Gear Tetris Nightmare

[Kielbasa]

Anyone else just cringe whenever they think of trying a new build at cap?

The division of gear effects has gone too far. In most cases I have 12 gear slots with 48 effects. And in order to get a viable enjoyably playable character I probably need closer to 60. This same complaint pops up from time to time but it needs to continue to be brought up until it is addressed better in some way. The biggest offenders that I notice from mostly playing melees are sheltering; be it prr or mrr, saves, and combat skills: stunning, trip, or sunder. Good luck getting one of those to a viable dc at end game on a class without an insight trance to combat dcs, let alone all three. I am sure casters and others have similar complaints with spell dcs, and spell power etc. For example do we really need spell focus, insightful spell focus, quality spell focus, profane spell focus, greater spell focus(augments), and artifact to spell focus? Now that I break it down glad I don't play casters at cap very often.

There are a few ways to address this: a revamp of augments so they scale into end game properly, scale cannith crafting up around lv28 so it is closer to the curve of late game gear, open up slavers crafting so you can put any 4 slavers augments into an item and not a select option from list 1, 2, 3 etc. We need more ways to viably fill in the gaps that have been left in named gear.

I enjoy playing the game at cap and raiding but the more builds I try out at cap the more I realize there is short list of viable options. Part of the games charm is that for much of it you can play a wide variety of builds especially so in heroics. This tends to narrow a bit in epics, narrow again due to reaper, and even further at end game reaper.

The game has gone too far into dungeons and spread sheets please address it. Anyone have suggestions or ideas to improve the situation?

[Valerianus]

a really good and most welcome start can be, like you are saying and many many many others too, forgetting about separate prr\mrr and go back to sheltering.

[Aelonwy]

The game has gone too far into dungeons and spread sheets please address it.

Lmbo@Dungeons & Spread Sheets but that doesn't work with the name DDO however you could say SSG stands for Spread Sheet Games.

Suggestions... well the same ones I given in the past:
Return to Sheltering
Return to Resistance for ALL saves
Combo or paired effects or grouped effects such as Perceptive giving both Search & Spot, Alluring Skills, or Command, etc.
Bring Combat Mastery up closer to individual tactics

I think they've lost sight of how many stacking bonuses there are now in gear and how focused you have to be in your gear to get DCs that will work reliably in EE/LE and reasonable defenses.

I mean you said it yourself the stacking bonus types run the gamut of equipment, insightful, quality, profane, artifact but there are also exceptional, luck, morale, sacred, alchemical, mythic, reaper, and I'm sure a few others I'm forgetting.

At some point it just makes you roll your eyes.

[axel15810]

Yes, I've felt this way for a while and frankly designing a gearset at cap is a freakin' nightmare.

I think the best solution like you mentioned is some new augments. I know they want to do an augment pass, so hopefully they get to that sooner than later. Though I just wish they'd hadn't gone so far with adding so many new stacking effects in the past which is what led to this. The gear tetris is just insane with how many effects are available and how many of them feel required to fit into your gearset.

I wish they could go backward and consolidate some effects but that doesn't seem likely or practical.

I feel like the devs intend to challenge players with gearing at cap but I also think they've gone too far here. I don't see a reason why gear being as inflexible as it is is desirable. Instead of 1 new piece of gear messing up everything pretty much every time it'd be nice if we just had to swap or add some augments instead of starting from scratch on our gearset entirely.

[myliftkk_v2]

Yes, I've felt this way for a while and frankly designing a gearset at cap is a freakin' nightmare.

I think the best solution like you mentioned is some new augments. I know they want to do an augment pass, so hopefully they get to that sooner than later. Though I just wish they'd hadn't gone so far with adding so many new stacking effects in the past which is what led to this. The gear tetris is just insane with how many effects are available and how many of them feel required to fit into your gearset.

I wish they could go backward and consolidate some effects but that doesn't seem likely or practical.

I feel like the devs intend to challenge players with gearing at cap but I also think they've gone too far here. I don't see a reason why gear being as inflexible as it is is desirable. Instead of 1 new piece of gear messing up everything pretty much every time it'd be nice if we just had to swap or add some augments instead of starting from scratch on our gearset entirely.

No new augments.

They should allow gear to be crunched into augments, and augments of matched bonuses but differing types to be crunched together to create a merged augment of a single bonus attribute (and allow them to be tradeable).

Nioh has a feature where you can crunch gear forward to level up target gear and carry a marked property from the first piece of gear to the second. If rare loot could be crunched into one of the selected properties on the gear, that would make for far more interesting looting for gear and planning gearsets in the future.

[Dnarth]

I don't play tetris. I toss on some hodge podge of what ever gear I got. Run it to 20 or 30 long enough to get first times and TR. No real reason to bother with gear that is going to last a week or less.

[Bjond]

Anyone else just cringe whenever they think of trying a new build at cap?

Heh. I can spend weeks toying with gear sets in Maetrim's DDO Builder. Without an offline tool for builds and gear, I'd punt DDO. Definitely would not be fun to try and lay it all out by hand. Google + wiki + spreadsheet would be a bit too much "old" in the school. I don't TR or start leveling a build until AFTER I have a nice gear set (at every key level, eg. 10 21 29) ready to go.

DDO already has enough seriously onerous time-wasting with how it doesn't integrate your offline builds into a leveling path, can't save gearsets, can't save leveling sequences, can't save appearance, can't save full UI layouts, can't save inventory layouts, etc etc..

"Gear tetris" is the price of idiosyncratic loot. What makes me cringe and avoid logging in is any TR other than ETR: 2Hs of fiddling with UI and other creation nonsense post-TR just to replay the exact same build with the exact same inventory and button setup. This kind of thing should be ONE click and it is on other games -- eg. on FFXIV, one weapon swap restores literally everything exactly the way it was from when you last played that job (weapon type determines class there).

The TR-cache is actually completely unnecessary. Just make bank slots and inventory permanent, require chars to be naked to TR, and leave it all where it is.

[Blastyswa]

I enjoy designing characters for cap personally, I've always been a fan of the numbers part of DDO and figuring out how to set up enhancements, gear, epic destinies, or whatever else to get the biggest bang for my buck. Personally I appreciate that you can get much more effectiveness out of your character by spending time looking into what to gear them with and how you want to set stuff up- if there wasn't any gear tetris to be done between different builds, I wouldn't have as much fun designing them personally.

I do think it would be better if there wasn't such a large divide between being well geared and poorly geared though. Some type of simple gearset or something to get a good version of working gearset, while leaving niche applications, would be nice. Part of the Family/Wall watch/Sharn Caster Sets are a good example of this, with most builds nowadays including one of these sets. Having something like that that includes all item slots could be very nice for avoiding gear tetris for people.

[kanordog]

For example do we really need spell focus, insightful spell focus, quality spell focus, profane spell focus, greater spell focus(augments), and artifact to spell focus? Now that I break it down glad I don't play casters at cap very often.

Unfortunately, equipment/augment/insightful/quality/artifact/profane bonus all needed along with ED/enhancement not just to spell school but all the same for main ability preferably with exceptional and festive added to the mix...
And at the same time You need the same for CON, for HP for PRR for MRR, resistances etc.
And I did not mention if You play a hybrid with melee/ranged/trapper or nuker...

The main problem not just that but the fact that many gear comes with the same -non-stacking- enhancements with little variation yet main enhancement are lacking...

It is about an afternoon of reading through Wiki to plan a gear set...

[SpartanKiller13]

Anyone else just cringe whenever they think of trying a new build at cap?

The division of gear effects has gone too far. In most cases I have 12 gear slots with 48 effects.

No? Gear tetris is part of the build to me; I usually set up a gearset at ML15 and ML30. I used to only use color-coded Google Sheets pages, but I've since picked up DDO Gear Planner net app which is a great way for me to start; it's not always perfectly up-to-date, but it's close. Just pick what affixes you want, sort by level, and start dropping stuff in

Item sets have made gearing significantly easier (worse, but easier). Just start with your set bonus and ideal items (like Bloodrage for me on a THF), and you're like 1/2 done because so many of your choices are then forced. My last two gearsets have had only two options, based on which artifact I was going to use (Brand vs Charune this time).

[yfernbottom]

I think whether this is a problem comes down to what level of play you need to engage in all this for.

Gear tetris is part of the game play here. However in most content and most builds you don't really need all the bonuses you can get. For the content I play, two or three bonuses to the stats I care about is enough. However I have absolutely 0 experience with level 30 EE. If you really need to stack tons of bonuses to every stat you care about just to function there, it is absolutely a problem.

For example, if you need absolutely every bonus you can get (6+ bonuses to at least eight or ten stats) just to be able to function in level 30 Epic Elite or R1, that is definitely a problem and I would further wonder what the devs are smoking.

If you need all that for Reaper 10, forget it. R10 is supposed to be so hard that it almost breaks the game. That is just a bragging rights mode, nothing needs to be balanced around it.

[yfernbottom]

The TR-cache is actually completely unnecessary. Just make bank slots and inventory permanent, require chars to be naked to TR, and leave it all where it is.

Totally this. Why do we even have this bizarre mechanic? Doesn't it greatly increase the odds that something can go wrong on the backend and you lose everything?

[droid327]

I agree with your point but not with your principle...

I dont think there's an entitlement to have everything at endgame. Tradeoffs are the whole point. If you want to have R10-viable DCs on your Tactics, then you're going to have to give up something else for it. You cant just slot a +30 Stunning ruby and call it a day.

Reaper is supposed to be nigh-on impossible at the top end, that's the whole point. If you have trouble making your DCs in high skulls while maintaining your other stats...then you're supposed to drop down a skull or two, not demand the game provide you with moar power so you can solo R10s no-fail.

That being said, I do agree that gear flexibility is too limited, and going towards balkanization of saves and sheltering is just making it worse. Saves especially, because often that becomes a binary win/fail metric, especially with CCs like Flesh to Stone. Imagine if Deathblock was broken up into DB vs Necromancy, DB vs Illusion, etc. and if you didnt have the right DB, boom, you just die.

We need more gear flexibility so we're more capable of adapting gear as we level up, instead of having to wait till we reach a breakpoint level and then completely regear every slot into a new Tetris. I agree that crafting is a good place to have this...free up Cannith and Slavers so you can mix-and-match your affixes more freely.

[TedSandyman]

Cannith crafting is one of the truly most enjoyable parts of this game for me.

Often you find a new piece of gear and thing ohhhh, that is nice. Only to realize it will replace some stat that is really important and there just is no way to replace. SO the awesome gear becomes a big disappointment.

I craft, so when I find a piece like this, I immediately think, OK how can I craft around it to get to the stats I need. Throw in some augment slots on that gear and usually in an hour or so I can be fully outfitted. That is unless I'm missing an ingredient and it turns out that ingredient will take days to farm.

Most people don't use the cannith crafting because it is soooooo time consuming. There are very few of us who do. And before you start with the "but it should take time" argument, I agree to a point. But to have such a good service and awesome part of the game to be used by so few people is a shame.

And then the tiered system it means you CANT farm because you don't have a character in the right level range. And by the time you have finally gathered all your ingredients and built your precious items, its time to level up and they are useless at best. Worse is now they take up valuable storage space because you don't want to just throw away all of that work.

The cannith system is great if you don't mind the grind. But it is almost worthless as a usable part of this game for a vast majority of the players.

They tried to make it so you can buy your way into it with anonymous boxes in the store. But these are deceptive and immoral in my opinion. Here buy this thing. It may or may not have what you need. Oh it doesn't? Oh well. I guess you will have to buy another one and see if it has what you need. Thievery in my opinion.

A good solution would be an ingredient exchange vendor where you can exchange ingredients 2 for 1 or maybe 3 for 1. But knowing these people it will be 10 or 20 to 1 and useless if they did implement it.

[A-O]

Do you expect your multiclass/pure build to do everything/get everything?
Do you try to build optimal builds/find nice combinations, etc.?

If the answer to either of those questions are yes. Then why don't you want options in items as well?

If your answer to that is "I need XYZ". Then

Do you consider DDO to be a hard game?
Do you consider DDO to be a too hard game?

If the questions to that is "no". Then why do you want to make it easier?