Will the Adorning Madness Stop? Sorta…
If you feel that the amount of Adorning and Reforging necessary every time you receive a new piece of gear has reached levels of insanity, well you’re not alone. Having freedom of choice and customization of stats is great, but there is a limit and we’ve probably reached it. Adornment Dislodgers are pricey and players who need 3 of the same type of adornment must run adv solo, group, or raid zones ad nauseum until the one they want drops and they win a Need roll.
In the Destiny of Velious expansion, once a character looted a War Rune (the best of the red adornments), that adornment became available henceforth from an NPC vendor. In essence, these Adornments were character unlocked. The downside to this convenience for the EQ2 design team is, it required the creation of hundreds of invisible quests working behind-the-scenes to support the feature. While it doesn’t sound like we’ll be getting character flags or adornment unlocks per-character any time soon, EQ2 Lead Designer Kander has posted some tantalising responses on a forum thread which show the team are aware of our frustration and are working on solutions.
On price of Adornment Dislodgers and the fact they don’t preserve purple adornments…
We’re going to change the Superb Prismatic Adornment Dislodger to remove purple adorns and we are going to lower it to like 15 plat. Our goal with the expansion is to make moving your adornments around more trivial and have it really be about the chase of said adornments.
[When?] As soon as possible on the Superb Prismatic Adornment Dislodger price reduction and change.
What about character flags?
We’re not going to do that, but we are going to make it a lot better. The DoV method is not sustainable.
We will make it 10x better though.
more specifically:
We have some other cool UI changes and mechanics changes coming with adorning soon too.
[When?] UI stuff will be between now and expansion.
So hopefully some of the pain can be eased on adornment juggling in the near and not so near future.
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Comments (17)
milliebii
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When I read this I thought ‘invisible quests, why not achievements?’ then I reflected for 30 seconds and thought I bet achievements are handled as ‘invisible quests’ too.
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Endymion
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How much do you want to bet?
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Loch
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Now that bet wouldn’t be very fair, would it? 😉
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milliebii
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I bet two rounds of drinks at the next SOE Live I attend.
As I live in Australia, that may be a long time coming though! 😈
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Striinger
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Amazing as you realise just how few tools these guys have to produce what they have. It’s truly a case of lateral thinking.
I wonder if using a bolstered attributes rune to buy a bolstered attributes recipe (level 1) would be doable? They could control cost via their choice of fuel and amount. Surely recipes aren’t quests!
That’s my idea anyway.
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Anaogi
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Frankly other than war runes, a lot of the whole adornment-chasing is simplified by stockpiling etymas and knowing a good adorner. Still, the overall point’s pretty solid; I’m getting tired of continual min-maxing, reforging, adorning, chasing the right proc…
Anyone who says this game’s gotten “dumbed down” clearly hasn’t tried to gear up properly in this expansion.
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Dedith
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I got tired of the grinding of etymas to be honest. I just don’t have the time for it.
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Tabri
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Why dont they just put the game the way it used to be. OMG I got a piece of loot let me equip it now viola equipped and done.
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Malade
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I agree adorn chasing is one of the worst aspects of the game.
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Dethdlr
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I’d love it if they did that. I really miss those days. These days, when I win a new item, I feel like I’ve been given homework.
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zorlo
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yes that was so much better
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Enrico
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Why not adorn yourself in an adornments tab on the character sheet, and have the gear slots enable them? Swapping gear would thus not change the underlying adornments. The slot on the gear would just open up what you already have adorned. (This could support adorning different colors for different roles in some future expansion.)
Of course, none of this is really a problem for those of us who research, and read third party sites like this one instead of having a life. But the whole mess is a huge barrier to casual players who get triple whammied by work, kids, the lawn, then log in and not know all the weird rules for when you can upgrade your ToV gems, or when you get your adorns back and when you don’t. Then you tell them “we need to go with the max HP armor now, so start over. Oh and go farm that dreadlord set for non-ae fights.”
I’m not really convinced that reforging should even have a plat cost, or be a paid extra feature. It’s a core component of loot design.
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Vapur
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My tank wants Hate Gain and Block in her mitigation gear. My tank wants Fighter’s Potency and Crit Bonus in her DPS gear. That solution would not work for her.
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Chunk
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It could if,they made it,somehow like the AA window, with a couple of sub tabs and let us pick which tab was the active tab.
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Vapur
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Then crafters would lose an income source. 😥
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Tekadeo
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I’ll be honest, the constant adorning reforging readorning and levelling adornments is a big reason I quit. It once was fun to get a new piece of gear…
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Striinger
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I live in Australia and my wife and I are both going again this year so stop slacking and bring beer money Millie. 😀
I don’t mind the loot complexity; stock standard loot is alright but spending more time and effort getting it ask tweaked yields far better results. You don’t HAVE to reforge or adorn, but those who do probably won’t want to group with you much.
If the designers reduce things people can tweak and refine there’s a LOT less to do to differentiate your toon from others. I’ve doesn’t all of my Saturday free time before playing the reforge-adorn-cast order mitigate. The play cost has gotten sorta crazy, though.
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