Actually, I have 7 sets of appearance armor, and one set I spent literally months farming for. and this was about raids being 'too easy' or not giving big upgrades/super omg jumps in power over heroic stuff. and yes, the raiders make up a much smaller percent of the population then people seem to think, so no, I don't find it overly odd that a lot of great stuff is dropping more so in Heroic/adv solo zones over Raiding anymore. that's the content the bulk of the playerbase actually uses. Raiding still gives better gear. especially I am sure after infusing it. but it's just not a monsterous jump to make a raider look like a god compared to a solo/heroic player just because of his gear. now a good heroic player can actually compete with or even outdo an average/mediocre raider.
Of course they wouldn't. That was back when forced grouping was the rule of the day and MMO's were a very niche activity. You had the king of the hill (Lineage I+II), then you had Everquest and Final Fantasy XI (the next two to eventually break 500k concurrent subscribers - still nothing close to Lineage). It wasn't until World of Warcraft came and shattered the barriers of perception that playing an MMO became a mainstream and 'socially acceptable' thing to do.
Again, only in regards to blue and green stats and only very small amounts. Effects/procs are identical and solos/heroics so far have the monopoly cloaks, war runes and and even some other procs. Considering that it takes MUCH more effort to get the gear in raids (even with how easy these ones are which I blame on itemization) the work to reward ratio is off by quite a bit. 'raiding is its own reward' is pretty much true now since you can't get anything unique out of it. Heroics offer more when it would be a simple matter to take heroic loot and add them to raid loot tables as is or with an infinitesimal boost. There's no point to raid content this xpac. Why even waste time making it if they aren't going to itemize it like every successful MMO has in the past ~15 years? And no, this is NOT how they itemize them, I've raided in most of them. They could have at least released a proper group DF with the xpac with this kind of nonsense.
I was thinking about this thread for a bit and there's something that jumped out at me. Infusion allows for those who play in multiple playstyles to invest their time to create those gaps that the thread complains does not exist. So even among raiders those who raid regularly for months and months will have access to more infusions and more plat of which they can generally push their gear higher than a super casual raider who just used to show up get a few pieces and /beat EQ2. _ _ _ Back in Sentinel's Fate the +2 cb/pot everywhere for an aggregate gain seemed like a gathering inches to move feet and we all had to get used to it. Last year there was AS/Heric/Raid and then gemming. Now the starting points aren't that big of a gap but the access to more plat and better/more infusions scales with time spent in the game and favors Heroic/Raiders at that which arguably it should as they need more ummph vs their content. _ _ _ If I were to make one adjustment to the current system it would be that there should be a way to carry infusions per slot over to new equipment within an expansion pack. This way people who are raiders that haven't gotten the drops in x4 raiding don't have to wait until they get their terminal gear to start piling on the plat/infusers. The ceiling is still quite high so I don't think many would fully peg even one character if they allowed such a mechanic. Advanced Solo partial Heroic players won't really notice the difference as they aren't diehard min/max players but those of us in the middle might might benefit as well. As an example, back in DoV I didn't blink when popping on x2/x4 equipment or switching out 1H/Shield/2H but in ToV/AoM I waited to get fully T2 Heroic before gem filling via tokens. Here in ToT I can already see my plan is to not using any infusion until ~mid January or even February when it is likely I've gotten most of my terminal non-raid or early raiding items. It would make more sense if the system encouraged me to use plat/infusers as I get them like I spend the deity points. _ _ _ Are we sure that infusions can't act like spiritual sockets in every slot? Even if we get them 50% capped (plat or infusions) upon transfer to a new piece it won't feel like starting over when we replace that item with the marginally better one that will be better once we re-infuse it.
What is the plat split for raiding in ToT? The only money I see as a non-raider is my 500p loyalty bag ~6k a month so that 1/2 of the infusion boost is off the table entirely for me. If AoM created players who think 400K plat is petty cash I don't even want to imagine what ToT is going to do. After 6 months of plat split raiders will have the gap between them and solo/heroic players they feel they deserve off the bat.
Uhm.. as a 'non-raider', don't you do AS quests/zones? Heroic quests/zones? Crafting quests? Kill over land mobs? Any/all of those give plat. I regular come back with 100-200 more plat just from a single run of the 6 AS zones...
A 'good' plat split (not best, and not super common or rare) at the end of the month is about 10k. Considering how much we dump into consumables to kill top end stuff a good portion of that can disappear. I've never had 50k at one time from raiding and i don't farm for plat otherwise. That was in AoM though, right now raid gear being uninteresting or garbage in general compared to heroic gear our people aren't interested in buying it for alts and we aren't interested in halting the raid to sell stuff to outsiders. This month i'm looking at about 1k from raid revenue. None of this is counting the actual split from the chests themselves (we just leave split on). The blue stats are just a part of the problem. If you look at it the other way though you can make a 'raid piece' out of a solo piece with some infusing since the effect is always the same and the loss in green stats/mit is minimal unless you are wearing a full set of solo gear. They have made a large mistake in relying on the 'defensive' side of raid gear to make them desirable. From offensive side of stats (the interesting/fun side) there is very little difference. Gearing up for progression is entirely made up of 'eating your vegetables' (defense). When a piece of jewelry has the best defenses (resist/stamina) it should also have the best OFFENSE. A 'balanced meal.' The loot in AoM did this well. The loot in ToT doesn't do this at all unless you consider an effect you can get off solo gear 'the best offense' which it technically is since there is no variation in an effects' power across styles/tiers. So an effect is only 'best' because its the only variation available. Item effects also need to go up. For example If 'Furious Barrage' can drop in solo giving group 22% per increment, then there should be a Furious Barrage II that drops in heroics that gives 26% and Furious Barrage III that drops in raids that gives 30%. No ones super excited to get the same effect they fell backwards into while soloing but now it has more resists and possibly LESS cb/pot/mod/sta if they infused the solo piece.
I don't understand the thought of everyone should have equal access to gear regardless of playstyle. What even is that even? My character is wearing about half solo gear mixed in with some aom bis pieces and 2 raid weapons. We have killed all but 2 mobs in instanced content. Half if not 75 percent of the gear our raid has seen has either been salvaged, given to alts or looted just to get a disco and hope that the item gets better in the future. Most items we see are complete trash and this even goes for the harder mobs that only one other guild has killed. This should not be this way, it's absurd. Why invest so much time into raiding when I can go clear all of the solos twice and get better upgrades for my character? In every expansion until now there has been a significant reason to raid with gear being better than anywhere else. That is the point of raiding. Doing the most challenging part of the game and being rewarded for it. The only reason to raid at the moment is for progression. Then what? The gear is terrible and people aren't going to continue to want to do this after the challenge of defeating the encounter for the first time is over. If the only thing I have to look forward to is replacing my current items with the raid version that has 20 more stats and a couple more cb and potency I'm not going to be playing much longer. Man, some of the raid items have even been worse with lower resists than items I have from the solos. Also, stop it with the whole raiders get better infusers thing. Just no.
The infusion system is confusing at best. What you can get from each infusor is different depending on what piece you are using it on. From what I understand of the system (which is not documented at all) it appears that the better the quality of the piece is, the higher it can be infused. While this ultimately doesn't have any effect on procs, it does significantly have an effect on the value dev assigned to the piece. The full value of infusions seems to be calculated into the itemization value of each item in this expansion. There was a big thread in the Tradeskill Beta forum about dropping refining from ToT. The initial calculation for ToT crafted gear had MC gear with lower stats than handcrafted because it was possible to refine, experiment and infuse the pieces. It wasn't until there was a second pass and refining was dropped that MC gear started with better stats than Handcrafted just because the potential top end number was the one used in calculations. So the raid drops in ToT probably suffer from something similar. Because the variance is larger for the raid item, they started with a larger chunk of their potential locked away in infusions. I think the infusion concept was good, but the implementation was bad. And I think the entire infusion process is meant to be the sort of grindy, plat driven machine that is suppose to encourage all the min-maxers to grind plat and flush it down the drain that is deity infusions, because you can actually become better than those that won't.
Fine. Then make RAID CONTENT drop more plat and parts for infusers so we can properly unlock our RAID LOOT without having to do tons of non-raid activities. Call me crazy but I don't think people would be excited about the opportunity to dump an obscene amount of resources into their equipment to unlock them fully. Infusing should be a bonus, not an integral part of tiering itemization.
The time of the raid players in Everquest 2 is over, Daybreak is another way or that way, as in all other MMO games. Daybreak is because off select worlds bosses in open content to kill. The loot should go for all types of players forward, and so also play each other more interesting. What brings you four times to take the week to Raiden when the joint group game suffers many Raid players have not even seen a Heroic zone because they skip this content. That's not the purpose of gams and what imagines daybreak, therefore, was the loot and very balanced in this XPac.
When a casual raid guild in less that 3 bits of AS gear and last expansion raid gear (no avatar loot) can clear T2 content and not actually want to loot any of the gear that has dropped there is a drastic problem.. When no one wants to even give it to the alts its a joke. The mistakes Firstly with the AS and Heroic gear being so OP that is make the raid content meaningless. 2nd No reward for actually doing the zones. 3rd that the gear is so mindlessly cookie cutter and computer generated. Infusions sound cool but you have missed the point in why people raid and though infusions can add a dimension to itemization t it can't be a subsititute for it. Its about the bling! You guys have missed with the loot for raiding when all the hard work was done making up the encounters and zones. Its sad that it becomes pointless and obsolete even before you enter the zone to clear it.
This part I can actually get behind (shocking for those who know me?). From what I've seen posted on the forums, in most (not all) cases raiding does drop better base loot than the heroics and solo, with the 'assumption' (yes, I know what that word means) that infusing will make it better still. I suspect that once they get a handle on how much plat is being drained by infusing (the real reason infusing was worked into the game), they'll be able to open the 'faucet' a bit and let more plat flow in to cover it. My guess is they have a lot of excess plat to drain off first before they'll be comfortable doing that. Either that and the excess plat is going to stay where it is and they'll have to make a decision based on that.
For being so terrible, it sure is going for an awful lot in the auction channel SLR's. Like, 6-figures.
Yes.. and some people are paying 4 figures for advanced solo stuff... it's amazing how much plat people will throw around to NOT play the game....
Yeah but I haven't looked back after an evening of a few zones or the contested and said to myself.... Wow that was hundreds or thousands of plat I just sold to the trash vendor... As an Inq I just can't do the zones very fast. I don't die but it takes forever. ToT set me back to pre-DOF Cleric days. 6 zones would take me 3-4 hours for sure. 100-200p for 3-4 hours of my life just isn't efficient and certainly not something I plan on doing by myself. It takes less out of me (the player) to heal a heroic group for the same time window although I don't seek out (nor really desire) SLR runs where we 6-way a 150K plat weapon. The real question is .... where did 400K players come from? No way were they 18hrs/365day players in AoM that just happened to accumulate that much plat. 10 people in the game? Maybe. A few hundred... nah there was a much easier way that didn't involve crafting, SLR (the money came from somewhere else), etc. Note: Crafting hasn't been a viable source of income since SF changed the rare prices.
SLR is a completely different issue then raiding. Most raids don't SLR there gear. People who SLR tend to have more plat then people who don't. People who raid don't tend to make more plat then people who don't. Is it really that bad for Inquisitors? I run through them solo just fine on my warden.
I agree. It was mind boggling to see 2K -10K Advanced Solo SLR that weren't as good as the 60p MC I bought off the broker. I thought about popping a fresh 60p purchase off the broker during the SLR spam at half the SLR price of the lesser dropped item to ... point out... the issue but thought better of it.
