With Aetherial i210 gear Available Why...?

[niwaar]

With Exploratory Missions potentially dropping i210 gear why is Void Ark gear not upgradeable?

While I realize that i210 gear will be both heavily randomized and rare, it still begs the question as to why we still are not able to upgrade this gear. From the stand point of gear progression it just makes sense that VA gear be given the opportunity to be upgradeable. A single i210 VA piece would still have the a very similar Time to Create as an Esoteric piece (1 week). With Twine and Coat being "handed" out readily through hunts, this mid-tier patch is the "catch up" patch as it always has been in the 2.x series. Even if a VA piece required 2x the upgrade materials it would still be fair.

XIV has always had a problem with a lack of gear choice. This patch COULD solve those issues with a bit of luck in The Diadem. But it could do so much more if the 24man raid would reward us with something better for our time and efforts. The game has had real issues with the concept of subjob gearing from the word go. XI did things right. Many jobs shared gear. Going from one job to another often only meant a couple of gear changes. Which opened up players to actually being able to play those jobs. XIV hampers us, but with VA we could.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

You could not upgrade the LotA, ST, or WoD dropped gear.

Why would you expect VA gear to be any different?

[Airget]

210 isn't guaranteed, you have to fight certain boss mobs and then lot against 8 others, you have to make sure your job drops and then you have to make sure the stats are worth something. With all those variable sin mind 210 gear isn't as glamourish as it sounds since you could get a 210 Monk gear but it has Spell Speed and accuracy on it, or something weird like that.

Void gear on the otherhand, guaranteed to have 8 i200 drop in the process of the whole dungeon, 8 chances that you may lot on something you want and when you do get it there is no RNG for the secondary stats so you won't see an i200 piece of gear and get wasted secondary stats, you'll know what you are getting unlike aetherial where it may take seeing the monk gear 5-10 times to get the one you want and the time to do that is rather high.

3rd doing Ark once a week gives you a token to upgrade an esoteric piece minus weapon into i210 version of it, so you can obtain a piece of i200 gear and technically you obtain i210 gear through void ark but only if you got x piece from esoterics. So technically Void Ark does offer a weekly guaranteed i210 piece of gear and you get it on the first run and you don't have to rely on RNG for good secondary stats so it really comes down to.

DO you wanna fight RNG in Exploration to get 210 gear or are you ok with the slow and steady i200 and i210 upgrade esoteric gear from void ark.

Void Ark run can take maybe 40-50 mins to complete, so say you have to spend 3hrs a week to get the piece of gear you want there, or you can just go once and have the upgrade for i210. On the otherhand Exploration is like hr and 30, have to wait 30/2hrs max to re-enter so you have to ask if it takes 5 full runs to get 210 you want you are spending 7 and a half hours in exploration to get the gear you want compared to the 1-3hrs in void ark. Even then those are just guesstimates give and take more or less in each 7 and a half could be 3hrs or even 15 hrs, void ark could just be 1hr or 6hrs but overall the item to time acquisition is a lot quicker in Void ark than it would be in island exploration.

[TiaHeart]

The thing however is:

- diadem skillwise is average joe
most parties should trigger 3+ gold chests, its not that rare. Unless you get thrown all those NM in a very small spot at the same time and cant kill them O:-)

- diadem loot is off week cap, and max level

- sure its 8 ppl roll, but if you make a pf to "need" your chances are no different from ark (1 or 2 people only per drop). Df is a bad idea to gear up main, thats sideclasses by gettin potential grabs on everything without need stoppin ya, and maybe pegasus for same reason

- ok its randomstats, but since its unlimited just go gather all your main 210s till you have a nice set with nice stats

You dont need ark or as gear, apart from stat jugglin. You can go all diadem with thor weapon. Diadem allows everyone full 210s easily. Diadem = as > eso and ark. This didnt exist in ct times (only via harder raids for, well, raiders), so yeah ark gear could as well go 210 seeing how its capped weekly, without throwin much more freebies out than are already there in diadem. Its pretty much ark + eso = garlond catchup post patch 2 pieces weekly then
-> you are right about ark requirin less playtime then diadem. But its not as important as ct was, and wouldn be op 210 due to diadems existence and weekly cap.

Maybe they feel that OP argument "variety" is a bad thing when previously purchased eso gear leaves for ark freebies hence eso 210 ark 200. But gearprogression(keepin ppls ilvl a bit below raiders) is weird, leaving diadem out of scope