Feldon Kander slipped an interesting comment into the raging TSO Stinks topic:
FYI: Stay tuned for the Shard of the Day solo quest, with some additional solo content. Cannot say more, but keep your eyes peeled for GU52.
The current plan is that it will take a time investment similar to that of running an entire instance.
So there you have it folks, while people have found a variety of more or less legitimate ways (which not everyone else approved of) to load up on Void Shards, now there is going to be an official way to get 1 shard a day.
.
It’s an interesting discussion to be sure.
- Fabled armor and Master spells were always designed and intended for Raiding.
- Legendary armor and Adept III spells were always designed and intended for Grouping.
- Treasured/Mastercrafted armor and Adept I/Apprentice IV spells were always designed and intended for Soloing.
Kunark started adding some Legendary-in-name-only as quest rewards. Kunark also added one Fabled reward for a quest series that could be trioed (A Fistful of Metal/A Few Coins More/An Ugly Bounty).
So the question of the day is: Is SoE painting themselves into a corner by making Legendary armor the new “solo” spec? What if in GU52 or the next expansion, you’re just expected to have Legendary armor even to survive doing solo quests?
It makes you wonder what form the new Solo content being added to Lavastorm will take.
Time will tell…
“now there is going to be an official way to get 1 shard a day.”
Woot. I am one of those all for the 1 solo shard per day. I think that’s great and that ties into your question:
“Is SoE painting themselves into a corner by making Legendary armor the new “solo” spec? ”
No. The problem with T/M + A1+4 people is that they are a killer in a raid.
Think about it. You have to gear up from TM -> L before you can really start raiding. Then you have to work your way up the raid progression.
What the current SOE system has does is to stratify the player base. Players just can’t dust off a character and hop into a very challenging raid.
Getting everyone to a legendary base set will help the game as a whole. The group people can do it faster and get more opportunities in raid to get fabled gear. And the solo people will get thier IN TIME.
I do think there is one change they still need to make and that is to allow Master crafter spells to be craftable. Set it up so that sage/alchey/jewlers can craft Master, but they need a Master 1 of that tier as a component.
This would get rid of the junk Master I drop, and the near absence of the ‘best’ Master 1’s on the broker (Try finding a T8 illy stifle/mez master). I feel that the current system gives an unfair advantage to the 24/7 raiders and the raid guilds.
Every time someone announces how to get void shards by mentoring, it increases the chance that SoE will find a way to stop this. Already people have hundreds of void shards via this method. This is considered an exploit. I won’t say I haven’t done it, but let’s call a duck a duck.
The issue is with this is Void Shard Inflation. You’ve got folks who will never do more than solo/tradeskill are in full T1 or T2 void shard armor and have hundreds of void shards. What price should SoE set on the next void shard items? 50 shards? 100 shards?
The whole mastercrafted armor market has collapsed and the legendary that drops in dungeons is vendor loot. The only thing that may save us is the level cap raise to 90.
If someone plans to raid, they should be getting T1 and T2 void shard armor from dungeon runs and the new x2 raid that’s coming in GU51.