Suggestion: One grade of gear per season

GaldorP

After giving this a lot of thought, I think gear should come in much fewer grades after the removal of the Veteran Ranks.

Having a new grade of gear for every 10 or 20 Champion Ranks makes anything you find before reaching the Champion Point requirement for the currently highest grade of gear (right now 160 CP on PTS) obsolete in a few hours, even faster than previous non top level gear with VR requirements was outleveled.

What I would suggest is to have only a single grade of gear that can be equipped by all characters that have reached lv 50 (and are thus at least Champion Rank 1) right now in the DB Update (season 1 gear).

Then, in a future update, raise the Champion Point cap to 1002, and add a new grade of gear that requires lv 50 + Champion Rank 501 or higher to be equipped (season 2 gear).

In a later update, raise the Champion Point cap to 1503, and add a third grade of gear that requires lv 50 + Champion Rank 1002 or higher to be equipped (season 3 gear).
Etc.

The Champion Point cap can be raised more often in smaller increments*, but there should only be a new grade of gear about once every 6-12 months, in my opinion, so players don't have to get the same equipment over and over again (there can still be new sets released in every patch, but no new grade of gear until the next seasonal CP cap is reached).

There really should be a crafting option or NPC service to change the trait at least of crafted items as well, especially with the complete redesign of weapon and armor traits in DB.

With the introduction of seasonal gear, monsters would still come in all Champion Point variants (1-current skill CP cap, so there could be monsters with Champion Rank 101, 102, and 103, etc. in the same zone, for example), with the higher Champion Point ones giving more XP (this is important! it lets players hunt anywhere they want but they get more XP if they hunt the stronger monsters).

In later Updates keep some content that is scaled for season 1 gear difficulty (and remains at that difficulty level), but add new content with stronger monsters designed for characters with season 2 gear.
Make sure, the season 1 zones have some rare things that drop only there which higher level players want as well so there can be some trading and players who haven't reached the season 2 gear requirement yet won't feel excluded from the community and get rewarded for playing the game.

In the long run, get rid of battle-leveled open PvE zones (Orsinium, Hew's Bane, Gold Coast) and attribute them a fixed Champion Point range.


* Every time the CP cap is raised, the catch up mechanic already in place will make it easier for newer players to gain Champion Ranks below the cap.

Edit: Sorry, I meant to post this in the PTS forum.

Edit2: I'd like to point out what I think are the strenghts of this suggested system:
- Lv 50+ gear doesn't get obsolete for a very long time. When a new grade of gear is introduced once every 6-12 months, it comes with entirely new sets (both dropped and crafted) exclusive to that grade and will only be minimally stronger than gear of the previous grade, but a lot harder to get. Nobody will have to get a higher grade version of the same item again for the nth time anymore (as many players had to in the past with boss helmets, crafted sets, sets dropped in dungeons, PvP sets every time the VR cap was increased).

GaldorP

Any kind of feedback on this suggestion for fewer grades of gear past lv 50 would be appreciated

Edit: Also, quick reminder that seasonal gear was mentioned as something that might get introduced in later updates long before the game had changed from the mandatory subscription model to the B2P model:

Found an old interview with Paul Sage published in July 2014 where the idea of seasonal gear is mentioned in the context of the Champion System (which had not been introduced to the game yet; the interview took place after the release of Lower Craglorn but before the release of Upper Craglorn):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0UUsPRdY5k&
Skip to the 42:58 mark.
Quote transcribed by me:

Paul Sage: If I may... I saw some questions going by in the chat there. And one of the things that was the question is: Well, how are we going to handle gear in the Champion System? And so, one of the things - and again, this is not set in stone but it's one of the early things that we're looking at - which is to have more of... gear that's introduced you know by seasons where there's no level requirement at all. So there would just be better and better gear introduced in the game that'll be harder to get but because more of that gear will exist in the game as players get it, it'll be more readily be available. So think of this like... I guess you want to like seasons. So you got - season 8 was what we were currently on as an example. There'd be season 8 gear in the game where you'd get it, it'd be more powerful than say season 7 gear by a little bit. But season 7 gear would be more readily available. And the reason why we're looking at this type of system to put into the game is because we feel like there'd be less player separation because we'll actually have something called a Champion Rating which will kind of look at your gear as well as all the points you've spent in the Champion System to kind of give you an idea whether you can take on a certain content or not. And so we wanna make sure that we don't have a whole lot of player separation so that's why we're going to make our itemization have less requirements for equipping the items but still finding those items will be more rare. Yes, there is a solution for crafting problems - people were asking about crafting - and that's what we're really trying to get to.