Another issue i see with the gear and the over abundance is there is way too much level gear, i don't think the game needs gear for every 5 levels, esp when most of the gear looks the same. it makes it tedious and worthless, a change to gear drops would be nice, but a very difficult thing to change that will make people happy, but the amount of gear in the game is a big problem, if only the mystic forge had better odds, people would be more inclined to flush their junk over putting junk on the TP or vendoring it.
Bruj.
The Scrying Pool: Too Much Gear
In this week's article of The Scrying Pool, I ask: Do we get too much gear as drops?
The idea isn’t that this would completely remove loot from the drop tables. Instead gear would drop at a rarer rate while gold and salvage item drop rates are improved. Now players are still getting the gold and salvaged items they were before and gear is a more valuable commodity. Maybe dropped gear will be dependent more on the crafting cost of similar gear than what the merchant or salvaged items values are.
Higher levels is where this becomes interesting, something the author of the previously linked article wouldn’t have yet experienced. At level 68 and above, rare and exotic quality gear has the chance to salvage into a rare and valuable material: Globs of Ectoplasm.
Ectos, as the material is commonly called, are only obtainable by salvaging level 68 and above rare or better gear. Reducing the drop rates of these would reduce the supply of ectos and cause their value to spike. This was demonstrated with a recent bug that temporarily reduced the salvage rate of ectos. Even though the bug was only in the game for a short period of time before being fixed, it caused a noticeable spike in ecto prices.
Much like the previous solutions this could be fixed by mobs having a chance to drop ectos directly. This has an effect on the Black Lion Salvage Kits, a gem store acquired item commonly used to salvage ectos from gear and as such is a good cash shop item for ArenaNet. Reducing the need to salvage ectos would reduce the need for BL salvage kits and, in turn, reduce revenue for ANet.
Adding a salvageable item that gives ectos would be the first idea, but gear doesn’t naturally salvage into them. It is these special kits, like the BL salvage kits, that give a chance of obtaining rarer materials. If possible, adding a new salvageable item (or upgrading current items of the same tier) that would have the ability to salvage ectos as a rarer material could be put in the game to solve this problem.
Having salvageable items does not completely solve the problem introduced by greatly limiting gear drops. Along with getting salvaged components, gear can also have upgrade components that are retrieved during the salvaging process. These upgrade components are sigils and runes, something valuable in building up a character as they give special stat bonuses and effects.
This would be the simplest to fix by adding them to loot tables. This is already seen in a way with universal upgrades such as marks, talismans, doubloons, etc. which are like a basic version of sigils and runes giving stat bonus combinations similar to those found on some armor and weapons.
Sigils and runes could be added alongside these in loot tables. Another idea would to have these be available from the chests at the end of dungeons or the large meta-events in the open world. Now these upgrades become a much more noticeable reward, especially if the high end chests have a rare chance of dropping Superior versions (or best versions) of these sigils and runes. Maybe specific chests would give a specific set of sigils or runes, so players would need to find the right location to farm these upgrades.
So to wrap this change into an easy to see package: gear drops would be greatly reduced from all sources of drops (i.e. both mobs and chests). In their place players would get an equivalent amount of gold or a salvageable item that gives similar crafting components. In addition mobs and/or chests would now also drop runes and sigils.
The one side effect this would have that there isn’t really an answer to is bag space. Getting less gear would put less strain on the bag space. While this would be welcomed by players, it would be a negative to ANet which sells additional bag slots for characters. On one hand it makes those additional bag slots less needed, but on the other hand it makes them more of a convenience cash shop item than they are currently.
This change would also have another, somewhat interesting, effect. About a month ago The Scrying Pool looked at the problem with Magic Find. Magic Find is used to try to get higher rarity gear to drop because it’s more valuable. With gear dropping less often the usefulness of Magic Find would go down which in turn would potentially reduce the Magic Find problem. This wouldn’t make Magic Find useless, however, as loot drop chances could still be boosted to get any piece of gear or rarer materials such as lodestones.
Matt "Mattsta" Adams received his copy of Sea of Sorrows (the newest Guild Wars novel coming out on June 25th) yesterday and is happily reading it.
The Dredge and Flame Legion formed an Alliance after the suggestion from a mysterious person. Now we are led by a mysterious person to Majory Delaqua right as she is taking a job to investigate the Case of the Councillor's Cancellation. Hmm...
As always, if you have a question for me you would like to see answered here, comment below or tweet it to @MattstaNinja.