I’ll be honest, I do not understand the thought process behind the gear system. Why require people wear a luck set in dungeons or in elite areas in the world in order to have a better chance, though still fairly negligible, at getting decent gear drops?
I don’t understand why any designer would want players to purposefully nerf or retard their own performance in combat in order to have a better chance for drops? I just do not understand the reasoning. From someone who typically enjoys theorycrafting and min-maxing and designing builds and testing them out in game, I just don’t understand why you would design a game that is seemingly anti-thetical to that and seems to purposefully make that more difficult and discourage it by the very systems that have been implemented (not just luck but also the extreme randomness to in-game crafting for gear and how incredibly rare it is to craft BiS legendary gear).
It’s the same process now for Mutations. The number of umbral shards required to upgrade 590+ gear to 600 is punitive and simply way too harsh. What makes the 600 legendary gear so unique and so much better is that it has 3 perks not that it’s 600 and certainly not 1 attribute point (do those improve it, sure, but not as much as an additional good perk does imo).
The RNG based crafting makes it where most players (not all of course) do not have full sets of legendary gear with 3 good perks applicable to their builds, so they had to work on getting good 2 perk 590+ pieces, but now with this mutation umbral shard requirements being so punitive for sub 600 gear increases, they are driving people to subpar 600 gear in order to earn enough umbral shards to be able to upgrade the good 2 perk gear. So once again, players are encouraged, some might argue required, to wear/use subpar/inferior gear in order to have a higher chance at getting decent gear.
God forbid players be able to actually wear/use the best possible gear they can get a hold of in order to take on challenges of Mutations! No, we’ll force them to level up voidbent or other inferior legendary pieces, nerfing their own combat performance, in order to take on the “challenges” of mutations… Why would you not want to design dungeons that take the best possible gear and builds to step up to a challenge? Why design a system that actually promotes inferior gear for combat challenges?
Quick Tangent: While I am providing game feedback, when will players have access to combat logs or at least have some sort of parsing available with appropriate combat dumbies that allow full testing of dps and other combat performance? Would love to, again, be able to actually see real data for theorycrafting and min-maxing builds in New World (though you would rarely get to use the optimized gear due to reasons listed above).
I have played several MMOs over the last 2 decades and have done quite a bit of end game raiding in a few other MMOs, and typically the idea is to get better gear from those dungeons in order to continue to improve your combat capabilities and take on more difficult challenges, but New World simply seems to want players to do the opposite by forcing them to wear inferior gear in order to work toward top tier gear. The systems simply seem counter-intuitive.
Again, I understand some players have been able to grind out BiS 600 legendary gear through lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of crafting or by having companies that are flush with cash pay for those crafted items, I get that, and for those players the Umbral shard system allows them to immediately upgrade their gear and progress through the tiers of mutations, but the rest of the players, and I would argue that it’s most players, simply do not have that luxury and are forced to use inferior gear in order to progress in mutations which simply doesn’t make much sense to me, but that’s just my perspective.
Thoughts?
Edit/Update:
The epic/purple drops in mutations that have the new perks geared toward the added challenges in mutations (i.e. fire dmg resistance) also drop as sub 600 gear, at least in the mutation levels I have completed) which also makes this gear useless when the GS scaling is incredibly harsh as you progress and the cost is so high to upgrade the sub 600 gear pieces up to the recommended level. The pieces of gear should at least drop at the recommended GS for that mutation level- otherwise no one is ever going to use these, because they would have to upgrade them to the proper GS first.
I’ve enjoyed the extra challenge with the mutations thus far (though would prefer more actual content like main storyline, additional zones, new pvp battlegrounds or arenas, smaller scale battles that influence the actual larger wars etc instead of the additions like mutators that simply add more gear grinding).
However, in order for more players to participate in this new content and be able to progress in the mutations the 590+ gear (non named & non legendary), armor primarily and jewelry, needs to be more in line with umbral shard costs with their legendary 600 counter parts. It should not cost very much to increase a 590 item to 600; it simply should not receive a extra perk (for armor). I can see a named weapon piece that does upgrade to legendary and does receive a third perk costing a lot more to upgrade, but not 590+ armor pieces that should only increase its GS and stats but not receive a new perk.