Tiers 1-3 loot

Wouldn't that pretty much just leave Dreadfang Spire and maybe HoM and I guess the lower tier planes?
I would say that a revamp of DFS would be a pretty nifty idea, while it is a neat dungeon crawl zone now, I don't think it gets a lot of use, and I think it has a lot of potential as a higher end 6-man or even 18-man raid zone that isn't exploited in its current form.
 
I know I am late to this party, but my 2cp is this:
The best idea in this thread is to make the lower tier zones doable by smaller groups of on tier players. I do not think you would have a farming problem with this, because who wants that loot if they can duo the mobs? Just make sure there is nothing desirable for a T6 character on them. XPable items sounds good at first, but putting in the time to xp those items up to make them on tier is probably not going to be shorter than just progressing through the raid tiers, so that does not really solve the problem.

I disagree with turning the zones into higher tier zones to make them more used. SoD already has an extremely aging population. Getting rid of lower tier stuff rather is not going to encourage new/newer players to stick around. It is not a good idea to slowly turn this game into something that is basically only enjoyable for a certain segment of the existing population - especially if you really expect a large increase with the new SoD changes. Since the lower tier population is shrinking though, it would make sense for more of this to be 6-10 man geared content for the same tier.

Also, I agree 6 man dungeons are my favorite part of this game (a la cmal).
 
Well what I was getting at with Halls of M is that its one of the few raid zones I could think of that was all lower tier in full.

Move Ancient drops to a really low drop chance from all 60+ named like 1%
ex. (RSM) (FG) (CMAL I think this can drop already)

What little low tier content there is for a starting guild right now is duo'ed or soloed by High tier folks ( Halls of Misery)
I've been scouting out for low tier targets for my guild and there isn't a whole lot up.

TBH the best way to gear up a new guild is Maps and Deepshade (yes I still raid deepshade with ne players). Pristine stats on the drops in that zone is really really good for fresh 65's. You can find probably 3-6 Slots per class in that zone with 60+ hp mana on it, Not to mention every mob has a chance to drop stuff and or spawn a named. The only Hill is the HP mobs have but bring 2 groups of 60+ people and 1 solid tank its a cake walk with never ending mobs.
 
Titanas said:
What little low tier content there is for a starting guild right now is duo'ed or soloed by High tier folks ( Halls of Misery)
I've been scouting out for low tier targets for my guild and there isn't a whole lot up.
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I don't know for sure, because I have never really looked into it, but I suspect this is largely because of the Vah quest. That is a completely different issue that should really be looked at, putting so many items for a quest that requires you to be really high tier to complete on low tier mobs has always confused me. Making * versions for the quest drops that could be triggered/despawn when the real one is spawning makes way more sense to me, and I really do not know why this was not done.

(Disclaimer: I have been gone a long time, maybe this is not the way things work any more)
 
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Tiers 1-3 were made 'skippable' long before Ikky and adept changes by the implementation of high end tradeskill armor, because imp hide, deepmetal, etc. were balanced around tiers 2-3.

It's okay, not all players will choose to spend their money on tradeskill items or ikky drops, many will want to 'earn' their items as they level at a level-appropriate challenge. They may not always get to kill every adept, and if they did, they may not fill every slot.

Having some t1-3 no drop raid targets does not cause problems, even if they don't get hit all the time.

Although, if they need love: they may be a better solution to be used for quest pieces than mid-tier and other contested raid targets.
 
Allielyn said:
Tiers 1-3 were made 'skippable' long before Ikky and adept changes by the implementation of high end tradeskill armor, because imp hide, deepmetal, etc. were balanced around tiers 2-3.

It's okay, not all players will choose to spend their money on tradeskill items or ikky drops, many will want to 'earn' their items as they level at a level-appropriate challenge. They may not always get to kill every adept, and if they did, they may not fill every slot.

Having some t1-3 no drop raid targets does not cause problems, even if they don't get hit all the time.

Although, if they need love: they may be a better solution to be used for quest pieces than mid-tier and other contested raid targets.
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BAM, there it is. A lot of these targets get hit frequently regardless (when's the last time someone saw every WW dragon up at the same time?). Between dragon scales and sinews up to unique items like WR bags, lev clickies and remove disease clickies, there aren't a lot of even low tier raid targets that don't get killed pretty regularly, if even just for ancient spell scrolls. Excluding Telvosh of course, who nobody touches even with a 10 foot pole.

At every tier there are drops that make you go "OHHHHH GOD YES" and drops that make you go "eh" and with fairly regular frequency make you go "@!#!&$@(" (lookin at you, Flametalons).

Tier 1-3 has a solid niche in SoD. On rare occassions, there IS the guild that wants to progress naturally from A to Z. More frequently than that, there are alts or fast-up-and-coming higher tier guild replacement toons that want to farm out the lower tier mobs like WW dragons, Lavascale, Gnok, etc for things like ancients or one of a kind clickies/items. Even these higher tier guild farmers will USUALLY /ooc or at the very least /who all XX and /tell RANDOM GUY "Hey, going to go kill BLAHBLAH mob, he might drop/is holding/can drop GREAT ITEM FOR YOU THAT WILL ROT OTHERWISE, get your ass over here real quick so you can scoop it." Then that player has an item that, being an obviously casual player for not already having better, he/she will cherish for eternity, and an experience he will not forget.

"Remember that time when Jenks sent me a random tell and said "hey, summoner in cmal is wielding a twilight rapier, it's going to rot, get your ass to cmal and it's yours"

I sure remember it.

The GREAT thing about this low tier now-non-progression-neccessary content is that it allows an even greater opportunity for socialization. On progression targets that are "neccessary" we get awful awful awful awful awful damn crap like the obvious guild drama over yclist/spires. With stuff like undesireable tier 1-3 content, people are people, tier 15 down to lvl 55, nobody really cares, it's just a matter of "hey guy, let's go slay a dragon and scoop some phats." It's the real spirit of SoD shining through, because there is no disporportionate (i'm really drunk, spelling is out the window) self-interest clouding comraderie.
 
Having progressed from T1 to T7 in the past 6 months, I have had a decent exposure to the low tier raid content.. As such..

1. Low tier zones are connected to Vah quests. This makes it hard for new players to break content. Possibly adding * versions of the Vah quest mobs so that they won't be kept on lockdown by higher guilds would open the zones up some.

2. Most T1 area's are open world, and the mob difficulty does not match loots. Buffing loot and honestly changing mob strats would be a good idea. Specifically, dragons who chain mez / fear are kind of stupid. Not undoable, but the strat is heavily based on rng, especially assuming you have an on tier guild. Buffing T1 up to possibly T2 drops would be a good idea, as T1 loot (except some BoE stuff from say meilech) is pretty useless.. Barbarian / Troll Charisma cape anyone?

3. HoM was our first true progression area. I think the zone is well balanced, but Shadow of Misery probably needs to be retuned down. The loot is on par with T6 content, and the difficulty is T6 or better. Having a T4ish type of engagement there would be nice.

4. Ancients are far to rare. At T7, we are still missing ancient spells. As these spells only drop in.. giant and dragon zones essentially, I would suggest expanding this into other low tier content. 6 man content, HoM etc. Increasing droprates across the board would honestly be pretty reasonable. I'm not asking for easy drops, but the content becomes trivial months before enough ancients drop to get a raid fully completed on spells.

5. Lastly.. I do think that T1 should move to T2, T2 should be increased to maybe T3 loots. Zones can be compressed, and some recycled for possibly higher tier content, or as suggested 6 man zones with no-drop loot only? I think that NDHK and Storms Eye and Storm Keep would be good targets for revamping, specifically DHK, as the east and west wings are basically not run at all.

Anyways, just my 2 cents, and kinda half baked at that lol.
 
Last I checked ancietns dropped in cmal 3 off the boss. They used to all drop in DFS, but who knows what that will become.

Really, low tier loot and a good chunk of tmap loot could really use some looking at. If we are going to push for a bunch of newer players, re balancing some of the lower tier loot, *especially* tmaps would go a long way. Tmaps are fun, and were a great way to gear and meet people when you are new to the game. Now I can hardly justify doing them other than for QP's and for an occasional rare.
 
Ancietns can drop in DN from the dragon semi nameds // fr from Elemental prince of fire
 
Really I feel that tier 1 loot shouldn't be BOE at all. There are enough BOE items as it is and many of them are better then tier 1 and 2 loot. A lot of the tier 1 mobs can be duoed by high tier players and it would make sense if they just didn't drop BOE items. What kind of raid loot is BOE anyway?

Also I feel that some of the tier 1-3 loot could be rebalanced as far as stats go. Some of it is just bad. There is definitely a big jump between tier 1 and 2 stuff. It would make sense if at the lowest tiers there was a more uniform stat progression.

edit: not to mention all of the BOE items with higher focus effects then low tier raid loot :(
 
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If I made a comprehensive list of items that really should be tweaked, as well as proposed stat changes to them, would it be a waste of time or would someone actually take it into consideration?

With the hopeful large influx of new players soon, low end re balancing may be a good idea, especially if its just a few stat changes.
 
Zaela said:
Remove tier 1 and 2 mobs, rename tier 3 to tier 1, finished.
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I kinda rolled my eyes when I read this, but it actually makes sense. I think maybe the existing t1 and 2 mobs could be recycled as quest mobs or adepts or something though. Maybe sub-100 aa adepts or something? Maybe use them for some of the existing vah bottlenecks? They could still be vah bottlenecks, but wouldn't keep the existing ones down for any purpose other than vah.
 
Sub 100 AA 12 man adepts sounds so unreal good that I can't even believe it hasn't happened yet.
 
Zaela said:
Remove tier 1 and 2 mobs, rename tier 3 to tier 1, finished.
Click to expand...

removing them is dumb. it makes sense to actually rebalance the loot.

edit: or instead of removing them, just bump the difficulty and the stats on the loot up to tier 3. now new raiders have a huge amount of tier 3 (now tier 1) content to do.
 
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It really comes down to one of two theories in dealing with the problem of an increasing ceiling. Two popular theories both deal with raisin the floor. One way of doing it is increase the power of the loot without changing the difficulty of the content, the other being simply wipe out the low end of it so you start higher than you would otherwise.

There has been a massive increase in available drop-able loot over the past few years that is now circa t5 loot (or whatever.) Before that, trade-skill loot allowed people to buy into t3. It has gotten to the point that it makes more sense for newer plays to spend their time farming platinum to buy raid gear and join pugs for high end content, then it does for them to form a raid for low end content, as the loot is god awful in many circumstances.

There really is no issue with this, as it can in theory encourage trade between players (which I see as a good thing.) However, should we not give the option to players to, instead of farming the same mindless mobs, hours, days, if not weeks on end to fully deck out their chars with items they buy from other people - to instead, go have more fun with interactive content and earn their loot that way.

Sure, there are PUGS. There are a few guilds who will take you, but there are incredible limitations to this. PUGS arn't all the time, not everyone has a schedule that allows them to raid, or even lives in a time zone that there are active guilds for. There are 6man zones like cmal, cata (needs a loot revamp btw) and emberflow which give the option to players to actually go earn their loot through challenging, and fun, interactive content.

However these zones have spawn timers, and in the cases of cmal and cata, still don't provide a good enough incentive to go farm these zones, instead of just mindlessly farming platinum. Don't get me wrong, the cmal revamp was *amazing* and some of the loot is really good - but it also really rare.

Something should probably be done.

On a side note: tmaps are fun, the loot needs a revamp.
 
The main problem I have with any significant changes to tier 1/2 anything is that, more than having bad loot and being mostly irrelevant, most of the content is just boring. They're from a time when "Hits for X and does spell Y every Z seconds" was everything.

In the interest of new playerism and recognizing that the super low tiers really are mostly irrelevant, I'd wanted to turn DFS into a 6-man zone with an AI-controlled helper/7th group member, anti-rot loot code, low respawn times, and actual interesting fights and mechanics to be a kind one stop shop to get characters from tier tmap to tier 3 in a reasonably short amount of time. Expecting players to form up raids for these things and trudge their way through a bunch of fights scattered around the world just to get up to where most players skip to with purchased gear is silly, imo. Getting up to par may as well be convenient and enjoyable.

But the idea of a one stop shop zone was vetoed and the ambitiousness of the rest of it seemed pointless after that so my interest kind of puttered away.

edit: being able to repurpose some hardly-ever-used zones and areas that this would effectively replace was another potential benefit of all that but then I guess we probably wouldn't have much other use for that stuff anyway. A lot of zones could use total revamps but that's a lot of work.
 
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Could always just turn some of the Tier 1/2 mobs into a weaker form, let them be 6maned and turn any BoE loot into No Drop loot. Then people would have an easier go at getting the sub par loot to get them geared up a little better, and they wouldn't be farmed since they aren't dropping anything BoE.
 
"anti-rot loot code"
WTF is this and why doesn't CMAL have it?

Zaela nailed it. Make DFS like that.

Make all the randomly spread out tier 1/2 mobs into adepts of varying levels.

Any leftover tier1/2 gets rolled into 3, which is now 1.

It all sounds so simple.
 
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