Illurian wrote: »

In regards to sets, you seem to be asking for each set piece to function like a vMA weapon. That would be insanely powerful, and would need to be scaled down to such a miniature state (if ever implemented) that you might as well just equip four 2x set pieces instead.

Nah. DDO didn't bother scaling down anything. Your character had insanely powerful gear that could make or break the encounter. Don't have immunity to poison? Well that boss is going to wreck you. Are you constantly getting one-shot killed by Vorpal weapons? Use fortification armor. Is this enemy literally immune to all your damage? Stop using a fire sword against a fire elemental. Enemies have 60,000 hp but aren't immune to critical hits? One-shot kill them with Vorpal weapons.

Powergaming knows no bounds. The content just gets designed to be as awesome as the gear is. There's bosses who use Wail of the Banshee which will instantly kill everyone who fails their Fortitude save. In ESO, you just dps them to avoid the mechanic or execute or try to block and heal through it but in DDO you either had someone cast Death Ward on the group or you prayed to god that everyone is wearing Deathblock items. Of course the tank probably has a Fortitude save of +72 so he just laughs and makes the save. Except that 5% of the time when he doesn't.

Heck, another game I played was City of Heroes and your tank could have 99% damage resistance at one point, along with the CCers debuffing enemy damage by 98%. They just balanced the raids to require these things and you either worked as a team to shut down enemies or you were one shotted for 243,053 damage.

LordSemaj wrote: »

Illurian wrote: »

In regards to sets, you seem to be asking for each set piece to function like a vMA weapon. That would be insanely powerful, and would need to be scaled down to such a miniature state (if ever implemented) that you might as well just equip four 2x set pieces instead.

Nah. DDO didn't bother scaling down anything. Your character had insanely powerful gear that could make or break the encounter. Don't have immunity to poison? Well that boss is going to wreck you. Are you constantly getting one-shot killed by Vorpal weapons? Use fortification armor. Is this enemy literally immune to all your damage? Stop using a fire sword against a fire elemental. Enemies have 60,000 hp but aren't immune to critical hits? One-shot kill them with Vorpal weapons.

Powergaming knows no bounds. The content just gets designed to be as awesome as the gear is. There's bosses who use Wail of the Banshee which will instantly kill everyone who fails their Fortitude save. In ESO, you just dps them to avoid the mechanic or execute or try to block and heal through it but in DDO you either had someone cast Death Ward on the group or you prayed to god that everyone is wearing Deathblock items. Of course the tank probably has a Fortitude save of +72 so he just laughs and makes the save. Except that 5% of the time when he doesn't.

Heck, another game I played was City of Heroes and your tank could have 99% damage resistance at one point, along with the CCers debuffing enemy damage by 98%. They just balanced the raids to require these things and you either worked as a team to shut down enemies or you were one shotted for 243,053 damage.

So... I'd hold back on the jargon when you're speaking to someone who hasn't played DDO. I haven't the slightest clue what half of your post means.

From what I can tell, you either 1 shot the boss or the boss 1 shots you. That doesn't sound fun imo.

To each his own, but I prefer having mechanics to learn and to rely on that doesn't simply involve equipping another weapon to 1 shot the boss.

Kova wrote: »

If you were to find a really good setup with single items, how long would it take before everyone else started running it?

Already exists in many games. The balancing factor is that a single set cannot beat every other set combination ever. In ESO, things are pretty level across the field with set bonuses having a minor difference over similar sets. But in other games, if you went with that all-arounder build that can 1vX, you're dead meat the second you run into a glass cannon specialist who literally puts out 300% of your damage. Or maybe you decided to make a gank build all around being the god of invisibility. Along comes a guy who trivializes stealth by being a walking guard and ruins your afternoon.

Like if people decided to stack Necropotence, Julianos, Netch's Touch, and a bunch of other sets to get a stupid amount of spell damage, the only way you're surviving that is if you stacked spell resistance sets in a similar way. You can go 50/50 but you're not going to be surviving for long so you better kill him fast. If he's in a group behind 11 friends supporting him, good luck doing that.

This is pretty much how DAOC was. Enchanters would come in, bomb your group with CC, then their friends would eliminate you. So counterbuilds were made to stop that. And counters were made to fix that. And so on until the game was just a labyrinth of build counters and you absolutely needed a group of varying specialties if you wanted to survive more than 10 minutes. Think of like playing League of Legends or DOTA. There might be a guy who is immune to magic and shuts down your casters, so you have to support your casters with someone who doesn't use magic to handle people like that.

Illurian wrote: »

So... I'd hold back on the jargon when you're speaking to someone who hasn't played DDO. I haven't the slightest clue what half of your post means. From what I can tell, you either 1 shot the boss or the boss 1 shots you. That doesn't sound fun imo. To each his own, but I prefer having mechanics to learn and to rely on that doesn't simply involve equipping another weapon to 1 shot the boss.

Nah, not at all. Each boss comes with a series of mechanics like normal. Some gear pieces ignore or mitigate certain mechanics. So players walked around with an armory of gear that they could swap depending on the situation. At higher level bonuses are more common so it's easier to work together sets of gear that have all the bonuses you need for just about everything. But at lower levels, which is where these raids were (DDO worked similar to the original VR system for progression), you didn't necessarily have access to these items the first time you ran through this encounter. So you had to use carefully timed spells that replicated the effects that the gear gave passively. Except magic in that game is limited, you don't have infinite resources and that's dungeon-wide. So beating the boss efficiently was important, you couldn't just spend four hours wiping to him until he died. If your healers ran out of magic, they were useless. Each boss basically had a time limit which was the mana bar of everyone in the raid. Once players got access to things like Deathblock gear it made it so they didn't have to cast Death Ward anymore so it saves resources and makes the encounter easier. If you didn't have someone casting Death Ward, the best you could do was buff your saving throws stat to try and resist it which was RNG and almost impossible for wizards or rogues to succeed since only warrior-types had good Fort saves.

It may sound confusing and full of jargon but the simple version is this: Fights were mechanically rich and preparation was mandatory to even stand a chance of beating them. You couldn't just waltz in with a pug to an encounter you had never done before and hope to clear it. You'd get hit with so many mechanics that you'd spend all your resources trying to combat them and then be unable to do anything the rest of the battle except swing your sword. If you had perfect BIS slot gear for the encounter then it was somewhat managable by even lower skilled players. But anything less than perfect and you had a challenge on your hands because you only have so many gear and spell slots which means you can't build to overcome ALL the mechanics. You had priortize and pick and choose what was important for the battle and what you were going to live without. That means sometimes people went in without their favorite spell because they needed something else that was more important. It means people would go in and be immune to the poison attack but they had to sacrifice their immunity to critical hits to get it. It means the spinning blades that deal 89 dmg if they touch you will one-shot a 60 health wizard BUT if he's good enough at dodging them he doesn't need to bring extra health gear to survive it which will let him deal better damage. With so many redundant bonuses on gear, it was also part of the challenge to even find a combination that gives you everything you need without costing you too much in terms of stats or damage. Because if everything you're wearing has the same redundancies, you're weak as hell and liable to die anyway just because you were greedy on the immunities or some other stat.

I like sets, and I think people use a wider variety than you're suggesting here. My mageblade tank runs bahraha's curse and livewire, my stamsorc tank runs warrior poet and leeching plate, my warden tank runs black rose and shacklebreaker (working towards twice born star traits and aspect of mazzatun). There's options outside the meta if you're not doing leaderboard runs.

I basically avoid that whole loop for the most part. There is pressure to have BiS sets for end game content. Happily I have zero interest in end game content. Soloing WBs and doing an occasional NORMAL alliance zone group dungeon is as far toward 'end game' as I care about and those sets are not required for that.

I wear one crafted set and one overland dropped set (from alliance zones where I can easily farm dolmens for purple jewelry). If those sets are carefully chosen they yield perfectly fine results for my purposes.

Specifically, my healer does not have any interest in WGT / SPC.

Part of the fun for me is trying different armor sets, so I disagree with the OP completely. I don't feel the need to have exactly the same "meta" as everyone else, though, since I don't do vet trials.

Vaoh wrote: »

I’d like if there were lots of unique items similar to Maelstrom/Master/Asylum Weapons..... except for armor and jewelry. Like a powerful ring that is its own 1-piece set. Or a gloves. Stuff like that. That’s sort of along the lines of what you want.

The way Diablo 3 handled sets was the best imo.

ESO didn’t do a bad job though. The only issue with ESO’s system is that like 90%+ of sets are completely horrible and/or outright outclassed. ZOS will never rebalance like 200+ sets to make them viable for niche builds despite how cool that’d be.

Yeah, I think this is the best way to go about it. Introduce more 1-piece sets. Maybe with unique styles like monster sets, too!

This might also be an appropriate way to finally introduce artifacts to ESO, which are such a corner stone in TES games. Doesn't have to be Daedric stuff like Savior's Hide, but the Fists of Randagulf or something would be neat.

Kwik1 wrote: »

I've played a lot of MMO's and as much as I like ESO, I really wish they would get away from the whole set idea. In other games sets are rare and unique and are special. Here every set is pretty easy to get and the crafted ones are super easy to get.

Don't people hate knowing you are wearing exactly the same thing as everyone else? Want to make a Tank? Get Ebon/Alkosh. Want a Stamblade? Get Hundings/Spriggans. yes I know you can make a lot of different sets work but that's not the point. We are still stuck with the same pieces.

I really wish the set bonuses were gone so we could look for individual pieces. Have that special ring that is awesome? Save it and use it. That sword with the cool proc? use it.

We can't since it would break the set.

=(

There could be 1000 different sets and yet there would still be an optimal set for a build. Even if set A was 0.0002% better than set B, it would still be the favored set for the min maxers. There is nothing you can do to prevent that.

Illurian wrote: »

Which MMOs have you been playing that didn't have gear sets? Every single MMO I've ever played has had a gear set system (or similar).

Gear being easy to get is not a bad thing in my opinion; quite the contrary in fact. When the BiS (or close to) is attainable by everyone, it really highlights an emphasis on player skill in order to pull off good dps or to complete harder content. I can only see this as a good thing.

In regards to sets, you seem to be asking for each set piece to function like a vMA weapon. That would be insanely powerful, and would need to be scaled down to such a miniature state (if ever implemented) that you might as well just equip four 2x set pieces instead.

Starwars Galaxies didn't have gear sets. pre-cu people didn't even wear full armor but just in rags. And the armors that were there were not sets, but just armor which gave protection (and as con, you action (=stamina) was lower due to wearing armor)

Edit: Also Pirates of the Burning Sea didn't have armor sets.

Runefang wrote: »

ArchMikem wrote: »

If you want to Heal end-game content it's pretty much a standard requirement to wear Spell Power Cure, but you can only loot that from White Gold Tower, which has a couple horrid Bosses, and if you want the Jewelry? vWGT is a nightmare.

I'm pretty much one of the very few Healers in the game that isn't wearing that set. (yet)

So almost all healers in the game have SPC but its too hard to get?

Honestly its easy, just go buy some key fragments. Took me 100k but I have 2 full purple jewelry sets, I was actually after some SPC swords.

.....at the risk of sounding dumb, what do key fragments have anything to do with spell power cure gear?

ArchMikem wrote: »

vWGT is a nightmare.

Lol man. WGT is ten times easier than it was on release. It has been nerfed to hell for many patches

Kirameku wrote: »

ArchMikem wrote: »

vWGT is a nightmare.

Lol man. WGT is ten times easier than it was on release. It has been nerfed to hell for many patches

Though even at release, sorcerers were soloing it.

Kwik1 wrote: »

Oakmontowls_ESO wrote: »

switching to the kind of system your suggest wouldn't solve your problem though. It would just shift to needing 7 specific unique items instead of set items.

Asolutely and I understand that. My point though is I would have something to work to. Currently you work to the same exact setup as 90% of the rest of the gamers.

This is the same in every MMO though.

I mean SWTOR/WOW you work towards the highest tier of gear, sets from raids/operations being better.
EVE Online you fit you the current fleet doctrines or most efficient ship fittings.
Skyrim most people would wear the best tier armour as it unlocks because the base stats make you better.
Pathfinder RPG the same thing, everyone aims for the big six for their class.

It's gamer nature to want to have "the best" stats, and once someone figures out the best combinations it makes little sense to go against it if you want to be the best.

jabrone77 wrote: »

Unless you're pushing for leaderboards or speed times, who really cares what you're wearing? No one says you HAVE to use what everyone else is using. 98% of the content in this game can be done in the most ridiculous combination of sets. There's a reason sets exsist.
That's not the problem. The problem with this game is even in the normal random group finder pug you'll find a player who acts like they are shooting for a leaderboard score and will come down on you for your gear not being "optimal".
Have fun, do what you want, and don't worry what other players think.
I'm in a guild that just completed vSO in just over 3 hours with 4 players at or under 200cp's, none of them wearing "meta" gear. Saying that can't be done is BS.
(Ninja Cakes, ps4 eu)

Well, gratz, but "meta" groups do it with HM in 30 min, so you with 11 other people just wasted 2,5 hours of your lives just because some of you dont like "meta".