Feldon While we’ve heard indirectly from Silius that work on existing items from level 20-80 was being done, SmokeJumper has an official quote for us:
We have a full itemization plan in place now and we’ll be unveiling much of it at Fan Faire.
I’ll tell you this much though. We’re going to itemize *all* of the level 20-80 items by GU 61.
When asked if this includes raid Fabled items from levels 40-80:
“All” includes Raid items.
We’ve already been informed that crafted gear especially Mastercrafted gear from level 22-77 are being tweaked to have the right stats for the appropriate Archetypes. There’s also a chance that we may see a reversion of the unpopular revamp of all itemization for level 1-20 characters. Handing out coon skin caps and furs to Sarnak or Fae didn’t make a lick of sense.
We are hesitant to make any prediction about how this will all go. There are thousands of items in EQ2 with similar stats that exist mostly for appearance. We would be very disappointed to see those items washed away in favor of a single progression of items shared by all dungeon bosses and trash. We don’t know what form this revamp will take, but it seems an insurmountable amount of work to do it “right”.
No word on if we’ll see any improvement to Destiny of Velious itemization which has replaced cool items that people strive to acquire, with a stat odometer propelled by incrementally more powerful yet completely unmemorable items.
To be honest, I’d rather see a bland stat-item itemization and a much larger variety of appearances available for appearance-only gear. Then again, this being Sony, I have the feeling that such appearance gear would be on the Marketplace. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that there’s no way to earn SC except to hand over real cash. Yes, my conspiracy theory about Extended being a testbed for their next big MMO is the basis of this assumption. Why do you ask?
Optimally, I’d like to see appearance items available on a merchant for just about every faction you can work up. Not only the big-time factions (Thurgadin, Ry’Gorr, etc.) but also the little ones that have little to no value at this time (Seamist Fairies, Far Seas Trading Company) but can be worked up. Most especially they could be put on the city factions’ merchants – right now having 40-50k faction with the Freeport Militia doesn’t do much for you except bragging rights and access to a title. It’ll give those of us achievement-hunting something else to aim at.
They’ve put in a lot of work to make the scripted creation of items work ‘properly’ (with boring results). It is quite possible that they can use that to just change the stats of existing items, instead of having to recreate every single items. They have done that before to all treasured and legendary items from evel 20-60.
I do fear they’ll mess up the items with special effects though. There are quite a lot of those spread around.
EQNExt… Now Hiring. No creativity required. Just push the button when we say to create new items. We pay you cheap and give ourselves raises.
Magar,
If only the appearance of the item had some effect on being able to heal better, tank better, kill stuff faster. 😉
this is about time ! With the “new” one stat does all system, it’s very painfull to find items with +5str, +15wis, +2int…Also quest item are usually far less intersting than even many treasured grade item.
I’d like to see mastercrafted gear fixed. Just leveled my Fury to 90 recently. What was sad, she wore her level 62 crafted gear till I could get her to 82 for the next tier of armor. It was better than (stat wise) anything else I could make or get for her. The Rime faction items and even crafted faction items were not upgrades in my opinion. I’m mostly a solo player and rely heavily on my tradeskills to make what I need.
I know there are many new stats to be considered when looking at gear. My rule of thumb for gear…if it doesn’t increase health and power its not an upgrade. I know that’s a simplistic way to look at items but if a toon doesn’t have the the health to stand up to a mob or the power to cast on it, no amount of anything else is going to matter.
Well sheeeet. I might start playing the game again. Well, thats if they do a good job.
Both awesomely good news, and feeling apprehensive 🙂
Although to be blunt at this point even reitemising in a way that results in bland stats for items would be a big step forward from where we are today, so often a fabled chest drops and the item that appears out of it gets beaten by handcrafted 😛
One thing for sure though, I’m very pleased that they are doing all the items, they have just done the tradeskill stuff once before, and to do it again would result in it being the only gear for 70 levels, even now while it has redundant stats the gear is actually fine.
One other thing I wonder about, since they are doing all the gear in one go I wonder if they will therefore be able to scale everything correctly? If so will they be able to automatically rescale portions of the game, this would have big implications if they decided to change the way we level later on.
I have a dim memory of them doing something like this before, and I think it was via a heavy-handed script that rampaged through the item database. When the dust cleared, most of the stuff was fixed and then players helped report the stuff that missed, looked funny, or for some reason wasn’t supposed to fit the typical mold. I’m guessing this new wave will play out like that again (which is fine with me).
Nice. Can’t wait to see the 80-90 non-DOV item revamp though.