[Suggestion] Overall Changes to Artifacts, Customs, Modifications, and Crafting

[Nasai]

My primary concern with the overall gear scheme in SWTOR is that it will fall into the unfortunate trap where most endgame characters of a given class will effectively look identical in terms of gear (the use of orange-type gear for aesthetic purposes effectively becomes a non-option due to artifacts). This is especially problematic for such cases where many players might find one of their sets to be particularly displeasing, in terms of aesthetics.

 

I think that the armoring modification slot should be unlocked for artifact items. All of the base stats and the set bonuses in artifact items should be able to pulled out of it in the form of an armoring modification. This includes endgame level 50 gear that can be purchased with tokens from PvP and Flashpoint/Operations accomplishments. The idea behind this is that all the effective stats of a given piece of artifact gear could be removed from the item and placed in a different piece of "shell" gear. This would allow players to make use of the wide array of character costumes available to them at lower levels, instead of forcing them to use the "shells" provided to them by the artifact items as the current system does. For "set" gear, instead of set bonuses being awarded by gear pieces, they would be awarded by the Armoring modifications in them. For example, "Battlemaster Force-Master" gear would now have "Battlmaster Force-Master Armoring" modifications in them. As long as a character is wearing 4 pieces of gear with Battlemaster Force-Master Armoring modifications in them, they will have all of its set bonuses. This system works rather conveniently, as the 5 slots targeted by set gear are the same exact 5 slots that can take Armoring modifications. To prevent raiding guilds from being able to get a full suit of endgame raiding gear by just killing the first boss over and over again, the armoring mods in gear earned from endgame content could simply made to be slot-specific. For example, if I get a pair of boots off a boss in a raid, i can only put the armoring mod into another pair of boots.

 

Effectively, under this system, artifact quality armor pieces would have no base stats, and all its stats and bonuses would come from the modifications inside. This means that artifact items would be the functional equivalent of Custom quality items.

 

Essentially, I think it's just ideal that players be able to take on whatever appearance they want with their equipment. The current system behind Artifact quality items pretty much make that a non-option for endgame players.

 

EDIT: I've slimmed this thread down to just my idea on how artifact items should be changed. For those of you that have read my crafting system changes concerning Custom quality items, I might make a new thread for that stuff down the line (once I've taken the time to master all the crew skills)

Edited January 10, 2012 by Nasai

[AJGeraden]

I agree wholeheartedly. Though having all base gear be Orange might be a huge overhaul, it would definitely set SWTOR apart from all other MMOs. I'm still blown away when I see someone who's achieved a particularly iconic look. And my bounty hunter is still searching for his.

[LordSatoh]

Agree

[Raximillian]

I agree with giving synthweaving/armormech the armoring modifications. While I'm cybertech and love being able to upgrade my armor, it does not quite fit...

 

I did not quite get the other change you proposed, but at least with the change to the armoring mods should help a lot.

Edited December 28, 2011 by Raximillian

[Deef_Cheputy]

Agreed. Sounds like a great idea!

[Nasai]

I did not quite get the other change you proposed, but at least with the change to the armoring mods should help a lot.

 

Allow me to clarify. While we're levelling, we pretty much have full control over the appearances of our characters. We can get orange pieces, and upgrade the mods inside them forever, allowing the same gear to be useful all the way to 50. If a different orange comes that you like the look of better, you can switch to that piece. If you like the one you have already better, you can take the mods out of the new one and put them in the one you already have.

 

When we hit 50, we'll be coming across a lot of Artifact (purple quality) gear that is much like Orange, except they only have a Mod and Enhancement slot (no Armoring slot). These items make up for the difference by having the stats that would have been gained from the armoring slot as just base stats on the actual piece of gear. This means that those stats cannot be removed from the gear and placed on an orange if you like the appearance of the orange better.

 

As an example, all of the moddable level 50 pvp armor has between 40 and 50 expertise (expertise will be vital for success in PvP as a level 50). The expertise on these pieces of gear are base stats on the gear, in place of what would normally be provided by an Armoring modification. This means you cannot use the expertise of level 50 gear in any other piece of armor, which means everyone pursuing lategame PvP progression will be forced to have the same appearance as everyone else of their class while PvPing. Additionally, these pieces of gear have set bonuses, which are also awarded through the gear (not the modifications in them). I'm also suggesting that these bonuses be gained through the armoring, so that they too can be taken advantage of in gears of different models.

Edited December 28, 2011 by Nasai

[MisterWratten]

Is this the situation for PVP only, or for PVE, as well?

[polishrobinhood]

Okay so I can't seem to find it, but awhile ago there was a post from someone at bioware whose name I can't remember, but it's the guy everyone likes because he's good at giving detailed explanations about some of bioware's choices. The two I remember were about gear customiation, and another with the match color option. Now in the customization post he stated that in operations, probably the harder modes but maybe not, the bosses at the end or toward the end of the place will drop the equivalent of the armoring mod of the artifact gear if the gear had an armoring mod. That is to say suppose you pick up an artifact armor piece from an operation. There is a chance sometime in the future you might pick up an armoring mod in that operation that gives the same stats as the base stats of the artifact gear. They didn't want to include all of the mods in the artifact gear because they didn't want people farming the easier bosses, ripping out all of the mods and just slapping them into their old gear making it so that it would be possible for someone to get all of the stats of someone with a full set of operation gear without even going past the first boss.

[MisterWratten]

They didn't want to include all of the mods in the artifact gear because they didn't want people farming the easier bosses, ripping out all of the mods and just slapping them into their old gear making it so that it would be possible for someone to get all of the stats of someone with a full set of operation gear without even going past the first boss.

 

Or they could just make the gear, and accompanying mods, better as the bosses/ops get harder. I'd hate to get rid of my epic Jedi look, even for a day.

[Raximillian]

Allow me to clarify. While we're levelling, we pretty much have full control over the appearances of our characters. We can get orange pieces, and upgrade the mods inside them forever, allowing the same gear to be useful all the way to 50. If a different orange comes that you like the look of better, you can switch to that piece. If you like the one you have already better, you can take the mods out of the new one and put them in the one you already have.

 

When we hit 50, we'll be coming across a lot of Artifact (purple quality) gear that is much like Orange, except they only have a Mod and Enhancement slot (no Armoring slot). These items make up for the difference by having the stats that would have been gained from the armoring slot as just base stats on the actual piece of gear. This means that those stats cannot be removed from the gear and placed on an orange if you like the appearance of the orange better.

 

As an example, all of the moddable level 50 pvp armor has between 40 and 50 expertise (expertise will be vital for success in PvP as a level 50). The expertise on these pieces of gear are base stats on the gear, in place of what would normally be provided by an Armoring modification. This means you cannot use the expertise of level 50 gear in any other piece of armor, which means everyone pursuing lategame PvP progression will be forced to have the same appearance as everyone else of their class while PvPing. Additionally, these pieces of gear have set bonuses, which are also awarded through the gear (not the modifications in them). I'm also suggesting that these bonuses be gained through the armoring, so that they too can be taken advantage of in gears of different models.

 

Ok, thanks, I get it now. I thought high level gear would follow the same trend, but a bit saddened it does not. I like my black talon operative jacket

[Nasai]

They didn't want to include all of the mods in the artifact gear because they didn't want people farming the easier bosses, ripping out all of the mods and just slapping them into their old gear making it so that it would be possible for someone to get all of the stats of someone with a full set of operation gear without even going past the first boss.

 

You bring up a really good point, and I have to say I hadn't thought of this. There's workarounds for this, though. Armoring pieces dropped in pve or ripped from a boss drop could just be slot-specific. As in, if i take a piece of armoring from a pair of boots, i can only put it in another pair of boots.

 

This probably wouldn't have to be done for PvP though.

Edited December 28, 2011 by Nasai

[Inuko]

Or, even easier, just do what WoW did and let you take the item that has the appearance you want, and put that appearance on the gear with the stats you want.

 

Edit for clarity VIA example: in wow, you could take a set of tier 2 gear that looks awesome, and a set of tier 12 gear that has awesome stats, and "consume" the cool looking gear to make the high level gear look awesome.

Edited December 28, 2011 by Inuko

[Kugruk]

There are a few things about the overall gear scheme in SWTOR that strike me as odd, and there are a few ways (some drastic) that I feel that it can be improved. My primary concern in this approach is that SWTOR will fall into the unfortunate trap where most endgame characters of a given class will effectively look identical in terms of gear (the use of orange-type gear for aesthetic purposes effectively becomes a non-option due to artifacts).

 

I have two ideas, one rather drastic, and one comparatively tame. Lets start with the easier one to stomach.

 

First and foremost, I think that the armoring modification slot should be unlocked for artifact items. What I mean by "unlock the armoring slot" is remove the base-stats of those pieces of artifact gear that come with mods and enhancements, and add the stats back to the item in the form of an armoring modification. This includes endgame level 50 gear that can be purchased with tokens from PvP and Flashpoint accomplishments. The idea behind this is that all the effective stats of a given piece of artifact gear could be removed from the item and placed in a different piece of "shell" gear. This would allow the moddable orange-labelled Custom quality gear (which is deemed equivalent to prototype quality because they have none of the base stats that Artifact items do) to achieve any overall gear quality. This would allow players to make use of the wide array of character costumes available to them at lower levels, instead of forcing them to use the "shells" provided to them by the artifact items as the current system does. For "set" gear, instead of set bonuses being awarded by gear pieces, they would be awarded by the Armoring modifications in them. For example, "Battlemaster Force-Master" gear would now have "Battlmaster Force-Master Armoring" modifications in them. As long as a character is wearing 4 pieces of gear with Battlmaster Force-Master Armoring modifications in them, they will have all of its set bonuses. This system works rather conveniently, as the 5 slots targeted by set gear are the same exact 5 slots that can take Armoring modifications.

 

One could argue that such a system would make orange-labelled Custom quality items too powerful, and would discourage crafters from ever bothering to hunt down epic versions of lower quality gear schematics. I've come up with a pretty drastic crafting overhaul to accommodate.

 

Remove the Armoring recipes from Cybertechs, and divide them among Synthweaving and Armormech (synth gets all the str/will, armor gets all the aim/cunning). Change all the craftable armors to the orange-labelled Custom quality.

 

Like I said, that one's a bit drastic. All of the craftable armor "shells" would take the same ingredients as Prototype quality crafting gear. Premium quality Armoring would take Power Crystals and Scavenged Materials for Synthweaving and Armormech respectively, so as not to disrupt the current relationships between crafting skills and their optimal gathering/mission skill pairings. Higher quality Armorings would require higher quality Underworld materials, in the same manner that equipment crafted by these professions currently do. This also drastically increases the quantity of costume sets available to players that could be used endgame.

 

Essentially, I think it's just ideal that players be able to take on whatever appearance they want with their equipment. The current Artifact quality items will prevent that for endgame players. I think at least my first idea would accommodate this ideal in such a way that isn't game-breaking. Admittedly, my second idea might stir the pot a bit too much, but there it is.

 

 

They've already adressed this, and rather well in the post Emmanuel made about the changes to item modification. They don't want Ops groups to farm the first boss for boots and then just remove the armoring from the boots and jam it into whatever custom gear they want. It more or less removes any reason to do any boss further into the Operations.

[Nasai]

They've already adressed this, and rather well in the post Emmanuel made about the changes to item modification. They don't want Ops groups to farm the first boss for boots and then just remove the armoring from the boots and jam it into whatever custom gear they want. It more or less removes any reason to do any boss further into the Operations.

 

You bring up a really good point, and I have to say I hadn't thought of this. There's workarounds for this, though. Armoring pieces dropped in pve or ripped from a boss drop could just be slot-specific. As in, if i take a piece of armoring from a pair of boots, i can only put it in another pair of boots.

 

This probably wouldn't have to be done for PvP though.

 

That whole issue can be so easily remedied that I can't accept it as a justification to pigeonhole all endgame players into appearing exactly the same.

[tonygleek]

its sucks when you finally has 400Armtech and realized that every lv50 weapon need Biometric Crystal Alloy which you can only got by join a Raid..

and the only thing Armtech do is caft barrel which SW and SI cant use...

look at cyber,oh they caft armoring and mods and every1 has 6solt for armoring,8-9solt for mods...even artifice can caft enhancement...

armtech sucks

[VinnieDaMac]

I agree with everything for the most part. I think most people would probably stick with the default purple gear just for the "social status" of having the full set, but it would be nice to be able to customize your gear if you found a look that you like better and it certainly would prevent lvl 50's from all looking the same.

 

...or just implement something similar to WoW's transmogrification where you can change the look of your gear as long as you already own that piece of gear. Or maybe a system where you can equip two sets of gear, one for aesthetics and one for stats.

[Nasai]

...or just implement something similar to WoW's transmogrification where you can change the look of your gear as long as you already own that piece of gear. Or maybe a system where you can equip two sets of gear, one for aesthetics and one for stats.

 

Yeah, I'm familiar with the systems used by Rift and WoW to allow players to customize avatar aesthetics through costume mechanics. The sad part is, SWTOR is so very close to making this possible already just by how they have the Custom quality gear system set up.

 

It seems to me that the player community is going to come to expect this sort of functionality in triple-A MMO titles, as evidenced by the fact that it's been implemented in one form or another in so many of the successful games lately. I worry that if Bioware doesn't fix their archaic set gear configuration, it will ultimately be one of the very few negatives of SWTOR when a customer sizes it up against its competition.

 

It's already a negative for me. I've been using my shaman-warlock-chicken-thingy Sith Inquisitor PvP gear for about a week now, and it's really starting to kill the charm of my avatar. I'd level a different toon, but I know I'd just be forced to wear armor nearly equally strange looking if I want to compete in PvP.