It's been up as a topic before, but with the new style of "more communication" from the devs I thought I'd bring it up again and cross my fingers for a real response.

 

So the endgame loot stats seems to be a little "odd" to say the least.. Tons of accuracy and Endurance for classes not needing it, less main stats swapped for crit and surge etc..

Looking at it it could seem like the people putting stats on the gear has little idea of what the class needs, but I'm also pretty sure noone has a better idea of the internal mechanics in the game than Bioware..

 

This pretty much leaves 3 options.

 

1. The playerbase lacks the internal knowledge that Bioware does, and the stats are very carefully chosen to specifically balance (aka. help the player) progress through the next tier of endgame content. So full Rakata/BH gear is what you need to progress EC HM, Columi is designed to get you through EV/KP HM and so on. Stats are simply cherrypicked to combat the mathmatics behind each fight for each class.

 

2. Bioware decided to design the system so that players would ultimately need to first gear up on a certain tier of gear, and then after that hunt for Best in Slot modifications.The reason could be anything from a pure moneysink (swapping mods is huuuugely expensive), to being Biowares way of adding a carrot in the game for the more hardcore crowd.

 

3. Bioware managed to fubar the stat budgets from the beginning and are now dancing around diminishing returns, while still trying to give the illusion of your gear progressing.

 

Bonus. Somewhere deep in the Bioware dungeons, the monthly intern presses the "randomize stats" button after putting in the gear rating..

 

Hope to get some dev feedback on this question.

 

TL,DR: How does Bioware decide endgame equipment stats?

Its alittle of option 2 and alittle of option 3.

Most definitely not option 1.

Have they introduced any new type of mods/armourings or enhancements with BH/campaign gear? I cant think of any to be honest.

 

So, i think they just tell a program what modification items to use for certain armour sets, and hit a randomize button, look over the final result okay it and be on their way. It is obvious with tier one gear they didnt give it much of a final look, or just rushed it out rather quickly. With tier 2, it is obvious that they have deselected some of the options, while keeping others, hopefully if and when they do tier 3 they will spend the time and effort to actually itemized things individually.

Its clearly(or at least it seems thatway to me) number 2.

 

And it sort of needs to be that way. If campaign gear just came perfectly itemized there would be no point to being a bunch of professions(mod/armoring/enhancement) and about a million other reasons(why even have mods etc if youre never gonna swap anything, timesink, harder to get bis etc).

 

Also dont find it that expensive but I have 2 chars with slicing so :>

Its clearly(or at least it seems thatway to me) number 2.

 

And it sort of needs to be that way. If campaign gear just came perfectly itemized there would be no point to being a bunch of professions(mod/armoring/enhancement) and about a million other reasons(why even have mods etc if youre never gonna swap anything, timesink, harder to get bis etc).

 

Also dont find it that expensive but I have 2 chars with slicing so :>

 

I don't want it to be perfect, but it seems waaaaayyy off now..

 

In MY perfect world the stats would be useful, but the very best in slot stuff would come from crafters using crafting mats gathered from raids. As it is now I'm looking at getting Smuggler gear to rip out stuff for my Shadow.. That's just wrong imo!..

Black Hole and Campaign gear is reasonably well itemized. Rakata gear has way, way, WAY too much accuracy.

There is also a silly amount of alacrity on Sage / Sorc gear. It either needs to have a significantly higher impact on what you do for the points or needs to be on far less pieces of gear. As a DPS sorc I basically have to buy all of the force master BH / campaign gear AND all of the Force mystic gear to max out my willpower while keeping crit at 40% and surge at 75% then working on power. I'm gearing up 2 characters to gear up one, at incredible credit expense of moving around mods / enhancements / armorings.

 

It's not quite as bad as the accuracy problem, but it often gets overlooked.

Thank you for the answer.. So it's pretty much as option 2..

 

I was afraid it was JUST the automatic process, and that process just looooooved stacking weird stats making players run into diminishing returns or accuracy ratings of 110%

As long as the next tier of gear doesn't have Tank armorings in DPS gear I'll be much happier. Armorings are by far the most annoying since they're slotted and therefore a lot harder to properly itemize (though I'd heard they were thinking of removing slotted armorings in future updates).

I can already see huge problems with the mod system due to the games design.

 

Every class is two stat heroes and in Campaign mods you easily reach the point of DR's on crit/surge etc making future sets worthless as there is no advantage to going past certain percentages.

 

Due to the limitied secondary states such as crit/surge/power then all future will be the same type of the thing such as 60 strength/50 Endurance/50 Power/60 Surge and so on.

 

Bioware would have been better letting all classes use every stat in the game and putting hard to reach caps.

 

As it is unless there is a fundamental change is itemization then future raiding content is not worth the effort.

I don't want it to be perfect, but it seems waaaaayyy off now..

 

In MY perfect world the stats would be useful, but the very best in slot stuff would come from crafters using crafting mats gathered from raids. As it is now I'm looking at getting Smuggler gear to rip out stuff for my Shadow.. That's just wrong imo!..

 

Yeah, I think I bought 5 striker's boots with comms because they were the only thing that had a single mod I needed. I don't even have a sith assassin.

It's not because I really dislike this minigame of hunting BiS mods, but the are a few things bioware should be very careful about..

 

First of all they need to make sure that EVERY BiS modification exists within a class's equipment.. I don't want to end up with a game where it's suddenly okay to Need on other classes pieces because you know it contains a mod that is BiS for you..

 

Secondly they need to take a looooong hard look at the costs associated with hunting BiS stuff.. Especially if you're a class that needs to utilize pvp and pve sets and need to switch your expertise mods in and out.

 

It ends up with players needing to grind money, and even though money is not that hard to get, it's not a fun activity in the game as it is right now.. Unless you have some extremely sought after recipe, you have to run dailies until you're blue in the face.. It's simply not a fun activity.. Reducing the cost with 90% seems fair.. 3000 creds per pull seems like a decent level to put it at..

i saw one a Pryo with the same BH gear set (witch has no bonus set) and it had all high stack endo with Crit and surge and power and he was a DPS im like wow clearly your a noob the dude had more 200 more ENDO than AIM so if people cant figure out to buy all the HIGH stack main stat gear for DPS/Heals then they shouldn't be playing this game. I mean your Heals/DPS how hard it to relize "Oh i need High stacked main stat" just do you Teir 1 Dailys and get the bouns set's from Teir 1/2 Gear you can buy until you get good raid groups geard out and then you get finaly get the Camp Armor mods to make you look different and to tell the truth most Bouns sets are POOP.

Our goal is that a highly-skilled player can complete content without needing to swap mods on their gear, but spending the time and credits necessary to optimize the mods should still make a noticeable difference.

 

That is simply not the case in PvP. If 2 equally skilled people meet - a player with higher power+surge wins (which means he spent dozens of hours grinding for force-mystic hands - not only the basic full war hero gear grind is beyond unacceptable but to fully optimize your gear you need 8 x force-mystic gloves. Are you serious? That is 16000 rated comms + ~7000 wz comms IN ADDITION to full war hero.

 

That additional grind would not be necessary if the gear sets were properly itemized and game systems functioned correctly. But in the current state of game systems mitigation and avoidance are broken so the best way to succeed in pvp is to roll a high force/tech damage character (like powertech or rage juggernaut) and stack power/surge which most of the times are the only viable stats for any class in any type of gameplay.

Edited August 29, 2012 by vandana_

If im honest i like the swapping of modifications to achieve best available final stats, it adds depth to the game and is what any MMO needs. The gear should be good enough to compete or complete all content, as it stands...but the smart players should be able to go the extra mile.

 

I do agree at the moment the stats are a little off for some of the classes....and should be looked at for future gear sets. But please dont take away an awesome feature of the game by making it too casual friendly. If anything the only thing that is broken with the system, is the cost of extracting all the modifications.......as an earlier post mentioned im sick and tired of doing dailies to fund this. Even with the reduction in price this is still too expensive.....and needs to be at least reduced by half.........god forbid to change my custom look now would cost me a million.

 

Bioware have to remember people normally collect a main set and a off set for PVE , add to that a PVP set and your talking enough dailies to put you off the bloody game for good.

My biggest complaint is mods is still the cost to remove the mods from the armor.

 

For all intents and purposes, your armor and weapon(s) are just containers that holds your real equipment, your mods. I frequently find myself unable to equip these new mods when I loot them because I can't afford to remove all of them from the horrendous armor that was holding them.

 

Also, not a fan of the -Black crystals but I have a hard time finding (and being able to afford) comparable crystals.

If the system is going to continue like it is with new tiers (with the change beings that the correct armor mods will be slotted in the new gear), I'd like to see individual mods and enhancements be made available by what ever replaces blackhole comms. That way you could spend a few less comms for the item you need, instead of having to buy the highest priced item, just to pull 1 mod or enhancement out of.

The BiS barrel for Smugglers of all flavors is impossible to get without A) Having an imp toon, raiding HM denova for a token drop and transferring the barrel to your Smuggler with the legacy-bound rifles from the last world event, or B) buying a skill barrel crafted by an Imperial player who got the schematic from a RE of a HM denova drop.

 

 

TL;DR: There is no way for a Republic player to craft or obtain Skill Barrel 26.

Edited August 29, 2012 by PresBMK

Developers, please answer this:

 

Is impossible to change stats of items, ie. roll back the armor modifications with higher endurance than mainstat?

 

Furthermore, I am curious to know why, for an example, Imperial side Smuggler Campaign barrel mainhand has more cunning than that of Republic side (big boys told me)?

 

I am asking this because it seems to be possible to change an item from bound to bound to legacy and making items adaptive (ie. modefication of Karagga's hat to adaptive).

 

Why should it be impossible to change static armor modification or barrel, nevermind if it has been moved from it's original item? If it's possible, what is the reason it doesn't happen and things are fixed only in later tiers?

 

If these things were fixed, people would be generally happy about it. Even me, even though I have grinded the better modifications for couple of alts.

 

Yours, Ruswyn of Nightmare Lands

I'm not surprised that cost keeps coming up in this thread. Bio really needs to listen to this...I think they heard it, but they're really not listening.

 

the cost is simply prohibitive. I have grown tired of dailies. I don't mind a quick BH run, Yet I have to consistently grind dailies just to keep up. a new piece of armor may throw of my set bonus...or now i have to augment that too. or I get a BH piece, and i want 2 mods from it, but I don't want to lose the mods currently in my worn piece. that's. 120k plus right there. That's everything i made in my BH run, including the weekly reward and running 4 man heroic. or that's belasivis dailies (and who isn't burnt out on those yet?).

 

the COST is simply getting tiring. regearing a single piece of gear shouldn't cost me my days wages. regearing completely is understandable. but a single piece?

 

I'd even be OK with 15k per high end mod. and adjusting downwards as we get higher tiers of gear coming in (i.e. the highest level tier will always be 15k) 31k per mod is simply too much.

Whatever synthetic that was used to guess at mods for endgame gear had a Friday afternoon when you did black hole sentinel gear, it is plainly and simply WRONG, instead most PVE sents have to buy guardian DPS spec and strip it, (because we can't use heavy armor dah)and put into to the Rakata gear they already have; I say most because their are a few that don't bother to check how their DPS is doing and think a start up robe with a pair of Ewock snow skis stuck on the shoulders actually looks good, fould looking armour and worse yet bad stats.

 

So to be effective we have to spend on the armour it's self and then spend around 90k pulling the correct mods out of someone elses armor. And i don't believe the "testing" to me the stats are uprated tioneese which work at that level but cease to be effective past 58, and could you please at least try to make higher end gear look like it's higher end?

 

needed to get that off my chest

There is also a silly amount of alacrity on Sage / Sorc gear. It either needs to have a significantly higher impact on what you do for the points or needs to be on far less pieces of gear. As a DPS sorc I basically have to buy all of the force master BH / campaign gear AND all of the Force mystic gear to max out my willpower while keeping crit at 40% and surge at 75% then working on power. I'm gearing up 2 characters to gear up one, at incredible credit expense of moving around mods / enhancements / armorings.

 

It's not quite as bad as the accuracy problem, but it often gets overlooked.

 

I'd love for the crap can't remember name, but the middle tree of sages to be viable.

In future tiers, you'll see many issues with mod allocation corrected!

 

rofl.

 

Fix what's in game now, or nobody will be around to see the "future tiers!"

Evidence seems to indicate that we can expect a lackluster effort, moving forward.

1) Split the gear into FOUR PIECES & you pick the Shell, Armor, Mod and Enhancment instead?

--- Shell (Any orange item of your choice)

....... Or cost 5-10 BH Comms each for BH versions / Set Bonus

--- Armor 20 BH Comms

--- Mod 15 BH Comms

--- Enhancement 15 BH Comms

 

2) Yes, I agree that Extraction costs are crazy! Even with 30% less I hate changing my "Look" with no value.

 

3) Madness SORC DPS has to buy Striker gear and/or swap out +57 Alacrity MOD's to have decent CRIT.

 

4) WHY do we need to make Orange Bracers/Belts that have Better Stats than Black Hole & Campaign equals?

 

- ty