Steal ESO's gearing system

https://youtu.be/2gSGPbn6mh0

Found this video and thought it's interesting and we should discuss the proposition.

Things I agree with:
-This type of gearing system definitely gives me tons of motivation to grind like crazy
-It fixes the new expansion old gear flop problem
- It would give more incentive for players to grind the zones which will speed up and help node development.

What are your thoughts?

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Comments

unknownsystemerror

No, eat less pasta.

George_Black

The worst gearing system in any mmo that I have seen. 0 challenge in getting it and 0 pride for having it.

ariatras

I'm still an advocate of having player power -not- be too dependant on gear.

rikardp98

George Black wrote: »

The worst gearing system in any mmo that I have seen. 0 challenge in getting it and 0 pride for having it.

The way of getting the gear is irrelevant here. It's about the gearing system as in the gear it self, stats + effects and bonuses.

I do agree with you that ESO has no real challenge of obtaining good gear (been a while since I played it though), but the way the gear is itemized is interesting, fun and long term viable. Yes they have some balance issues but still interesting and fun.

I also just want to say that I haven't watched the video yet so maybe i misunderstood something

George_Black

Eso stats are bad as well

Karthos

Full disclosure, I didn't watch the entire video, but the general premise of this thread is flawed in that copying another game's gearing system just copies all the flaws that system has, AND you run the risk of just adopting an incompatible system into your game, because it's a part designed for another game.

Plus at this point, gear stats should be well established. We don't want AOC to be a New World, making massive sweeping changes midway through development based on no reason other than "some people want this".

Azherae

Karthos wrote: »

Full disclosure, I didn't watch the entire video, but the general premise of this thread is flawed in that copying another game's gearing system just copies all the flaws that system has, AND you run the risk of just adopting an incompatible system into your game, because it's a part designed for another game.

Plus at this point, gear stats should be well established. We don't want AOC to be a New World, making massive sweeping changes midway through development based on no reason other than "some people want this".

While I completely agree with the sentiment of your post, I don't think Gear stats are actually established at all right now?

Are you saying that what we saw in Alpha-1 is the final concept of what stats go on gear?

I think it might have been somewhat 'hinted' that we won't know that until Alpha-2, and that they aren't really that far along yet. There's still a chance to overhaul a bunch of stuff, including class abilities and such, that we saw in Alpha-1.

George_Black

Eso gear stats dont make dont reflect the actual items at all.

Heavy armor drove the highest dmg output, max MP was used to increase magic dmg along with spell dmg,
Max mp, mp regen, mp cost reduction cancelled each other out for unlimited MP usage and depending on the flavour of the month you'd invest on them. No static value in the concept.
Same with weapon dmg, weapon penetration, weapon critical. Flavour of the month, 2/3 were useless every other day.

Not to mention armors dealing burst dmg every 4s or every 10s.

Now let's see the weapons.

Dual Wield bonuses where all over the place. For three months DW was used to boost defence and that was its primetime.
Ill say it again... dual wield was used to boost defence...

For 2 years sword/shield was better than 2handed for damage dealer brawlers, two handed was only used by rogues.

Bow was always supplementary, never an actual playstyle. (Too much realism hurts videogames).

What else.... recently the developers realized the futility of their stats and now they combined all magic/physical attributes into the same stat per category (dmg, penetration, armor).

All they had to do YEARS AGO was to remove the dmg bonus attached to max mp and max stamina pools, as well as remove the free dmg bursts from the armors and make heavy armor feel heavy and medium feel medium.

So yes, fvck eso for anything related gearwise.

The only thing I like from eso is its transmorg/glamour system. That's it. And that was crap in the first 3 years of it. If you wanted to be effective you gad to look like shiet with all the monster sets.

bloodprophet

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Weapons

Gear has approximately a 40-50% influence on a player's overall power in the game.[16]

rikardp98

George Black wrote: »

Eso gear stats dont make dont reflect the actual items at all.

Heavy armor drove the highest dmg output, max MP was used to increase magic dmg along with spell dmg,
Max mp, mp regen, mp cost reduction cancelled each other out for unlimited MP usage and depending on the flavour of the month you'd invest on them. No static value in the concept.
Same with weapon dmg, weapon penetration, weapon critical. Flavour of the month, 2/3 were useless every other day.

Not to mention armors dealing burst dmg every 4s or every 10s.

Now let's see the weapons.

Dual Wield bonuses where all over the place. For three months DW was used to boost defence and that was its primetime.
Ill say it again... dual wield was used to boost defence...

For 2 years sword/shield was better than 2handed for damage dealer brawlers, two handed was only used by rogues.

Bow was always supplementary, never an actual playstyle. (Too much realism hurts videogames).

What else.... recently the developers realized the futility of their stats and now they combined all magic/physical attributes into the same stat per category (dmg, penetration, armor).

All they had to do YEARS AGO was to remove the dmg bonus attached to max mp and max stamina pools, as well as remove the free dmg bursts from the armors and make heavy armor feel heavy and medium feel medium.

So yes, fvck eso for anything related gearwise.

The only thing I like from eso is its transmorg/glamour system. That's it. And that was crap in the first 3 years of it. If you wanted to be effective you gad to look like shiet with all the monster sets.

I do agree with you on all those points! I mean I no longer play ESO for a reason xD

But what I do remember from ESO is the flexibility you had with gear and the cool experimental gear setups you could play with. I like the interesting gear bonuses ESO have, In comparison to like World of warcraft were most power comes from raw stats to increase power, which leads to hear from older expansions/patches being completely useless.

Amma

It hink Set-Boni are always an interesting thing for every mmo. So if i have a set where i like the boni, then it is always hurtfull to loose that at the next expansion, even if you get some special coins for it.

My suggestion would be to make it the other way around: Make the old sets at an expansion upgradeable.
It would be easy to make the way of upgrading as difficult as getting the new gear from the expansion.
Just make the possibility to get those special upgrade-coins in the same raid, where you would get the new high gear.
Then let the upgraded gear be comparable in strength with the new gear of the new raid.
That means that you still have to do the same raid to get better, but the player could decide for himself what he wants to wear.
The only problem that i see is that the devs would have more work to balance the new gear with all the upgraded old gear from previous expansions.

Kaban

Gear progression is one of these quirks of the genre that either elevates it or kills it. Lets take a look at few examples. Early Lineage 2 had small differences between raw power of gear of certain grades. Like Top B grade and Low A grade gear difference was around 7-10% which was quite often a player was able to offset by a matching set effect. We can treat new item grades in Lineage 2 in terms of WoW expansion items. For a good amount of time this meant players who were geared in top equipment from previous expansion were still able to raid content in the new one or even fight other players who were equipped with "expac gear". Later in the game the difference became larger but for a good few years that was the case. Some bonuses were even more than enough to skip certain gear grades. For example archers would quite often stick to low c-grade Plated leather set until they got their hands on Majestic Leather sets as the damage bonus of plated leather set easily offset defensive attributes of Doom Leather set but at the same time Doom leather would be preferred by assassins over plated leather due to... defensive attributes. The idea was these sets affected some general stats instead of skills. And now we can move to WoW itemisation (ill refer to WOTLK expac as i really dropped the game afterwards). So as those who played know stats are everything in WoW and sets more often than not have laid out meta since they've influenced certain skills to a great extent and were barely ever equally distributed. Also progressing to another expac meant that you change your Blessed blade of the windseeker to Longsword of the Bear the moment it dropped. It served the purpose of creating a sense of progression however quite often other much more interesting set effects were lost in the process and ultimately we've ended up with +x% to y ability. All in all I'd call Lineage 2 gear progression system a variety one while WoW was power one. And both progression system have their ups and downs. When the variety is provided you lack the power progression, or with power progression you lack the variety. That's why there's few options one might consider to find the middle ground. One is to not have sets at all and focus on individual items that affect characters in a more general way with some enchantment systems made available to customise them even further to be more specific in what they do. Second idea is to have aforementioned gear upgrade system (which was already debunked during one of the streams). Third idea is to be able to dismantle set items in order to get some enchantment item from them which upon use would change another set item affix to that set which would keep the base stats of the item but change the set effect. I personally would opt in for the 3rd solution as it makes people trying to get the gear which would become obsolete otherwise. That way we can keep both power and variety progression systems at balance and have the old content being revisited quite often.

JustVine

Kaban wrote: »

Gear progression is one of these quirks of the genre that either elevates it or kills it. Lets take a look at few examples.

Early Lineage 2 had small differences between raw power of gear of certain grades. Like Top B grade and Low A grade gear difference was around 7-10% which was quite often a player was able to offset by a matching set effect. We can treat new item grades in Lineage 2 in terms of WoW expansion items. For a good amount of time this meant players who were geared in top equipment from previous expansion were still able to raid content in the new one or even fight other players who were equipped with "expac gear". Later in the game the difference became larger but for a good few years that was the case. Some bonuses were even more than enough to skip certain gear grades. For example archers would quite often stick to low c-grade Plated leather set until they got their hands on Majestic Leather sets as the damage bonus of plated leather set easily offset defensive attributes of Doom Leather set but at the same time Doom leather would be preferred by assassins over plated leather due to... defensive attributes. The idea was these sets affected some general stats instead of skills.

And now we can move to WoW itemisation (ill refer to WOTLK expac as i really dropped the game afterwards). So as those who played know stats are everything in WoW and sets more often than not have laid out meta since they've influenced certain skills to a great extent and were barely ever equally distributed. Also progressing to another expac meant that you change your Blessed blade of the windseeker to Longsword of the Bear the moment it dropped. It served the purpose of creating a sense of progression however quite often other much more interesting set effects were lost in the process and ultimately we've ended up with +x% to y ability.

All in all I'd call Lineage 2 gear progression system a variety one while WoW was power one. And both progression system have their ups and downs. When the variety is provided you lack the power progression, or with power progression you lack the variety. That's why there's few options one might consider to find the middle ground.

One is to not have sets at all and focus on individual items that affect characters in a more general way with some enchantment systems made available to customize them even further to be more specific in what they do.

Second idea is to have aforementioned gear upgrade system (which was already debunked during one of the streams).

Third idea is to be able to dismantle set items in order to get some enchantment item from them which upon use would change another set item affix to that set which would keep the base stats of the item but change the set effect. I personally would opt in for the 3rd solution as it makes people trying to get the gear which would become obsolete otherwise. That way we can keep both power and variety progression systems at balance and have the old content being revisited quite often.

Edited syntax for the above post since I felt like it had some good info for the discussion but was difficult to read.

Thanks for the post above @Kaban. It had some good examples I am less familiar with in there. I think I like your third proposed option with a lot of caveats/context below.

I believe there was a mention of set bonuses as something the devs were going to try and work in. Set vs 'mix and match grade' is a very fine line to walk. In many mmos set bonuses create a situation where certain sets overwhelm individual pieces depending on the games over all stat balance (e.g. if there is a set bonus with crit or attack expect it to be the default set for most builds in the meta other than support.) This comes up because a set bonuses is usually used to strengthen otherwise middle of the road gear into something unique and desirable. It can be a lot harder to balance a set bonus relative to other gear pieces and so it slips through the balance cracks.

This isn't to say set bonuses are inherently bad. There is a potential for set bonuses to create a genuine trade off in boosting a stylistic approach vs 'optimized meta approach'. I feel monster hunter world did set bonuses best in a way applicable to mmos. You only needed a few pieces of the gear to trigger parts of the set bonus and basically the entire set to trigger the 'full' bonus. This let's you more fully calculate what exactly the trade off is with the full set bonus vs other full sets, while still giving people the 'stylistic approach' through the first 'tier' of the gear bonus to keep creativity in build sets competitive with full sets. Additionally, this tier one set bonus is easier to restrict to certain gear piece combinations rather than fully free form, this makes what your comparing the trade off to as a dev and a player building more apparent and adjustable in a balance patch if there was some sort of mistake or overlooked combination.

I feel like your third option is taken in some mmo's with varying degrees of success, therefore, and think it's more about what stats are available to tweak and balance with in the first place. When there are more beneficial stats and a relative wide variety of 'different win conditions' for different enemies in the same areas of content,, the healthier a meta and economy tend to be. But to achieve this, it needs to be the 'goal' of the design day one and 'easy' answers need to be present but avoided as the 'over all best' answer. I also feel keeping gear slots sticking to only a certain set of stats that they benefit helps keep balance easier to achieve and tweak over all.

Tl;dr I think set bonuses are a fine line to walk and work better when they have different tiers of effect and are more focused on stylistic approaches to combat rather than general buffs. I also think gear as a whole benefits from more stats with stylistic impacts, to fine tune balance and style. And I feel that a tiered set system also fits better for content progression.

Therefore I think in my ideal system I would have the first tier of a gear set be how one 'boosts stylistic class choices' unlocking a different way to fight or approach an enemy, the full set bonus giving an 'easier and serviceable answer' to 'general content' but ultimately a mix and match approach being the 'most optimal' at fighting specific match ups in pvp and bosses with those same fighting styles. I'd prefer if there was different viable styles and specs that make you more or less effective against different matchups. And lastly I think this tiered set bonus approach scales with content challenge levels well. The more optimal the gear piece the harder the content is to acquire it, while the 'mid steps' in a build are obtained from high level crafters in nearly all cases to keep different level gaps of players on a floor footing of stats.

Caeryl

Set bonuses are a good thing to include to encourage rerunning older content for completion, but not on everything, not always “full set or bust”, and not in place of strength on a single item if it takes a lot of effort to get.

Obtaining a legendary sword feels great, until you read the tooltip and see that you don’t get anything more from it than a normal sword until you pair it with a pair of gauntlets.

Merek

ariatras wrote: »

I'm still an advocate of having player power -not- be too dependant on gear.

No... what's wrong with you? Making an MMO require players to have some form of skill outside of time sunk is just wrong! How will the average, braindead player be able to compete? Everyone needs a participation trophy, stop trying to split the community!

Noaani

Merek wrote: »

ariatras wrote: »

I'm still an advocate of having player power -not- be too dependant on gear.

No... what's wrong with you? Making an MMO require players to have some form of skill outside of time sunk is just wrong! How will the average, braindead player be able to compete? Everyone needs a participation trophy, stop trying to split the community!

Players that think time is what is involved in getting top end gear have never had too end gear.

Tragnar

That video is a perfect viewpoint from the outside - focusing on the feature of item set matching disregarding the dysfunctional reality that eso gearing had/has.

Having sets or even two (like a one full, one incomplete or anything in between) is usually added as a fix for boring item stats. I would very much like to not see any sets before the stats are refined to be a fulfilling system that works by itself and doesn't need another game system to make up for its flaws

Those suggestions for "improving" sets from the video is honestly inapplicable to the current state of Ashes, because item sets are always either a fix or a sprinkle above the base gearing system. Not to say that class specific sets are an antithesis to the custom character build that Ashes wants to provide.

So if anything to take from this post is that Ashes needs stats to be the pillars that will carry the gearing treadmill, because Steven's philosophy for gearing is really solid

Vhaeyne

The only thing notable about ESO related to gear is its crafting system. While it is a watered-down version of a good crafting system. It brings the concept to the table of being able to learn visual styles and apply them to your crafts. The way you get these styles in ESO is trash, but that concept is solid.

EVERYTHING ELSE ABOUT ESO'S GEAR IS SHIT.

The stat system is jank.
Gear advancement is shit.

Also as pointed out:

Zero challenge in obtaining gear=Zero pride in having gear.

McMackMuck

I think Ashes would do well to never use the term "expansions" (which I associate with p2w and DLC payments) and instead talk about a continuous process that results in server updates as and when content is ready. They get the $15 per month, so they don't need to hype up expansions each time the game is updated to generate DLC sales. Updates should drop without warning, leaving players to adapt to new opportunities, rather than having time to prepare. That generates genuine excitement. Player notifications that "XYZ" content is now present in the game would be a great way to get players rushing home from work to login and engage with the updated content.

Gear creep / gear degradation associated with expansions is commonly a p2w "milk-the-whales" technique. I hope Ashes will put the focus on a developing storyline which the players interact with. Why the next BiS gear better than the last _absolutely must_ make sense as far as the campaign is concerned and not just be an arms race/power creep that players eventually tire of. There doesn't need to be a new BiS every time there's an update, an update can just change a game mechanic, the seasonal weather or acknowledge Easter/Halloween/Christmas in some way.

Vhaeyne

@McMackMuck

I actually agree with you heavily. As a lover of open world sandbox and PvP games, I think the focus of new content should always be to make the world better.

I honestly would be fine if the level cap never actually increased and gear creep was not a thing. I know many might not agree with this but, I don't think in these specific types of RPGs that focus on open world PvP and risk vs reward should have gear that has no heavy maintenance fees to keep the war machine and economy going.

Slaying a dragon today should not grant you a lifetime of good gear that can only be bested by defeating a dragon with good stats. Dragon bones and scales are not indestructible. You proved that when you slew the dragon. Instead, you are using the dragon as a resource to make gear that will give you an increase in power until it is worn out and needs upkeep or replacement. The competition for these resources is what makes these games so real and replayable.

Even without PvP so long as gear is hard to obtain and takes real time and effort to obtain you can have a game go years and years without level increases or gear creep. This is why FFXI private servers like to stay with the same level cap. I have seen the same people playing FFXI on private servers for decades. On the PvP side, I have seen it with L2.

Nothing beats the feeling of getting one piece of gear in after working for months and months on it. You can be full BiS in a week or two on WOW and FFXIV of active play. Feeling all of those slots never feels as good as getting a single slot in some older games.

I know I was a little all over the place on this, but I do agree with you. "Expansions" in most games just amount to a few new fights for DLC. Going to play endwalker in a few weeks. Looking forward to paying for a few new EX trails, 12 Savage fights over 2 years and maybe 2 ultimate trials if we are lucky... I will probably be full pre-raid BiS day 2-3 waiting for raid... Yay

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