Friday, October 07, 2011

Random Observations on Armor

RIFT Sets

I've been playing RIFT again lately, mostly as a casual leveling game. But recently I stumbled across the raid armor vendor, and I thought that their system for handling raid sets was rather neat.

Basically, RIFT has 4-piece armor sets, but the set bonuses are actually on a different piece of gear, a "synergy crystal". There are 8 souls in each class and each soul uses a different set of abilities. So each soul has it's own synergy crystal. The armor sets themselves are more generic. For example, there's DPS armor and tanking armor. So you buy the armor for your role, and then get the synergy crystal for your main soul.

In WoW terms, it would be like having a single DPS plate armor set that could be used by any warrior, death knight or paladin. Then you pick up a Retribution crystal, Fury crystal, etc. to get set bonuses specific to your spec.

Obviously, it's not the best solution for WoW, if only because WoW classes prefer unique looks. But for RIFT, it's a rather elegant solution, as each class has its own armor type.

New Need Before Greed System

Blizzard posted that the new Raid Finder will use a modified Need Before Greed system. Items will be tagged with roles. If a player with the same role as the item rolls Need, she gets a +100 bonus to the roll.

Basically, it's Main Spec beats Off-spec, but you hit Need if you want it for either spec. Your role is defined as the current role you are playing in the raid.

It's an interesting solution. Tanks always get priority on tank gear. DPS gets priority on DPS gear. And healers get priority on healing gear.

The hard part here, as always, is classifying items. Is an Intellect cloth item without Spirit or Hit considered Healing or DPS or both? Are categories going to be restrictive or broad?

But still, this should be an improvement. Nothing burns a tank more than seeing a DPS--who has proven themselves unwilling to take the hard job of tanking--grab an upgrade that the tank needed.

Transmogrification

Apparently, plate bikini bottoms are selling on the Auction House for 5000+ gold.

Hooray for transmogrification?

6 comments:

  1. Apparently, plate bikini bottoms are selling on the Auction House for 5000+ gold.

    Hearing things like this almost makes me want to resub by itself. I miss playing the AH more than anything else.

    As for the role bonus on NbG, it's about time. I only hope that when they say "currently selected role" they don't mean that the Fury warrior can right-click his unit frame and change it to Tank when the boss is at 5%.

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  2. I rather doubt you'll be able to change roles in Raid or Dungeon Finder group. You probably get the role the system assigns you at the start, and the option to change will be disabled.

    That being said, I've never tried to change my role in a Dungeon Finder group.

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  3. The announcement for the role bonus says that items can be flagged for multiple roles. So I would imagine that ambiguous cloth gear would just be flagged as both healer and DPS.

    And as far as I can tell, a role can only be changed in a Finder group when a full party role check is performed. Which seems to only be when you need to re-queue. That said, I know that players can manually set their roles in a normal raid, and I've never tried to do this in the Dungeon Finder.

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  4. Communities drive a lot of the systems. WoW introduced different looking armor sets with the first raid in the Molten Core. Ever since then, there was just this unsaid expectation that all following tiers must look different from before and different from other classes.

    13 PvE Tiers, 11 seasons, 10 classes, that is 140 UNIQUE looking armor sets right there. And then there are the dungeon sets and other matching sets sprinkled throughout the game.

    The raid loot rules though seem interesting. But what if one asshole respeced to a tanking role right before a fight, and ninja'ed the item anyway?

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  5. I don't think you can change your role in the Raid Finder. I believe you can't change your role in the Dungeon Finder, and I imagine that the Raid Finder would work the same way.

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  6. Apparently, plate bikini bottoms are selling on the Auction House for 5000+ gold.

    Hooray for transmogrification?


    Well...

    I'm reminded of Age of Conan, when they went with vanity gear. Think of all the topless female toons, particularly in the lowbie and freeplay zones. Combine that with a Succubus, and you get the idea.

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