I get the purpose of gear resets and don't mind them every now and then, but having them too often really serves to drive dedicated players away. It was one of the things that put me off WoW towards the end of my time there, that they started to have a gear reset every single patch. You could see the expiration date on your hard-earned raid drops pretty much the moment you got them, and the time until then always felt too short to let you truly enjoy the rewards for your achievements. When you know that anything you earn will become obsolete very soon, it really saps your drive to keep logging in... and if this planned obsolescence keeps happening at very short intervals, at some point it hardly feels worth working on anything at all anymore.
So yeah, trying to get any more tier 3 gear has felt a bit pointless when the first tier 4 box I'll earn will already have better stuff in it. There's no use crying over spilled milk, but I do hope that Bioware has taken note of the less than positive reaction to the original tier 4 announcement and will avoid another early push like that.
On the plus side, I've been able to save up a bit, in the form of nearly two cargo bays full of various CXP packs. I expect that popping all of those at once (only after the light side has won, obviously) will be pretty fun.
I haven't really felt motivated to get an alt to Command Rank 300, because as I've observed previously, it doesn't really do much. I've just pushed a couple of them a bit closer towards the middle/end of their current tier so that they'll immediately benefit from the changes to drop rates from crates come patch day.
Aside from more gear for everyone, Bioware has also told us that there will be even more things to look forward to than we originally thought - for example there will be quality of life changes to quick travel, and while this tweet about master mode uprisings almost seemed to come as an afterthought, I'm looking forward to trying those with my guildies too.
My interest may have flagged a little as of late, but I expect patch 5.2 to provide me with enough new things to post about for at least a month.
Very much agree, I am not playing as much as I would like because T 1&2 gear is pretty much obsolete. There maybe another expansion planned for December which I'm sure will add T5 into the mix. I do enjoy gearing up but I will think twice about it when I'm playing anything but my 3 mains (tank, dps and healer)
ReplyDeleteFor me it's actually the opposite, I don't mind working on my lower level alts, because they can continue to slowly work their way through the tiers.
DeleteHowever, working on a hard to get best-in-slot set that will cease to be so very shortly feels pointless.
I must confess, I just can't understand BW's (currentish) plans for gearing, even before everything went pear shaped. It appears they are going to revert to (mostly) status quo ante, only with an even wider and more bewildering range and selection of components. At least the last stream promised a QoL improvement in the vendor interface. To late for the 100 unassembled components I blew buying a wrist slot piece for the wrong advanced class, despite staring at the vendor interface trying to figure out which one I should be buying. IE, an armor piece I could never use on that character, even if I respecced. And, of course, all sales final.
ReplyDeleteThe entire gearing minigame is a seething and impenetrable morass of complications to someone not familiar with the language, and the various (3rd party, mind, not in game) gearing guides assume a level of familiarity with the intricacies as to be indecipherable to the newcomer. There is literally no easy for someone not already familiar with the system to know what enhancements to choose to put into an empty orange shell, and it's not even intuitively obvious what armor and mods to put in (though at least you only have a 50/50 choice for armor, so that's easy enough to figure out.)
It's definitely sad what a mess it has become, especially considering that "simplifying things" was one of their stated goals with Galactic Command. But I feel I've harped on that enough and don't really have anything new to add. :/
DeleteThey simplified gear acquisition. Which only was needed in some areas (though it was needed), and they very nearly threw the baby out with the bathwater.
DeleteBut, what they didn't do (and ended up making worse, was simplify gear use. Itemization is a worse mess than it was before, except that PvP gear is not a completely separate upgrade chain (and because they didn't make PvP "need" as much Accuracy as PvE, they screwed that up too at the BiS level).
Not to mention adding too many gear levels, too quickly, for no other reason than "because we can."