BW,

I have officially completed my 10th HM run. I do not have a single piece of gear from those runs. Not drops, not commendation pieces, NOTHING.

I understand that I've just had bad luck with the drops. That's just how things go. However, after those 10 runs, I only have 22 commendations. Not even enough to buy a single piece of gear from the vendor.

You know what that is? ITS WASTING MY TIME.

BW you DRASTICALLY need to change the amount of commendations awarded from Hard Mode Flashpoints. The fact that I can't afford a single piece of gear after 10 runs is absolutely fracking stupid.

Yes I'm mad, but seriously I don't think I'm wrong here. PATCH THIS ASAP.

Not only that, but the ratio of crystals to commendations is also out of whack. That'd be forgivable if there was something useful to buy with only crystals (like stims, or something), but as it is, after buying my first item I'm sitting at 6 commendations and 121 crystals. Er...ok.

I'm not sure why they didn't just set it to just one type of Tion commendation and make each boss/miniboss drop one. The crystals thing is pretty redundant, confusing, and pointless.

Not only that, but the ratio of crystals to commendations is also out of whack. That'd be forgivable if there was something useful to buy with only crystals (like stims, or something), but as it is, after buying my first item I'm sitting at 6 commendations and 121 crystals. Er...ok.

 

I'm not sure why they didn't just set it to just one type of Tion commendation and make each boss/miniboss drop one. The crystals thing is pretty redundant, confusing, and pointless.

I agree, the ratio of the crystals is bizarre. I have WAY more of those than I need, and nothing to do with the excess. This system is really poorly implemented. It's making gearing up for operations WAY more painful than it needs to be.

Yeap, played 10-50+ in a group of friends and did all the flashpoints multiple times and now the hard modes, Trooper gets all his stuff so quick, many times the only thing that dropped was trooper, then a lot of Consular stuff and none of us is one.

Third most popular is knight gear, except I only have 1 of them (Columi Boots) and the scoundrel has never seen a piece drop, this is 22 runs.

As above, I'm tanking in mostly PVP gear (which is almost as low), I was able to craft T3 Rakata bracers/Belt, Proc crits on boots and gloves of the Beskar'Gam Artifact quality for the slots and yep, was a good 2 days head start, since then, nothing. That was over 2 weeks ago.

I hate RNG in acquiring items, nobody should have to spend a day or more getting something than another person doing exactly the same thing.

For some, it's weeks whilst others consistantly get gear every few days, of course those who get all this stuff won't complain and tell us to stop, but they wouldn't sing the same tune if I got all my gear in the first week and they were still trying in 2.

HMs are not worth the time, they are just fun pitstop when not raiding. I just PvP now, as it will actually yield some useful gear until raiding.

Sad.

I was under the impression that for operations and hard mode flashpoints, everyone no matter their profession would get a "loot bag" that would contain good gear or tokens to get good gear.

The impression I, and I suspect many of you got from this statement was that you'd never do a HM flashpoint or operation and come away with nothing gear wise, and if you did then you'd have the tokens from 1-5 bosses to buy something.

That isn't the case.

Yea the amount of commendations is really stupid. Normally you would have enough gear that you would never get to use the tionese commendations/crystals only because they take so long to acquire and require such extreme amounts.

Also the randomness in drops is really frustrating, getting all strength gear the one time we do not have a warrior in our team is painful. Personally the whole hardmode/operation part of the game is extremely broken and it's offending that bioware even dares to ask for money when the end game content is both shallow and awfully broken

Well, my "Hard"-Flashpoint group is doing 4-5 instances almost every night (Black Talon, False Emperor, Battle for Illum, Boarding Party, 7).

Our usual setup is: Sorc (heal), Powertech (tank), Merc + Marauder.

Guess what, most items + tokens we get are for agents. Medium armor with cunning.. awesome! And seriously I'm talking about 75% of the items. My Mako has more epic (PVE) items then my character. Lucky for us that we can cover most slots with PVP items to beat the enrage timers etc.

And yeah, please merge the crystals with the commendations.. who the hell came up with the crystals idea anyways?

I was under the impression that for operations and hard mode flashpoints, everyone no matter their profession would get a "loot bag" that would contain good gear or tokens to get good gear.

 

The impression I, and I suspect many of you got from this statement was that you'd never do a HM flashpoint or operation and come away with nothing gear wise, and if you did then you'd have the tokens from 1-5 bosses to buy something.

 

That isn't the case.

Exactly THIS.

From everything I read pre-release, this was going to be a 'different' game, breaking the mold, etc in regards to loot drops for raid-level gear, but it appears to be the same old crap. Really, how HARD is it to drop gear appropriate for the players in the group/operation?????

Exactly THIS.

 

From everything I read pre-release, this was going to be a 'different' game, breaking the mold, etc in regards to loot drops for raid-level gear, but it appears to be the same old crap. Really, how HARD is it to drop gear appropriate for the players in the group/operation?????

From a design point? Very hard actually. but i guess for some its a difficult notion. It's not impossible, but difficult enough to not be a priority when so many other things can be fixed in the same ammount of time.

Wow guys thanks for the feedback. I went to bed last night angry about this loot situation, after having written the OP. I half expected to wake up and find a bunch of troll responses that read "You suck, play moar." Thanks for not flaming me (boy I don't miss the WoW Forum community).

On the other hand, it looks like a lot of people are having similar problems, and that's BAD. This is exactly why I quit Aion: it was unlikely you were going to get any kind of reward for hours and hours of gameplay.

BW really needs to re-evaluate the time spent vs. reward formula for Hard Modes. I suggest a 100% commendation system, where ALL gear is bought (except maybe weapons, relics, implants). Then I'd tune the drop rates so players were able to afford a new piece of armor every 3-4 HMs or so.

This would even the playing field for people, making it so one person couldn't gear up amazingly fast (the gunslinger in my static party last night got 6 drops over the course of 4 FPs), and also would make it so people can get totally screwed.

Having a "static" loot progression in an MMO might seem good to us players, but look at it from a developer's perspective: they need the general population to stay on the gear grind hamster wheel until they can push out the next major content patch. When your core playerbase gets everything they want gear-wise from an MMO, they tend to either quit entirely or just temporarily until the next content patch hits, ultimately causing Bioware a loss in revenue.

So while I hate running that one HM FP for a week+ and not getting my drop, I can understand why the current loot system (random) is in place.

So while I hate running that one HM FP for a week+ and not getting my drop, I can understand why the current loot system (random) is in place.

but you also have to consider the demographic, tor is a veeeery casual game - I doubt they will to the abysmal geargrind for long.

I know a lot who are just fed up with the instance grind. it didn't help rift, and it won't help tor - voiced dialogs mean squat if the endgame is the same or worse than wow.

OTOH, I didn't expect anything else, so I'm not really surprised.

Having a "static" loot progression in an MMO might seem good to us players, but look at it from a developer's perspective: they need the general population to stay on the gear grind hamster wheel until they can push out the next major content patch. When your core playerbase gets everything they want gear-wise from an MMO, they tend to either quit entirely or just temporarily until the next content patch hits, ultimately causing Bioware a loss in revenue.

 

So while I hate running that one HM FP for a week+ and not getting my drop, I can understand why the current loot system (random) is in place.

Yeah I can see how they don't want us to lose interest too quickly. However, that ominous feeling like you're wasting your time running content because you're not going to get any gear is what causes people to quit entierly and cancel subs. It's a balancing act, but I feel its too much tuned on the 'time wasting' side. At least in HMs. I hear Operations are loot pinyatas!

So the general consensus is that for every HM/Op done at LEAST one full piece of gear should be obtainable?

No, learn to read. 0/10 is too few. Not 0/1.

I agree with this 100% the grind to get gear at 50 is sad. Especially that pvp gear is so much easier to get then PvE gear. I can do my dailies/weekly for pvp and get a piece of gear once a week at least if i dont get anything out of my bag. Thats not how it should work. As much as i enjoy the pvp i shouldnt be raiding in pvp gear because i can get it soooo much easier and sadly some of it is better itemized then even the rakata gear.

I run at least the daily hardmode and try to get 2 or 3 if i can and i have just now after 3 weeks of being 50 do i have enough to buy one piece of tionese gear. The crystal thing is stupid. Either make it all tionese crystals so people can at least buy the low level gear or make commends drop off bosses instead of crystals. Its rediculous.

Exactly THIS.

 

From everything I read pre-release, this was going to be a 'different' game, breaking the mold, etc in regards to loot drops for raid-level gear, but it appears to be the same old crap. Really, how HARD is it to drop gear appropriate for the players in the group/operation?????

In theory it should be pretty simple. But I wonder if the drops are generated when the instance is created. If that's the case, you don't want to restrict loot to the group that created the instance, because people can drop and be replaced. WoW works like that as I recall, and I imagine there's a reason for it.

Not that you couldn't design around that. For example, create loot priority lists for each boss when the instance is created, and when the actual kill comes, discard items that can't be used by the current group until you get one that is useful.

Of course, there's the question of farming content for companion gear. If only loot useful to the current group is obtainable, the only companions that can be geared up are the ones that share your armor type & primary stat (or those of someone else in the group).

Not only that, but the ratio of crystals to commendations is also out of whack. That'd be forgivable if there was something useful to buy with only crystals (like stims, or something), but as it is, after buying my first item I'm sitting at 6 commendations and 121 crystals. Er...ok.

 

I'm not sure why they didn't just set it to just one type of Tion commendation and make each boss/miniboss drop one. The crystals thing is pretty redundant, confusing, and pointless.

The entire HM system is borked. I made a post about this yesterday and had the fanbois shouting I was trying to "make things easy." What I want is to make it worth while.

As pointed out, the drop rates suck. Horribly. We've gotten more gear for classes not present than classes present (lots of Trooper gear when we didn't have any Troopers). What happened to the regular FP where they see what classes are available and tailor drops based on that?

Then you have the commendations, also as pointed out. I got either 1 or 2 commendations for finishing HM FPs. And about 12 Crystals. But, as pointed out, you can't buy anything with the extra crystals (gear is about a 1:2 Commendtion:Crystal ratio, not 1:6). IMO, they need to up the rate of Commendation drops (7-8 HM per piece of gear would be reasonable, requiring upwards of 100 HM FPs to be fully geared) and if they keep the same stupid ratio of Commendations/Crystals, a way to buy commendations with Crystals.

That, and well, fix all the borked encounters, bugs and loot boxes that don't open. How the hell did this stuff make it past QA? Did they even DO any testing on this content? I know public testers didn't, because BioWare didn't let them, but did their internal team do any? I remember someone posting, a dev, that the internal testers were what they really cared about, yet they either aren't doing their job or this stuff isn't being tested.

What scares me is they are already pushing new content (new OP bosses and a new FP) with the current OPs and FPs in such shambles. Apparently they think poorly finished content is as good as having "lots" of content.

They really should look at LOTRO with regards to handing out gear. A simple barter system is so much fairer than random.

Basics would be that the final boss in a flashpoint drops a barter token for a piece of gear. That token can be looted by anyone and then traded in for a piece of gear. So, Esseles for example, the final boss might drop a "boots" token which anyone can loot and trade in for a pair of boots of their choosing. That way, it would require 4 full runs on a flashpoint for everyone to obtain their piece of gear.

That way, progression is measurable and within a guild group its easy to control the gearing up of people. In pugs, yeh, you might get unlucky and lose the roll 12 times in a row but that'd be rare.

Make the primary armour items (helm, chest, gloves, legs, boots) and main weapon all drop tokens from set bosses, and then make the rest (implants, earpieces, belt, bracers, offhands) all random drops.

Doing it that way ensures sure but steady progression in a timely manner whilst retaining some element of randomness to keep the loot exciting and reward those who grind instances a lot. Pure random like they have now is terrible, they had/have the same system it WAR for pve instances there and its one of the many reasons no1 runs them.