Item Set Curation in Craglorn Trials

AJTC5000

With the advent of Update 32, the new changes to item set collections have been (mostly) quite good. However, I believe that with these changes should come a rework to how the Craglorn trials now reward uncollected gear pieces.

Each trial has three "native" item sets. Let's take Hel Ra Citadel as an example:
- A Heavy set, Beserking Warrior
- A Medium set, Poisonous Serpent
- A Light set, Destructive Mage

The three trials then share a fourth group of sets that have Minor Slayer and Aegis buffs:
- A Heavy set, Eternal Warrior
- A Medium set, Vicious Serpent
- A Light set, Infallible Mage

Prior to Update 32, the convention was that if you ran the trial on normal difficulty, there would be an 80% chance of you receiving a "native" gear piece, and a 20% chance of you receiving a gear piece from the Minor Slayer/Aegis sets. On Veteran difficulty, these chances were reversed, with a 20% chance of you receiving a "native" gear piece, etc. Completing the Veteran difficulty on Hard Mode would also net you additional weapon and jewelry pieces from the last boss.

Our trials group ran Hel Ra Citadel on Veteran difficulty last night (06 Nov) as a few of us wanted to complete our sticker book there, and were targeting the Beserking Warrior set in particular. However, we found that the old 80/20 convention was still in place, and many of us were still mostly receiving gear pieces from the Minor Slayer/Aegis sets. Moreover, people who had already completed their collection of the Minor Slayer/Aegis sets, and were still missing gear pieces from the "native" sets, were continuing to receive gear pieces from the Minor Slayer/Aegis sets. We followed this up with a Hel Ra Citadel run on Normal difficulty and an Aetherian Archive run on Normal difficulty, and found that the Normal difficulty versions were indeed still leaning towards the "native" sets when it came to gear drops.

What this tells me is that before the game calculates which missing item to reward the player with, it is continuing to make the 80/20 dice roll to decide from which pool it will pull the items from, rather than targeting the uncollected pieces first.

I believe this system should now be secondary to the new system that was introduced with Update 32. As weapons make up most of the grind with completing the sticker book, most groups will want to pursue Veteran Hard Mode as a faster way of obtaining more weapons. The 80/20 system is making it incredibly difficult to target the "native" set weapons from the Craglorn trials, which I would assume is rather against the design philosophy of the new system. I believe the 80/20 system is still good, as it encourages players to pursue the Veteran difficulty if they would like the Minor Slayer/Aegis sets, but as I said, it should be secondary to the new system.

I would appreciate some feedback on this. Was this intended? I'm leaning towards it being an oversight, as the Craglorn trials are the only area in the game that currently has this 80/20 system. I imagine it's also only going to be highlighted on account of the current power of the Beserking Warrior set.

Thanks!
- AJ

@ZOS_Kevin @ZOS_Finn @ZOS_GinaBruno