Feldon Today brings the first part of a two part story about how we got to the Itemization situation we are in now. Part history lesson, part recap.
Part 2 will try to sort out the Sentinel’s Fate Itemization picture as we have it so far. I assure you that Part 2 will be MUCH shorter. š After the posting of Part 2, we will be posting a survey to get your feedback on these long-form articles.
Itemization in the Rise of Kunark was rather straightforward.
Heroic (Legendary) level 77+ armor dropped in heroic dungeons. There were just 8 generic sets for Warrior, Crusader, Brawler, Cleric, Shaman, Druid, Scouts, and Mages.
Raiders starting out in the Tier 1-Tier 3 raid zones (before Veeshan’s Peak) gained access to the slight upgrades of the 12 sets of level 78 subclass Raid armor (Predator, Cleric, Brawler, Crusader, etc.) Once players gained access to Veeshan’s Peak, they had available to them 24 class-specific armor sets. These class-specific armor sets were the introduction to powerful set bonuses that made it desirable for most players to earn and hang onto all 6 or 7 pieces of their armor.
Other armor pieces for Groups and Raids did drop but they were usually not the best items. And only solo players saw any value in the vendor-sold faction armor throughout Kunark.
There was one really good Fabled jewelry quest in Kunark. Otherwise, jewelry came from contested named group mobs, dungeons, and raid zones.
The Shadow Odyssey shortened the quality leap of gear from Legendary to Fabled and increased the options for soloers, group/heroic players, and both casual and hardcore raiders.
The Shadow Odyssey reminded many of the Lost Dungeons of Norrath from EQ1, as it introduced familiar and new dungeons which each dropped Void Shards. These tokens were redeemable for legendary armor. For group players, a full set of Tier 1 Void Shard armor cost just 38 shards (44 without the aid of a talented crafter). For another 112 shards (136 on your own), players could upgrade to Tier 2 armor, which provided a small amount of Critical Mitigation, crucial to survive entry-level raiding in TSO.
Meanwhile, raiders saw the “raid patterns” idea carried forward from Kunark, with the TSO Raid Patterns. TSO Raid Gear had substantial amounts of Critical Mitigation, however casual raid guilds noticed that the jump from Tier 2 armor to this Raid gear was substantial, and some guilds struggled to survive the Critical Mitigation checks mobs were asking of them.
Then came the announcement of the Ward of Elements. This was EQ2’s first x2 raid zone which got the perfect balance of mob difficulty and gear quality ideal for 12 players. Ward of Elements singlehandedly defined a new class of players who were serious enough to move beyond group dungeon runs, but were still working on building a full raid force with sufficient gear to survive the harder encounters. WoE provided a great stepping stone and opportunity for casual raid guilds to gear up players to move on to harder content.
Incidentally, with the introduction of the Ward of Elements ‘Tier 3‘ fabled gear, those TSO Raid Patterns were hereafter referred to as ‘Tier 4‘ armor.
Set bonuses, once only found on the Rise of Kunark Fabled gear, became widespread throughout legendary and fabled TSO armor. Jewelry and even odd combinations such as necklace, cloak, and belt each got the “set bonus” bug.
TSO introduced a series of collections and quests that made powerful jewelry available to group and even solo players. TSO also greatly extended the power and quantity of Charm and Cloak items.
The Devil in the Details — Stat Caps, Set Bonuses, and Mythicals
With such a smooth progression from Tier 1 to Tier 4 armor, what could go wrong? As it turns out, quite a bit.
In Kunark, the average Group/Heroic player was lucky to see 15-20% Critical or Double Attack from their combined gear. Even raiders weren’t typically passing 50% Critical or Double Attack from gear in Kunark. And yet with TSO, even Group/Heroic players found themselves starting to creep up on the 50% mark. Worse, some raiders reached the end of The Shadow Odyssey nearing or over 100% in many key skills and abilities.
Another issue created by such powerful set bonuses was that players ignored any dropped pieces of armor in group and raid zones, even rather powerful items, as equipping them would mean breaking up Set Bonuses. Only avatar gear (before it was nerfed) was capable of competing with those bonuses.
Finally, as was widely predicted when they were announced, Mythical Weapons completely eliminated any chance of developers tempting players any weapons other than their mythical.
A Rock and a Hard Place
So going into the Sentinel’s Fate, Fyreflyte and Aeralik had a plan:
- Reintroduce Gear Scaling, to make current gear worthless at level 90.
- Use Set Bonuses sparingly on new gear.
- Consolidate Stats and Skills, and make each archetype focus on one Stat for their power and core class ability.
- Expand the Adornments system so that players can add procs and special effects to their own gear at both the Solo, Heroic, and Raid levels.
- Provide a Mythical Quest that would provide players a stripped version of their mythical weapon, and a permanent spell granting them its unique abilities. This would allow players to upgrade to a new weapon without losing their mythical’s unique, class-defining effects.
Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Gear Scaling
Gear Scaling was never really “sold” to the players. It was presented to the players in a rather horrific posting (in this editor’s opinion) on the EQ2 forums. It was to be a flat scaling percentage that would have meant players became less effective as they leveled up wearing the same gear against the same mobs. It was a very real possibility that players would be unable to kill content at level 81 that they could at level 80.
It was identical to the Gear Scaling system added to and then hastily removed from both the Kunark and Shadow Odyssey betas. Without a “weighting” system or “conning” system to compare the mob’s level to the player’s it was half-baked at best and summarily rejected by the players.
However the negativity about the reappearance of a flat Gear Scaling system only compounded on the extremely unpopular Fighter Revamp which would have reduced Tanking in EQ2 to a single “Taunt” macro any monkey could do.
Unknown to most players, Rothgar and Fyreflyte continued to work on the Gear Scaling system and made substantial changes that would have made the system very workable. A conning or comparison system was added such that your items would be compared to the level of the enemy. Also, a weighting system was added such that players would be able to perform reasonably well against enemies as they leveled up, although it would still be an obvious upgrade to acquire new level 90 armor.
The damage was already done in the eyes of the players, and since these improvements had not been sufficiently communicated with the players, Gear Scaling was scrapped in totality.
No doubt Fyreflyte now found himself stuck between a rock and a hard place. Gear Scaling was supposed to solve all of the problems with powerful items, powerful set bonuses, etc. It was hard to miss the exasperation in some of his posts during the Sentinel’s Fate beta.
The Sentinel’s Fate Equation (Math Ahead!)
When Sentinel’s Fate went live one month ago, the first thing I noticed is just how powerful Adornments were. Examining a piece of armor either from a merchant, dungeon, or raid drop no longer provides a complete picture of just what that item is capable of. Players must consider White Adornments (player made), Red Adornments (raid), and with yesterday’s patch, Yellow Adornments (group) when looking at any piece of gear. With the addition of percentages to most stats, just examining and comparing gear can be quite a mental exercise.
The second I noticed is that the armor sets of Tier 1, Tier 2, etc. armor for Heroic/Group players are incomplete. Fyreflyte confirmed this in a beta forum post, indicating that only some armor, some jewelry, charms, and weapons would be available for purchase with shards (Marks of Manaar). Most of the best items would be dungeon drops, even main armor slots.
Initially, Fyreflyte and Domino thought that players would be willing to give up all Resists against Noxious, Arcane, and Elemental attacks in exchange for 2-3 pieces of mastercrafted resist jewelry, harkening back to the days of Kunark raiding when players would have to swap in different jewelry to survive certain encounters. However, this was loudly rejected by players, and developers relented just yesterday, adding resists to nearly all gear.
Because of Stat Consolidation, there was no need for 24 individual sets of Raid armor. So there are just a few sets of raid armor applicable to all classes. There are different tiers of this armor, but no more are there separate sets for each class or even each archetype.
Battlegrounds and The Vigilant x2 raid zone have been red herrings, providing some of the best gear in the game, instead of a logical, smooth progression from the low end heroic to the high end raid gear.
Today, itemization is an even bigger jigsaw puzzle than it was in either Kunark or The Shadow Odyssey, and trying to get a grapple on it has been tricky to say the least. part 2 of this article will tackle Sentinel’s Fate Itemization head on and provide you the resources you need to understand what gear is available and how to get it.
Just shows everyone how stupid SoE can be. The lack of communication not only between the Devs and the players, but between themselves just shows how inept the division really is. I personally do not blame Fyre or Aeralik, but I blame their superiors and there lack of judgement if not there intelligence. We can now say that we have a cluster-fu_k with itemization.
Something I’m noticing is that even though SK’s are now using STR as a “straight fighter” anymore, a lot of the itemization for them to be able to use mage items with tons of INT on them has carried over and I have to be careful on what I’m getting or it’s all to easy to find myself with a ton of INT gear still when I do not need that stat at all. Hopefully over time Fireflyte will be able to make a pass through existing items and make them more appropriate for the new stats.
I freaked out when i first heard about item scaling. I think a lot of famous players like jethal did too. The argument was “So now not only do i out level my armor like normal, but now the armor gets even crappier as i level?”. I could imagine if this went live though. I’m a raider and my T4 shard set would be crap right now at 90. My raid guild is still doing T8 stuff like potato. Either we would all have to mentor and hope the armor scales to think we are still 80 or i may have to raid in some crappy treasured stuff i picked up soloing.
I lost all confidence in Fyreflyte when I saw these two snippets from two of his posts talking about + spell damage and poisons:
“It’s unintended that spelldamage bonuses affect your poisons.”
and
“I didn’t realize the spell damage bonus would affect them at all.”
Assassins, and probably other classes as well, had AAs that gave bonuses to spell damage. The popup message on these AAs said that this would increase the damage of poisons. Right there in game text. This wasn’t some secret exploit or anything, it was an intended mechanic of the game that spell damage/int would increase the damage of poisons for anyone that used them. To find out that the main gear dev didn’t have a clue about this made it a very sad day for me.
I understand that it’s tough to know everything about 24 different classes, but it’s not like poisons are some obscure thing in the game. Hopefully he has learned a great deal more about game mechanics since then.
And great article btw Feldon! Keep up the great work! š
As i see this problem. Sony will continually have problems with gear for EQ2 until they set base, define, and support each classes role. If they continue to keep changing the mechanics of of any class. They’ll be continually increasing problems with gear, and how it affect game play.
To sum what I’m saying up. Fix, and standardize all the classes, then when a foundation is acquired. Fix the loot.
Nice article. 2 remarks.
One: WOE was much too easy for the quality of gear it presented. By the frequency casual people farmed that zone you can see how risk vs reward was totally off, same as with the skeleton named in Protector’s Realm.
Two: Gear scaling would have been just another means to do what every MMO has to do with a new expansion: make your old gear undesirable because the new one is better. If people weren’t such a bunch of whiners, they’d “suspend their belief” for a moment and realize that each new xpack only has the task to devaluate their old gear – because making the new gear better and better each xpack will some day just cap everything. How that is done, nobody should care. Essentially they could strip your character naked at the start of SF, and everybody goes from there. The mechanism is just the same. But oh nose, the whining and complaining just leads to having the developers come up with convoluted schemes to do the same in a more careful manner, introducing all kinds of new problems.
It is obvious that either the problems in the SOE design team or Fyreflyte himself are not up to the task of providing consistent itemization from one to the next xpack, or even within one single xpack. With all the whining about how their precious TSO gear would suddenly be worth jackshit in SF, players just make it much harder for the devs.
And this disaster is what we got. Thanks.
SOE should be tougher on the players. Example Rune Etched Helmet from Shard of Hate, and its TSO upgrade from Gozak. Everybody with a bit of brain still uses these, I included. Why does SOE not acknowledge that they failed on that item (twice, actually) and nerf it to oblivion? It’s just ridiculous.
Once and for all, holy crap it is SOE, not SoE, even EQ2Wire can’t seem to get it right, “SoE wants feedback” on the menu. IT IS SOE. SONY ONLINE ENTERTAINMENT… I’m going to go back and watch the BbC tonight to see Top Gear. Or maybe I’ll surf the WwW for porn.
I have no idea why this is such a pet peeve but please, please people listen it is SOE not SoE.
While gear scaling is a good idea, as things are now, it only works for every other expansion. TSO would have seen no benefit, due to no level cap increase.
Another problem is that the game mechanics are too linear. Stat caps, mitigation, shield effectiveness, resists, damage scaling from “Nuke IV (master)” to “Nuke V (master)”… too many of these are just (level x constant). Not to mention all the DPS/haste/DA/crit effects that don’t scale at all; they just cap at 100/200 and never have room for growth…
When the cap went from 50 to 60, that gave the devs 20% room for growth in all those linear areas, which probably wasn’t enough. From 80 to 90, it’s only 12.5%. When you try to cram upgrades to handcrafted, treasured, solo legendary, mastercrafted, group legendary, group fabled, x2/x3, and at least 3 levels of x4 into that narrow window, you’re going to have massive amounts of overlap and itemization is going to be a basket case.
So we get more and more new numbers to raise every expansion, along with all the old ones we keep capped. Or we raise the “constant” to raise the cap. Or institute a new cap in addition to the old cap, like the Potency-for-stats-over-1200 in SF (it still has a cap, since potency caps at 100%).
It’s always been this way… remember any outrage about imbued crafted items when they first went in? Procs went from “almost exclusively raid-only” down to the “handcrafted” tier in one update. It’s all been same-old, same-old from there; SF is hardly an exception to the itemization rule.
How do you fix it from where we are now? Probably Everquest 3… for a couple years, until they do the same thing all over again.
Sorry you underwear are in a bunch over a typo. I have corrected the Category, and I have gone back and changed some of the references from SoE to SOE. Honestly, when it was first pointed out to me that it should be SOE and not SoE, I thought, maybe my subconscious is trying to make a comment here. After all, SOE haven’t always been so great with the “Online” part of their business.
If you find any more, try sending an e-mail.
For its intended audience, Ward of Elements was balanced very well in my opinion. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that you have never been this zone outside of guild groups or dedicated raiders.
For its intended audience of Tier 2 shard armor, no Mythical, maybe 1-2 pieces of Fabled jewelry, and 185 AAs, I thought Ward of Elements was fine. As you gear up, it gets easier, and it’s completely trivialized by Mythical, T4 gear, and level 81-90 gear.
What ever happened to the part 2?
>> What ever happened to the part 2?
Excellent question. š