paul_preib Posted October 11, 2012 Share Posted October 11, 2012 This ended up being an overwrought response to someone else's thread but it got me thinking what the heck, I'll throw it out here on its own as well a bit TLDRish but its late and thus feeling rambly: Therein lies I think one of the bigger issues with regards to pve endgame. The way gear is acquired overall vs. what gear can be obtained in what content pretty much eliminates the value of a huge portion of the game's content. Regular level 50ish instances-- No real purpose when a few BM/recruit pieces and some orange pieces with daily comm armorings and GTN snagged level 49 purple mods/enhancements outpace anything to be acquired. Hardmode Flashpoints-- The ease of entry into storymode ops in conjunction with augmented BM gear means that you pretty much skip over the tionese +partial columi stage entirely. A few columi drops might still be worthwhile but by and large once you've gotten your BH comms for the GF daily irrelevant again, this is exacerbated by how many columi comms it takes per pieces compared to alternate gearing means. Lost Island-- To run you are generally pretty close to full columi+ already, rakata chest can be nice but otherwise you will basically outgear the drops again by the time you run this. Storymode Ops-- Ease of entry for for KP and EV are nice to make it a good way to gear up fresh characters fast, but by making this tier 2 difficulty (i.e. on par with hardmode flashpoints) you negate most 4 man content (BH coms aside) Hardmode EV/KP-- SM EC--WIth a war hero barrel/hilt and a few BH pieces the drops from here are going to look mighty mundane. Some value filling in remaining columi with rakata but should be a primary gearing method not "fill in whatever I don't have BH comms to finish up yet" Nightmare mode-- Basically a pure "can we do it" test as there will be little in the upgrade department here once you are sufficiently geared to run it etc. etc. The combination of being able to augment everything now, having Black Hole coms be gained through so many sources and yielding top-tier mods, and the capacity to be full BM with a couple WH pieces within a week or a tad more of hitting 50 all serve to allow the player to bypass most steps in PVE progression (I leave out legacy mod-moving on purpose as I think being able to gear alts easier is beneficial to the overall endgame atmosphere) So what's the solution? Hard to say. Is it fair to tune content to be reliant on gear already being augmented? This would result a lot of irritated people, but the problem is that when encounters are not tuned to those fully augmented then augmented gear serves as effectively a tier higher then it is, or allows someone in say fully augmented BM to be statistically on par with non-augmented Columi except with a sizeable boost to weapon damage and force/tech power. What about how readily BH coms are acquired? Dial that back somehow? Perhaps make gear acquired this way on par with rakata instead to allow a greater purpose to campaign? Might work, who's to say? Perhaps tweaking pvp gear to make it less viable in pve somehow? This would anger a lot of people as making enough of a dent such that it doesn't replace anything below rakata would both be an annoyance for pure pvpers wanting to knock out some dailies for coinage and cause the "casual" mass to bring up that whole "game only caters to those with too much free time" argument you already see when discussing min/maxing WH gear and such. Perhaps the answer lies in what is acquired where-- Remove the separation of Tionese coms and crystals and make it com only, prices are adjusted accordingly such that you can obtain tionese gear about twice as fast, making it so tionese can be obtained while you still have some use for it (aside from an easy place to dump BH mods to retain the set bonus), daily comms can be traded for tionese at the 3:1 ratio used with pvp comm ugrading, columi costs are reduced by about 30% so that you are buying more than one piece before you've outgeared it with BH and a couple rakata pieces (but not so easily that it negates tionese), Rakata gear is dropped as it normally is dropped or on-par is obtained via group-finder and BH weekly-related commendations, the current black hole gear is gained via nightmare modes, and campaign gear is acquired from its traditional sources. If some of the above can happen, this could cause a shift-around in the gearing process that would increase the viability of each tier of content, giving everything below top-end progression content a purpose beyond "getting my BH coms for the day/week). Right now the higher the tier in pve the easier it seems to be to obtain, turn that on its head so Tionese takes virtually no time, Columi be fairly easy, rakata slightly perked up at the expense of BH being significantly slowed down and I think you'd see a far greater purpose put into any given echelon of level 50 group content, while allowing those who "aren't really pvp but do so because that full BM is so much faster then full columi" an adequate gear-path pve-wise. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theblaznee Posted October 11, 2012 Share Posted October 11, 2012 Remember, not everyone plays pvp, and even fewer play enough to buy BM pieces anytime soon after hitting 50. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alec_Fortescue Posted October 11, 2012 Share Posted October 11, 2012 Imo gear is very easy to get in this game. Best in slot gear is very easy if you have enough credits... I already got each enhancement to be grade 27 and crafting grade 27 armorings for my tank... There are those annoying ones who are giving away Campaign/Dread Guard-grade gear almost for free on the fleet while those things should be expensive and tough to get. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul_preib Posted October 11, 2012 Author Share Posted October 11, 2012 (edited) Imo gear is very easy to get in this game. Best in slot gear is very easy if you have enough credits... I already got each enhancement to be grade 27 and crafting grade 27 armorings for my tank... There are those annoying ones who are giving away Campaign/Dread Guard-grade gear almost for free on the fleet while those things should be expensive and tough to get. That is basically part of the problem I think. After spending a long time as almost purely a pvper I recently hit 50 an another alt (Sawbones Smuggler). Decided for a change of pace I'd work on getting him pve geared as well instead of the pure pvp that my Sentinel, Sniper, and Sage were. Even without spending any credits on buying mods/armorings off the GTN I was surprised with how quickly this guy went from "fresh 50 with a war hero gun/implant and BM" to 4 pieces of BH armor (2 dropped into tionese and two into BM for the ideal set bonuses) 1 rakata, BH earpiece, rakata implant, orange belt/bracers with a 61 and 63 mod (but a daily com and a 58 armoring in 'em). My sawbones may be far from perfect, but he's run Lost Island twice Storymode TFB once, no other operations, and is already geared to handle all but the absolute top progression content. Nice to be able to do so on one hand, on the other means a whole lot was trivialized rather soon. Edited October 11, 2012 by paul_preib Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alec_Fortescue Posted October 11, 2012 Share Posted October 11, 2012 I can equip any character of mine into full Campaign the moment they hit level 50. However I worked srsly hard on discovering schematics with my main. I don't really like it when someone who doesn't even have much credits is able to do the same because of some good samaritans around the place, ya know. Besides... The faster one is to get his end game gear, the more likely he is to cancel sub until next content update. Imo end game crafting should get some revamp and make it more difficult to craft end game pieces and make it unable for ppl to reverse engineer player-made modifications. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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