Should Alexander hard drop highest item level gear?

[Laesha]

Absolutely disagree. The way it is now is excellent. Especially in this last patch cycle, i feel as though the devs did absolutely everything they reasonably could to incentivize players to explore FcoB.

As raiders we get plenty of extra/better rewards for raiding. Exclusivity to higher ilv just isn't one of them, and in my opinion it shouldn't be. Personally i think raiders who ignore the myriad of other rewards we get just for being raiders and QQ about wanting higher gear levels are ridiculous. We get the glamour. We get to experience the fights in their truest forms. We get the satisfaction of beating them! We get to learn and sharpen our skills with our friends/statics. We get the titles. For those who want, they get to afk in player hubs and lord their new gear over all the "casuals" (extremely distasteful in my opinion, but, w/e). We get all this, and in my opinion taking away what we have would lead to a lot more harms than losing any of these rewards. The short-sightedness just staggers me.

In my experience, locking those ilv's behind harder content will not give people more incentive to raid, it will push them away from raids. Higher ilv (for whatever it's worth) is a great way to boost player confidence and get them to attempt things they otherwise would not. Obviously skill and group cohesion are the biggest factors, but ilv is definitely more than a placebo. Allowing people to reach the top ilv over time also incentivizes more attempts after what could potentially be a string of tough losses. We need more players enjoying raid content, not less, and i suspect that ilv padding goes a long way toward that. This would also create a lot more work for statics looking for replacements/subs who dont' raid regularly (especially if Alexander HM has a lock similar to the weekly lock out on coil. We know NM will be like CT, but we still don't know how HM will be). Having an ilv 128 poe tank with only a casual interest in FCoB on standby for when 1 of our tanks couldn't make it was very very nice. We were able to teach him the fights, get our weekly clears, and enjoy it without having to worry about a arbitrary rift in ilv.

This would also be unfortunate for theorycrafters and itemization. The fewer gear options per level there are, the less gear optimization is possible. This isn't to say there wouldn't be competitive pieces, but an additional gulf in ilv would trivialize the competition all the more. Higher ilv raid gear would have to be optimized for things like accuracy so people aren't stuck with sub optimal vitality for HP checks (depending on how tightly the HP checks are tuned).

And the biggest one, for me anyway. I want people who don't care to play their jobs optimally (for whatever reason. their game) to overgear all other content by a nice, large margin. I want my dungeons to be that much faster/smoother (even if the difference is minimal). I want the dps in my 24 man raids to have enough gear without raiding that the good dps dont' have to break their wrists trying to make up for players who aren't interested in raiding to be stuck w/ ilv 20 levels lower. The player who want to get better, will get better. They'll find ways to improve themselves. They'll be curious. But you can't make someone care by imposing an arbitrary gear ceiling. Because of that fact, i'd much rather have top gear levels accessible to everyone to help make up for apathy/distractions/whathaveyou. Locking the highest ilv gear behind the hardest content would be bad for the masses, and create more stress in the community. And for what?