Gear crunch still unaddressed

"Neo2551;894797" wrote:
So let'a agree to disagree :)

Agreed. :) *handshake*

But I can also understand your point of view. It is true it is easier than in the beginning. But requirements also went up in a way because of tourney and HAAT.

Also, aren't two of the high end gears un-farmable? I know the MK4 Holo Projector Salvage is not node farmable nor is it requestable. Same with the MK3 Bacta Gel Salvages....not node farmable. You have to either slog through them in guild shipments, fleet shipments or have RNGesus bless your raid earnings for the Tank.

One thing i really dislike currently is farming blue gear. I actually got frustrated the other day because of it, and that doesn't happen quickly.

The point is, there's far more toons now than when the game launched, it's time to relieve a bit of the low level gear wall. It's counter productive and causes ppl to quit the game entirely.

With the garbage tank rewards and gear 10/11 requirements there is, effectively, 2 gear walls now. 3 if you count the shortage of a few blue and green gear. And soon enough we'll be gearing toons to 12.

There should be a grind to gear, I actually like and enjoy grinding gear, but the way it's set up now makes ppl feel like they're making zero headway. Or worse, falling behind. It's time to vent some of the gear pressure the way they did with credits.

I don't really think gear in general is a problem, but rather specific flashpoints in the gearing process.

In two months I've taken a completely uncultivated team from nothing to three toons at G11, one at G10, one at G9. I'm still working on the team but I don't really feel like this is totally unfair. Without crystals from spending I can't gear this team any faster under the current ruleset.

Now, that said there are specific things that make the gear grind aggravating and I'd love to see some pressure come off in these regards.

1. There's a bevy of different gear items at each tier and yet no real diversity in what items characters require. Nearly every toon needs the same pieces of gear. Fusion Furnaces and Stun Cuffs. This makes acquiring the non-core pieces aggravating. This probably points back to an indemic imbalance in the value of the stats assigned to certain gear pieces and how they get selected during the character design process.

This also means that when sharing gear within the guild, nobody can spare these pieces and everyone is always requesting them. This is disheartening. I can't share pieces, and can't actually ask for the ones I really need (because no one else can afford to share them either).

2. The AAT nearly never provides completed gear pieces and doesn't provide enough fragments. We need the gear from this raid to promote characters towards G11, but the raid drops a small number of random pieces. Every piece of gear I have used to promote toons to G11 has come from banking crystals and not from the raid rewards. We complete this raid regularly and the rewards never truly further the promotion of my characters.

I'd really like it if the raid reward boxes provided a modest quantity of a large pool of gear salvage. If the reward boxes added 2 - 6 pieces of salvage from all or almost all the gear in the tier we'd see more frequent completion of gear pieces from doing raids, and we'd have more capacity to share the reward pieces from the Rancor (many of the Tank raid salvage can't be requested for some reason)

3. Challenges provide mountains of gear that characters barely require, which admittedly is aggravating. I'm not on the ship that top level challenges should provide all the gear from the lower level challenges, as this is a choice in farming - but it might be nice to see those gear pieces craft up somehow. In particular, I'd draw focus on the TAC gear challenges, where outside of the Loronar Power Cells in tier III, virtually none of the gear pieces are actually required by characters frequently enough to justify the uptake.

Contrast this to the AGI gear challenge, which has the Droid Callers that some gear pieces require up to 40 of. I'm always out of this piece. And the Mk 6 hair drier which many toons require both in isolation and as part of the Fusion Furnace. I also am constantly running out of this item. So why is the top level TAC gear worthless and the AGI gear unsustainable -- because not enough characters use the TAC gear and almost all of them use the AGI gear.

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Now I certainly realize some of these things might be intentional to try and drive using crystals on certain things, but these are the parts of the system that make this system aggravating for me.