PetersCD Posted September 17, 2019 Share Posted September 17, 2019 With all the back and forth on RNG gearing i thought i'd throw out some numbers and opinions from my run at gearing a new PTS char from 268 to 306. What we did: 2 characters (Assassin + Operative) with 2 companions (level 26 dps companions) running master mode hammer station. We made no attempts at doing the bonus boss, we just chained through the three normal bosses many times (18 as of now) How did the gearing go? 18 run throughs took us ~4.5 hours. On the 14th run through i hit item level 306. by the 15th i had a near-complete alternate set of 306 gear. My buddy was at 294 and had been stuck there for the last 6 runs, having only gotten side grades or downgrades for the last 18 boss fights and getting kinda frustrated. This illustrates the problem with RNG gearing: the potential for long droughts of no net positive gearing. Just as a thought experiment, assume there is a 75% chance of side grades or downgrades per boss. That means there is about a .5% chance of 18 down grades or side grades in a row (.75^18). That sounds like a low probability but that is 1 out of every 200 18 boss sequences. Its going to happen, and it will annoy the hell out of the people it happens to and they will complain about it loudly. Consider some sort of pity timer like was used on the ME:Andromeda gear packs to truncate those low probability tails on the distribution? What an i content with? Gearing from 268 to 306. It can be a bit annoying, but anyone who thinks getting to just-sub BIS gearing is harder than early 5.0 needs to have their memory checked. Even with the introduction of gear tokens you were looking at a 50-60 minute operation to get a 5/8 chance at a single piece of 230-236 gear for most people. And with legacy implants/earpieces/relics there isn't a need to do left hand side grinding like there was in the past. BTW, i do thank you for that change, left side has gone from being the biggest pain of gearing to probably the easiest part. Finally, once you've done it once you can ship the 306 gear around to any character you're starting to gear and bypass leveling their gear up again. What don't we know? What are the new set piece vendors are going to be like? what will the cost be for a full 6 pieces set? will they be empty shells or filled with ILVL mods? How will the mentioned 'gear to spec' button work, when will it be introduced? Answers to these questions could be a net positive for gearing or a nightmare. What don't i like? the random mods/enhancements/armor slot pieces from Takarra. Using the well known tech fragment feature i ground out and did statistics on a large block of purchases:193 pieces for 62725 tech fragments. Which is a huge amount of fragments. 3 runs of MM hammer station has been giving me approximately 1000 fragments, so that is nearing 200 runs of MM HS (at 15 minutes a run). As an operative healer nearly half the mods i got were tank specific (87), which is ridiculous. This may be something that got overlooked while changing all the other gear purchases, or might get changed with the new 'gear for this spec' button that was stated to be in development. If not, please include it. The remainder were some distribution of healer/dps compatible pieces (106). I wasn't happy with the distribution of pieces i did get, though my sample was small enough that it could have partially been bad RNG. At first order i'd say that the ideal distribution would be 7 (28%) armorings, 9 (36%) mods, 7 (28%) enhancements and 2 (8%) barrels/hilts per 25 purchases, as that would fill all your slots for a fully modable set a of gear. Really, one should be getting more enhancements than that given that that is a major way to balance tertiary stats (Alacrity, accuracy and crit or Shield/Absorb). At 193 pieces i was getting too many mods (41%), and armorings (34%), and not enough enhancements (19%). The shortage of enhancements is actually probably the worst part: there are 2 (tank, heals) or 3 (dps) types of enhancements that you need to balance out your stats and the wrong distribution can be crippling to hitting target numbers for your spec. With my purchases, ignoring the small variations within enhancements i might have barely had enough correct-ish enhancements to mod out a set of healer, dps and tank gear. No. this does not mean that 20k fragments will let you gear someone out, the chances of you having the proper distribution of parts is probably near zero. I'm not overly thrilled at the 20 new variations on each of the classic mod/enhancement/armorings. Its not an automatically awful concept, but the huge number of possibilities mostly serves to drive people nuts. Knowing that you need one of say 4 alacrity type X enhancements, seeing that you got one, but its in the 16 that don't boost your alacrity enough is another way to frustrate people. Maybe reduce the number of options? 2 steps in either direction from the base distribution, maybe with a reduced total range? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PetersCD Posted September 18, 2019 Author Share Posted September 18, 2019 So, update. ?the most recent patch? seems to have dialed back the gear drops from MM fps from 3-9 per boss to 1-3, which won't do at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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