Okay, before you judge the thread by its title, let's talk a bit about the history of pink items, and how they were either relatively underused or even misused first.
Vanilla ARR Aetherial gear
Pink items in vanilla ARR are fixed items with semi randomized substats and come with the "aetherial" prefix. I call them semi rng substats because they seem to follow relatively strict distribution, not going overboard or too low, and overall prove similar to the rest of the loot.
-> Those are still in the game but don't bring anything much different from normal loot. Even before, they didn't bring anything much beyond their semi rng substats and their base, fixed appearance, which in my opinion, has been greatly underused. On the other hand, you constantly change gear when leveling up as you get better stuff, so I'm not sure there is much to do with that as a concept beyond introducing the notion of crappy loot and superior loot, which would only last a little shorter or longer until the next few dungeons... Still, I find it interesting enough not to glance over it.
Diadem 1.0 pink gear
Pink items in old Diadem v1.0 were item lvl210 loot with rng substats, where stat variance was a lot more freeform and could prove superior to identical normal i210 tome gear, or be actually much inferior depending on how many substats points you'd get on them. They mostly dropped from the hard version of Diadem from gold chests.
Obviously harder to obtain and extremely subject to rng, those items were literally competing with augmented tome gear and savage gear of 3.0 (outside of savage weapons of i215) with a possibility to be better, or worse. Diadem was the first exploratory area and served as the base for Eureka and Bozja in the later expansions, with various area mechanics, spawning NMs watching over bronze/silver/gold chests (i150, i180 and i210 pink randomized gear with rng appearance as well).
-> I actually do think that there was a lot of potential behind those items. We actually used to see a lot of people walking around with pink items here and there in their equipment and I do feel it was great for many, many reasons:
- They offered gearing alternatives, which this game cruelly lacks, especially for casual players that are stuck with tomes as the only option (because alliance raid gear or bozjan gear is inferior).
- They didn't make high end raid gear obsolete since the item level was equivalent, and since Diadem came out in 3.1, casuals just gained a slow access to augmented tome (i210) with Alliance raids augments, and Gordias was already 4 months old and raiders were already on their BiS for a while. In fact, I do think it was cool to shake the bis a bit more and provide opportunities for raiders playing the more midcore Diadem to meagerly improve their builds and customize them with unique rng items. Imagine suddenly breaking new thresholds of speed BLM just for the memes, or actually getting surprising results in the old raids that came in the previous patch? You know, once those raids become less serious and the competition is over for long, why not have a little fun with this?
- This offered a lot of replayability for players that wanted to invest time in the game. You could always try to gamble a bit and try to get better items here and there, or for other jobs, which wasn't tied to the tomestone cap. Extremely good for player retention, but unfortunately Diadem proved to be a disaster in terms of gameplay. Still, imagine this system with an actually engaging exploratory zone?
Diadem 2.0 pink gear
Pink items in old Diadem v2.0 were exclusively weapons of ilvl 280 gated behind the infamous emergency missions. They had better item level than savage weapons (i275), but their rng substat distirbution in the fashion of Diadem 1.0 could make them worse, or way better, depending.
-> This went a little overboard and caused back then a huge uproar as they dropped from Emergency Missions, which were not a guarantee to happen in the 2 hours long Diadem instances (and you couldnt just leave and reset, you were locked out for 2h), and required 72 players to run and dropped a single Coven weapon in the chest, so you had 1 chance out of 72 to get yours (perhaps better if it was for your job, but I don't remember if need was even allowed for rolls). However the uproar was mostly due to this literally nullifying BiS weapons for raiders, but I do believe that it was grossly misinformed as Diadem 2.0 was patch 3.55, essentially the tail end of an expansion where Relics themselves were better than raid weapons already. Still, those Coven weapons were obviously designed with prestige in mind more than anything and I do believe them being i275 would have worked just fine and caused a lot less uproar. If anything, what was bad, again, was the Diadem instance, not the gearing, and the method to get those weapons (way too gamba / fighting with other players).
Where am I going with this?
It is pretty obvious that going in exploratory areas and having a lot of gearing options is what literally drives progress. If players constantly have means to improve their gear, get their hands on new pieces here and there to fill their different slots, or gear up other jobs, it provides a lot of player retention for an extended period of time, provided that the area doesnt suck.
Eureka and Bozja did introduce +1 and +2 gear, but in my opinion it suffered greatly from two things:
1) +1 and +2 was just some elemental and haste gains, not the most exciting beyond (I am stronger and my rotation speed loopium is fucked).
2) Players only got access to those at the tail end of every instance, which turned them into rewards for completing the instance where it made them stronger if they wanted to keep playing in.
Sure, cool, but what about the whole process through the actual instance to get there? Imagine if you could constantly get your hands on leveling gear pieces and whatnot? With rng substats and other things?
Now imagine if said gear had a lot more exotic stats and effects? Haste is just the most basic of it. Imagine non tank gear that suddenly gives crazy highphysical defense, or magical defense? Imagine tank gear giving boosted damage? Imagine being able to customize all of this within the frame of those areas? And obviously, disable that for serious content like savage/ultimates. Or even just make it active only within said exploratory zones and just keep the normal rng substats active everywhere, idk.
I do think honestly that this is just scratching the surface of a lot of possibilities. I do think that if SE manages to find better, funnier gameplay loops above fate grinding and mob farming to do, combined with this, this could literally bring a lot of hype and fun and replayability into the game. Imagine if we had rogue lite instances or elements to pair this up with as well?
Continue reading...
Vanilla ARR Aetherial gear
Pink items in vanilla ARR are fixed items with semi randomized substats and come with the "aetherial" prefix. I call them semi rng substats because they seem to follow relatively strict distribution, not going overboard or too low, and overall prove similar to the rest of the loot.
-> Those are still in the game but don't bring anything much different from normal loot. Even before, they didn't bring anything much beyond their semi rng substats and their base, fixed appearance, which in my opinion, has been greatly underused. On the other hand, you constantly change gear when leveling up as you get better stuff, so I'm not sure there is much to do with that as a concept beyond introducing the notion of crappy loot and superior loot, which would only last a little shorter or longer until the next few dungeons... Still, I find it interesting enough not to glance over it.
Diadem 1.0 pink gear
Pink items in old Diadem v1.0 were item lvl210 loot with rng substats, where stat variance was a lot more freeform and could prove superior to identical normal i210 tome gear, or be actually much inferior depending on how many substats points you'd get on them. They mostly dropped from the hard version of Diadem from gold chests.
Obviously harder to obtain and extremely subject to rng, those items were literally competing with augmented tome gear and savage gear of 3.0 (outside of savage weapons of i215) with a possibility to be better, or worse. Diadem was the first exploratory area and served as the base for Eureka and Bozja in the later expansions, with various area mechanics, spawning NMs watching over bronze/silver/gold chests (i150, i180 and i210 pink randomized gear with rng appearance as well).
-> I actually do think that there was a lot of potential behind those items. We actually used to see a lot of people walking around with pink items here and there in their equipment and I do feel it was great for many, many reasons:
- They offered gearing alternatives, which this game cruelly lacks, especially for casual players that are stuck with tomes as the only option (because alliance raid gear or bozjan gear is inferior).
- They didn't make high end raid gear obsolete since the item level was equivalent, and since Diadem came out in 3.1, casuals just gained a slow access to augmented tome (i210) with Alliance raids augments, and Gordias was already 4 months old and raiders were already on their BiS for a while. In fact, I do think it was cool to shake the bis a bit more and provide opportunities for raiders playing the more midcore Diadem to meagerly improve their builds and customize them with unique rng items. Imagine suddenly breaking new thresholds of speed BLM just for the memes, or actually getting surprising results in the old raids that came in the previous patch? You know, once those raids become less serious and the competition is over for long, why not have a little fun with this?
- This offered a lot of replayability for players that wanted to invest time in the game. You could always try to gamble a bit and try to get better items here and there, or for other jobs, which wasn't tied to the tomestone cap. Extremely good for player retention, but unfortunately Diadem proved to be a disaster in terms of gameplay. Still, imagine this system with an actually engaging exploratory zone?
Diadem 2.0 pink gear
Pink items in old Diadem v2.0 were exclusively weapons of ilvl 280 gated behind the infamous emergency missions. They had better item level than savage weapons (i275), but their rng substat distirbution in the fashion of Diadem 1.0 could make them worse, or way better, depending.
-> This went a little overboard and caused back then a huge uproar as they dropped from Emergency Missions, which were not a guarantee to happen in the 2 hours long Diadem instances (and you couldnt just leave and reset, you were locked out for 2h), and required 72 players to run and dropped a single Coven weapon in the chest, so you had 1 chance out of 72 to get yours (perhaps better if it was for your job, but I don't remember if need was even allowed for rolls). However the uproar was mostly due to this literally nullifying BiS weapons for raiders, but I do believe that it was grossly misinformed as Diadem 2.0 was patch 3.55, essentially the tail end of an expansion where Relics themselves were better than raid weapons already. Still, those Coven weapons were obviously designed with prestige in mind more than anything and I do believe them being i275 would have worked just fine and caused a lot less uproar. If anything, what was bad, again, was the Diadem instance, not the gearing, and the method to get those weapons (way too gamba / fighting with other players).
Where am I going with this?
It is pretty obvious that going in exploratory areas and having a lot of gearing options is what literally drives progress. If players constantly have means to improve their gear, get their hands on new pieces here and there to fill their different slots, or gear up other jobs, it provides a lot of player retention for an extended period of time, provided that the area doesnt suck.
Eureka and Bozja did introduce +1 and +2 gear, but in my opinion it suffered greatly from two things:
1) +1 and +2 was just some elemental and haste gains, not the most exciting beyond (I am stronger and my rotation speed loopium is fucked).
2) Players only got access to those at the tail end of every instance, which turned them into rewards for completing the instance where it made them stronger if they wanted to keep playing in.
Sure, cool, but what about the whole process through the actual instance to get there? Imagine if you could constantly get your hands on leveling gear pieces and whatnot? With rng substats and other things?
Now imagine if said gear had a lot more exotic stats and effects? Haste is just the most basic of it. Imagine non tank gear that suddenly gives crazy highphysical defense, or magical defense? Imagine tank gear giving boosted damage? Imagine being able to customize all of this within the frame of those areas? And obviously, disable that for serious content like savage/ultimates. Or even just make it active only within said exploratory zones and just keep the normal rng substats active everywhere, idk.
I do think honestly that this is just scratching the surface of a lot of possibilities. I do think that if SE manages to find better, funnier gameplay loops above fate grinding and mob farming to do, combined with this, this could literally bring a lot of hype and fun and replayability into the game. Imagine if we had rogue lite instances or elements to pair this up with as well?
Continue reading...