There are far too many items in NW that are Bind on Pickup (BoP). What purpose does this serve? To require people to farm their BoP items from dungeons or bosses, right?
This seems particularly incompatible with the current GS/WE system. It just seems like overkill to require someone to farm a dungeon a hundred times (including mutations) to a) raise their gear score in the item they want to get up to 600 b) get the specific item they want c) get enough umbral shards to upgrade it.
Now, maybe you could make a reasonable argument in favor of BoP if items actually dropped at max GS (currently 625), but really this extra grind seems totally unnecessary otherwise. It is really punishing and not good game design, especially for a game that is bleeding playerbase so profusely.
More good ideas need to be implemented to outweigh the currently overwhelmingly negative aspects of the game that have caused so many people to quit.
I propose changing all BoP items to BoE. This is the path of least resistance in terms of making more items available to more players without the insane grind. In fact, the grind would remain as the status quo, the only difference, or diminishing of the grind, would be the ability to sell more items that you get on the trade post. And the concurrent ability to buy more good items from the trade post from other players.
As a crafter, I don’t love my own suggestion to make more items available as drops, but I think it would be a good change for the game. It would also open up the ability for crafters to craft all the currently BoP craftables, like the expedition replicas for example, and be able to sell them on the trade post.
Ideally, some new recipes should be made available for crafters to help balance out this change in available drops. Speaking of recipes…why aren’t recipes a more integral part of the dungeon loot/drop system? Seems like a common sense way to integrate crafting with drops.
The bottom line is that BoP is an outdated idea that was inherited from other MMORPGs that doesn’t necessarily make sense for THIS game.