So bascially before this patch I had taken notes of my bags, and monday yesterday I opened my 42nd bag. Of all those bags I recieved *ONE* champion item. This is bad, and it had to be fixed. On the other hand, there was dudes in full champ gear after opening half the ammount of bags that I did. Nothing was done to rectify these imbalances. As is, there are a lot of players out there who have abused the ilum honor farm, got lucky on bags and overall played less in pvp than I did and they are twirling about in battlemaster gear, while I'm still in half centurion, half pve modded gear doing jack squat damage and getting mauled at every corner.

How can you justify not doing anything about this? I understand the need for an element of some sort of luck in a game like this, but really? THIS much luck I may aswell be spending my life savings in a casino.

Anyway, here's comes the deal-breaker. Patch 1.1.2 was supposed to fix the bags and drop rates. Cool story bro. I've done a little quick math and here's what I've come up with.

If you play decent in a warzone, regardless of win or loss, you should be able to hoard about 80 commendations. As we all know, 800 commendations rewards 1 champion bag. NOW with the new bags, you get 7 champ commendations per champ bag. One champ item costs just about 70 commendations, which means you'll have to open 10 champion bags to purchase an item. To get 10 champion bags you actually have to play one hundred warzones. How about that. Some fix, huh?

Yes, yes, I'm aware we get a bunch of extra bags for daily and weekly, but that doesn't by a longshot reduce my and many other's suffering.

At my calculation, I need about 8 more champion items for a full PvP gear to compete with those luckers that opened 20 bags. For me to get to that point I have to do 800 warzones. EIGHT HUNDRED!

Wanna tell me what in the bloody seven hells you are doing, BioWare?

edit: Because I know someone will mention centurion items.. let's be very clear about this.. centurion items are useless. 3x Level 50 PvE mods give you better stats. So, no, centurion items are not interesting at all.

In case anyone plans on doing 800 warzones, I'll calculate the time for you. Let's take worst case scenario.

All 800 games are huttball, and each huttball lasts 16 minutes. That is 213 hours. 213 hours is about 9 straight days. Now add waiting times for each individual server. That's another 9 days, for 18 days. On my server, we can easily say 15 minutes between each game. Then you have to sleep, work, eat and all that, so if you play 12 hours a day - double that time again. That'll be about 36 days.

Yep. I should have champ gear by year 2014.

In case anyone plans on doing 800 warzones, I'll calculate the time for you. Let's take worst case scenario.

 

All 800 games are huttball, and each huttball lasts 16 minutes. That is 213 hours. 213 hours is about 9 straight days. Now add waiting times for each individual server. That's another 9 days, for 18 days. On my server, we can easily say 15 minutes between each game. Then you have to sleep, work, eat and all that, so if you play 12 hours a day - double that time again. That'll be about 36 days.

 

Yep. I should have champ gear by year 2014.

2 Weekly's = 6 bags

14 Dailies = 14 bags

Maybe add in another bag or two for that week is 22 bags a week.

So bascially before this patch I had taken notes of my bags, and monday yesterday I opened my 42nd bag. Of all those bags I recieved *ONE* champion item. This is bad, and it had to be fixed. On the other hand, there was dudes in full champ gear after opening half the ammount of bags that I did. Nothing was done to rectify these imbalances.

This isn't an imbalance. This should more than demonstrate to you that either A) the players just got more lucky than you on random draws or B) the loot tables just happened to lean in the there favor this time.

Nothing is broken just because YOU don't have what you want, when you want it.

Yes. If you do every daily and weekly quest, you'll have 20 bags a week from just the quests. That means, 1 month for 80 bags. That'll get you 8 champ items, and add x ammount of bags from commendations that you buy. It won't take 800 warzones, of course.

But you misunderstood my point. My point is... they rewarded unlucky people with forced grinding. This is not acceptable.

Nobody actually thinks that buying the bags is the main way you get gear though. And if you've opened 42 bags already you'll surely agree that, by far, the primary source is daily and weekly quests, surely?

It's misleading to say "oh it now takes 100 Warzones for one piece of gear" because, well, that isn't the case if you complete even half of the dailies.

20 bags per week max. from dailies/weeklies + a conservative estimate of 3 bags from commendations means a potential for 161 Champ tokens.

That'll get you two set pieces, three ofset pieces or a mainhand weapon, all with some change left over for next week.

If you complete fewer dailies (fair enough, not everyone wants to play every day) then you can expect the rate to slow accordingly in real-time, but probably not in terms of hours played.

I see what you mean but honestly this isn't that bad.

First of all you are focusing on champion gear.

Re-do the math with the 15 centurion drops and the centurion gear chest piece costing 39 coms.

Centurion gear will now be usefull and will allow fresh level 50's to get geared quiclky for pvp while being able to slowly but surely farm some champion gear.

In my book, that's how it SHOULD have been from the start.

Honestly i have never seen ONE player with a centurion set. Either you are unluky with token and you end with 70% orange/pve gear and 30% centurion gear or you are lucky with token and end up having 6 champion items before even touching the centurion gear.

This was a messed up system. Farming T2 pvp gear SHOULD take you some time, it should not be so easy that you can get 2-3 pieces a week.

This new bag system does what it's suppose to do. Bringing T1 pvp gear as the first step before moving to T2.

The 15 centurion and 7 champion drop system does that VERY well.

My only complaint : It should have been this way from day 1. Now we have too many T2's geared players because of the old system (including me).

But you misunderstood my point. My point is... they rewarded unlucky people with forced grinding. This is not acceptable.

They replaced grinding based on a favourable diceroll with grinding based on a sure thing. I find it entirely acceptable, personally.

Where it'll help most is those who only need a couple more pieces as it'll remove the instances of duplicate items. For those who are newly 50 I guess it has potential to either speed up or slow down their "grind" but at least everyone is now on roughly the same progression curve.

TL;DR BioWare just turned the pvp into a senseless grindfest.

You do realize you're playing an MMO...right? Character development = Time Invested = Better Gear = More Power

People have got used to champions gear thanks to free tokens that they completly forgot about the impact this new drop system has on centurion gear.

you get 15 centurion coms, and you can get a chest piece for 39. I can't even call that grinding it's a free give.

At least now T1 PvP gear is there and will allow new comers to get geared quickly.

Champion's gear is the T2 equivalent, and honestly grinding it isn't as bad compared to other games.

The goal of this patch was to bring back Centurion gear as the first step in pvp gearing. Not to make champions gear more accessible.

My only problem is that BW waited to long, so now we have T2 gearded players all over the place.

People complaining about 213 hours???? It takes twice as long to get to 10th prestige in mw2/mw3 and thats a FPS.

You should be thankful its not more. Sometimes you have to work for things you know.

"and the chance to obtain a direct trade item token has been reduced"

This is probably the worst part about this. The chance was pretty low to begin with and now it's even worse. What's more annoying is that they didn't do anything about getting duplicate items. I play a Sith Sorcerer and got my second unassembled focus yesterday. What am I supposed to do with that? None of my companions can even use it.

Over the course of a week, just doing your dailies should net you 24 - 25 bags. That is 2 - 3 champion items per week. I believe that's a reasonably rapid pace to gear up, especially with the increased ease of getting Centurion gear for your other slots.

If you're on a server where it's impossible to complete the Ilum daily, I suppose that points to a larger problem with the game. Severe faction imbalances need to be addressed for many reasons, not just this.

So much wrong here...

1. You can't talk about gearing up PVP and ignore the dailies and weeklies.

2. "Centurion gear is worthless".

Obviously it's not as good as Champion, but it carries expertise and set bonus. If you've got lots of great lv 50 PVE mods (which not everyone has, and they take more work than Warzoning your way to Centurion gear) then great : buy the Cent gear for the set bonus and expertise in the basemod then put your mods in the other slots.

3. "Damn Bioware, y u make me play so much?"

Even without Battlemaster gear, you should be ENJOYING the warzones. If you're not, then why put so much work into gearing up for them? If you ARE enjoying them, then great! Try not to stress about the gear so much, just keep getting rewarded for having fun.

4. Lastly, prices. "One champ item costs just about 70 commendations" is flat out false :

http://www.oldrepublic.net/threads/1543-danowars-guide-pvp-gear.html

So at this rate, 100% Centurion geared up, all slots, in 29 bags. That's like one week of work doing your quests and buying from Warzones. 100% Champion geared up, guaranteed no RNG, in 106 bags. 106 may sound like a lot, but in the old system you were trying to hit 25% chances at a random 1/12 specific piece of gear and drowning in duplicates.

I never minded the fact that people investing more time and effort than me were getting better gear (although the kill-trading Ilum-exploting buildup out there may be frustrating, I understand them not rolling it back). What I minded was the inherent unfairness of RNG, followed by the escalating RNG punishment (trying to get that last piece of Champ gear was a 2% chance, 25% x 1/12 slots) and the fact that there was no middle ground between "fresh 50 with bad luck and no expertise" and "lucky guy in full Champ gear"

They've fixed all that beautifully. There's still a little bit of RNG "wow I just got a token for gear I want!" to add excitement, but you also have a quick path to Centurion and a guaranteed path to full Champion. Huge improvement in my book.

So bascially before this patch I had taken notes of my bags, and monday yesterday I opened my 42nd bag. Of all those bags I recieved *ONE* champion item. This is bad, and it had to be fixed. On the other hand, there was dudes in full champ gear after opening half the ammount of bags that I did. Nothing was done to rectify these imbalances. As is, there are a lot of players out there who have abused the ilum honor farm, got lucky on bags and overall played less in pvp than I did and they are twirling about in battlemaster gear, while I'm still in half centurion, half pve modded gear doing jack squat damage and getting mauled at every corner.

 

How can you justify not doing anything about this? I understand the need for an element of some sort of luck in a game like this, but really? THIS much luck I may aswell be spending my life savings in a casino.

 

Anyway, here's comes the deal-breaker. Patch 1.1.2 was supposed to fix the bags and drop rates. Cool story bro. I've done a little quick math and here's what I've come up with.

 

If you play decent in a warzone, regardless of win or loss, you should be able to hoard about 80 commendations. As we all know, 800 commendations rewards 1 champion bag. NOW with the new bags, you get 7 champ commendations per champ bag. One champ item costs just about 70 commendations, which means you'll have to open 10 champion bags to purchase an item. To get 10 champion bags you actually have to play one hundred warzones. How about that. Some fix, huh?

 

Yes, yes, I'm aware we get a bunch of extra bags for daily and weekly, but that doesn't by a longshot reduce my and many other's suffering.

 

At my calculation, I need about 8 more champion items for a full PvP gear to compete with those luckers that opened 20 bags. For me to get to that point I have to do 800 warzones. EIGHT HUNDRED!

 

Wanna tell me what in the bloody seven hells you are doing, BioWare?

 

edit: Because I know someone will mention centurion items.. let's be very clear about this.. centurion items are useless. 3x Level 50 PvE mods give you better stats. So, no, centurion items are not interesting at all.

I'm sorry for your bad luck, but I like the new system (I'm just missing a few Champion Pieces). This will allow me to work towards them.

Also, the Centurion items are decent and are a great starter set and can be gotten pretty quickly AND concurrently with getting champion items. After this changegearing an alt is not so bad now.

As for playing Warzones... That is kinda the point of getting the gear. If you don't like playing them then why do you want the gear so bad? They are a lot of fun.

I'm sitting at 414 expertise and I do just fine. As a healer, I'm tough to take down and can contribute to my team.

I have been pretty harsh about BW amateurs in other threads, but here...just no.

RNG was one of the biggest issues. They took their sweet time, but the system actually makes sense now.

PvP is still a horrible trainwreck, but at least now dude A and dude B get exactly the same reward when they put the same effort into PvP.

Still sucks to know about the bads who got their sets at rank 25, but now you know exactly where you'll be in X days.

Yes. If you do every daily and weekly quest, you'll have 20 bags a week from just the quests. That means, 1 month for 80 bags. That'll get you 8 champ items, and add x ammount of bags from commendations that you buy. It won't take 800 warzones, of course.

 

But you misunderstood my point. My point is... they rewarded unlucky people with forced grinding. This is not acceptable.

When you exaggerate, taking only the daily/weekly or the warzone grind into account and not both, and use the cost of the most expensive piece of gear to compare to, then of course it seems like a long road. The rest of the players will gear up relatively fast while you cry yourself to sleep.