Suggestion: Set Bonuses or special effects

[Jonnycbad]

I miss when equipment had bonuses like this:

http://i.imgur.com/Rt40A.jpg

[Sylvina]

It works in some games but I don't think it would work well in this one.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

The turnover rate on gear is probably too fast to do set bonuses...
How long is it between gear upgrades, a few months?


It probably wouldn't work too well with the vertical progression FFXIV uses.
A horizontal progression game could do it much better.

[Sylvina]

The turnover rate on gear is probably too fast to do set bonuses...
How long is it between gear upgrades, a few months?


It probably wouldn't work too well with the vertical progression FFXIV uses.
A horizontal progression game could do it much better.

Yeah I agree that's probably the determining factor in how well set bonuses work out in a game.

[KaldeaSahaline]

Like for example if you have 2 pieces of raid gear you get a bonus, at 4 pieces you get another bonus. And the bonus doesn't have to be stats but like a special effect. For example maybe for a tank having 2 pieces of raid gear would give you 20% more chance to parry and getting 4 pieces would make it so you would counter auto attack when you parry.

Or how about weapons that have special traits or procs. Stuff like a sword that occasionally attacks twice, or weapons that have an HP drain proc.

Every single example you listed is a binary effect, thus would be trivially boring. All 4 examples do not change any decision points or offer any divergent gameplay.

In an ideal world, this is what the materia system would have been for, but they opted for a bland design there as well. Stuff like socketing materia improves/changes existing abilities.

In order for a design like this to work though, they'd need to revamp the entire job and encounter design paradigm, and frankly it's just too much work.

We use to have nice things like that but, according to SE, the community would force people to have said set and if they dont have it they would shun them away. Basically a PF would be "have X set or dont join".

Which is ironic considering they built in ilvl restrictions for PF and duty complete checkboxes, things that are intentionally designed to shun players who do not meed arbitrary standards.

[Penthea]

We use to have nice things like that but, according to SE, the community would force people to have said set and if they dont have it they would shun them away. Basically a PF would be "have X set or dont join".

As someone who played WoW for a very long time, I can tell you that this is very true. It makes it difficult to get in to raiding if you lack set gear at any point after the first few weeks of the expansion because so many will turn you away if you don't have it.

While set gear looks fun on paper in practise it can be a nightmare to balance. In WoW some classes/specs were very underpowered unless they had certain set bonuses while others were fine without them but then became op with them. Then there were those who saw very little difference in their performance after getting set gear and then felt crappy as it was meaningless to them. It was very demoralising to see set gear carry some players and completely ***k others. I don't want to go through that again.