My opinion on endgame gear progression : DRK i225, 4th month of subscription

[KitingGenbu]

Progression is too predictable in this game. Can bust your but with esos only for lore to be the new uncapped in a couple of months. Last alex tier in 3.4. Lost city will go unlocked from lockouts. Last 24 man in 3.5. Same cycle as 2.0-2.55 only with less content imo. Honestly no point in "catching up" until 3.55 which will probably be in April

[Deceptistar]

*remembers the good ol days where gears took years, players strengthened ingame communities, and raid bosses took a year to decipher how to beat*

[Exidrial]

You raise some valid points but I do take umbrage with one statement that seems to have sprung up in a lot of post-WoW players."The relic grind is annoying not hard." You're not going to agree with me at all, but not all difficulties are the same kind of difficulty. EX primals and savage raids are hard as hell but once you follow someone's guide and solve the puzzle well enough to complete it you just grind it, farm it. Lots of difficulty up front then you just need to be attentive.

On the other hand, while the anima weapon is INDEED a grind, having the dedication to pick away at it for months is a hard thing to do that many people choose not to. Especially since at no time is it required to do it, you could save so much time just getting a lore weapon which isn't far worse than a 230 anima, and is fine for getting into raiding with. Besides soon you'll get an item to upgrade that 230 lore weapon to 240.

So why then is there a real point to getting a relic? If it's just annoying to get then why would anyone do it considering lore weapons and primals weapons do fine? The answer is that actually having dedication to do this thing normal people don't is a challenge and you feel a real sense of achievement for completing it. When I see someone with a 230 or a 240 relic I can respect someone who put in the work to get that shiny thing. That's different than the person with the raid weapon who completed challenging content months ago.

Yeah I'm not agreeing with you.

You can look at grind like this as a challenge if you actually find the content you are doing fun.
I am the kind of person that needs difficulty to have fun, the casual content in this game is not difficult enough to satisfy me.

But I fail to understand how any of the grind is "hard". Yeah I know what you mean, after you know a fight really good it's not challenging anymore.The point is overcoming the challenge, mastering the fight.
While it sure is a hard thing to focus on one thing for such a long time it's not the content you're doing that's hard. It is overcoming the boring grind that is hard.

Those are two extremely different types of challenge. In my opinion overcoming annoying things is not nearly as "valuable/good" (can't find a fitting word).
The fact that a lot of people find getting the weapon boring and tedious to get is proof for bad game design. I pity everybody who finds grinding for the weapon tedious/boring but does it anyway.Don't do it.Do something more fun instead.It's not worth it.

[mp-please]

*remembers the good ol days where gears took years, players strengthened ingame communities, and raid bosses took a year to decipher how to beat*

Or grind that piece of loot with a 0.01% drop rate out from a field boss that only spawns every 6 hours to then see it explode at a +4 to +5 (with 10 max). Good times.

[MaFi0s0]

Im a returning player from 2.0, and I wanna say that:

1) I enjoy that I am forced to do the MSQ and levelling 50-60, a jump potion would totally ruin the experience of this game, for immersion and learning your class and game mechanics.

2) I dont expect to have BiS anytime soon after I hit 60, please dont continue to make it an expectation that everyone should have the best armor, all content should be able to be cleared with 2nd or 3rd best but only difficult content should award the best gear. PvP should award its own gear for this reason.

[RamothElggur]

I am the kind of person that needs difficulty to have fun, the casual content in this game is not difficult enough to satisfy me.

In your earlier posts u saw no point of doing that becaus it is in your eyes too easy to obtaining strong gear and you see no point in doing that at all.
This needs abit of explenation i sense a big "confliction". You are not even trying to do those kind of Extreme Primals and Raids and you want a Challenge.
Well that is the Point of doing that. Gear from there is nice if u get it but thats not the Main point, heck people who are full 240 atm they still do those Raids and "ex primals", even "7-Man" stuff for challenges and becaus it is fun.

So what is the point of Ranting about Challenge if you are not even trying? High level Gears does not make you the worlds best player, there are way more factors speaking for a skilled player.

And to the Relic: it is meant to be an easy achieveable weapon, for people who are not Raiding or People who are attempting to do Raids, it is just a "time investment" nothing else.Regardless the Relic will never be the best weapon in the game and they made that clear that this will not happen

[Exidrial]

In your earlier posts u saw no point of doing that becaus it is in your eyes too easy to obtaining strong gear and you see no point in doing that at all.This needs abit of explenation i sense a big "confliction". You are not even trying to do those kind of Extreme Primals and Raids and you want a Challenge.
Well that is the Point of doing that. Gear from there is nice if u get it but thats not the Main point, heck people who are full 240 atm they still do those Raids and "ex primals", even "7-Man" stuff for challenges and becaus it is fun.

So what is the point of Ranting about Challenge if you are not even trying? High level Gears does not make you the worlds best player, there are way more factors speaking for a skilled player.

And to the Relic: it is meant to be an easy achieveable weapon, for people who are not Raiding or People who are attempting to do Raids, it is just a "time investment" nothing else.Regardless the Relic will never be the best weapon in the game and they made that clear that this will not happen

Let me explain again. I want to do Savage. I really do but finding a group for Savage is hard.
I'm really happy that the FC I'm in wants to do nidhogg ex tomorrow but they'll probably never do Savage.

I do like challenge but I need a reward for investing this much time in it.It's not just investing time into the raid itself, it's investing the time it takes to find a party.
If I wanted to just simply play a hard game I would play Tetris: The Grand Master 3 xD

At the end of the day fun is nice but to keep myself motivated I need a goal, I need a reward.

[TankHunter678]

At the end of the day fun is nice but to keep myself motivated I need a goal, I need a reward.

So the game should be like WoW where it is raid or die?

In essence if all the best gear is only in raids then that is what people will do. All other non-raid battle content would be dead on arrival because "I need a reward to do it" will be repeated by everyone. "Does it progress me for raids? No? Sorry no point in running it." A mentality I commonly see during my interactions with hardcore raiders. Same with the mentality where they deem you worthy or not to speak with them based on your hardcore raid completion.

I actually rather like that I am not required to do savage raiding. I like that I can progress my character without having to try to bash my head on the brick wall that is raider mentality.

[Brannigan]

OP,

raids are completely unrewarding in this game. On that you are correct. The easy mode and crafting recipes that come out in 3.4 will reward better gear than the savage 3.2 raid while being far, far, far easier. Catchup patches allow everyone to get nearly-best-in-slot setups by playing very easy content a couple months after the raid comes out. Raiding does not even reward you with unique looking gear, since anyone can get it from easy mode - raids only allow you to dye it (both sets so far have had a fairly lazy dye pattern as well). The only rewards you get are a mount and a minion, but the content gets nerfed eventually so even those are widely available with time.

Frankly, I cannot recommend this game to anyone interested in any sort of MMORPG progression. There are ->six<- stats that matter on gear, and two of them only apply to healers and tanks. Three stats do the same thing - increase damage/healing output. How they increase it varies slightly, but only critical hit has anything interesting going on, and even then it's only for a couple of classes (SCH, BRD). There are no set bonuses. There is nothing special about raid gear, despite the raids being tuned way more harshly than anything else in the game.

So you're raiding for bland gear that isn't even really that good, and a full set can be replaced within a few hours of the new raid patch dropping thanks to easy mode, crafts, and primals all blowing old raid gear out of the water. Raiding to experience the fights is one thing, but it gets old after wiping for the 150th time to fight mechanics that the devs didn't even test without invulnerability. Heavensward raiding is a god damned disaster.

Oh yeah, and all that unique (and bad, really) side content they keep releasing syncs your item level down, so the +5 item levels on the weapons don't even matter at all. GG.

I actually rather like that I am not required to do savage raiding. I like that I can progress my character without having to try to bash my head on the brick wall that is raider mentality.

Being able to progress your character without raiding and raids actually rewarding superior gear are not mutually exclusive. It just means that you wouldn't be able to progress your character to the absolute highest levels without doing the hardest content, which is how it is in almost every RPG ever made.

When I see someone with a 230 or a 240 relic I can respect someone who put in the work to get that shiny thing. That's different than the person with the raid weapon who completed challenging content months ago.

Also this statement is ridic. Raid weapons almost certainly take more time and work to acquire than the relics - ESPECIALLY in Heavensward with how raids are tuned - plus they require 7 other people.

editing again for one more quote from the previous page

hurray you can get full 240 once the catch up patch gets released, but 50% of that gear has bad a Stats which is not even worth getting while the people who are Raiding getting the BiS Pieces they are looking for if they put the effort into doign the Raids

Without a parser you will never notice a difference in performance between full-on best in slot gear vs full upgraded tomestone gear. Even in a raid, unless you're at bare minimum gear levels for the content, your execution is going to be 100x more important than optimizing your secondary stats. This is even more true now that we can put materia in everything.

[TankHunter678]

Being able to progress your character without raiding and raids actually rewarding superior gear are not mutually exclusive. It just means that you wouldn't be able to progress your character to the absolute highest levels without doing the hardest content, which is how it is in almost every RPG ever made.

Oh I do not mind BiS being raid gear. If people want to raid to get the BiS gear that lets them hit the theoretical maximum DPS a class is capable of in the hands of a master then go right ahead. I do not mind getting gear that is of similar ilvl and not the best stats from other sources because I do not need the best of the best in stats for the content I run. Raiding can award the ideal gear, the ones with the best stats for a given class. Just do not make that the focus of everything.