Anybody think Item Levels should only increase once per year?

[Nalien]

Since you gain Soldiery at basically the same rate as the old stones, your gear will upgrade at a decent clip.

Except new players cannot gain Soldiery at the same rate because they're stuck doing the older dungeons only due to their iLevel. Even if some of the dungeons will allow you in with a low iLevel, unless you're a DPS (and even then) you're not going to have an easy enough time to farm them regularly. That's partly the playerbases fault for being unwelcoming jerks, but I can't help but blame SE a bit... Did they even test Pharos Sirius as a party of full i48s?

10 Soldiery from Amdapor Keep is a snails pace, rather than remove Philosophy they could simply have increased the number dropped, then a new player does a couple runs of an easy dungeon and gets i70, instead of having to slog through countless runs with the aim of jumping them from i50 to i100...

There really is nothing confusing about the old tomestones; "Each tomestone is for a different iLevel, you'll want to start out getting Philosophy" is not a complex concept... Raising the number of Philosophy dropped, or lowering the cost of Darklight would have been much easier on new players than going "This is Pharos Sirius, you'll only get 15 Soldiery for this and people will probably kick you when you can't even tank the first boss". Pushing new players right in at the deep end just feels cruel, crueler when SE is removing easier grinds for the purpose of doing so...

[Ehayte]

While I do like what people are calling horizontal progression, what I think is missing is "Alternative Advancement."

When you are max level you can grind xp or special dungeons to gain more power (1 level 50 worth of XP would maybe let you buy +1% permanent boost to hit points, up to a 5% total boost).

THAT would keep HCs logging in.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

As things have been standing so far, you're actually progressing 20 ilevels per 6 months. The intial poetics gear is i120, for the time being, only fcob can provide you with the means of rising it to 130 (we're talking strictly tomes gear); when World of Darkness aka Final Tower gets here, they'll probably add the carbon items to hunts and the gear will jump another 10 ilvls with people zerg rushing hunts for them.

Hell no to the hunts. Square nerfed the hunts (eventually) to stop people from gaining ilvl too fast after that fiasco. They wouldn't be that stupid (as many people believe) to make the same mistake twice.

[StouterTaru]

In order to make gear relevant for a year, you would either have to make it rare or time intensive to get, or you would lose people after a few weeks when there's no worthwhile reward for another year. We might see something like this with the expansion, but the current state wouldn't keep people playing without the increases.

I hope we get enough content in 3.0 to spread around unique gear that will last until 4.0, instead of just a new coil with a different name.

[Krr]

We don't need less ilvl increases, we need a smoother ilvl curve. Each item level tier completely blows the last out of the water, making it a jilted progression with tons of useless chaff.

[Maero]

Not sure one year but new gear comes out to quickly in my opinion.

[JayCommon]

Hell no to the hunts. Square nerfed the hunts (eventually) to stop people from gaining ilvl too fast after that fiasco. They wouldn't be that stupid (as many people believe) to make the same mistake twice.

While I don't disagree with your viewpoint towards the 2.3 hunt fiasco...I can't help but believe you are being extremely hopeful.

I fully expect them to inflate tomes in hunts (more solidery, A ranks giving poetics and more poetics in S ranks) and add the upgrades to poetic gear into the allied seal loot pool with the 2.5 patch. There will only be one more patch after that (2.55) before Heavensward and SE is going to want as many people as possible at the ilevel cap for when that releases. I suspect this time around they will put the carbon items (both of them) into World of Darkness from the get-go as added incentive to do them, but yeah I would just get ready for the disappointment again if I were you.


On topic: OP the best you can hope for is that SE changes the way they tackle progression with the expansion. There have already been comm. rep posts in the past saying the developers "have no plans" for horizontal progression, for reasons that were very well defined by Kyuven.

That being said, I would love to see some horizontal progression. I just don't think we will get it in the form that you are hoping for. Many of the playerbase enjoys that instant jump in power every 3-6 months. And ultimately, the type of progression you want is usually gated by horrifically long grinds that isn't very widely accepted (on the forums anyway). Atma threads went on for months....