The problem of gear becoming obsolete every next expansion

I see there are already considerable discussions about the importance of not making CONTENT obsolete, but what about equipment and gear?

This is an incredibly frustrating reality players of every MMO have always faced. With each new major content update, almost every single piece of gear from anything previous is now totally worthless and a waste of time to farm for.

Not just with content updates, but just with levelling up in general. Farming for equipment during the levelling process always feel incredibly silly to get if you know it's just going to automatically be obsoleted in 30 minutes the next time you level up.

I think FFXI during the 75 cap era is the only game I know of that I feel solved this problem because of it's general philosophy on equipment. Besides weapons, the level requirements of equipment was almost always completely irrelevant in considering their overall use and power. There were tons of powerful pieces of equipment far lower than the level cap that carried on as the best equipment all the way up to the highest levels.

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CROW3

George Black wrote: »

It's part of the mmo equation.
Otherwise you play ForHonor or Mobas

Or shift the equation...

George_Black

CROW3 wrote: »

George Black wrote: »

It's part of the mmo equation.
Otherwise you play ForHonor or Mobas

Or shift the equation...

That would mean break up the game.
Mmorpgs are PvX, open world.
Not battlegrounds like mobas, or PvE dungeons like some Co-op stage.

Anyway. Some people like dungeon runs for titles and 'the fun of it'. (Where is the fun running the same sterilized dungeon so many times?)
Others like BGs.
I like open world PvP, and the fact that every day is a new scenario with bew bad guys and jokes.
And AoC aims to be that.

CROW3

George Black wrote: »

I like open world PvP, and the fact that every day is a new scenario with bew bad guys and jokes. And AoC aims to be that.

Don't get me wrong - 100% agree on this. Would just like gear to be less of the deciding factor as often as it is, v. skill, environment, etc...

George_Black

CROW3 wrote: »

George Black wrote: »

I like open world PvP, and the fact that every day is a new scenario with bew bad guys and jokes. And AoC aims to be that.

Don't get me wrong - 100% agree on this. Would just like gear to be less of the deciding factor as often as it is, v. skill, environment, etc...

Without spending time to go around gathering for materials, completing quests to get blueprints to craft a set, the world becomes an RP themepark.
Once you or me spend time to get the appropriate gear, skill becomes the one and only factor in combat.

But players need to put in the effort to get whats needed to be competitive, otherwise we have meaningless instant gratification, which is what most mmos are about these days.

Sathrago

George Black wrote: »

CROW3 wrote: »

George Black wrote: »

I like open world PvP, and the fact that every day is a new scenario with bew bad guys and jokes. And AoC aims to be that.

Don't get me wrong - 100% agree on this. Would just like gear to be less of the deciding factor as often as it is, v. skill, environment, etc...

Without spending time to go around gathering for materials, completing quests to get blueprints to craft a set, the world becomes an RP themepark.
Once you or me spend time to get the appropriate gear, skill becomes the one and only factor in combat.

But players need to put in the effort to get whats needed to be competitive, otherwise we have meaningless instant gratification, which is what most mmos are about these days.

good take. I appreciate a pvper that understands mmos are not an fps shooter.

PlagueMonk

George Black wrote: »

The game will have very little dungeons.
The "grinding" will happen out in the open, where people can attack you, or you can attack them, potentionally starting guild wars and other real rivalries.
This setting is much better than dungeon runs or meaningless BG matches.

Nothing better than venturing out of the city gates with friends, never knowing who we will end up fighting with for a spot in the sun.
I am not "required" to pve. I play the mmorpg, which is PvX.
Wars
PK
Boss stealing
Caravan attacking
All out in the open.

Well you are referring to what you 'hope' AoC will be like but atm we really don't know, especially when it comes to things like endgame, gear progression, etc. And from what I gathered. there will be plenty of dungeons. Maybe what you are referring to are instanced ones?

Anyway, most of what I was talking about came directly from my WoW experience that is already history, not AoC speculation......PvE grind for gear, new expansion, grind for gear, new expansion, grind for gear, ad infinitum. So yes, if you played WoW you were required to PvE for an extended length of time every expansion. If oyu didn't do so you couldn't compete with everyone else that did the grind. Seems pointless to me and should probably be annoying to the truly HC PvPer.

That's why I prefer the games i mentioned....I get my gear out of the way and can then spend my time RvRing full time 24/7/365 and not have to worry about doing it all over again when the next expansion comes out.

Balrog21

I"ve wanted to chime in on this for a bit, but life has chosen other things first, but first off the bat, Steven has said that with expansions there will be level increase (as per the wiki), I just hope it's not implemented on the first one.
I would much rather have a horizontal progression than a vertical one. @George Black I don't know why you don't think this game won't have a lot of dungeons, as per a reply from Margaret on their FB page, there will be alot. The main one they are showing off of late (with the dragon) is only for levels 1-10. I can think of 4 including before mentioned one just off the top of my head, but I'm not here to talk about the amount of dungeons the game will have, I"m not worried about that at all.
I want to talk about gear progression and level increase. Dungeons will come up in the talk though.

I'm going to use GW2 as a prime example of what they could have done and I hope Ashes does something similar. The genre needs a change, a nice shake up if you will. Let me explain...
In GW2 they have the weapon lock attacks per your weapon, the special attacks as well and even further abilities that you can unlock. Now, how about in the first expansion we let the character specialize in whatever type he/she wants? Deep Dive if you will. So as an example, lets say I'm a wizard, i have all my spells which range from fire to water or just regular magic....so with the new expansion I can deep dive into a specific school and that's all the type of new spells I will learn/get. These spells will be nothing but let's say, air, which would be all electricity/air based attacks, which I chose as my deep dive specialization. They don't all have to be spells either, they could be abilities as well, but they would only be in the school of air. The same could be for any archetype be it fighter who deep dives into in your face slashing type attacks, a rogue could deep dive into different diblitating attacks, etc. Now, these attacks wouldn't be more powerful than the original spells, but just different and you the player get to really choose the type of class you want to play.
The gear would feed off the above, as in there is no level increase only a deep dive with bonuses to your chosen deep dive. It's all about customization.
Monsters or Denizen's aren't that hard either, of course there should be new ones with an expansion, but they can be more powerful without too much trouble, change their AI, give them a certain resistance, and of course new attacks. The possibilities are really endless.
There should be new dugeons and areas to explore, this is where the node sytsem shines that will keep the old content new and relevant.
So let's say you cleared the dungeon in the core game and your level 50. New Xpac comes out, and you find out that to help augment a new peice of gear it requires something from the said dungeon, but now if you have a rogue with you he/she finds(with their arhetype ability) a new passage way that wasn't there before, the rogue investigates and boom a whole even bigger and deeper dungeon is on uncovered below the old one.. Who knows what has been buried deep in the depths of time?
I wanted to keep this short and to the point, I hope my idea got across, but I do agree with some of the posts, nothing more disheartening that to grind for top gear and the first mob you kill in the new xpac is better than what you have on, and the killer of all for me is standing next to say a level 60 in their groovy armor and you're a lowly lvl 10 and you can't hit him and it just says miss, even though he is standing still doing nothing but laughing at you...it's just....well....silly.

George_Black

I should really add "instanced" when I refer to those boring dungeons

Nerror

The gear treadmill is why I left WoW. I really don't like it as an endgame focus. Fortunately we will have many things to do in AoC other than that, but I do worry about the frequency of level and gear cap increases. I hope they are super rare, and that they focus on parallel levelling systems instead.

Dark Age of Camelot did many things right when it comes to this. Level cap was 50, the best gear was player made and enchanted, if we discount the mistake that was the artifacts in the Trials of Atlantis expansion. And the endgame content wasn't focused on the gear treadmill.

PlagueMonk

Nerror wrote: »

The gear treadmill is why I left WoW. I really don't like it as an endgame focus. Fortunately we will have many things to do in AoC other than that, but I do worry about the frequency of level and gear cap increases. I hope they are super rare, and that they focus on parallel levelling systems instead.

Dark Age of Camelot did many things right when it comes to this. Level cap was 50, the best gear was player made and enchanted, if we discount the mistake that was the artifacts in the Trials of Atlantis expansion. And the endgame content wasn't focused on the gear treadmill.

See, someone else gets it

I do have to temper my other statement about "get it and forget it" because in remembering DAoC (one of the games I always refer back to as a shining example of many things done right), your gear was not eternal. It would degrade over time and with every repair you knocked a tiny bit off it's lifespan. Eventually it could not be repaired back to A grade level and you would then have to go hunting for a replacement. I thought that was a great idea an made sense because nothing lasts forever. So this would occasionally give you the incentive to go PvE again. Don't know if something like this will work in AoC but I would be all for it.

rikardp98

@George Black a game that has good horizontal progression in my opinion is ESO. ESO have many problems but one thing they do right is how they handle new gear with each new expansion. The gear in ESO focus on set bonuses, and because of these set bonuses one can uses many different builds. Since gear focus on set bonuses they do not have the need to Increase the lvl cap to make people come back to the game, all they have to do is add interesting gear that enables players to test different builds and customize their play style to see what they like the most.
Other good thing with set bonuses is that they can make targeted gear towards curtain classes/specc to indirectly buff them, instead of changing how the whole class work (like they do in wow).
ESO also have something call world and guild abilities that every class can learn if they do a curtain quest line. And with some new expansions they add new guilds and world abilities that players can go after and customize there build even further.

I really wish AoC do not go down the rabbit hole that is, increase lvl cap with each new expansion, because in my opinion it's a lazy solution to a problem that can be solved with a little creativity. Instead I hope they focus on story driven expansions with new and interesting dungeons and zones that can give us gear with interesting set bonuses that will keep us busy playing the game.

George_Black

Honestly ESO has done nothing right according to the nature of mmorpgs. I only stuck with it for 5 years because I liked my stamDK and I was stuborn at PvP with dw. Having its identity erased I see no reason to keep playing that single player game. I faced 0 challenges all this time. Anything I needed was achieved easily within a day.

As for its gear sets. Worst in any game.

rikardp98

George Black wrote: »

Honestly ESO has done nothing right according to the nature of mmorpgs. I only stuck with it for 5 years because I liked my stamDK and I was stuborn at PvP with dw. Having its identity erased I see no reason to keep playing that single player game. I faced 0 challenges all this time. Anything I needed was achieved easily within a day.

As for its gear sets. Worst in any game.

I know that ESO has many problems and over time have become heavily game store based and "beginner friendly".

But as for it's gear sets, why do you think it's the worst in any game?

George_Black

rikardp98 wrote: »

George Black wrote: »

Honestly ESO has done nothing right according to the nature of mmorpgs. I only stuck with it for 5 years because I liked my stamDK and I was stuborn at PvP with dw. Having its identity erased I see no reason to keep playing that single player game. I faced 0 challenges all this time. Anything I needed was achieved easily within a day.

As for its gear sets. Worst in any game.

I know that ESO has many problems and over time have become heavily game store based and "beginner friendly".

But as for it's gear sets, why do you think it's the worst in any game?

Because gear does the combat instead of abilities.
Because it is extremely easy to obtain, I cant stress that enough. (Drop, traders).
In the last 2 years I spend maybe 10h farming gear for my PvP stamDK?
10h farming for gear in the last 2 years.
Because there is no beauty or pride on wearing x or y set, it's all motifs and fashion.
Because while progressing from Lv1 to V14 (cp160 today) I never felt the need to spend time putting together a set, I was just picking up pieces from quest or overland EASY encounters.

If you had play any game similar to L2 or diablo or any real mmorpg you'd see the difference of depth that gear adds to those games.

Honestly in ESO I dont care what gear I am wearing. It's all covered under my outfit. Heavy? Medium? Who knows. Axes maces? They look like swords on my character.

That's not how gear should be treated in mmos.
When was the last time you saw in ESO a player celebrating for owning a piece of gear set? Never.

George_Black

In L2 I was celebrating my gear at 10lv, 20 40 52 61 76 80lv Every time it took effort.
Every time it gave me the competitiveness boost for the next 2 months of gameplay.
Can you say the same for eso?

rikardp98

George Black wrote: »

In L2 I was celebrating my gear at 10lv, 20 40 52 61 76 80lv Every time it took effort.
Every time it gave me the competitiveness boost for the next 2 months of gameplay.
Can you say the same for eso?

There are gear grinding in ESO if that is what you mean xD And you also have different stages of gear, both in lvl and in cp. Maybe I'm miss understanding what you are trying to say?

HeronMarkedSword

I think the curve is hyperbolic starting at zero on the x = 1, y = 0 point, then as the graph extends along the x-scale towards, say, 100, the y scale increases to infinity, with x being the total number of items and y being the total number of Levels. As the Levels of all the players on the server increases, the number of useless items eventually cap off.

So in layman's terms, the total number of items, and therefore the total number of "obsolete" items is dependent upon the total number of character levels. If everyone is level 70, there would be no need for a crude longsword, or it's brethren. If early on there is a plethora of different levels, the number of obsolete items is alot lower, because you have a percentage of levels 1-10 characters.

rikardp98

George Black wrote: »

rikardp98 wrote: »

George Black wrote: »

Honestly ESO has done nothing right according to the nature of mmorpgs. I only stuck with it for 5 years because I liked my stamDK and I was stuborn at PvP with dw. Having its identity erased I see no reason to keep playing that single player game. I faced 0 challenges all this time. Anything I needed was achieved easily within a day.

As for its gear sets. Worst in any game.

I know that ESO has many problems and over time have become heavily game store based and "beginner friendly".

But as for it's gear sets, why do you think it's the worst in any game?

Because gear does the combat instead of abilities.
Because it is extremely easy to obtain, I cant stress that enough. (Drop, traders).
In the last 2 years I spend maybe 10h farming gear for my PvP stamDK?
10h farming for gear in the last 2 years.
Because there is no beauty or pride on wearing x or y set, it's all motifs and fashion.
Because while progressing from Lv1 to V14 (cp160 today) I never felt the need to spend time putting together a set, I was just picking up pieces from quest or overland EASY encounters.

If you had play any game similar to L2 or diablo or any real mmorpg you'd see the difference of depth that gear adds to those games.

Honestly in ESO I dont care what gear I am wearing. It's all covered under my outfit. Heavy? Medium? Who knows. Axes maces? They look like swords on my character.

That's not how gear should be treated in mmos.
When was the last time you saw in ESO a player celebrating for owning a piece of gear set? Never.

I agree with the statement that outfit or transmog is not good for a game. I also agree with you that how one obtain gear in ESO is pretty easy, like the personal loot system (with trading) and the easy dungeons that you do to obtain them. But then you have new dungeons with really interesting mechanics and vet dungeons, and you also have trials where you can obtain some really interesting gear sets. You have pvp currency that you can use to by gear (or gear boxes that have a chance to drop the right gear, not the best), open world bosses, quests and chests that drop gear.

If you think that gear makes a player good in ESO you haven't played it. Gear is a part of the equation but how you pull of your rotation is everything! In my opinion gear is there to compliment a curtain play style and in some cases make an otherwise bad specc good.

And you say ESO is a single player game, but then you refer diablo as a mmorpg, I do not think I can trust a person like you 😆

So I haven't played L2, can you explain how that game handles gear?

George_Black

Believe/trust what you want.
I have been playing eso since before IC came out.
The only challenge of the game was the original vMA back then without transmute, (solo, lol for mmo) with the second dlc.
There are no good players on ESO PvP.
It's all zergballs and cheese builds.
100% gear doing the combat for the player while they switch between backbar turtle-up and frontbar dizzy/execution.

Then it was a series of weird combat dev decisions, most notably the increase of DoTs power last year ("we the devs, felt they were weak") and then the nerf 3 months later beyond their previous state (we the devs, felt that DoTs became strong, so we will make them weaker than they ever were). But here are some more gear sets that deal 19k dmg.

I wont explain how L2 handless gear, this topic was about expansions and gear, and I just disagree with "new expansions make gear obsolete. I want iron sword to be relevant while I run dungeons for titles".

I would suggest you follow up with this games development updates, the sources of inspiration for AoC systems and getting familiar with a world very very very different to ESO.

If you think ESO did well with gear (a complete joke from craftets POW as well), I think you are going to either love the depth this game will offer (based on its inspirations) or hate it.

And that's my last bit for this topic.

rikardp98

George Black wrote: »

Believe/trust what you want.
I have been playing eso since before IC came out.
The only challenge of the game was the original vMA back then without transmute, (solo, lol for mmo) with the second dlc.
There are no good players on ESO PvP.
It's all zergballs and cheese builds.
100% gear doing the combat for the player while they switch between backbar turtle-up and frontbar dizzy/execution.

Then it was a series of weird combat dev decisions, most notably the increase of DoTs power last year ("we the devs, felt they were weak") and then the nerf 3 months later beyond their previous state (we the devs, felt that DoTs became strong, so we will make them weaker than they ever were). But here are some more gear sets that deal 19k dmg.

I wont explain how L2 handless gear, this topic was about expansions and gear, and I just disagree with "new expansions make gear obsolete. I want iron sword to be relevant while I run dungeons for titles".

I would suggest you follow up with this games development updates, the sources of inspiration for AoC systems and getting familiar with a world very very very different to ESO.

If you think ESO did well with gear (a complete joke from craftets POW as well), I think you are going to either love the depth this game will offer (based on its inspirations) or hate it.

And that's my last bit for this topic.

Good players or not, the game is all about the rotation and you choose your gear setup to compliment your rotation. I also think that there is complicated and difficult vet dungeons and trials. And there are also some very good and viable crafting set in ESO, so your statement that gearing in ESO is a joke is completely wrong.

When I say that with new expansion old gear will be obsolete WoW classic is the perfect example. From the start you had raids like molten core with your tier 1 set and other random gear pieces, the bwl comes out, almost all the gear you have grinded will be replaced, that's fine because there are still interesting gear in mc that one will need. The AQ40 comes out, all new gear you need to grind out, mc and bwl ain't that important anymore except a few gear pieces, then naxx and aq40 ain't that important anymore except a few gear pieces. Then tbc comes out, all the gear from vanilla is so obsolete that you will never set foot in mc, bwl, aq40 or naxx again. The only reason to go back is to go back is to get gear for transmogs.

Why did all the gear in vanilla become obsolete? Because they increased the lvl cap, making 60 gear far from top tier even though some pieces from vanilla are interesting and unique.

Right now in bfa (shadow lands) there are many, many raids and dungeons in the game, but only 1 or maybe 2 are relevant.

I gave ESO as an example that handled gear pretty good in my opinion (interesting gear sets that have potential to customize your builds) to show that there are other ways to make people stay and continue to play the game. I never said ESO is a perfect game, in fact I just started to play it again after a 18 months break.

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