Spoils of War - Constructive feedback

[matthaxian]

I spent the weekend testing out the new gearing on the PTS.

I'd like to make some suggestions to help improve the system.

It's clear a lot of time and effort was put into the Spoils of War system, but it definitely needs

some balancing and tweaking to turn it into something that, to me as a player ,

is something that is more enjoyable than frustrating.

 

1. Too many tiers of gear. 19 jumps of only 2 level is way too many. Many players will simply give up.

My suggestion : 3 tiers of entry level gear and 3 tiers of endgame gear.

270 green 276 blue 282 purple. 290 blue1, 300 purple2, 310 gold

 

2. Too much unmoddable gear.

With set bonuses being the other half of the grind,

it is imperative that all gear contain mods that can be swapped into set bonus gear.

Unmoddable gear should be limited to trash mob drops and synthweaving and armormech gear crafting.

 

3. Item rating of loot drops and difficulty of content are completely disconnected.

Solution:

Insert a maximum and minimum item rating range into the drop algorithm for each kind of content,

regardless of your current item rating.

 

For example:

story FP can drop tier 1-3 (270-282), vet fp 2-4(276-290), MM FP 3-5 (282-300)

SM OP can drop tier 3-4, VM OP 4-5, MM OP 5-6.

 

4. Crafting system has too much mat inflation and unnecessesarily puts endgame mats in simple schematics.

Also, requiring 9 green components plus 3 blue compontents to craft one purple component is overkill.

The new tier system is interesting, particularly getting different tiers of mats from running moderate or rich missions, but the system on the PTS vastly overcomplicates things, and its going to be near impossible to make augment kits as currently situated.

 

Suggestion:

Realign the basic vendor trained schematics with the pre 6.0 meta.

Example:cybertech

270 green mod: 2 green cybertech components (which cost 2 of each green mat + one white mat+ 2 green UT mats)

276 blue mod: 2 blue cybertech componenets (2 blue+2 white+2 blue UT mats)

282 purple mod: 2 purple cybertech components (2 purple+2 white+2 purple UT mats)

 

Suggestion: Please use the corresponding crew skill mats for crafted mods instead of using slicing components for everything. This was one of my pet peeves with the 5.0 crafting system.

Make use of the slicing mats in the augment system only, where they have more than enough use.

 

Use the refined iso stabilizer in the endgame gear schematics and leave it out of the lower tiers.

If people want to craft their way to a level suited for entry level ops, they should be able to do that.

Save the grind for the set bonuses and the higher tiers of gear.

 

Suggestion: Add a new dark project recipe which removes the refined isotope stabilizer and inserts the new conquest mat, which should balance the 2 mats and allows guilds to better craft their way towards opening up their ships, or solo players to max their companions.

 

5. Tech fragment vendors should not contain additional RNG.

All set bonuses should be available at all times. If this isnt acceptable and you still need variety/time gating,

make one particular piece of all sets consistently available on a certain day of the week.

Example: All headpieces are available on monday, all chest tuesday, etc.

 

Set bonuses and tacticals are interesting because, since they are not tied to item rating, you can keep adding them down the road to give people new things to work towards. I would even suggest adding sets specific to certain operations or events to refresh older content. Offering a carrot to players not tied to item rating Is a strength of this update and has the potential to bring sustainability to the game and balance to the competing interests of the dev and player.

But if people:

1. Cannot plan their way towards a goal

2. Feel the grind is too long

They will give up.

 

6. Amplifier RNG and credit cost

It appears this is intended as a credit sink. I think it would be smarter to accept the new normal in the economy.

Players have adjusted. Casual players arent going to touch this.

I wouldn't mind paying 100k per mod for the right to choose my own amplifier.

I would also either not vary the stat amounts of each amplifier, or tie it to item rating instead of making it random.

 

7. The Core Issues of conquest have not been addressed and goals are too high.

The Guild Leveling and passive conquest points were great additions.

The update on the PTS puts a real damper on them.

But the problem was always that conquest goals were not repeatable., or not repeatable enough.

I think the events (Gree, Rakghoul, Bounty) could have new life breathed into them if their conquest goals for the dailies, world bosses, and Ops were made infinitely repeatable like the Dantooine ones are.

Xeno, Eyeless, Pylon Guardians are some of my favorite content, and they've been ghosttowns all summer during their events.

 

8. Items are dropping which are not for your discipline, and with funky stats (defense and accuracy on the same piece for example). Hopefully this is just a work in progress bug, because your algorithms/loot tables need work.

Edited September 4, 2019 by matthaxian