Why are conquest relics worse "upgrading" from 330 to 332?

[AlCiao]

I haven't bothered upgrading gear in a while, but I decided to do so recently, and today I went to the Conquest Upgrade vendor to trade in my green 330 relics of SA and DV for 332, only to be weirded out to see 243 Power (iRating 330) drop to 192 Power (iRating 332). I went all the way through the upgrade chain to iRating 340, which has Power 211 - still worse than iRating 330.

What gives? is this a known bug? Is something else going on that I don't know about?

Edited June 22 by AlCiao

[DragoslavRadanov]

Green gear, like conquest, is more focused on endurance than power. If you want more power do either FPs or ops to either get a blue/purple relic drop or build up the currency to buy the blue/purple versions

[AlCiao]

24 minutes ago, DragoslavRadanov said:

Green gear, like conquest, is more focused on endurance than power. If you want more power do either FPs or ops to either get a blue/purple relic drop or build up the currency to buy the blue/purple versions

I know that. That's not the issue.

The issue is that, on any particular upgrade track, whether that be Conquest gear, flashpoint gear, or ops gear, sequential upgrades should be better than the one before it.

My iRating 330 Relics of SA and DV (from Conquest Gear) have 243 Power each, and can be traded in/upgraded at the Conquest Gear Upgrades vendor to iRating 332.

But the "upgrades" inexplicably drop to 192 Power.

This isn't a matter of different upgrade tracks. These are all Conquest Gear items on the same upgrade track. I've never before seen an upgrade track where a stat lowered at the next step in the chain.

Edited June 22 by AlCiao

[AlCiao]

Here's a screenshot illustrating the issue.

Compare the two SA relics. My current 330 has an augment slot, but I took the augment out for the sake of the comparison. I can trade in the 330 one for the 332, but it's a worse deal.

Every other step in this upgrade track (324 to 326, 326 to 328, etc), not to mention every single step in upgrade tracks of other items like Earpieces, have all stats go up a little bit at each step. There's never a stat going down when trading up to the next iRating on the same upgrade track.

Edited June 22 by AlCiao

[Darcmoon]

Because, for some reason, that’s how they decided to allocate the stat budget for the items.  They increased the endurance and reduced the power.  It seems to fall in line with the inane gear decision they went with when 7.0 went live.  It also is probably a way they try to ‘encourage’ players to do vet & MM FPs andOPs, or go for the mods they finally gave players. 

[AlCiao]

2 hours ago, Darcmoon said:

Because, for some reason, that’s how they decided to allocate the stat budget for the items.  They increased the endurance and reduced the power.  It seems to fall in line with the inane gear decision they went with when 7.0 went live.  It also is probably a way they try to ‘encourage’ players to do vet & MM FPs andOPs, or go for the mods they finally gave players. 

It's weird that that only happens for the one step though, from 330 to 332. Every other step has both Power and Endurance higher than the previous step. And the green Adept Earpiece, at least, does not go down in Power at any point. I can't speak to the other green items, since I use to the purple/blue mods instead of those, but obviously you can't use mods in relics or earpieces. (Or implants, but I get the gold implants.)

[supertimtaf]

32 minutes ago, AlCiao said:

It's weird that that only happens for the one step though, from 330 to 332.

Most likely unintended, probably something reminiscing from one of their early iterations of gearing. The issue when you're having so many (bad/unecessary) upgrade steps, is that you're bound to mess up at least one item in the lot. Take each equipment slot, multiply it by the number of steps needed to go from 326 to 344, then multiply that by three because you have green, blue and purple gear. No surprise for them to have miss-matched an item because there's simply *too many of them*. They shot themselves in the foot with that gearing system :')

[AlCiao]

10 minutes ago, supertimtaf said:

Most likely unintended, probably something reminiscing from one of their early iterations of gearing. The issue when you're having so many (bad/unecessary) upgrade steps, is that you're bound to mess up at least one item in the lot. Take each equipment slot, multiply it by the number of steps needed to go from 326 to 344, then multiply that by three because you have green, blue and purple gear. No surprise for them to have miss-matched an item because there's simply *too many of them*. They shot themselves in the foot with that gearing system :')

Then I'd wonder why it's not on a known issues list somewhere.

I tested by upgrading one green relic all the way to 340, and the 340 relic's Power still winds up lower than the 330, sheesh.

[supertimtaf]

2 hours ago, AlCiao said:

Then I'd wonder why it's not on a known issues list somewhere.

I tested by upgrading one green relic all the way to 340, and the 340 relic's Power still winds up lower than the 330, sheesh.

Because they're probably not aware of this bug. And they're also not reading the bug report forums enough, the known issue lise would be much bigger if that was the case !

[The-Kaitou-Kid]

This is actually probably intentional and they almost certainly won't say anything about it, because it was done for a fairly cynical reason that points out the silliness of 7.0's gearing system. If you're curious, jump to the fleet and check the Flashpoint vendor for the 324 blue relic and compare it to the 324 green relic. The stats are basically identical, which I believe also rings true for the Operations vendor gear as well. The relics were the same up until 330, because up to 330 the option to convert Conquest commendations into FP commendations wasn't a thing. With the addition of 332-336 and the ability to convert from Conquest to FP (to give solo players a chance to get mods), they realized there was no reason to use the currency to get higher quality relics, because they made the stats the same. Instead of increasing the stats on the FP & Operation relics to compensate, they just lowered the stats on the Conquest relics after 330, leading to this issue.

 

It's a way to nudge solo players into upgrading their gear to the FP track without making the FP stuff "better" than the solo gear would have been if they kept the original stat scaling. They did basically the same thing at 7.0's launch, when a lot of solo players opted out of the new gearing system entirely and stuck with 306 gear from Onslaught, which was better optimized and ended up giving you better stats overall on any level synced planet. The devs went through and added a gear penalty to level sync to nerf your stats if you did that, to force people to drop their old 306 gear and get on the new gear treadmill. This didn't fix the fact that green gear was worse on most planets than 306 gear was at 7.0's launch, it just nerfed the 306 gear overall once you hit level 80 to force you into the new gearing system anyway.

 

Their decisions around the gearing system overall in 7.0 and beyond have been baffling.

[supertimtaf]

15 minutes ago, The-Kaitou-Kid said:

Instead of increasing the stats on the FP & Operation relics to compensate, they just lowered the stats on the Conquest relics after 330, leading to this issue.

Ahahahah seriously wtf
This is such a bad joke, and people wonder why they're having troubles keeping players when their system designers can't even properly do their jobs lmao

[DAWUSS]

2 hours ago, The-Kaitou-Kid said:

It's a way to nudge solo players into upgrading their gear to the FP track without making the FP stuff "better" than the solo gear would have been if they kept the original stat scaling. They did basically the same thing at 7.0's launch, when a lot of solo players opted out of the new gearing system entirely and stuck with 306 gear from Onslaught, which was better optimized and ended up giving you better stats overall on any level synced planet. The devs went through and added a gear penalty to level sync to nerf your stats if you did that, to force people to drop their old 306 gear and get on the new gear treadmill. This didn't fix the fact that green gear was worse on most planets than 306 gear was at 7.0's launch, it just nerfed the 306 gear overall once you hit level 80 to force you into the new gearing system anyway.

Gotta keep that grind going...

[recalcitrantIre]

they actually adjusted the gear distributions across the board during the update that upped gear levels to... 336, I think?

I did my own investigation regarding Rakata gear at the time, certain stats dropped in the upgrade process but the overall increase in stat budget outweighed them

relics are probably the most notable example of the distribution change because they have so few baseline stats

 

fundamentally, your problem is that you're using green gear, it's designed to be the worst

[AlCiao]

4 hours ago, recalcitrantIre said:

they actually adjusted the gear distributions across the board during the update that upped gear levels to... 336, I think?

I did my own investigation regarding Rakata gear at the time, certain stats dropped in the upgrade process but the overall increase in stat budget outweighed them

relics are probably the most notable example of the distribution change because they have so few baseline stats

 

fundamentally, your problem is that you're using green gear, it's designed to be the worst

Yeah but it's also the gear that's easiest to get for someone who only does solo content.

Also, stat redistribution doesn't explain why the relics literally got worse from green 330 to 332. It's far better to stick with 330 than to upgrade any further along the green track, and that's a system which makes absolutely zero sense.

Edited June 26 by AlCiao

[tsteenburg]

And there is/was the issue for the 320-330 relics that color didn't matter: Green, Blue, and Purple all had the same stats and bonus stat at a given rating.

[BelorfinSiana]

This is why my characters are stuck at 330.  If there's no moddable gear, I'm not going to bother going any further.  It'll all be irrelevant and worthless when 8.0 comes out anyway!

[Darcmoon]

23 minutes ago, BelorfinSiana said:

This is why my characters are stuck at 330.  If there's no moddable gear, I'm not going to bother going any further.  It'll all be irrelevant and worthless when 8.0 comes out anyway!

There is moddable gear.  The relics have never been moddable however.

[kgaydos]

Select the exact same Relic, take off the augment on the 330 item and check again.

 

Edited Thursday at 09:15 PM by kgaydos

[YaddleTwo]

Yep this has bothered me for ages so i don't upgrade till i know i can easily pop over those couple levels otherwise it sucks for a while

[AlCiao]

On 6/27/2024 at 4:13 PM, kgaydos said:

Select the exact same Relic, take off the augment on the 330 item and check again.

 

If you're addressing me, I had already taken out the augment before comparing, which I both stated in text and you can see in the screenshot I put in some posts above.