Please don't delay Savage Raid Releases

[Packetdancer]

The reason why full crafted gear doesn't cheapen the fight is because it is literally the minimum ilvl to beat the last fight in a raid tier, the only one that really matters in the end and on top of it everyone has access to crafted gear with the only restriction being your willingness to spend a lot of gil.

It is not; crafted is always better than previous BiS. Right now BiS is i500; 5.4 crafted stuff will be i510. Just like Edengrace and Augmented Deepshadow stuff was i470, and Neo-Ishgardian is i480. Minimum ilevel to queue into E5S was i470; presumably for E9S it will be i500.

So crafted is more than the minimum needed (the previous highest ilevel). If it were all the same as the previous BiS, sure, that wouldn’t change the fight balance. Yet people don’t consider skipping an entire gear grade (I.e. 10 ilevels) to be unbalancing the fight.

The issue with being able to get more tomestone gear isn't really that it cheapens the fight but that it basically goes against the idea of delaying it by a week in the first place, everyone being on an even playing field.

But you already have inequality; people who want to start on day one and don’t have a dedicated crafter (or crafter team) willing to get up at stupid o’clock and devote hours and hours to gathering materials as quickly as possible, who have all their scrip already maxed (sometimes on multiple characters) to buy the new scrip mats immediately, along with people potentially grinding the now-uncapped tomestone for the inevitable tomestone materials, etc.

World-first statics have dedicated teams of crafters and gatherers who have stockpiled everything they can think of ahead of time and who will rocket out the gate to obtain the new materials introduced with the patch as quickly as possible, all to make HQ versions of those new i510 crafted sets appear in the shortest possible time. Your average smaller hardcore static will have to either wait longer, spend a ton of money, or go in with i500 gear.

If your goal is that everyone starts on equal footing, we already broke that as things stand; the one-week delay would actually even the playing field by allowing more small statics to obtain the crafted gear and be on equal footing, as they could have a single crafter outfit them by spreading the gathering of new materials across a week. Sure, you’d be able to get a slightly better set via a second i520 tomestone accessory or replacing it with a bigger piece of left-side gear... but that would be more obtainable.

Grinding 450 tomestones in the hours post-reset is something basically any player can do, given time; a couple of roulettes, run a dungeon or two, have a journal ready to turn into Khloe and pick the tomestone option... it would be easy for any savage raider to get that out of the way on the first day post-reset. Obtaining a full HQ set of the crafted gear on day one is a much much higher bar to entry as things stand right now.

So if the concern is making sure everyone has a chance of equal footing when they start, then the week delay is a good thing so far as I can see; it puts the HQ crafted gear within reach of more statics than will readily have access to it without that delay, meaning more than just the most dedicated or well-funded groups can go in with the 10 ilevel advantage over the minimum requirement.