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Gear RNG in 5.0 is a Bad Idea


DarthOvertone

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  • the drops will be random. The item type is determined by your Advanced Class and the item rating is determined by your Command Rank (higher rank = higher item rating). Keep in mind that you can always earn more Crates and that you can disintegrate any duplicate or unwanted items into CXP to get your next Crate faster.

 

The proposed change of reintroducing gear RNG in 5.0 is a terrible idea. As a PvPer, if there is one thing in this game that I am very satisfied with, it is the current gearing situation. Grinding a new set of PvP gear is very reasonable in the time it demands and the cost. As a Player, having the ability to choose specifically how to gear is a significant boon.

 

Reintroducing Gear RNG in the form of Command Crates is a serious step backward in this regard. It has been about 5 years so I get that you guys may have forgotten what RNG gearing was like in this game, but I recommend that you do not repeat your mistakes. What you are proposing as a change in 5.0 is strikingly similar to the RNG gear drops many of us suffered in the first few months of game launch. It was a terrible system in every way. Do not bring that back.

 

And the caveat of having the drops match your Advanced Class really doesn't help matters much. There is a pretty massive difference on my PT between gearing for Tanking and gearing for DPS. Healer and DPS roles within advanced classes can also exemplify this difference, especially as far as Set Bonuses are concerned.

 

Please do not reintroduce Gear RNG in 5.0. It's a horrible idea. Player choice in regard to gear is one of the positives in this game. Keep it alive.

Edited by DarthOvertone
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This. All of this. You beat me to posting this.

 

Command crates should give you at least SOME element of choice regarding what slot piece you want (ear, head, mainhand, etc), and with what stats (i.e. tank/dps/heals, etc).

 

EDIT: Also, the ability to disintegrate duplicate/unwanted items for more Command XP is NOT sufficient recompense. It's like if you bought something for $100, only to discover that it's not what you need - but you're only refunded for $25. Bad bad bad.

Edited by AlCiao
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This. All of this. You beat me to posting this.

 

Command crates should give you at least SOME element of choice regarding what slot piece you want (ear, head, mainhand, etc), and with what stats (i.e. tank/dps/heals, etc).

 

EDIT: Also, the ability to disintegrate duplicate/unwanted items for more Command XP is NOT sufficient recompense. It's like if you bought something for $100, only to discover that it's not what you need - but you're only refunded for $25. Bad bad bad.

 

^ My understanding of the old gearing system for PvE gear was that certain bosses dropped certain parts and everyone got something their class can wear.

 

RNG just sounds like a Trooper Healer Commando can wind up with Consular Tank Shadow gear. This "RNG" should be limited to at least AC so said trooper might wind up with Trooper DPS Commando or Healer Commando gear.

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^ My understanding of the old gearing system for PvE gear was that certain bosses dropped certain parts and everyone got something their class can wear.

 

RNG just sounds like a Trooper Healer Commando can wind up with Consular Tank Shadow gear. This "RNG" should be limited to at least AC so said trooper might wind up with Trooper DPS Commando or Healer Commando gear.

 

It is limited to advanced class, which is still unacceptable. I primarily DPS on my Guardian, however my advanced class also has a tank tree in it. So I'm going to bounce between getting RNG drops for both DPS and Tank sets? Nope, no thanks.

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It is limited to advanced class, which is still unacceptable. I primarily DPS on my Guardian, however my advanced class also has a tank tree in it. So I'm going to bounce between getting RNG drops for both DPS and Tank sets? Nope, no thanks.

 

Okay, so it's the same as the RNG for running Tacticals (gear drops that are based on AC, not stance/discipline/whatevery'wannacallitnow). At least there will be craftable stuff that'll be almost as good while you grind for the gear you really want/need.

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I don't actually mind the RNG as long as it can be directed by the player. (The following are suggestions)

 

1. Player filters the gear they get for their role. A DPS will never receive tank gear, for example.

 

2. Specific Ops bosses (and possibly other content... dunno yet) should drop consumable items for all present players that increase the probability of a specific type of gear piece dropping in the next Command Crate.

 

-Consuming the item grants you this probability buff (but won't appear on your buff bar to avoid clutter. Put it in the GCMD menu.

-The buff goes away the next time you open a Command Crate.

-The buff can stack with other probability increasing consumables, even to 100% probability (though 100% would be hard considering lockouts, but see next point)

-Harder difficulty modes drop consumables offering higher probabilities. So, if you just run story mode ops, you can only increase the odds a small amount, but if you run hard or nightmare modes, you can almost guarantee what will come in your next crate.

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Okay, so it's the same as the RNG for running Tacticals (gear drops that are based on AC, not stance/discipline/whatevery'wannacallitnow). At least there will be craftable stuff that'll be almost as good while you grind for the gear you really want/need.

 

except ops haven't had that style of rng in ages, instead you got unassembled piece that you traded in for the proper set bonus (which, includes at some point gearing offspecs AND/or alts since certain unassembled pieces were easier to get than others). moreover - specific bosses dropped specific pieces, and it was always the same every week, so you could gear at a decent pace.

 

now, not only you don't get to chose which gear slot you are getting an item for, you don't get to chose which set bonus either. so its very possible to end up with a ton of gear that you have no use for, for WEEKS at least. its a very crappy system and a huge step back.

Edited by Jeweledleah
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RNG gearing is very frustrating, I quit leading a raid team with 4.X because of the marked operations system. A direct in game progression is far more engaging and fun for a group of people then a "you must grind grind grind" with no real chance of getting one you need from one to another.
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You're in a pug and your tank quits. You have a tank, and you'd happily switch.... but you don't need the gear on your tank, so you sit there as a DPS and wait 30 mins for a tank until the the group dissolves.

 

gg

 

RIP

 

Ahh... But you can send the tank gear, which you probably already stuffed into legacy gear, to yourself, if you happen to be on a spec that can switch (juggs/PTs/assassins), and still earn the command rank points on that toon.

Even if you do have to completely switch toons, there doesn't appear to be anything preventing you from doing what you would have needed to do pre-5.0 anyway: rip out the mods from the token gear and send via legacy gear to your original toon. Other than the command rank points.

 

In many ways, this is sort of like a modern day "DKP" type system. It's pretty common that people can walk away from even a guild run of an operation with nothing to show for it. That is always frustrating and now it is less likely to happen. In addition, you won't have the confusion of people buying horribly optimized gear from vendors.

 

In my opinion, this isn't a vice of the new system. I do wonder if this either intentionally or coincidentally was done to eliminate the practice of gear sales, since those won't really be possible now. I also wonder what will happen to specific decorations and other vanity items that dropped from bosses. I heard Charles Boyd say vanity items would be in these command crates. But it would be very odd to get Karagga's Unyielding Helm, or the Reconstructed Hypergate decoration, from a command crate you earned after you did a GSF match that gave you enough points to earn the next rank.

 

EDIT: NVM I saw one of Musco's posts and he said that those types of things will still drop from their proper bosses. Lrn2read self.

Edited by phalczen
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I see this as fantastic. Nobody will have gear so we'll just get it when it comes and it won't be a big deal. There's no new difficult challenges to face so I'm not worried about how fast I gear up.

 

FYI, I said and did the same thing in 4.0. I even passed on a few highlighted hard mode EV's early on because the gear just didn't matter.

 

But 6 months from now, I'll likely be better geared than ever from playing whatever content strikes my fancy. That's good news to me.

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except ops haven't had that style of rng in ages, instead you got unassembled piece that you traded in for the proper set bonus (which, includes at some point gearing offspecs AND/or alts since certain unassembled pieces were easier to get than others). moreover - specific bosses dropped specific pieces, and it was always the same every week, so you could gear at a decent pace.

 

now, not only you don't get to chose which gear slot you are getting an item for, you don't get to chose which set bonus either. so its very possible to end up with a ton of gear that you have no use for, for WEEKS at least. its a very crappy system and a huge step back.

 

Weeks? More like months. It took me until July to get everything but the Offhand BiS gear on my MAIN. Imagine how long it's going to take now!

 

At least I'll be one of the first to finally get my main geared this time, considering the GSF daily rewards the most and I love GSF. :D

 

~ Eudoxia

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Okay, so, I'm sort of ambivalent about the system until it goes live (I thought I'd hate level sync, and it ultimately was neither good nor bad, so...).

HOWEVER...

Could somebody explain how, in practice, the drops are going to really be that much more "random" in 5.0? Yes, the actual box itself is going to drop a random item. But right now, if I get into an Ops group on the GF, I have no idea what I'm going to come out with. In fact, I might not come out with anything at all. Heck, even in a guild run, unless I'm with 8 people who are specifically willing to let a particular drop pass them by, I'm still not guaranteed anything particularly useful.

 

Now, without seeing how quickly Command Crates are awarded or how many you can get from a single activity, it's hard to say, but it seems to me like the reward will at least be something...maybe not something that can be used, but at least sold to a vendor for a quick smack of profit.

 

How is that really any different from how things currently are, when you actually tally up the final results?

 

I'm legit curious here; is there some other aspect of this that I'm not considering?

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JLazarillo, in ops, each boss drops a particular slot of gear every single time. A boss that drops an unassembled earpiece token will always drop it. it's not random what slot he drops; furthermore, you can turn in that token for any gear of that slot you want: tank or heals or gear or whatever.

 

So while the Command Crates may better at giving you more gear (rather than having to roll in ops), it's the RNG element of not being able to shoot for something in particular, that's killing so many people.

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I see this as fantastic. Nobody will have gear so we'll just get it when it comes and it won't be a big deal. There's no new difficult challenges to face so I'm not worried about how fast I gear up.

 

FYI, I said and did the same thing in 4.0. I even passed on a few highlighted hard mode EV's early on because the gear just didn't matter.

 

But 6 months from now, I'll likely be better geared than ever from playing whatever content strikes my fancy. That's good news to me.

 

Better geared for what content? Its gearing up for the sake of gearing up which as a motivation is going to get stale fast.

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Gabigool and other guilded raiders appear to be assuming that boss drops are directed towards the needy in guild raids, target than being rolled for.

 

And bosses do drop tokens, not fixed gear, and they drop predicable tokens, so currently a group can say, "OK, Ian needs to get a Mainhand, a Belt, and a Relic to complete his gear level. Let's go hit these ops, and we will use non standard loot roles to make sure he gets the tokens he needs to get the items from the vendor."

 

These changes will drastically reduce the benefit of being guilded, in the sense that they will no longer be able to quickly help people gear up in a fast fashion

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These changes will drastically reduce the benefit of being guilded, in the sense that they will no longer be able to quickly help people gear up in a fast fashion

Hypothetical situation.

 

Let's take a casual, non-guilded player. She's been playing for a while, and has been working through a high-rating gear set. 4 out of 6 pieces of the set bonus are filled. 2 remaining.

 

Under the current system, she can preview the loot drops by boss by operation, and decide which content to go for. Joins a fleet group, starts her own, etc. She passes on all the gear except for the ones needed to finish the set bonus.

 

Under the new system, she has no control over how to get those last remaining pieces. Perhaps RNG smiles today and she gets it at the next command rank. Perhaps RNG farts in her general direction, and she levels multiple successive command ranks, all without finishing that set piece bonus.

 

Both methods are at the mercy of RNG. But the second method is (in my personal opinion) more frustrating as a player.

 

So it doesn't just affect guilded players trying to quickly gear up an alt.

 

Personally, I would have preferred a method whereby one could trade in results of leveling a command rank for a specific chosen piece of gear.

 

Edit: Come to think of it, that was the original reason behind the "commendations" that dropped from doing operations runs. They were a sort of "consolation prize" -- even if you didn't win a token drop, you could still use it to purchase gear. It "eased the pain of bad RNG", as it were.

 

Of course, this was back during the 1.x days when the commendation gear had the same (or at least closer to the same) stat values as token gear, it was just missing the set bonus. So gearing with commendations was actually useful.

Edited by Khevar
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, there doesn't appear to be anything preventing you from doing what you would have needed to do pre-5.0 anyway: rip out the mods from the token gear and send via legacy gear to your original toon. Other than the command rank points.

 

Except it's tank gear. It's useless to my DPS character. pre-5.0 I could use my tank to get DPS gear. See the problem? Why would I swap to a tank now when I need gear on my DPS?

 

Also, let's say I'm in a group doing a HM Op and DPS is a little low. Right now, I can swap to one of my better geared characters to help the group. In 5.0 I cannot, unless it's the same advanced class. Pre-5.0, I'd be on that character anyway, because - why play the lesser geared character?

 

In many ways, this is sort of like a modern day "DKP" type system. It's pretty common that people can walk away from even a guild run of an operation with nothing to show for it. That is always frustrating and now it is less likely to happen. In addition, you won't have the confusion of people buying horribly optimized gear from vendors.

 

Well, there's that whole part where your loot crate might be your 6th pair of bracers and you need a helm.

 

And it's not like tank gear wasn't horribly optimized already :D

 

this idea is moronic - and it's even more baffling that it's something they did before and removed because they figured out it was moronic.

 

The thought of having to grind to some ridiculous level of Galactic readiness for a "chance" to get the gear you want defies logic.

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Reintroducing Gear RNG in the form of Command Crates is a serious step backward in this regard. It has been about 5 years so I get that you guys may have forgotten what RNG gearing was like in this game, but I recommend that you do not repeat your mistakes. What you are proposing as a change in 5.0 is strikingly similar to the RNG gear drops many of us suffered in the first few months of game launch. It was a terrible system in every way. Do not bring that back.

 

I think you're a bit confused... No one working on the game today was here when it launched, you talk about them "repeating mistakes", that would require they were here in the first place...

 

The people running this today have no idea whatsoever what they are doing, if they did, well, almost everything would be different.

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Weeks? More like months. It took me until July to get everything but the Offhand BiS gear on my MAIN. Imagine how long it's going to take now!

 

At least I'll be one of the first to finally get my main geared this time, considering the GSF daily rewards the most and I love GSF. :D

 

~ Eudoxia

 

I was being too optimistic I suppose. although from what I understood OPS still reward the most? followed by hardmode flashpoints and then all the other stuff with easiest difficulty of story giving the least amount of xp?

 

you know, this actualy makes me appreciate alliance crate system :/ which I'll be honest, I'm still not a fan of. but at least you can do selected heroics for specific rep crates/ OR buy them with commendations you got from other activities :/ this complete randomness is kinda like if Alliance crates also gave random representative reputation in addition to random loot

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The proposed change of reintroducing gear RNG in 5.0 is a terrible idea. As a PvPer, if there is one thing in this game that I am very satisfied with, it is the current gearing situation. Grinding a new set of PvP gear is very reasonable in the time it demands and the cost. As a Player, having the ability to choose specifically how to gear is a significant boon.

.

 

Just wait till PvEers are out gearing the PvPers and just steam rolling them because it will take longer to get gear thru specifically PvP activities then PvE... Mark my words, this argument is coming back to a forum near you...

 

Of course if they make it faster thru PvP, PvP players will be screamin about the scrubs in matches just tryin to get gear. And PvE players screamin that the fastest viable way to get gear is thru PvP...

Edited by Psychopyro
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Better geared for what content? Its gearing up for the sake of gearing up which as a motivation is going to get stale fast.

 

^ This...

 

And it is the SECOND time...

 

Gear from 4.0 was useful for what purpose? I complained when 4.0 came out that we had our power taken away, for nothing... there was no new content that you needed to level up and gear up for, instead you lost "end game BiS gear" and had to go regrind the EXACT SAME CONTENT to get back to where you were.

 

Now they want you to do it AGAIN, for the EXACT SAME CONTENT...

 

The single player story mode isn't going to require any of it, so what is the point? I'm not bothering this time...

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^ My understanding of the old gearing system for PvE gear was that certain bosses dropped certain parts and everyone got something their class can wear.

 

RNG just sounds like a Trooper Healer Commando can wind up with Consular Tank Shadow gear. This "RNG" should be limited to at least AC so said trooper might wind up with Trooper DPS Commando or Healer Commando gear.

 

Even if this RNG provided only gear viable for the advance class, that does not mean that it will drop the gear that you need. You might get accuracy gear when you are trying to gear your character has a healer, or you are short on crit., but you keep getting alacrity pieces, or you never got a main hand weapon after two months of trying.

 

A system that is entirely dependent on RNG is likely to give you many pieces that you just don't need, and the more pieces that you already have, the more likely you will be to get something that you already have, and no longer need.

 

Getting gear in a system like this may feel good at first, but in the long run I suspect it will frustrate more people than it pleases.

Edited by Exly
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