8.0 Gearing Info & Controversy

It's been a bit quiet on here over the past two weeks because I've been pretty engrossed by the launch of World of Warcraft Forever, plus there's been some distracting real life stuff going on as well. Meanwhile, SWTOR has hit what I can only call the "pre-expansion lull" where we're all just waiting to get a launch date for Masters of the Force already. There is still some content on the PTS to test, but I honestly feel like I've personally had enough of that for now. I'm ready to see the real thing.

One bit of interesting expansion info that dropped last week was that Eric Musco did a stream in which (among other things) he explained how gearing is supposed to work in 8.0. This has been something many players have been curious about ever since the expansion was announced, and people were keen to get more details about what exactly the devs had meant by their early hints that gearing was going to work somewhat differently, but not too differently. Now we know the plan.

First off, gear will be purely deterministic at 8.0 launch, with everything being vendor-bought and no direct gear drops from content at all. They said they do want to add those later, but as a lever to encourage engaging with content that may not feel rewarding enough. (They didn't go into much detail about what exactly that means, but I imagine it's something like: if nobody does operations because every other method of acquiring the new gearing currency is more efficient, they might put gear drops back in ops to make them more enticing.)

At launch though, all gear will come from a fleet vendor, purchased with credits and special currency, just like you can buy the basic green, blue and purple sets now. The current commendations and the way they divide gear into green, blue and purple at the same item level will go away though - instead, all gear will start out as green and upgrade to blue and then purple as it goes up in item levels. There will be two new currencies that will be distinguished by the fact that one can be farmed indefinitely while another has a weekly cap. Tech fragments are also sticking around.

When you upgrade your gear, instead of essentially trading it in at the vendor for the same thing but with a higher item level, the new upgrade terminal will actually upgrade the gear you have as it is, which includes preserving augments and augment slots - good news for everyone who's ever lost an augment to not pulling it out of a piece of gear before engaging with the current trade-in process.

Also, once you've pushed your gear up to the maximum available item level, the upgrade terminal will allow you to modify some of the secondary stats on the item, similarly to how reforging worked during some World of Warcraft expansions. This should alleviate current difficulties with getting the right balance of certain stats when your default set doesn't have them at the ratio you actually want.

Finally, this new gear will be bound to character (not legacy) but as you increase your item level, what your alts can purchase from the vendor will automatically go up too. So if you imagine this logic applied to current gear levels, once your main hits 344 item level, when your newest alt goes to the fleet, they can immediately buy 340 from the gear vendor instead of being offered the base level 324 gear. 

Also great! Or is it? Actually, this last bit has stirred up quite a shitstorm of complaints, which I honestly can't really relate to.

For context, let me start by explaining how I've been playing the game myself for the past few years. I'm currently sitting on more than 30 max-level alts who all have their own 344 Rakata gear, including implants and tacticals, sometimes multiple sets. Legacy of the Sith has been going on for a long time, and it's once again been extremely easy to gear alts this expansion. Whatever content you do, it'll constantly drop bound-to-legacy gear that matches your gear rating, so all I had to do was stuff all that spare Rakata gear into a dedicated bay in my legacy cargo hold, and every time a new alt hit the level cap, they could just grab what they needed from there and basically be geared instantly. Implants required doing a quest on each character and spending some tech fragments to upgrade them, but tech frags were only really precious for the first two months or so after Legacy of the Sith came out. Ever since then I've had plenty to spare anyway and spending a few on each new alt was no issue either.

The only slight nuisance was the randomness of the drops, which sometimes meant that I'd have ten spare pairs of leg armour lying around but no boots. The new system essentially frees up that legacy bay as I'll no longer have to make my own gear collection, and every alt can just grab what they need directly from the vendor. Having to pay a few credits for that privilege doesn't seem so bad to me.

I'm honestly stunned why fellow altoholics would complain about this. I saw several people post on the forums that they currently have X number of alts and they don't want to collect X sets of gear. As far as I can tell, instead of what I've been doing by using the bound-to-legacy status to get each alt their own gear, they've just been sending one set of gear back and forth between all those characters for the last five years, which sounds extremely annoying to me and I honestly don't get why anyone would want to keep doing that.

There is one use case for this behaviour that I understand - though I find it hard to imagine that it applies to all these people suddenly flooding the forums - and that's if you're a high-end raider. Because one thing I haven't mentioned yet is augments. All my characters may have their own gear, but only a few of them have fully augmented gear, because augments are not something that's just thrown at you for free - they're very expensive in fact, and the power difference between a character with and without augments is considerable in competitive content.

So NiM raiders who swap between several different characters for progression and lockouts naturally don't want to have to buy augments for them all, so they've been sending the same best-in-slot set of gear back and forth between their alts to save money. That seems reasonable, and I think saying that augments are too expensive to acquire on multiple characters is likewise a similarly reasonable concern to raise. I do hope that's something the devs think about.

But for some reason a lot of the complaints aren't really focusing on that but instead moaning about the horrible hassle of needing to have more than one set of gear in principle, which I just... don't get. While I understand the practical limitations that led to progression raiders handling their gear that way, I've always thought that conceptually, the idea of all your characters running around naked most of the time until it's their turn to put on the one set of gear shared between your entire legacy is ridiculous and stupid. It's a big reason why I've only done it very rarely myself even while working on master mode ops progression.

It's also annoying for other people you group with. If I had a penny for every time I heard "just gimme a minute, I need to send my gear over" from someone I did ops with, I'd be filthy rich. Bonus points if it takes them extra long because they've misplaced something and need to log through five different alts to find their bracers or whatever.

What makes it worse is that this has been one of those habits that's trickled down from the top end (where people have a genuine reason to do it, to squeeze every bit of power out of their character that they can) to players who have absolutely no reason to worry about stuff like that; they just do it because they've been told that's how it's done. God forbid you join us to kill the Dromund Kaas world boss in anything less than your fully gold augmented gear. We'll all just sit here and wait while you find it so the boss dies five seconds faster when we eventually fight it.

So while it may not have been the devs' stated reason for doing this, I honestly do love the idea of this change for no other reason than that it would get rid of that nuisance, which I currently have to deal with to some degree in pretty much every single ops I organise. It's not such a huge deal that I'll be crushed if the devs backtrack on their plans due to people's complaints, but I would definitely be a little disappointed.

I'm not disagreeing that augmenting multiple characters is currently kind of expensive. But that has been a problem for a long time; people just worked around it with this weird gear-swapping nonsense - it was never a good solution in my opinion. I'd love it if the devs actually took this as an incentive to finally address the core issue.

As for the matter of gearing up multiple characters in general? I don't know, man, I thought gearing up was part of what people used to find fun in MMOs. This isn't modern World of Warcraft where all your gear goes in the bin every few months and you have to start over. In SWTOR, we've been wearing the same gear for almost five years, during which the item level ceiling was only raised a couple of times.

I sure hope that Masters of the Force won't have us sitting on the same stuff for another five years, but I'm pretty confident that there'll be plenty of time to work on your gear if you take part in endgame content. It's just alien to me that so many SWTOR players seemingly find the mere notion of putting some work into gearing up so off-putting nowadays.