Ultimate Coils should Never be rebalanced

[Almagnus1]

Ultimate Coils represents a very interesting thing within the community.

On the one hand, you have a lot of the really good raiders that are going after the prize of the weapons (which look quite amazing). On the other hand, you have players (like me) that have not fully cleared Omega Savage, and probably don't are probably not in a raiding static that see the shiny and want it - yet (for one reason or another) don't have the time (or the drive) to form up and work with a static to get into Ultimate Coils.

Really though, this needs to be the prize that is extremely hard to do, and will continue to eat people alive for years to come. These cosmetics not only need to stay rare, but they need to be representative of an achievement for at least this expansion, if not the next and possibly the one after that.

Ultimate Coils needs to be the hardest thing in the game, and it needs to be there for the raiding community so they have something to work towards. And it should NEVER change.

[Imladris]

I agree there should be no nerf, period.

The devs however should take the gear rewards out of these kinds of runs, and replace with a mount reward. The gear, by the time this run is cleared in 'reasonable' numbers, will be simply relegated glamour gear, all but useless so otherwise. (Maybe not all but useless, but likely better nominal gear will be around by then for the majority player base.)

At least a mount is a proper mmo standard elite trophy reward, that doesn't take up space in my retainer banks, that can be used to rub in other players noses in all such. In the end, isn't that the real point of it all, besides titles and a unique experience that adds years to one's life?

[Hasrat]

Yeah. Kinda funny how devs must surely know how much of their gear will quickly be reduced to glamour, yet still can't fix inventory/glamour woes.

[Rufalus]

If they let you massively overgear and undersize it later on then maybe they should start putting in limited time rewards, like clear an ultimate fight within the first 6 months / 2 major patches of its availability, you get some commemorative earrings to show that you did it, or a trophy furnishing, which will never be available again. I think raiders would appreciate a little something like that because the weapons and title will lose some value 2 years later when people can do it unsync in lv500 gear and following a video guide, although insta wipe mechanics will still be there but phase skipping could eventually be a thing with no item level sync.

[Lambdafish]

Agreed, tonnes of people complained about lack of content this patch, and a primary reason for that is that content becomes irrelevant very quickly. This should stay relevant for a long time. No nerfs, and no rewards unless you run it synced.

[Masekase_Hurricane]

The devs however should take the gear rewards out of these kinds of runs, and replace with a mount reward. The gear, by the time this run is cleared in 'reasonable' numbers, will be simply relegated glamour gear, all but useless so otherwise. (Maybe not all but useless, but likely better nominal gear will be around by then for the majority player base.)

Why not both Weapon whilst it's current and mount from getting the achievement or Why not create an Ultimate Relic weapon base weapon from first Ultimate and each upgrade from completing the next one in the chain :P

[RiyahArp]

If you don't have the time now, you won't later when it will be impossible to find people who care about it.

[Serilda]

I would like them to one day allow undersized entry so that I can actually see it, but never unsynced or echo. It should stay brutally hard and it doesn't bother me at all if that means I'll never complete it; let those who expend the effort have their special content.

I would also like them to add some similarly brutal 4-man content one day so that my tiny group can have something to work on.

[Lambdafish]

If you don't have the time now, you won't later when it will be impossible to find people who care about it.

Depends, people still farm ARR ponies. If the content is designed to last then it will. The big problem is the Dev team are poor at incentives IMG longevity in content

[Zojha]

Depends, people still farm ARR ponies.

I'm at a loss of words here. Sure, yes, they do, that is fact. Likewise, people still do the Lord of Verminion challenges to get the Clockwork Twintania. Does that make these challenges "lasting content"? Because they have rewards new players have yet to attain? Because then all content is "lasting". But for any given player, any given pony farmer or LoV challenger, the content only lasts a rather limited amount of time - right up until they got the rewards.

Now, increasing the longevity of a piece of content for a given player is extremely tricky, because if you try to create "longevity" via rewards - and MMOs always do - then the longevity equals the gating of the reward. And the tighter you make the gate, the less people will fit through. You can gate things behind time, skill, effort/grind, disposable income... whatever, the harsher the gating, the less players will bother, the less people will qualify and there's a clear tradeoff between longevity and accessibility, between the amount of players doing the content and the time it lasts the players doing it. And your job as designer becomes to find the sweet spot between them.

What SE then commonly does is to nerf content over time - they start with a tight gate and widen it over time to let more people through. In essence, that's the skimming strategy you can find in price politics. As the skilled people get their rewards and move on, you open it up to the next skill segment so it doesn't die out and then, once those got their rewards and moved on, to the next and the next until it's pony farm and anyone can get it "for cheap" to maximize it's longevity for the playerbase as a whole as it passes all skill segments. Which is precisely what people are yelling against here.

And a side note on the content volume: The game already has more content than anyone can reasonably consume and people are eager to point out all content there is in this game whenever someone complains that there's a lack of content. The key to understand the plaint is to realize that when they say there isn't enough content, they mean there isn't enough content they like to engage in. Which, for the vast majority of players, Ultimate is gonna fall into. It's dead on arrival content for most and the longevity of it for those players is zero.


Personally, I expect Ultimate to fade into obscurity before the end of the expansion and then never get touched again until it gets nerfed in one way or the other. It's only relevant to a small subset of players while it's fresh already and as those start to get their rewards and clears, the pool of players for it will dwindle and the remainders able and willing are gonna have an increasingly tough time finding people.