, or by SLR. I may be able to get the gem for overcharged via SLR, but I still need to do the heroic content to get that potent, and that ton of etyma to gem it up. Overall, it seems how much effort depends on the situation. There will be times where it's easier to go the overcharged root, there will be times where it is easier to go the Energized route.

5. What type of armor should they have dropped in the zone? If they simply dropped energized patterns would there be the same complaints?

6. If anything, doesn't the overcharged stuff kind of enhance the solo to heroic to raid progression SOE had planned for this expansion?