Set bonuses: Flexibility (Slavers) is preferable to Rigidity (Sharn)

[Bjond]

Gotta avoid tying set bonuses to any one type of item as a keystone or you end up with the exact same "locked in" effect that you're trying to avoid by creating a flexible system.

What you're basically asking for another "augment" slot on everything that can be slotted with set bonus "tags" to apply a set to any group of items you wear; eg. stuff 3 things with SHOCK tags and you get the SHOCK set bonus. Slot another 5 with AWE tags and you get that bonus for a combined SHOCK & AWE effect.

You'll also have to live with people poking fun because everyone knows SHOCK is better as a 5pc than AWE.

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BTW, considering that set bonuses are "artifact" type and the number of lines in them, you might as well just create individual tags to grant artifact bonus lines identical to the lines from current sets and permit them to be slotted into any named item at one per item. You'd end up with no more lines than given by 3pc + 5pc RL sets and the lines themselves wouldn't stack with existing set bonuses. It would still be a power creep due to flexibility, but you'd definitely see items being used for their own stats instead of their set bonus unlock.

[scut207]

1. Slavers was only 'flexible' to people willing to grind 1000 runs of it. Not accessible to casual players. Drove me away from the game for a while because it was so boring; would not call it successful.

2. Arguably the problem here is more that one set bonus is so much more powerful than any other options that there's no choice to be made. If the 'Part of the family' set was less OP (or the individual items weren't so good in any case) we could consider using different items. Just like 'martial hymn' being so much better than 'divine' or 'primal' that nobody has any reason to use either of the latter.

3. The suggestions of having all 'strong' sets use armor so you can only have one 'strong' set active at a time isn't a bad one to control game balance, as long as all armors are designed with that in mind (e.g. all have a strong set bonus, are *amazing* individually, or are just semi-freebie easy to obtain items to tide people over until they get a better item and sentient food otherwise), then there can be some other much weaker sets that don't use armor that you might be able to fit in alongside a strong set.

4. Generally speaking I also like e.g. 3 of 4 items to get a set bonus so there is a little flexibility if you want to fit in one other specific thing.

I think you're correct with slavers being only a couple of dungeons that grinding became "unfun" but that was a larger part of how people saw MMORPGs at the time, it wasnt so much what you did at the time, it was fun doing it with friends not matter what you were doing... Everquest had multiple grind systems same with WoW to a lesser extent.

I like the blank/augment systems.

Get blanks/augments for armor from quests. Also get some sort of currency from that quest to make the barebones version of an augment that would transform the Chest armor piece into something that makes sense for the char your playing (Gish, Melee Dam, Tank, Healer, Caster ect)...

Drop all the other random weapon / gear tables from the quests. A chance at a blank/augment, some expansion currency/ (pots/scrolls/ thieves tools) and some plat. for the love of god just skip the gems and boost the plat.

For the Set bonus to go active, a min number of specific color augments mounted to a min number of blanks in that release.

Very much like a mishmash of filigree and LGS with a far simpler system/vendor. blanks other expansion gear /augments you dont want can be turned into basic gear currency

Then you purchase / quest blanks and augments for all other spots. Each normal quested blank has one slot / hard 2 / elite 3 / Reaper 3 with the chance of mythic +1 or 2 < R5; r5 and greater common mythic 1 & 2 chance of+3-4 mythic with very rare chance of Reaper.

Raids have a different augment currency, a chance at rare chest augments do improve the set bonus slightly, chance of raid augment drops and cool weapons

Raid Augments are not overtly crazy powerful version of the std augment but maybe adds an additional bit of AC / Fort and a couple pnts of PRR / MMR / Stat / martial & Spell DCs ect ect.

Raid rare augments / weapons are purchasable with raid currency

Either way you can build your set quickly with lucky passes(blanks / augs ) from group members or grind out at leisure, no running the same quests over and over and over for the missing piece of a 3 piece set, as you can just run the whole quest set and buy what ever blanks (1,2,3) slot and std augments from vendor, maybe some expansion lore based weaps too like RL.

Harder play is rewarded with better gear at the outset, you can also incrementally work your way to harder difficulties if your new.

Harder / Longer Dungeons in the expansion get more base currency and XP.

Each expansion has its own set of augments/blanks/weapons that work well with each other, but newer expansion set bonus's require blanks and augments from that expansion.