Please don't delay Savage Raid Releases

[SnowVix]

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.

you're talking about the first fight. the person you quoted is talking about the last fight.

[Packetdancer]

you're talking about the first fight. the person you quoted is talking about the last fight.

Ah, I misread them as saying it was what it took to beat the last fight previous to the tier dropping; this is what happens when you read the forum while insomniac but not awake.

I’ll own my mistake there, and grant that having two potential pieces of tomestone gear (which I think would, for this tier, have been the difference between i481 and i482) or one piece of more valuable gear (still i481, but a bigger potential stat bump) could affect the fight balance very slightly in the first week, yes. I’m not sure that it’s enough variance to completely break the balance of savage raiding altogether and ruin it forever, though.

Moreover, if the argument is to keep a level playing field, I strongly suspect the difference between i470 and i481 (with the crafted stuff pentamelded) is a larger one in terms of the effect on the fight than the difference between i481 and i482 would be; the group that couldn’t afford a set of HQ crafted stuff (whether or not it’s pentamelded) would not only have been at a disadvantage stats-wise in E5S, but with folks who didn’t have the crafted set they wouldn’t be able to queue in to E8S at all the first week of release in the first place.

So I stand by my feeling that a week lead time between patch and savage unlock actually levels the playing field by potentially putting the crafted gear in the hands of more raiders.

Edit: And if folks really feel that a second tomestone accessory (or a left-side piece in place of an accessory) is enough to break the fights entirely... then make it so no tomestone pieces can be bought until a week after savage drops. Let folks amass tomestones for those two weeks, they just can’t spend them right out of the gate. Now you’ve removed even that current benefit of the one tomestone piece, and only the crafted stuff is on the table for week one clears.

(Or take the crafted gear out of the picture altogether until a .x1 patch; it removes the ability for week one clears of the tier, but there’s no risk of unbalancing the initial clears of the fights until crafted gear lands a few weeks later. And at that point, the pressure is off and you don’t need the one week delay on savage unlock. I don’t like that option myself, but it would be one they could go with, and might even be arguably better to make those initial clears even more impressive.)