5.2 Gear Gap is Wrecking New Players

[Kurj]

The increasing gear gap is destroying new-to-PVP 70s, and I'm worried that it's going to decrease population or encourage AFK play, most likely a combination of both. Either increase and re-tune bolster, or make Tier 2 gear available for purchase with tokens only, at cheap prices so newer players can get a leg-up on the GC grind. The one-sided nature of many matches is simply shocking at this point, and we are less than 2 weeks in. And I speak not as a victim of the gear gap, but as a beneficiary. Seriously, you guys need to do something about this quickly.

 

How can it possibly be fun for new players to feel like rag dolls every time they step into a WZ? It's bad enough to face a skill gap at the start of your PVP career. Combine it with an enormous gear gap and you have a recipe for empty WZs.

[Eli_Porter]

Either increase and re-tune bolster, or make Tier 2 gear available for purchase with tokens only, at cheap prices so newer players can get a leg-up on the GC grind.

 

Why would you need T2 gear when bolster puts you above it?

Edited April 26, 2017 by Eli_Porter

[Kurj]

Why would you need T2 gear when bolster puts you above it?

 

Because 4 tiers of gear is too much to grind. What they should do is remove Tier 1 gear from the loot tables and make Tier 2 the entry level of gear.

[TheMadProphet]

Good. Working as intended. 10/10. TY Bioware.

[Foambreaker]

Because bolster with no set bonus is just as good as BiS with set bonus, you just need a little skill...

 

/sarcasm

[Soljin]

After PvP from beta until now this system was the last straw...I have no intentions of fighting through a gear deficit to get back on par in WZs again....It's not just new players. But I do empathize with new players situation coming into PvP in the current system. Edited April 26, 2017 by Soljin

[Kurj]

After PvP from beta until now this system was the last straw...I have no intentions of fighting through a gear deficit to get back on par in WZs again....It's not just new players. But I do empathize with new players situation coming into PvP in the current system.

 

That is a good point. I don't play alts in PVP - I have enough trouble keeping up with one class. But the problem for alts under this system is just like the problem for new players, or veteran players who didn't experience the Thrill of keeping up with GC from release. Something needs to change.

[Kazz_Devlin]

The increasing gear gap is destroying new-to-PVP 70s, and I'm worried that it's going to decrease population or encourage AFK play, most likely a combination of both. Either increase and re-tune bolster, or make Tier 2 gear available for purchase with tokens only, at cheap prices so newer players can get a leg-up on the GC grind. The one-sided nature of many matches is simply shocking at this point, and we are less than 2 weeks in. And I speak not as a victim of the gear gap, but as a beneficiary. Seriously, you guys need to do something about this quickly.

 

How can it possibly be fun for new players to feel like rag dolls every time they step into a WZ? It's bad enough to face a skill gap at the start of your PVP career. Combine it with an enormous gear gap and you have a recipe for empty WZs.

 

Half population warned this would happen! As usual idiot dev's ignored community. There's not a single pvper that was upset with old gearing system so why the heck did bioware implement this monstrosity.........its the new content because they lack innovation and always put fourth just the bare minimum mostly in an effort to say they accomplished something Replicating stock items and the lame excuse for a space sim are prime examples of this. They ignore pleas for a balance pass or lie and say will fix that in 5.2 and yet nothing gets done. I'm sure the excuse is its hard yet the whole revamping of the class system into the utility's was suppose to make balance passes faster yet another lie. The plain fact is bioware/dev's don't care they know that most of us have years invested in this and the odds of most of us just quitting are rather low. The only solution would be to boycott PVP maybe if people stopped playing even if its just for a day the dev's might get the hint!

[Neoforcer]

Because bolster with no set bonus is just as good as BiS with set bonus, you just need a little skill...

 

/sarcasm

 

Because bolster does not make up for the fact that as a rank a 300 player that has 129k health as a dps and hits new toons with there bolster 238 gear level at 30k a hit before they can even fight back there dead when cc locked right through the geared healer healing them. As the geared healer runs out of force because of a squishy new toon.

[Janglor]

They need to make the 230 gear attainable with tokens only at the very minimum. I cant imagine trying to gear a toon from the ground up in this current system without a main to poach mods/ehn from.

[Eli_Porter]

They need to make the 230 gear attainable with tokens only at the very minimum. I cant imagine trying to gear a toon from the ground up in this current system without a main to poach mods/ehn from.

 

I used the vendor at the supply section to pvp gear up my skank tank, dirt cheap lethal b-mods and discipline enhancements. If that vendor sold mk-9 augments and kits for cheap that'd be great too.

[Gebrakstkasten]

To compensate I play Arsenal Merc or Engineer Sniper.

[Lundorff]

To compensate I play Arsenal Merc or Engineer Sniper.

 

Sorcerer healer is also viable with terrible gear.

[jdubbbz]

Tier 1 (230) and 2 (236?) gear just bolsters to 238 right now anyway though? Do I have that right?

[Foambreaker]

Tier 1 (230) and 2 (236?) gear just bolsters to 238 right now anyway though? Do I have that right?

 

Yes, so basically you have to grind thru 2 useless sets of gear before you even get a benefit.

 

This game is so over.

[Schoock]

Tier 1 (230) and 2 (236?) gear just bolsters to 238 right now anyway though? Do I have that right?

 

Yes. Basically you run some HM raids to gear up the first three tiers then PvP to finish 248.

Edited April 27, 2017 by Schoock

[jedcjedcjedc]

Because 4 tiers of gear is too much to grind. What they should do is remove Tier 1 gear from the loot tables and make Tier 2 the entry level of gear.

 

t2 IS the entry set of gear atm, you don't need t1 to get t2 anymore. also, you'll shortly be able to buy t1 with command tokens if you want. I do kind of wish they had made t1 for tokens and made t2 the cost of t1, t3 the cost of t2 etc. though.

 

Yes, so basically you have to grind thru 2 useless sets of gear before you even get a benefit.

 

This game is so over.

I mean, either you guys want bolster high or you don't. you can't have both, make up your mind.

Edited April 27, 2017 by jedcjedcjedc

[Eli_Porter]

Yes, so basically you have to grind thru 2 useless sets of gear before you even get a benefit.

 

This game is so over.

 

1. They're not useless because of set bonuses and optimized left-side gear.

2. If you're doing a lot of PvP, you can reach T3 and T4 gear a lot sooner. Preferably on your main hand since that makes the biggest difference.

[Kurj]

I don't think a bolster increase solves the problem (unless you set bolster at or very close to Tier 4, which creates its own set of problems). There are too many tiers of gear to grind. They need to remove one of the tiers, and make the first tier very easy to acquire, i.e., tokens only. That way, the first set of gear you have to grind for (242s) has a benefit, i.e., it gets you above bolster.

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

t2 IS the entry set of gear atm, you don't need t1 to get t2 anymore. also, you'll shortly be able to buy t1 with command tokens if you want. I do kind of wish they had made t1 for tokens and made t2 the cost of t1, t3 the cost of t2 etc. though.

 

 

I mean, either you guys want bolster high or you don't. you can't have both, make up your mind.

 

Yeah, in reality nothing has changed, it's still three teirs you have to work through, not 4 and thats just for people who are brand spanking new. People who have been playing for a while were in many cases at least at tier 2 if not tier 3.

 

BIS gear shouldn't be easy to get nor fast to get. It should be hard to get and take a long time to get. Gearing is the only thing that really keeps MMOs going. The promise of more power.

 

I had just gotten full 242 geared three days before 5.2 dropped [and had started gearing day 1 of 5.0] and they came out with 248 gear. I'm so glad they did and I hope they will do that every 6 months. When you are fully geared and have done the same old content for 5 or 6 years, it's very hard to find incentive to play much.

 

I love gearing, but that's just me.

 

Keep the gear coming BW! Only good thing you did since 5.0!

[Kurj]

Yeah, in reality nothing has changed, it's still three teirs you have to work through, not 4 and thats just for people who are brand spanking new. People who have been playing for a while were in many cases at least at tier 2 if not tier 3.

 

BIS gear shouldn't be easy to get nor fast to get. It should be hard to get and take a long time to get. Gearing is the only thing that really keeps MMOs going. The promise of more power.

 

I had just gotten full 242 geared three days before 5.2 dropped [and had started gearing day 1 of 5.0] and they came out with 248 gear. I'm so glad they did and I hope they will do that every 6 months. When you are fully geared and have done the same old content for 5 or 6 years, it's very hard to find incentive to play much.

 

I love gearing, but that's just me.

 

Keep the gear coming BW! Only good thing you did since 5.0!

 

The difference is that every tier 1 crate you open is a waste of effort, and will be doubly so once you can buy that gear for tokens. They should just remove the current Tier 1 from the game, which would effectively take us back to 5.1. I don't think anyone is going to say that 5.1 gearing was too fast - you didn't complete it until 3 days before 5.2 launched. In my mind, that is too long to gear. I think you should have average time to gear take 2/3 of your development cycle. So, from 5.0 to 5.2 was 5 months. The average player should have finished gearing some time in February, giving them some time to play alts, goof around, maybe take a short break, etc. That's not so fast that you lose a lot of subs in between releases, but not so slow that you keep people constantly on the hamster wheel.

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

The difference is that every tier 1 crate you open is a waste of effort, and will be doubly so once you can buy that gear for tokens. They should just remove the current Tier 1 from the game, which would effectively take us back to 5.1. I don't think anyone is going to say that 5.1 gearing was too fast - you didn't complete it until 3 days before 5.2 launched. In my mind, that is too long to gear. I think you should have average time to gear take 2/3 of your development cycle. So, from 5.0 to 5.2 was 5 months. The average player should have finished gearing some time in February, giving them some time to play alts, goof around, maybe take a short break, etc. That's not so fast that you lose a lot of subs in between releases, but not so slow that you keep people constantly on the hamster wheel.

 

I agree with you, they should just get rid of Tier 1, absolutely.

 

5.1 was an improvement, but you have to remember the first two months before 5.1 came out, there was only one way to get any of the new tiers, and that was from Command crates. There were no UCs until 5.1, even earning CXP was 5 times slower than it is now. There was no gear of any kind dropping in any Operation of any difficulty level from any boss. You either got lucky with a command crate [which 95% of the time, you didnt] or any of the new gear [Tier 1 -3] ]was literally impossible to get.

 

The only reason people were even bothering with Operations and PVP was to earn CXP to grind out a new command level to take a shot at getting something from a command crate. What gear did drop from it, most of the time was green or blue and had no set bonus. Set bonus/Legendary gear were exceedingly rare, much more than now. So you need to take that into consideration because people who are gearing now are in a FAR better place than we were were starting out. Had 5.0 had all the 'amenities' that 5.2 does, I would have gotten geared far quicker, by a month or two.

 

As things stand now, gearing is not at all in a bad place really given the amount of options you have. You can get BIS gear from crates and from PVPing, and you can get gear of Tier 2/Tier 3 in SM/Hm Operations. And for those rare birds that can sucessfully do NiM Operations, you can get Tier 4 BIS gear.

 

That's even even better than gearing was in 4.0.

 

Gearing is the bread and butter of Raiders, that's what drives them [ to a great degree] and BIS gear has always been the sole province of Raiders. If you speed up BIS gearing, you ruin progression raiding who is just now as of 5.2 have had gear returned to Operations in full. You make PVP the superior form of BIS gearing which would be completely unfair given that it had always been gear that ONLY raiders could get from doing Operations.

 

The only fair thing to do here that leaves both Raiders and end game PVPers able to enjoy their respect spheres of preference in a manner they had grown accustomed to is to raise bolster to offset any gear differences and return it to skill vs skill that pvpers want, and leave the BIS Gearing as is, [ or even more fairly, take it out of PVP entirely and only obtainable in raids [for Tiers 1-3). The best part of that strategy is that it's easy as hell to do, requires no altering of how things are done and can be instituted with the flip of the switch back to how bolster was between 5.0-5.1.

 

I know the grinding isn't pleasant, and I know it may be a bit longer than some people might like, but there are plenty of us who have done it and done it under far worse conditions than 5.2. We need to consider the wants of both PVEers and PVPers, the game can't sustain an ever decreasing population. Every player lost because they are unhappy with what the state of their gaming is is one step closer to the game shutting down because of lost revenues of canceled subs.

 

Neither PVE or PVP should have to suffer for the benefit of the other.

 

The bolster upping makes that unnecessary to do. Win/Win.

Edited April 27, 2017 by WayOfTheWarriorx

[Kurj]

That is really well thought out. The only point of disagreement I have is removing gear from PVP via bolster. Gear can be as much an incentive for PVPers as for PVEers - it certainly is for me. I don't care if my gear is BiS for PVE content, because I don't want to play PVE - expertise was fine in my book. And I have no desire for PVEers to suffer. I am happy if they are happy. But I do care if my gear is BiS for PVP. That's why I am opposed to raising bolster to max level. If I want to PVP without gear progression, I will play Battlefront. But I like MMOs, and the gear progression that comes with them. That's why I play SWTOR.

 

The one thing I do agree with you on, though - 4 tiers of gear is silly. I think it will demoralize a lot of new-to-end-game players, which will hurt all of us as our respective PVP and PVE end-game populations decline. That was the concern that caused me to post. I feel sorry for the new players I am seeing in WZs. You can spot them instantly. They've got 110k hitpoints, and they pop like a balloon when a well-geared player goes to work on them. However ego-boosting that may be in the moment, it's not fair, it's going to chase these people away, and that's not good for anyone.

[DarthRaika]

Easiest fix is bolster to 4 levels below top gear.

 

This will accomplish several things:

 

1. Nothing for PVE'rs to complain about since PVP'rs will not be gearing faster than them.

 

2. PVP will be much closer to skill v skill (of course people complain about classes etc. but that is a separate issue).

 

3. There will still be a reason to grind and so the people who like grinding for gear and the min/max'rs will still have plenty of reason to do it. 4 levels is still a fair amount in competitive play (not saying swtor is super competitive though ).

 

4. People who like to play alts will be fine playing whatever class they want. I would also love it if they added components to legacy but I did not say this at the start because I am going for the largest and easiest fix first as it should be done.

 

This should be so easy to understand and flock around. It is one simple fix that would benefit most people and something that BW could easily do. I know we want the world but lets at least get shelter and food first.

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

That is really well thought out. The only point of disagreement I have is removing gear from PVP via bolster. Gear can be as much an incentive for PVPers as for PVEers - it certainly is for me. I don't care if my gear is BiS for PVE content, because I don't want to play PVE - expertise was fine in my book. And I have no desire for PVEers to suffer. I am happy if they are happy. But I do care if my gear is BiS for PVP. That's why I am opposed to raising bolster to max level. If I want to PVP without gear progression, I will play Battlefront. But I like MMOs, and the gear progression that comes with them. That's why I play SWTOR.

 

The one thing I do agree with you on, though - 4 tiers of gear is silly. I think it will demoralize a lot of new-to-end-game players, which will hurt all of us as our respective PVP and PVE end-game populations decline. That was the concern that caused me to post. I feel sorry for the new players I am seeing in WZs. You can spot them instantly. They've got 110k hitpoints, and they pop like a balloon when a well-geared player goes to work on them. However ego-boosting that may be in the moment, it's not fair, it's going to chase these people away, and that's not good for anyone.

 

 

Yeah, your right about targetting people based on their total health. Very easy to see who's better geared than others, very good point. And you know some people are doing just that for an easier kill.

 

Honestly, and this is just me, the gearing situation in PVP, I * personally* have no problem with, but that's easy for me to say because I'm running around with 128 k health! And as I mentioned, I really don't think the differences in gearing actually matter to the degree some people postulate.

 

It would b e hypocritical for me to say the gearing is fine for PVP overall,, because again, I'm always the guy with the BIS gear long before a lot of people. I limit myself to just one character and than I grind like crazy when I can.

I was a progression Raider prior to 5.0 so gearing has always been something important to me and the truth is, I love gearing, I love there being things out there that I can get that can improve my performance [even if it's by barely noticable amounts heh] That's what floats my boat. Furthermore, just like you said, that 'gearing incentive' is at the heart of it for me as well and subjectively I too think it should matter. You put in the effort, you hone your skills as best ya can and you earn it by your efforts. Your time and effort should matter to a degree. Even if that edge was small, it would still be enough to provide the incentitive for. I need that carrot at the end of the stick and I only wanna catch up to it when they have a new carrot ready and waiting for me to drive on once I finsh this one! heh

 

But that's my preference, one that I don't want to have to make other's pay for. Most PVPers want a totally level playing field where gear does not matter in the least. That's what they're used to, that's what they want, and if it makes for happier players and a broader player base for PVP, well than thats probably the best way to go.

 

I'll say this bluntly. I love to fight, and I love to smash people. Better gear than they have helps me do that heh [As a marauder I'm behind the gun cause maras are the only class without self heals and that can be very difficult at times so a slight edge with gear does help with that a bit], but, that's not what's best for PVP . I'm perfectly fine with either possibility, for myself because I know I'm skilled enough to be effective [as much as a mara can] and to put out good numbers whichever way this turns out.. Ultimately, I want to see whatever is going to make the greatest number of people happy come to pass, whatever my own preferences may be.

 

I don't think your thoughts on the matter are wrong in any way and I share them to a large degree, I just don't think that's what's going to make the most people happy is all.

 

Sometimes you just have to take one for the team. [Even if you know better! =p ]