October 25, 2008

High Rank Armor Sets - Tokens are gone

The latest Grab Bag is online and provides some interesting info on high rank endgame armor sets. Check out the US Grab Bag as GOA just did a bad copy & paste job and lacks pictures, etc. (GOA wth?!?). To give you a better overview i created a table (pic to the left) with all the different sets, wards and where they are obtained. First thing i noticed while reading through this infos: Token obtained armor sets are gone, they were removed from the game. This explains why the ambassadors inside the Eternal Citadel don't sell them anymore. It's a bit sad, as we recently found out that you can (still) obtain Defender's Signs through PQs in Bastion Stair.

How does the ward system works? NPCs inside the endgame encounters (be it dungeons or city PQs) hit harder then normal. You will need to wear pieces from the appropriate armor sets to gain wards (small ghost skull buffs you can see on people) and each one will yield approx. a 10% damage reduction. It's not exactly 10% from what a guildie of mine tested, but close to. From what i hear you don't need the full set to survive but around 2-3 pieces of the set are required to have a better chance to make it through - at least this is true for the City Dungeons (Bloodwrought Enclave & Bilerot Burrow). No one knows yet if more pieces are required later for city assaults. It seems from the sets that have more then five pieces, not all will yield wards. Only chest, boots, gloves, helmet and shoulders will give wards - so the greatest possible cumulative reduction is around 50%. Looking at the pictures from the Herald, some sets look nice while others look really bad. I hope they'll pimp them a bit concerning uniqueness a bit. The ward system sure is a piece of a tiered armor set progression block. Especially for tanks it will be mandatory to obtain pieces to survive. As long as you don't need the full set but can get away with 2-3 pieces with wards i think it's ok. Although the "problem" would remain that you need high enough Renown Rank to be able to wear armor that protects you better in King Fights. I still hope nontheless Mythic will fix dungeon drops... why not use the repairable tokens also in the high level dungeons? They already have the system in place and it can prevent the frustration ob having two Magus drops while none is present in the group.

4 comments:

Gronyon said...

Honesty, it's disgusting. I'm sick of those systems where you absolutely need a set that make every player look the same to beat the next level.

bye bye warhammer, I'm not going to play any PVE content, and most probably RVR content will also be killed by this system. Kudos !

Mythics why do you need to copy on the worst ideas of other mmos ?

Thulf said...

Well, all MMOs need some type of gear progression to keep people interested. If you want to go to the highend instances, you need to come prepared. As long as you can get away with having less then the whole set IMO it's ok.

Anonymous said...

Set's should always always have an equal alternative! Aslong as this is implimented I don't see any problem with having a set to collect - it's human nature to want to have matching and logical material things. Set collecting is a lot of fun to some players and also assists in showing at which level the player is most likely to be playing at!

Once again, aslong as there is equal alternative, which a MMOs do seem to lack, there's no reason why armour sets shouldn't be included.

Luwinski

Mike J L. said...

AS long as you are not required to have this tank / DPS, heal any high end content.. then ok.
I'll give up a main tank spot to someone who may have this set, however I want to be able to participate (off tank, etc).
I just hate the idea of everyone needing to grind to do end game city work .. and all look the same. (*cough WoW armor grind cough*).
Also other sets with different ways to obtain then (as Luwinski said) should be implemented.