Player Power Fantasy wrt Raid Loot

[Kilgrave]

There are a variety of reasons that we don't want to take a real step vertically here, and I'm not really inclined to waver on that point.

I agree that the Ravenloft set bonuses are too strong. I might link up a few of the Killing Time items together, though, good idea.

why do you say Ravenloft set bonuses are too strong no there not please dont tell me your going to nerf this next getting real tired of all this nerfing and not going to do your new raid.

[Shadow_Jumper]

why do you say Ravenloft set bonuses are too strong no there not please dont tell me your going to nerf this next getting real tired of all this nerfing and not going to do your new raid.

The RL sets are generally considered by most power gamers to be too strong due to the fact that they completely over arch gear set designs.

Very little of the loot that has come out (besides a few weapons and a helm or two) has come close to being even mildly useful due to the power that RL set bonuses get.

For a melee DPS it is almost a requirement to have the Silent avenger and Adherents sets in your gear layout. No other sets of gear give such a combo of item effects and set bonuses.

And after you fit in 8 pieces of RL gear, that leaves 4 left over for anything other than RL.

The ONLY reason I'm excited about the new helm and ring from Killing Time is because they don't conflict with my RL sets. I probably wouldn't consider using them otherwise.

The other issue is the relative lack of effects that a caster needs in relation to a melee. It is not surprising that casters are still wearing 5 piece sorcery sets and/or 3-5 piece LGS sets. Thanks to consolidators like Spell Focus Mastery (which only trails a single school focus item by +1) and Potency (which is generally only 10-20% less effective than school specific spell power) and such, and the very narrow specialization of casters into just one area and their ability to use distance to avoid a lot of damage, casters can afford to blow spots on items that have minimal value just for the set bonus.

Casters also get to use both their weapons to store useful affects that can be found on accessories. Things like DC's, spell power, spell pen, spell alacrity, stats. Melees have to use their weapons for effects that deal DPS. You can't use weapon effects for stats, or deadly, or accuracy, etc. Casters effectively have 2 more slots than melees for gearing purposes.

A DC Caster needs Spell Pen and DC gear. Maybe some spell power gear for a few damage spells. After that it is stats and defense.

A 5 piece set on a melee is near impossible to use, unless every item is adding some value and the set bonus is really really top shelf. (Adherent of Mists does not qualify for most of my builds).

A melee needs accuracy, deadly, MP, doublestrike, alacrity, armor piercing, combat mastery. And then the stats and defense. The defense of which is much more challenging, as the caster can skimp on AC and dodge.

Set bonuses should be stronger for melee, as they offer a way obtain extra effects that they can't fit into a too complex slotting requirement already. For casters to have such highly powerful set bonuses is just the rich getting richer.

This is a good synopsis of the problem of having an over arching gear design (4 effects per item) rather than building gear to fit the class that it is meant for. Being required to put 4 effects onto an item will ignore the question of does this item really need 4 effects? and makes loot power disproportionately strong/weak. Designing gear with actual builds in mind rather than just slapping 4 effects onto them and calling it a day would benefit this game a lot more.

Set bonuses also make it hard to keep semi old loot relevant beyond the next update that has a different set bonus.

[blerkington]

This is a good synopsis of the problem of having an over arching gear design (4 effects per item) rather than building gear to fit the class that it is meant for. Being required to put 4 effects onto an item will ignore the question of does this item really need 4 effects? and makes loot power disproportionately strong/weak. Designing gear with actual builds in mind rather than just slapping 4 effects onto them and calling it a day would benefit this game a lot more.

Very apt posts, Asheras and Shadow. It's really good to see more people speaking up about the flawed four effects per item rule and the problems it is causing.

The difficulty is further exacerbated by SSG's insistence on subdividing effects like saves and sheltering while also continually creating multiple stacking bonuses for a single effect - like we have with stats. So while we are getting fewer slots on items for these effects to stay optimal in just a couple of areas, we also have to include more effects.

Another problem is if you're playing a class that may want skill and DC effects in addition to the usual melee effects, there just isn't enough room anymore. By hiking the requirements for certain skills, bluff being the most egregious example, we may need to devote four or more effect slots (skills and charisma) just to make that one skill reliable in difficult content.

Being required to devote the equivalent of one full item (or more for highly resistant mobs) just to make one skill work is really not a good outcome at all. Since all the effects we need are not neatly found on just one item in practice, this really translates to using two or three items to make this skill work reliably at cap now.

This problem is made even worse by the amount of effect duplication there is in endgame gear for some builds and the inclusion of junk effects. We are very far from gear that lets us have it all right now.

In the case of my own main, a melee rogue, it feels like I have to do far too much gear swapping to perform class functions. And that's without my gearset including five pieces for the Adherent bonus; that set is good, but on a melee rogue you give up an awful lot of other things to use it. And since SSG just added a longer cooldown for item swapping having us rely on swaps, especially on effects like bluff that we may want to use in combat, is much more of a pain than it was before.

Lastly, restricting the number of effects puts more pressure on increasing the size of the effect bonuses. Otherwise you run a real risk, as the OP of this thread pointed out, of making raid loot that the community won't see any point in chasing. With more effects per item you have more variety of combinations possible, which helps to control vertical power creep.

Thanks.

[Engoril]

There are a variety of reasons that we don't want to take a real step vertically here, and I'm not really inclined to waver on that point.

I agree that the Ravenloft set bonuses are too strong. I might link up a few of the Killing Time items together, though, good idea.

Could you (as in SSG) please just stop designing items with set bonuses. They always cause itemisation issues where we don't want to use some cool new item, because it breaks an even cooler set we already have. It is a pain to work with sets. Life would be so much easier if their set bonuses did not make it feel mandatory that we fit them into our builds.

[Arkat]

Could you (as in SSG) please just stop designing items with set bonuses. They always cause itemisation issues where we don't want to use some cool new item, because it breaks an even cooler set we already have. It is a pain to work with sets. Life would be so much easier if their set bonuses did not make it feel mandatory that we fit them into our builds.

I like sets and set bonuses...a lot.

They sometimes force very tough build/itemization choices.

[droid327]

I like sets too. My problem with them is that they arent coherent...you're forced to take like 5 pieces in 8 slots, but one or two of the slots will only have items with affixes that dont really align with what your build needs. So you're essentially slotting a less-than-optimal item just to get the set bonus from the other slots.

I want to see sets be more like the design philosophy in D2. Each set was designed for doing something, and everything on the items and the set all synergized to make you do that thing very well when you had it fully assembled. So if there was, say, a Lightning Caster set, it would have all the things a lightning caster needs....spell power (including Insightful, Quality, etc.), lore, Evoc DC, spell points, and maybe some useful defensive affixes like Incorp or Dodge or ASF, plus maybe one or two useful unique properties like -10% enemy Electric Resist for the complete set. Or maybe the set was generic for all casters, but e.g. one of the slots was cloak, and you had to choose between different single-element flavored cloaks to complete the set and specialize it for your element.

It wouldnt have to be BIS - maybe you could get higher total spellpower by mix-and-matching other gear, or something - but it would provide you everything you need in one quick and easy solution, allowing you to itemize AROUND it instead of DESPITE it. And you wouldnt be essentially "wasting" slots on items that provide little benefit just to complete the set.

You wouldnt see the sets being nearly as generalistic as they are now, ie Silent Avenger being used for ALL melee. But I think that'd be good...while it would make builds a little more cookie cutter since there was only one or two sets designed for your class and build, it would mean we saw more overall diversity in gearing, it wouldnt be like it is now where "RL+Slavers or go home" is the rule.

[Robbenklopper]

I like sets too. My problem with them is that they arent coherent...you're forced to take like 5 pieces in 8 slots, but one or two of the slots will only have items with affixes that dont really align with what your build needs. So you're essentially slotting a less-than-optimal item just to get the set bonus from the other slots.

I want to see sets be more like the design philosophy in D2. Each set was designed for doing something, and everything on the items and the set all synergized to make you do that thing very well when you had it fully assembled. So if there was, say, a Lightning Caster set, it would have all the things a lightning caster needs....spell power (including Insightful, Quality, etc.), lore, Evoc DC, spell points, and maybe some useful defensive affixes like Incorp or Dodge or ASF, plus maybe one or two useful unique properties like -10% enemy Electric Resist for the complete set. Or maybe the set was generic for all casters, but e.g. one of the slots was cloak, and you had to choose between different single-element flavored cloaks to complete the set and specialize it for your element.

It wouldnt have to be BIS - maybe you could get higher total spellpower by mix-and-matching other gear, or something - but it would provide you everything you need in one quick and easy solution, allowing you to itemize AROUND it instead of DESPITE it. And you wouldnt be essentially "wasting" slots on items that provide little benefit just to complete the set.

You wouldnt see the sets being nearly as generalistic as they are now, ie Silent Avenger being used for ALL melee. But I think that'd be good...while it would make builds a little more cookie cutter since there was only one or two sets designed for your class and build, it would mean we saw more overall diversity in gearing, it wouldnt be like it is now where "RL+Slavers or go home" is the rule.

The sets are nice, maybe too nice, but not much synergize with what my gearsetup was before. It´s mainly go full new or go home, yes. 5 pieces set seems to be much, on the other side it´s just 5/12, just that you want the best from the newest gear for even fill the remaining 7 slots at best - "old" gear doesn´t match that well. The gains overall compared to former gear aren´t huge, but indispensable for catching up. Hasn´t been much different before to now. Remember LGS

The point about less synergy to older gear is that I wouldn´t assume everyone owns every pack. Certrainly, RL is higher level than SL, but there is some "competition". IMO, there should be even a stronger distribution of gear by choice of what "tree" in adventure packs you go.

Differences in sets are implied specifially for classes, in a very wide spread spectrum, but they are. Just not that narrow i would wish probably to work out the uniqueness or rarity for a class. I would prefere a spread of specifical loot to class like we had in TOD, pretty much that, but not in a way that decisions are made like splitting sheltering in PRR+MRR, mixing up things or a full palette of gear that totally lacks of an attribute (i.e. accuracy in RL). The downside, for sure, would be a bigger dis-synergy in gearsetup for comming updates/new gear in the future. However you do it, it´s never perfect.

[Dalsheel]

There's a notable exception: the Cast on the Run feat on the cloak---that's a nice item and it has a set bonus which makes it stand out as a good item

Cloak of the Mountain doesn't have Cast on the Run. It has 10% spell points cost reduction. Wiki is wrong.